All Chapters of Not The Man She Wanted: Chapter 81

Harry told me about my grandfather over a cup of tea at the kitchen table.He sat across from me and he said it plainly, the way he said all the hard things, without softening the edges or building toward it. Robert Knowles. 1987. Floyd County. A parcel of land that had belonged to my father's father, acquired by Alvin Alejandro in the same year my father was eleven years old.I held the cup and did not say anything for a long time."Jenny.""I heard you.""I know this is...""Don't." I set the cup down. "Don't tell me what this is. Give me a minute."I thought about my father at eleven years old.I thought about a family that had already lost something they did not understand losing. A parcel of land in Floyd County, whatever it meant to them, whatever they had planned to do with it, gone the same year Alvin Alejandro had been building the foundation of his empire. My grandfather, Robert Knowles, whose name I had heard twice in my life and whose face I knew only from a photograph tha