Author's Note: I just got finished watching Shawshank Redemption and decided to write a little ficlet about the family Tommy left behind.
Disclaimer: I do NOT own Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption or the movie of a similar title. No copyright infringement intended.
She gazed down at the letter in her hands, proud of the person he had attempted to become after she was born, but also disappointed that she would never get to meet him. He had written her mother letters while he was in Shawshank in the mid-sixties, the last of which described to his wife how his friend Andy DuFresne had helped him to get his graduation equivilant. The man wrote that Andy was a "good man, a real stand up kind of guy." Not even a week later, that very same man had five bullets pumped into his chest.
She felt a tear drip down her face and she wiped it away. The letter went on to say how much the man loved and missed his wife, her mother. He made promises that he would never get a chance to keep or break. He told her to kiss his baby girl for him, and as soon as the next year was over he would be back to see them both. He wrote that he would never leave them again after that, "sware to God."
Her blue eyes peered back up at the walls.
Shawshank Correctional Facility had long since closed it's doors. It's esteem never did recover after the stories about the money laundering and the murder of her very own father, Tommy Williams, came out. It now lay in ruins, grafittied walls and over grown grass surrounding it's facilities, holding in the demons that likely still lived there.
Her mother still spoke fondly of her father, even after another marriage and another baby. She still spoke of how handsome Tommy was, and told her that she had his eyes and his hair. In fact, she didn't look much like her blonde-haired, green-eyed mother. Even now as a grown woman with feminine features and a curvacious body, she still resembled her father. Her heart broke every time her mother reminded her of that, but perhaps that was why she had made her first pilgrimage to Shawshank on that particular autumn day. Or maybe it was something else.
On a barely legible headstone, at the end of the second row of the Shawkshank Prison Graveyard, read her father's name, his birthday, and the day that bastard had gunned him down so that the warden's shit wouldn't ever hit the fan. She was only pleased in the fact that the old myth was true; everything does come back around, eventually.
She tucked the piece of yellowed notebook paper back into her purse and fell to her knees, full out sobbing now. She did not care if her own fiance saw the tears as they fell. He sat in the car at her request; she refused to let herself share this, something so intimate, with him.
She ran her thin, pale fingers over the etched marble.
"Hi Daddy," She said, nearly hyperventilating now. "I've always wanted to talk to you. I always missed not having you around. Mom remarried, but I never let her husband replace you, even though I never knew you. I always felt close to you. I miss you, I always have missed you, and I wish more than anything that I would have gotten to know you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry about what happened to you. I'm sorry that this is the first time I've been able to come see you. But, I promise I'll never forget you. I'll never forget everything Mom told me about you."
She paused, sniffling and wiping a few stray tears from her eyes.
"I wanted to tell you that I'm going to get married soon, and Marty asked me to marry him the same place you asked Mom to marry you. But there's something I haven't told him yet, and I haven't told Mom yet, either. But I wanted to tell you first."
She stopped again and softly whispered her secret to him; "I'm pregnant, Daddy."
She began to cry after that, knowing that one of the best parts of her childhood was sitting on her grandfather's knee
When she was done blubbering, she placed the flowers (daisies, the flowers he had given her mother before he had asked her to marry him) on his grave and stood up shakily. Her fiancee rushed to her side and helped her back to the car.
"I just needed to say goodbye," She explained. She felt she needed to give him some explanation; after all, she was going to spend the rest of her life with him.