Gemini by Carol Cassella

Author:Carol Cassella
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

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raney

When Raney was in second grade, Pete Brewer, an obnoxious little boy who ended up in a wheelchair after he ran his Harley into the open door of a parked car, shouted a curse at her on the jungle gym. When she got home she asked her grandpa why the two of them had the same last name. Grandpa was sitting in the yard on a woven plastic lawn chair chipping mortar off some old bricks he’d hauled out of a demo yard, his knees splayed and his elbows braced so the bits of gray cement fell into the weeds. “What? You don’t like the name Remington?” he said, without looking up.

Raney sat cross-legged on the damp ground matching up the broken chunks of fallen rock into perfect fitting pairs. “Yes, sir. I like Remington fine.”

“And you remember where it comes from?” She did. She could not forget. The day Grandpa taught her how to write her name, he started the lesson with a trip to the storage closet underneath the eaves. He brought out a long wooden box and set it on the kitchen table, swung the tiny brass hasp out from its brass ring, and lifted the lid. A rifle lay inside, fitted into a bed of crimson felt molded to its exact shape, dark with gun oil. The wooden stock was polished to a silky gloss you couldn’t help but touch, and the metal barrel and firing mechanism were a fine blue black. He lifted it out of the case and set it across her scrawny knees with solemnity equal to laying the baby Jesus in his manger. “Renee Lee Remington, every time you write your name you think of this rifle. Oldest guns in America.”

“This is the oldest gun in all America? Did you take it to the war?”

He bit back a smile. “Oldest gun manufacturer in America.”

She was afraid to touch it. She kept her hands locked against her chest like two flighty birds until he put it back in the case. For years she thought her ancestors had made all those guns, until she figured out they wouldn’t be living like dirt farmers and buying her clothes at Value Village if that were the case.

Grandpa didn’t get out the gun again when she told him what Pete had called her on the playground. He just hacked at the ancient mortar clinging like barnacles to those fine red bricks, sending chips flying far afield and spraying dust into the bowl of her school skirt. “I said I like my name,” she repeated.

“Then what’s your question about?”

“Well, if you are my mama’s daddy, why do I have the same name as you? Pete Brewer says I should have my daddy’s name. Not yours.”

Grandpa put the brick and the chisel down and smiled at her. Then he said something memorable enough for Raney to hold on to until she was old enough to understand it. “Well, it sounds like Pete Brewer is the card-carrying bastard in the Quentin Elementary School second-grade class.

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