Authors: Bettye Griffin
“
No, thanks. I just want to get home and go to sleep,” Cliff replied as he seated himself.
“
Yeah, I heard that.”
“
You’re up awfully late.”
“
Oh, I’ve been dozing, but I knew you were coming so I’ve been on autopilot, I guess. Ava and the kids were all upstairs asleep.”
Cliff looked at Hilton thoughtfully
. “It’s good to see Ava so happy.”
After a brief pause, he replied,
“I like to think I have something to do with that.”
“
I’d bet on it.” Cliff lowered his voice. “I hope you don’t think I’m speaking out of turn, but I’d hate to see her hurt.”
“
I would, too, believe me. I think it’s good of you to be so concerned. You two must go back a long way.”
Cliff
’s brow furrowed in confusion. “We do. She didn’t tell you?”
“
Tell me what?”
“
We used to be married.”
Hilton stared at him
, astounded. “You and Ava…” He had difficulty absorbing this.
“You’re
the one who was so disappointed because she couldn’t…”
The other man
’s sheepish expression and quick averting of his gaze was his answer.
“
Here we are,” Connie called as she slowly descended the stairs, holding her daughter in one arm, while her other hand held on to the banister to balance herself. “Help Ava out, Cliff; Cliffy’s too heavy for her,” she requested.
Cliff was on his feet in an instant
. Hilton knew he was glad for a break in the awkward moment. He, too, rose, moving to stand by the fireplace so he could observe the interaction.
Ava was too busy ushering the Dukes and their half-asleep offspring out to notice the tight set to Hilton
’s jaw, the squaring of his already broad shoulders and the slight protrusion of his lower lip.
She closed the door and smiled as she approached where he stood
. “Well, that’s my good deed for—” she broke off when she noticed him staring at her through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong, Hilton? You look furious.”
“
Why didn’t you tell me Cliff was your ex-husband? And don’t say because I didn’t ask.” It was true he never asked what had become of the man she’d married, but he thought she would have told him that he’d actually
met
the guy. That was the type of open relationship he thought they had.
“
Oh,” she said simply.
“
Yeah, ‘oh,’” he mimicked. “What’s the big secret, Ava? You told me
why
you’re divorced. It would’ve been nice to know
who
you’re divorced from, since he’s right here in town and I’ve met him several times. I felt like a fool, and even he was embarrassed at having to be the one to tell me when that was your responsibility.”
She shrugged helplessly
. “It…didn’t seem important.”
“
You’ll have to do better than that, Ava.”
She struggled over a lump in her throat and tried to control her rising panic.
“It
wasn’t
important, Hilton, not the specifics. What actually occurred in my marriage was the important thing, and that’s why I shared it with you. The identity of the other party didn’t really matter.”
“
Maybe under different circumstances, but we’ve been to three social functions with Cliff and Connie. The tree-trimming Kendall and Spencer had, the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Sundowner and your open house. Can you honestly say you didn’t feel it was important for me to know you and he were once man and wife?”
“
It was a long time ago, Hilton.”
“
Yeah, so when I come off looking like a first-class jerk that’s fine with you, huh? How would you have liked it if I had introduced you to Janelle but not mentioned that she was Max’s mother?”
His words struck a chord, and whatever Ava had started to say died in her throat
. She wouldn’t have liked that at all. The main reason she disliked Janelle so much was that she had given Hilton a child, something
she
would never be able to do. The fact that Janelle gave Hilton such a hard time came in second, although Ava wouldn’t want to admit that to anyone. Her priorities weren’t in proper order, and she knew it. Janelle’s shabby treatment of Hilton should be the main reason for her dislike, not jealousy of her.
Hilton
stared at her, his expression a curious mix of triumph and sadness as she met his query with silence, but mostly sadness. “I thought so.” He put his hands in his pockets and walked past her. “Max will be all right with you tonight. Let him sleep. I’ll pick him up in the morning.”
Blinking to hold back tears, Ava stood where she was, waiting until she heard him drive off before going to the front door and latching it
. The moment the lock tumbled into place she was overcome by a wave of dizziness so severe her legs gave out and she slipped to the floor.
Chapter
22
T
he sense of being cold made Ava open her eyes. She sat up and rubbed her arms vigorously as she tried to remember what happened. All she could recall was locking the door behind Hilton, then finding herself here on the floor.
She looked at her wristwatch
. It was 12:25 a.m. She realized she had only had a brief period of unconsciousness, just a few minutes at the most.
Slowly she got up
. She felt steady, but she wasn’t going to be fooled twice. With slow steps and a tight grip on the banister that she made her way up the stairs to her bed.
*****
In the morning, Max was delighted to learn he had stayed over the entire night. “Your Daddy will be over soon with a change of clothes for you,” Ava told him. “In the meantime you guys go down and have breakfast after you wash up.” Thank heavens for Marcus, who would fix cereal with sliced banana for both of them. “Marcus, I’m going to leave a couple of dollars for you by the TV. You buy lunch today, okay?”
“
How come?”
“
I’m feeling a little bit under the weather today. I didn’t get around to making your lunch.”
“
You all right, Aunt Ava?”
“
Just a little tired, but I’ll be fine. I’m going to go back to bed. When Mr. Hilton comes you ask him to lock the door with my key and then slip it back through the mail slot, okay? You can all leave the house at the same time. Maybe Mr. Hilton will even drive you to school. I’ll see you this afternoon.”
“
Okay. Aunt Ava, do you think Mr. Hilton would mind if I didn’t work today? I’d like to visit Granny and Grandaddy this afternoon. Besides, I worked yesterday.”
“
You’ll have to check with Mr. Hilton and make sure he didn’t have anything important planned that he wanted you to help him with. I’m pretty sure it’ll be all right with him, though. You tell your grandparents hello and that I’ll see them soon.”
“
I’ll tell ‘em. And I hope you feel better, Aunt Ava.”
She held out her arms
. “Give me a hug and I’ll be on my way.”
Marcus complied, and as she hugged him she thought,
Marcus. My beautiful little boy.
He wasn’t hers, of course, but she loved him so much, he might as well be.
In her room she sat propped up in bed, a book in her lap and the
Today
show on the television. With her hours-long nap, she had slept through the night and then some, and while she was no longer sleepy she still felt tired and weak. She had put on a pretty nightgown in the hopes that Hilton would stop in and say hello, especially once Marcus told him she wasn’t feeling well.
She could hear his voice from downstairs as he enthusiastically greeted Max and Marcus
. She waited expectantly for the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but there weren’t any. After about fifteen minutes she heard the heavy oak front door close, and knowing he hadn’t wanted to see her made her heart ache.
*****
Hilton made cheerful small talk with the boys as he drove them to school, but his mind was on Ava. He suspected that “not feeling good” was Ava’s euphemism for sulking in her room. He’d asked Marcus if he’d forgotten his lunch box, only to learn she hadn’t even gone down to make him a sandwich but had instead given him money to buy lunch. He wasn’t surprised at all when she stayed barricaded in her room while he was there. That seemed to be her answer to everything that troubled her, to retreat into her own little world and refuse to acknowledge the problem’s existence. With Marcus not helping him today he’d have no reason to go by Beginnings later, but he’d talk to her tomorrow. It still bothered him that she didn’t tell him she had been married to Cliff Duke, but he was more embarrassed at being caught off guard than angry at her. It really wasn’t anything they couldn’t get past, but it was annoying as hell.
*****
“The emergency room? You don’t want me to just come in and see the doctor in the office?”
“
You had a syncopal episode, Ava,” the nurse at her doctor’s office replied, “meaning you passed out. That’s a potentially serious situation. In these cases we always refer patients to the emergency room. You’ll need to have tests done that the hospital is better equipped to do than we are. Be sure to let them know that Dr. Smithwick referred you. One word of caution, however. Don’t drive yourself. If you have syncope again while you’re behind the wheel you can have a collision, injure pedestrians as well as yourself and damage property.”
“
All right. I’ll get ready to go now.”
Maybe I can be home in time for dinner.
But in the back of her mind she knew she needed to make provisions for Marcus’s care…just in case.
She had already called Woody, who had agreed to open Beginnings
. Now she dialed Kendall, who said she would be right over to drive her to the hospital.
“
You know,” Kendall said when they were in her car, “every conversation we’ve had the last week contained the words ‘how are you’ someplace. But you always said you were fine.”
“
I wasn’t lying, Kendall.”
“
Get real, Ava. We’re on our way to the E.R., not to go play tennis.”
“
I was just a little tired, that’s all. I didn’t think anything of it.” She thought for a moment and then said, “All right, maybe unusually tired.” She thought of how she’d required support to hold her legs up when making love to Hilton. “All right, maybe a little weak, too.”
Kendall flashed her a sardonic look across the console.
Ava sighed. “But I’ve been so busy. I figured I’d just been trying to do too much and needed to slow down a little. The first time I got dizzy last night I thought there might be a connection, but when it happened again I knew I would have to see the doctor right away.”
“
Too bad Hilton wasn’t with you. He would’ve brought you in last night.”
“
Actually, he had just left. He was upset with me.”
“
Uh-oh. Is the honeymoon over?”
“
No, I don’t think so. Not over something so inconsequential as my not telling him about Cliff.”
“
Wait a minute. You mean you didn’t tell him you were divorced?”
“
Of course I told him, and what happened, too. I just didn’t mention Cliff’s name.”
“
What’s the big deal? You told him now, didn’t you?”
“
No. Cliff did.”
Kendall
’s eyes widened. “Oh. Now I get it. I can see why he’d be upset. He probably thought he knew all the important stuff about you.”
“
He did.”
“
Yes, but not telling him it was Cliff you were married to might have made it seem more important than it is, even though you and I both know it’s no big deal. It was a hundred years ago.”
“
Um hmm,” Ava murmured, closing her eyes as an excuse to halt their conversation. The truth was that she found the situation worrisome. She was still thinking about Hilton not looking in on her when he picked up Maxwell. What did it mean? Was he through with her? Had her evasiveness just cost her the love of her life?
*****
At the hospital only a handful of people sat waiting in the E.R. Ava insisted that Kendall go home, knowing her friend had things to do before getting to her restaurant in time for the lunch rush. Kendall hedged, then scribbled the number to her cell phone on a piece of paper. “You call me when you’re ready to go home and I’ll come get you.”
Kendall
’s optimism made Ava believe she probably would be going home after her labs were drawn and the results interpreted, perhaps with a prescription for medication.
In the E.R. she was poked, prodded and had two vials of blood drawn, and
an hour later—which she passed by sleeping, for she was tired again—the doctor came back to the windowless curtained-off cubicle and spoke her name, jarring her awake. She looked at him expectantly.
“
Well, it looks like you’ve got an extremely low blood count,” he said, speaking as cheerfully as he would if he was telling her she had just won a prize. “Your hemoglobin and hematocrit are only 6.5 and 20, when they should be about 12 and 36 at a minimum. That explains why you’re always tired and why you’ve started to have dizzy spells and syncope.”
“
So what happens now? Iron supplements?”
“
The situation is a little more urgent than that. We think transfusions are in order.”
“
Transfusions?
Plural?”
“
Yes. We also need to determine the source of your anemia. I’m leaning toward the menorrhagia—that’s the excessive menstrual bleeding you told me about initially—as the cause, but we’ll probably want to do a GI workup just to be sure.
“
Won’t you have to admit me for all that?”
“
Yes. I have a call in to Dr. Smithwick now for orders.”
She shook her head
. “Dr. Duncan, I can’t go into the hospital. I’m self-employed and need to open my shop. Besides, I’ve got a big weekend coming up.”
“
Anemia at this level of severity is nothing to fool with, Ms. Maxwell. Now, today is only Monday. You’re sure to be home by the weekend, so I don’t think that’ll be a problem, as long as you weren’t planning to climb a mountain or do some other strenuous activity. In the meantime, isn’t there anyone who can operate your business for the rest of the week?”
Woody.
“Probably, I guess. She’s there now.”
“
Good. We’ve ordered you some lunch. It’ll be another hour or so before we can get you into a room, so you’re looking at about two o’clock.”
“
I hope so. I’ll need to make some arrangements for child care.” She regretted not having questioned Marcus about how long he would visit with his grandparents. He would either go to Beginnings or to her house when he left, depending on if it was before or after closing time. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal, only being a matter of a few blocks; but now she needed to figure out who was going to take care of him while she was hospitalized.
Who was she kidding
? Aside from his grandparents, there was only one person who could reasonably take over Marcus’s care for two or three days, and that was Hilton. She needed to put her hurt as his seeming disinterest in her welfare aside and call him. If for some reason he refused she could always turn Marcus over to the Hudsons, but in her heart she couldn’t imagine Hilton refusing.
T
here was only one way to find out. She doubted her cell phone would work here among all this medical equipment and glanced around the ER bay for a phone, spotting one on the wall. She couldn’t reach it from her bed, but surely she could stand up long enough to make a phone call. She reached for her wallet, where the business card Hilton had given her the night they met was still tucked away behind her health insurance identification card. She knew he regularly forwarded his calls to his cell phone, so even if he was at a client or in his car he would get the call.
“
Hilton White,” came the crisp greeting.
“
Hello, Hilton; it’s Ava.”
“
Hey, how’re you feeling? Marcus mentioned you were under the weather.”
He sounded friendly enough, and she began to feel
optimistic. “I’m feeling all right, but I’m in the hospital.”
His tone changed immediately.
“The hospital! My God, Ava, what’s wrong?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, happy to hear the concern in his voice
. “I’m anemic. Not just slightly, but pretty severely. I…passed out for a few minutes last night after you left.”
“
Passed out? Why didn’t you tell me, Ava? I would have brought you in.”
“
It really wasn’t an emergency situation anyway. It only lasted a few minutes. I managed to get upstairs to bed. This morning I called my doctor’s office, and they referred me here. Besides,” she added, “you weren’t too pleased with me last night.”
“
I won’t deny that I was upset—shock was probably more like it—but I hope you’d call me if you should ever find yourself in trouble, no matter what the situation is between us.” She was at the hospital. He could hardly believe it. And here he was thinking she was just pouting, or deliberately avoiding him. How wrong he’d been, and how bad he felt for having been so wrong.
“
No,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t. That’s why I’m calling you now.”
“
Good. Now that you’re there, what’s going on?”
“
I’m still in the E.R. They’re going to admit me for transfusions and testing. I should be in a room in another hour or two.”
“
What about Marcus?”
“
That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was helping you after school, but he had planned to visit with his grandparents today, of all days.”