#listen I realize I made it up this exact second but nana hardison lives in the midwest and she started out as an assistant/secretary

[notbecauseofvictories]

Could you write something about Alec Hardison and his nana? Maybe what she thinks about the leverage team?

Alec brings the boy home first, which makes Betty and Erna in her senior water aerobics class groan aloud when she tells them. It’s not that he’s a boy—Maeve’s got six children, all told, and Alec is the youngest; it’d be thoroughly unlikely for all of them to be straight. (Anjelica has been bringing her wife to Christmas services and Iftar dinners for years, and the biggest issue there was their children’s gluten allergies. How are you supposed to break fast without Pillsbury crescent rolls, Anjelica? They’re the right shape!)

The problem, the actual problem, was that Maeve knew Alec was serious about the girl. Even the boy seemed to know it, a solid bruiser of a man hunching his shoulders in a vaguely apologetic fashion as he offered out a covered dish. 

“Kołaczki,” he said, as though this was an ordinary thing to bring to your maybe-boyfriend’s family Christmas. 

“They’re cookies, Nana,” Alec volunteered, and Maeve took in the sight of him standing so close, how his hand reached for the bruiser’s shoulder and then shied away again. “With raspberry, your favorite.”

Maeve sniffed. “Gluten-free?”

The bruiser blinked. “Of course,” he said, and she decided to like him then. If she wasn’t going to meet the elusive ‘Parker’ who was blonde and inspired her youngest to recite twenty minutes of terrible poetry over the phone in her honor, then some nice Midwestern boy who made gluten-free cookies (and offered to wash dishes, afterwards) was certainly Maeve’s second choice.

If she stuck her head out the kitchen and found Alec and Elliot leaning in too close, as though they could breathe each other in—swallow, completely—without anyone else noticing, then that was none of her business. She went back to drying her mother’s china, and listening to the radio. Oh darling, say it’s true—there’s nothing like me and you—

.

“You’re very skinny,” Maeve observes, when she opens the door and there’s a white woman standing there, smiling like a cat who has swallowed the canary and also most of the local avian population.

“Thank you,” the woman says, flicking her hair over her shoulder. “Is Hardison in?”

Maeve narrows her eyes. “Are you Parker?”

The woman smiles in a condescending way that Maeve is definitely going to tell Betty and Marge about next class. “Not in the slightest. Is Hardison available?”

It’s Easter, so Alec kisses Maeve’s cheek as he bustles out the door. “Jesus is risen!” he shouts as the skinny white woman bustles him into the car.

“Halle-fucking-lujah,” Nana Hardison mutters. She glances skyward, where a light drizzle is starting to fall. “Sorry,” she adds.

Afterwards, once the last of her guests have left bearing tupperware full of ham, turkey, and various kinds of potatoes. Maeve smokes her annual cigarette on the front porch. Given that he’s risen now, she tells Jesus about her good-for-nothing-except-what’s-right son. Her strange and absolute gift. She almost envies the Catholics; she suspects Mary would know what she means. But Maeve’s church don’t pray to her, long-suffering mother she is. “Sorry, about before,” she tells Jesus. “But...not really.”

Finally, she grinds the cigarette under what passes for a heel given her orthopedic insoles. “Not sorry,” she decides finally. “Not even sort of sorry.”

.

(The less said about Jamal’s baptism, the better. Nathan Ford turns up, takes one look at the baby squirming its doting parents’ arms—and goes sheet-white and bolts from the church like Satan’s at his heels. Maeve hears from Cousin Leticia later, how Alec followed Nathan Ford out into the churchyard and they had a conversation that was all low voices and cigarettes and Alec looking scary, the way he only does sometimes, when it’s serious.

Maeve decides to hate him then: Nate Ford, who can’t even pretend to be joyous at some baby’s christening. Alec doesn’t protest.)

.

“James,” she says, when he comes into her shop. Cousin Rhonda took over most of the day-to-day management when Maeve got her diagnosis all those years ago, but Maeve still shows up sometimes, if only to poke at whatever knotty problem they’ve been dealing with. There’s something reassuring about the small, finicky details of a watch, its intricacy---Joel had always told her that every watch was a secret world, it had to be understood before it could be conquered. (Watches were the only women he ever loved, which is how Maeve had ended up with the store in the first place.)

She’s bent over a particularly intricate watch-face when the bell over the door rings, and doesn’t try looking up; these days it’s so rarely worth it. Someday, someone will burst into the shop with declarations about the end of the world that are actual, but then she will be dead. In the interim, she’s going to fix this silver Aristo so it can get back to its owner. 

Maeve adjusts her grip on the the pin vise. “Is there something I can help you with, James?”

“I think I have the wrong location,” a man she knows is called Sterling says after a long, long moment. “My apologies, Madam.”

“Of course,” she mutters, ignoring the ringing of the door-bell as the strike team exits her shop, one by one.

.

Parker comes last, which—Maeve suspects she should have known from the outset. She didn’t and so the sudden appearance is surprising. Parker is pretty and blonde and twitchy, especially looking at Alec’s things, or the higher-end watches Maeve repairs for men with too much money. She wonders if letting Parker steal something—anything, even small and inconsequential—would suffice, or if it’s something in particular she’s looking for. (She’s had too many thieves under her roof not to know the look. Maeve waited through seven months of Jaymes taking anything not nailed down and hawking it on ebay before confronting him, Parker is small potatoes.)

“You have a beautiful home,” Parker recites from rote, like it’s something she’s been instructed to say.

If Alec were here, he could probably mediate between them. But it’s just Maeve and Parker in a parlor-hall-drawing-room, and Maeve is tired. She wants this girl to like her, because Alec likes her. “It’s haunted,” Maeve says. “It’s why I could afford it, back in the day. I’ve never seen any ghosts, but that’s what they say.”

Parker blinks. “Oh,” she says.

“Are you haunted?” Maeve asks, and is pleased to watch the way Parker twitches, half-consciously. At the very least, Alec deserves someone who knows what it is---to have the ghost of something dogging your footsteps. Maeve doesn’t know much about Parker’s story, but she can guess, from that flinch.

“Come on,” Maeve says, and Parker is nodding, before she finishes.

They sit at the kitchen table, which smells mostly of flour, and food. Burnt, where Maeve and her various children have set down too-hot pans. Parker chooses the seat where Alec used to sit, and Maeve isn’t sure whether that’s deliberate or not. (She’s too skinny, Parker; a photo-negative of Alec, pale where he was dark, but still the same shape.)

“He wanted to come,” Parker says, like she can hear Maeve thinking. “He did.”

‘I know,” Maeve says.

“He...” Parker traces a burn on the table with a finger. “He’s good.”

The conviction there is enough to inspire whole religions. Maeve can’t help but take it in, think---this is my son, given up. That a bruiser of bruised man comes from dinner, that a twitchy thief of a woman sits at a table and talks. Because Alec is good. Because Maeve took him in, and told him to be good. 

Parker’s hands tremble, when Maeve touches them with her own. “Yes,” Maeve says gently.  When she squeezes Parker’s hands, Parker ducks her head, but then---squeezes back. “He is. He is...very good indeed.”

.

Afterwards, Alec comes. For---some holiday, the next one. She loses track sometimes. (Between the children and the religions, there are a lot of holidays.)

Maeve kisses her son’s cheek, and says, “I like them,” in a fierce and decided tone. Watches Alec duck his head, and smile.