“Feelings don’t have prerequisites of ‘rights’ to them. And I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just needed to get away for a couple of days, that’s all. Or can’t I have a vacation?”
“A person doesn’t simply go a few miles away for a vacation. And I saw you with a bandage.”
“Ted.”
He eyed the fine lines around her gray eyes, the soft hair framing her face, her pretty mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m not proud of it, but Kaye saw you and told me. I have to know. Did you hurt yourself?”
“I did not hurt myself.”
He closed his eyes when he felt the warmth of her hand on his shoulder.
“There’s more to this, isn’t there? Ted, I don’t presume to know how much longer you are given—or for that matter, any of us. If I’ve learned anything it’s to expect the unexpected.”
She moved away to sit on the top step. “Join me.” She waved to a spot beside her, and then wrapped her hands around her knees.
Late afternoon sun picked up the golden highlights of a few strands of hair that had escaped her barrette. He ignored her invitation to sit. Her left hand looked chapped. He knew how often she needed to wash at work, so he couldn’t make an issue of whether or not it was unusual.
“I had no break—no vacation—while I nursed my husband through two years of terrible illness and death.” She put her cheek against her knee. “It doesn’t seem like anyone really knows for sure what will happen to you, right? I mean, you look pretty good to me.”
Ted smiled when she flushed.
“What I’m trying to say is” —she turned her face into her knees at Ted’s chuckle— “I don’t see death in you.” He lowered himself to sit clumsily two steps beneath her, at eye level. Her eyes had flecks of black and hazel speckled among the pewter of the iris. He wanted to believe her. “What do you see?”
“I see a man with a past, who wants to be more than the sum of what’s gone on before. I think you’re worried about something worse than dying.” She pursed her lips and wiggled her toes. “And I guess that makes me wonder where I fit in here, my real purpose.”
“What could be worse than dying?”
“Not being sure of what happens next. After death.” She sighed and shook her head. “Sometimes it’s so nice to think that this life is all there is. But it’s not. And you know that.”
“Shelby says you have some special talent for knowing people from the inside.”
Grace’s dimple appeared. “You could call it that. You’ve known that I can—help—people sometimes, more than just with—medicine.”
“Yes.” Ted nodded. “I guess I’ve had that feeling for a long time—even before Jimmy’s accident.”
She shrugged. “Okay. It’s a hillbilly thing. My granny had the ‘sight.’”
Ted picked up on her change in tone and honored it. “I love my son. I want to know that he’ll be cared for, after I’m gone.” He swallowed. “Randy is good with him. But you...together, maybe we could talk…”
He was distracted when Eddy clumped up the steps with his hands reverently cupped around a butterfly. “Look!” he whispered, awed as only a small boy could be. He plopped down between them. Ted looked down across his son’s ruffled sun-kissed head at the insect, treasured between the little boy’s palms. Ted wrapped his arms about Eddy and looked at Grace, making and answering a wordless promise.
* * * *
Summer was ending, along with a great many other things Grace took for granted. She walked over to the Marshall house one morning after Eddy made a very rare phone call.
“Daddy didn’t get up,” Eddy told her. “I dressed myself all everything.”
Ted had lost more ground every day, health-wise. His short rally had ended and no treatment seemed to stop the degenerative effects of the illness.
Grace was not ready to give up.
Eddy reacted to his father’s illness with surly, uncooperative impatience, unusual for the normally contented five-year-old. Oops! Make that “almost six, Grace,” she could hear him rebuke her. He didn’t like breakfast anymore. He didn’t want to go the library story time. And Uncle Randy was mean when he told him to turn off the television.
She let herself into the house and greeted Eddy who wore blue shorts and green-striped shirt, no socks, and sailor hat.
“Looks like you’re ready for the beach, Eddy,” Grace said to his squirming delight. “Should we stop in and see your dad?”
Eddy’s shoulders slumped and he clutched his stuffed tiger under his chin. “Yeah, okay.”
Ted’s room smelled dank. A mister spurted in one corner. It seemed to help his labored breathing but made the atmosphere sweaty. The shades were pulled, for light seemed to make his constant headaches worse.
She paused inside the doorway to listen. Ted beckoned to his son. “Have a good day, okay, sport? I’ll be up when you come back, I promise,” he rasped.
Grace bent to pick up a used drinking glass and crumpled napkins.
“Just leave it.” Ted rolled over and pulled the sheet over his face.
It was hard, but she did. She drove them to the dunes for a romp in the waves and a picnic lunch. She ran harder than ever on the beach, chasing Eddy and the waves and birds and the little fish that swam near the shoreline until they were both exhausted. Ted’s white face haunted Grace and she pretended that the bright sunlight made her eyes water underneath her sunglasses whenever Eddy came close.
* * * *
Randy pulled up to the front lobby of the clinic to wait for Grace after work. She had her car in the shop and Randy agreed to pick her up on his way home. Ted had seemed overly delighted by the news, and that, topped with a couple of sly comments about how well he and Grace got along lately, poked his suspicious button.
He hesitated in the empty parking lot before exiting the car. When he saw her through the glass of the clinic doors, he turned off the engine but waited. Evans followed her into the small vestibule.
Randy felt like a voyeur but he couldn’t look away. Like some kind of TV melodrama he watched the doctor stand in front of the door, peel her hands from the grab bar and put his arms around her.
Randy opened the car door to…do what? Help her? Did she need him? Grace held up her arms to push against his chest before she let her forehead rest between her hands against him, a move he recognized as defiant and submissive.
Ashamed, he pulled the door shut and turned away, mind going a mile a minute.
He knew how his brother felt about Grace. He thought that she returned the feelings, although he couldn’t call himself much of an expert on that sort of thing. A dying man loves a woman who obviously—what—loves him back? But the woman also wants to be with other men? Healthy men? Men who don’t die? Randy shook his head and tapped the steering wheel, trying hard to find fault. He should stay out of it. Ted didn’t need to know any of this—whatever he thought he saw.
The passenger door opened and shut. Grace sat silent before clicking her seatbelt and wiping her face. She fished a hanky out of her pocket and blew her nose. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I had to—”
“You don’t owe me any explanation.”
Grace’s hands shook. She laughed a little—high-pitched and hysterical. “I could tell you that it wasn’t what it seemed but I’m not sure you would understand.”
Randy shifted his legs on the seat. “It’s none of my business. And I’m not planning to say anything to Ted.”
“Ted knows.”
“I doubt that! Ted loves you. And he deserves better.” Randy started the car and drove off with a squeal of the tires. They didn’t exchange a word all the way home. He didn’t know if he was angry at Grace, Evans, Ted, or himself. End of season business would set him on the road for the next several days. With Ted’s obvious decline, he was going to have to face some tough decisions when he got back.
* * * *
The next phone call from Eddy made Grace call in late to work. She went to check on Ted and found him sitting on a straight chair next to his bed, breathing hard. He had managed to pull on some clothes that did not hide the fact that he was wasting away. Grace’s mouth trembled at the sight of his bony shoulders. What should she say?
He brushed at his dark hair with his hands, flushing.
Grace shook her head. “I’ll call the clinic and take a day off. Let’s get this room aired, and the mister cleaned up.” She bent to tug the sheets from his bed.
He caught feebly at her hand as she passed. “Randy said you two had an argument before he left. What happened?”
She sat on the edge of the bed, twining her fingers in her lap. “I wouldn’t call it an argument, and why was he talking about me, anyway?”
“He wasn’t, but I was. I just said he should take you out when he got back.”
Grace narrowed her eyes. “All right, buster. Now it’s your turn to tell me what’s going on.”
Ted took her hand in his thin, cold, white one. “Look at me. It’s all right, Grace. We never—” He hesitated. “I know you need someone to lean on, someone strong, who can care for you. I’m not that person. I can’t be. I just thought that maybe, after…you know…it would be good for you and Randy…”
“You’re kidding. We don’t have anything in common. I can’t believe you’re trying to play matchmaker between me and your brother! Don’t you have a clue?”
“You don’t need to explain anything to me.” She let him touch her temple, then her hair. “It won’t be much longer. This has to be harder on you than on me, after all you were through before, with your husband.”
“Listen, Ted. When Randy came to pick me up the other night after work, he saw me crying and Greg…comforting me.”
His fist clenched around hers. “Oh.”
She withdrew her hands. “Please. I don’t want to talk about this today.”
She rose slowly and walked Ted into the bathroom. Upon her return she continued to strip the bed with short professional motions. When Grace finished, she helped Ted to the kitchen.
She left when Jimmy came back. At home, the first thing she did was call Randy.
He picked up the car phone after four rings.
“Randy? Randy? Are you there?” She heard the squeal of car tires and took in an alarmed breath. Before she could speak, Randy answered.
“Hi, sorry about that. Yes, Grace, I’m here. What do you need?”
“Are you driving? I’ll call later.”
“No—wait! Grace, it’s all right. What’s the matter?”
“I’ve been over to help Ted out a bit, after Eddy told me he was having trouble getting up. I just, well, I wondered if you thought yet about—well, maybe it’s time to think about, you know—”
“Yes. I have thought about it.”
“I’m sorry, Randy, but surely you’ve noticed that Ted is having more and more trouble getting around. It’s just not enough for you and Jimmy and Eddy to help him anymore. He needs some professional care. And I can’t—”
“I know. I wouldn’t ask you to.” He was silent for a moment. “I planned to talk about it when I got home. I’ll take care of it.”
At the click of the phone, Grace thought her heart had cracked.
Grace sat in her favorite place on the wide front porch surrounded by flowerpots of yellow and pink impatiens and cascading striped petunias. The drone of bees searching among the blossoms made the little hairs by her ears feel ticklish. She brushed a callused heel against the smooth floorboards, pushing herself in the swing. Eddy alternately dug in the sandbox and scampered after Trigger who stalked something amongst the waving cosmos.
Ted had told her that morning about the arrangements with the lawyer—his plans for Eddy, the trust he set up after the sale of the house out of which he paid her salary and the other childcare providers.
She cupped her chin in her hand. Randy would make a good guardian. Eddy would always know he was wanted and loved. How hard it would be to live here—after. Could she watch Eddy grow up and not be a part of his life if Randy didn’t want her help?
Eddy whooped as he picked up a growing kitten, a striped tiger that bared its tiny fangs and unsheathed miniature claws. Eddy dropped it as it hissed and spat and then chased it down again. He wasn’t being cruel to the kittens. He had listened very carefully when she explained and showed him how to pick them up and handle them.
Spiraling down the drain with Ted was her career. Although Jimmy tried to play down the extent of the injury, rumors that he’d blown off his hand but had it magically fixed created a ripple of unease through East Bay. People were staring at her again, and Tony Vander Groot’s mother had never let up on the botched blood draw last spring. She managed to bring up the subject at every social gathering and in every store aisle. Several children complained they didn’t feel well after seeing her for their routine school physicals, and Greg had taken to observing Grace again. They concluded it was no more than playground tales and a quick summer bug that blew over in a couple of weeks, but she was becoming apprehensive about treating children. After Jimmy, other little accidents happened, broken vials, a missed spider bite, a rash and fever that soared at midnight after she’d sent a little one home.
For the first time since Christmas she summoned the memory of her house in Tennessee—the color of the carpets and drapes, the placement of pictures and furnishings. She felt like a virtual visitor on a real estate web site. When she couldn’t remember which side of the door the light switch for the entry hall and formal living room was on, she forced herself to stop and think of something else, like the bizarre turn of recent events and Eddy’s upcoming birthday party.
Kaye Smits had apparently decided Randy Marshall was optimum husband material. Grace thought that maybe a ticking biological clock came into the computation somewhere, too, besides Ted’s rather clumsy attempts to pair them off, but she reminded herself to be kind. She’d been picking up an order of tea when Kaye confided in her and sort of apologized at the checkout.
“I assumed after Jilly left that Ted would turn to me. I mean, there aren’t that many eligible singles in town.” She took Grace’s money and sighed. “All these years. I should have known. Randy was the one I always turned to when I needed help. Everyone in town really relied on Randy to make their business profitable.” The register jingled. Kaye slammed in shut. “And this…emotion on my part now, it’s not only because Ted is so sick, you know. I’m just glad he has you.”