I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around

Copyright © 2016 by Ann Garvin.

All rights reserved.

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by

TYRUS BOOKS

an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

www.tyrusbooks.com

ISBN 10: 1-4405-9545-3

ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9545-5

eISBN 10: 1-4405-9546-1

eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9546-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Garvin, Ann, author. I like you just fine when you're not around / Ann Garvin.

Blue Ash, OH: Tyrus Books, [2016]

LCCN 2015043827 | ISBN 9781440595455 (pb) | ISBN 1440595453 (pb) | ISBN 9781440595462 (ebook) | ISBN 1440595461 (ebook)

LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

LCC PS3607.A78289 I3 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043827

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

The poem appearing on page 177 is "If I Could Tell You," copyright © 1934 and renewed 1962 by W.H. Auden; from
W.H. Auden Collected Poems
by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

Cover design by Sylvia McArdle.

Cover images © iStockphoto.com/korinoxe; retrorocket; BlackStork; GoMixer.

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Synopsis
  
• Dedication
  
• Chapter One: Horn Broken, Look for Finger
  
• Chapter Two: Lipstick and Cigarettes
  
• Chapter Three: Runners Run
  
• Chapter Four: An Inconvenient Truth
  
• Chapter Five: Pain for Your Troubles
  
• Chapter Six: No Such Thing As Fair
  
• Chapter Seven: Beautiful Euthanasic Precision
  
• Chapter Eight: Big Yellow Taxi
  
• Chapter Nine: I Like You Just Fine
  
• Chapter Ten: Is That Fair?
  
• Chapter Eleven: Stoke That Furnace, Sparky
  
• Chapter Twelve: Stray Dog List
  
• Chapter Thirteen: Splash Some Water on Your Face and Get on with Your Life
  
• Chapter Fourteen: Stage Fright
  
• Chapter Fifteen: I Have the Lethargy
  
• Chapter Sixteen: Space-Shuttle Relationship Conditions
  
• Chapter Seventeen: Consider-It-All
  
• Chapter Eighteen: Life Is Lame
  
• Chapter Nineteen: Time's Fun When You're Having Flies
  
• Chapter Twenty: Wrestling Intruders
  
• Chapter Twenty-One: I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around
  
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Worry Is What You Do When There's Nothing to Be Done
  
• Chapter Twenty-Three: A Little Night Music
  
• Chapter Twenty-Four: His Mistake
  
• Chapter Twenty-Five: There Now
  
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Time Will Tell
  
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: Something to Know
  
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Almost-Win, Almost-Lose
  
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Hope House
  
• Chapter Thirty: Vampires, Lottery Winners, and Soulmates
  
• Chapter Thirty-One: The Moon in Love with the Sun
  
• Acknowledgments
  
• About the Author
  

Tig Monahan, radio therapist, finds out the hard way that nothing is fair in love and war . . . or family.

Everything is falling apart in psychologist Tig Monahan's life. Her mother's dementia is wearing her out, her boyfriend takes off for Hawaii without her, and her sister inexplicably disappears leaving her newborn behind.

When a therapy session goes horribly wrong, Tig finds herself unemployed and part of the sandwich generation trying to take care of everyone and failing miserably. Just when she thinks she can redefine herself on the radio, as an arbiter of fairness, she discovers a family secret that nobody saw coming.

It will take everything plus a sense of humor to see her way clear to a better life, but none of that will happen if she can't let go of her past.

To my mom and dad, who figured out love some sixty years ago.

Tig Monahan tried to imagine what it would be like to lose her mind. Was it like a quick, fully aware, terror-filled slip on an icy sidewalk, or slower, where a tiny skidding sensation goes unnoticed until suddenly you realize all four limbs are in the air and your face is in a ditch. With her mother, Hallie, it was hard to tell what she'd been aware of, or how the knotted neurons in her brain foretold her foggy future. Either way, her mother's mind was not her own, her secrets were locked inside, and Tig was left to ponder the icy aftermath.

It was almost six
P.M
. and Hallie's nightly agitation was right on time; actually, a half-hour ahead of schedule, due to the recent relocation from Tig's home to Hope House.

“Where is he?” her mother said, her voice flapping like a bird startled from its roost. “Is your father here?” Hallie worked the worn platinum wedding band, loose beneath her knuckle, around and around. “He said I should wait.” She shoved the bedside stand out of the way and stood, the evening version of her dementia giving her a kind of agility that her laid-back daytime confusion seemed to eschew.

“It's okay, Mom. I'm here. I've got you.”

Her mother emptied her purse onto the bed. “Wendy, get your father.”

“It's Tig, Mom,” Tig, the forgotten daughter and sister to Wendy-the-absent-Monahan, said. “What are you looking for?”

Hallie stopped in her frantic search through her purse and snapped, “What do you think I'm searching for? It's always right here, in this pocket.” Her piercing blue eyes were clearly seeing one daughter where the other one stood, reminding Tig of how sure her mother had always been. Sure and blunt and lovely. Her signature soft, sun-blond hair now frayed and wild, white; her once full lips turned inward with the sourness of age.

“
N'est-ce pas
?” her mother said, changing from agitation to despondency, to French, a language she loved and remembered better than her family. She snatched Tig's hand in her pale fist.

Tig worked to keep her own anxiety locked inside, knowing that when she cried, it only upset her mother. “We can't all cry,” her mother used to say when Tig and Wendy were girls. “Someone has to man the battle stations.” Tig struggled against her grief, her lips twitching in effort.

A nurse swept into the room, responding to the call bell Tig had silently rung for assistance. Over her mother's head, Tig said, “I thought maybe tonight she wouldn't need a sedative. I thought if I spent the whole day with her it might help.”

The nurse drew a line with her lips and looked sympathetically at Tig, as if to say,
Here's another one who just doesn't get it yet. Another relative really low on the learning curve
. “Alzheimer's softens for no man, no how, no way. It's been one week. She was at your home for much longer than that. She needs time to acclimate.” To Tig's mother she said, “Hallie, let's get you settled for the night.”

Hallie Monahan ignored the nurse and began tearing at her sheets. Tig said, “My mom ran her own business. She was a vet, and a single parent. You have no idea how much she would hate being seen like this. Hate being here.”

The nurse spoke to Hallie in a tone that made Tig want to curl up on the wrinkled bedding for a nap. “Hallie, love. I have your medication here. Try some orange juice. Here you go.” Inexplicably, Hallie turned, flipped the small pill into her mouth and slammed back her orange juice like a drunk in a biker bar.

She returned to her sheets and buried her arm up to her elbow into the pillowcase and searched. “If I could tell you,” her mother said.

Behind her, Tig said, “Mom, let's sit down.” When her mother didn't budge, Tig said to the nurse, “She had an almost photographic memory.
Photographic
.” The emphatic way she said “photographic” got her mother's attention, and for just a moment she gazed at Tig with what almost seemed like clarity. But, just as quickly, her mother's face fell and she returned to yanking at her ring.

“I shouldn't have moved her out of my house.”

Her mother upended her now-empty purse for the tenth time, muttering, “It's here. It's always here.”

“You did the right thing. Just let this medicine take effect. You should go home and get some rest. Don't you work in the morning?” The nurse gently massaged her mother's back. Tig pulled the bed sheets tight, arranged the waterproof pad, and retrieved a rolled-up nylon from the floor.

“Yes, but I'll just stay until she falls asleep.”

Tig placed her arm around her suddenly-still mother. “I've got you, Mom,” she said, and guided her to the edge of the bed.

Hallie sighed and said, “I just can't keep it secret anymore.”

“What, Mom? What secret? What are you looking for?”

Her mother sighed and said, “You're nice,” as if Tig were a sweet stranger who just didn't understand, and her mother couldn't be bothered to explain.

• • •

A dull ache in Tig's neck woke her from a surprisingly sound sleep. She'd fallen asleep holding her mother's hand at an angle that made her arm tingle. Not wanting to let her mother go, she switched hands with her and tried to wriggle blood flow back into her cold fingers. As if disgusted by Tig's pathetic display of affection, Hallie snorted in her sleep and pulled her hand free. Seeing her mother asleep in a standard hospital bed seemed to lift the curtain of denial from Tig's vision. Her mother had always had colorful red lips, blue eyes, and yellow hair, but here in this parched place, she was monochromatic: an even palette of sand after an era of drought.

Tig resisted putting a dab of lip balm onto her mother's pale lips. Her mother hated to be fussed with. When Tig had complained as a teen about getting ready for prom, saying that all her friends had appointments for updos, her mother had said, “What a colossal waste of time and money. I hope you know by now that beauty is about a little lip gloss and
joie de vivre
.”

Tig believed that lesson, alone, had probably paid for her graduate school, since she'd avoided mani-pedis, complicated hair dyes, and spa visits. It was also a lesson in self-esteem, that self-worth cannot be bought and applied from a bottle. The unfairness that this woman from Tig's memory, so ripe with life and possibility, could have been transformed into this husk of a woman made Tig feel dry by proxy.

A nurse she didn't recognize pushed a wheeled medicine cart past her mother's room and glanced inside without expression. Tig stood, stretched her back, and rocked her head side to side. Her phone lay where she'd left it on top of a comforter she'd brought from home. She'd planned to call Pete, her boyfriend, but had fallen asleep instead. Tig hit the power button; the phone lit up and displayed the time: 6:30.

As she leisurely compared it to the wall clock with the huge numbers, Tig whispered, “Six-thirty? Oh my God.” She grabbed her bag and race-walked out the door and down the hall. Before life had become impossible, she had begun her therapy hours at seven
A.M.
so that people could get a little therapy high-five and then go to their day jobs. Every night that she spent with her mother, seven
A.M.
came sooner and sooner, and the past week it had become a habit to skid into her office while calling her dog sitter and trying to brush her hair out with dry shampoo.