He blinked and his lips parted. “What’s wrong?”
It was the uncharacteristically gentle question that nearly undid her. Nearly.
She could not leave her patients. “So you’re saying I’m not fired?”
“Of course I didn’t fire you.”
“Fine. If you didn’t fire me I’ll get back to work.” She returned to the locker, shoved her coat and purse inside, and resisted the urge to slam the metal door. She didn’t want to startle anyone further. Dr. Caine would return to his original curmudgeonly self soon and all would be back to normal.
But nothing in her life would be normal again.
She walked from the room. The surge of temper drained, leaving the imprint of grief to plow more deeply into her heart. Those furrows would be filled with tears.
Later.
Chapter 14
“I still miss you so much. Nothing is the same without you here.”
Grant knelt in the grass beside the pink marble headstone Wednesday afternoon.
He hadn’t expected the blast of emotions that had attacked him when he drove into this cemetery for the first time in three months. He hadn’t expected the confusion with Mom, the struggle over the deposition. He hadn’t expected to miss his children so sharply. And he hadn’t expected this sudden inner conflict over his growing attachment to Lauren.
Life was taking him by surprise and he didn’t know how to stop it from flooding over him like the banks of the nearby Mississippi after a week of heavy rain.
He traced the engraved date of Annette’s death with his finger. “I don’t know how I’ve made it two and a half years without you.”
He understood now that one of his unconscious reasons for moving was to remove himself from so many reminders of his personal failure after Annette’s death. Though he had certainly moved from St. Louis to Dogwood Springs to remove his children from some of the threatening influences of the big city and from the conflict that still occasionally raged between Mom and Dad, there were deeper issues. In a way, he was avoiding God. But he hadn’t expected to find God waiting for him in Dogwood Springs and he hadn’t expected two special messengers, Lauren McCaffrey and Archer Pierce, to surround him with reminders of love and forgiveness.
He continued his one-sided conversation with Annette, barely able to hear his own voice over the roar of a backhoe that was digging a fresh grave nearby. This was one of the older cemeteries in the city, with some tombstones that rose above the level of the lawn. Annette’s marker was set into the ground with a permanent vase attached. Grant had always kept silk flowers in it when he lived in St. Louis.
He felt himself reverting to the mode of city dweller—closing himself into his own world, avoiding the gaze of other humans so he could fool himself that he was alone with memories of the wife he had loved so passionately for so many years.
“You would have loved living in Dogwood Springs. I remember when we visited there on our last vacation before the kids were born and you told me you would like to retire there someday.” He felt foolish talking to a piece of chiseled marble but not foolish enough to stop. “It has its problems but the kids have discovered there’s life outside this city. They’re learning a sense of community.”
He stared into the distance at the traffic that served as a constant reminder that he had stepped out of the homey comfort of his new place of residence. “Of course, if you were alive we would probably still be living here in the city and you would still be carrying the load of family responsibilities on your shoulders. I wish I’d known what a burden you carried. I wish I’d helped you more with the kids.”
The shadows deepened. It was almost quitting time for many St. Louis workers. Rush hour would be starting soon but he didn’t want to leave yet. “You would know what to do about Mom.”
He closed his eyes and remembered when he had first met Annette. At sixteen she was so pretty, with laughter just below the surface of her beautiful blue eyes. There was a constant movement of life in her expressive hands—a lot like Brooke’s vital presence. Because of Annette’s influence, he had found Christ at the rebellious age of seventeen. And it was only through the grace of God, with Annette’s indomitable support, that he had been able to focus on graduating from high school through the turmoil of his parents’ messy separation and divorce.
Because of Annette, Mom and Dad’s continued sniper fire over the years—”If he goes to the wedding, I won’t be there”…“If she’s at your house for Christmas, I’ll just spend the day alone at home alone”…“How could you let him hold my grandchildren before I even got to see them?”—had been less disruptive than it might have been.
“I wish you could meet Lauren. You would approve of her,” he murmured.
As the backhoe operator completed his job and loaded his rig to leave, Grant settled into the grass more comfortably to catch Annette up on the past three months.
“Brooke and Beau already love her.” A surprising truth, because though Beau’s affection came easily, Brooke’s first reaction when he’d suggested he might want to start dating again was a public display of extreme outrage that had the Dogwood Springs locals teasing him ever since.
Small towns had long memories. They also had big hearts. Even though he knew he would probably be referred to as “that new doctor down at the hospital” for the next five years, he had no doubt that he and his children had found their home.
“She’s the best nurse I’ve worked with and she anticipates my orders before I ask.” He paused with a smile. “She’s even brave enough to stay with Brooke and Beau while I’m here.”
He knew Lauren had some misgivings about allowing their friendship to progress further. Since they had never actually discussed their friendship, he didn’t have a good grasp about what those misgivings might be. She was good for the kids and she was certainly good for him. What would her reaction be if he were to ask her to consider a closer relationship with them? What would she say if she knew how much he’d come to care for her?
“You know, Annette, you told me one time that if anything were to happen to you, I should find the right woman and remarry. I remember my reaction.” He felt grief rush through him at that distant memory. He had told her that if she died he wanted to die with her. In her wisdom she had reminded him that someone needed to stick around to keep Brooke out of trouble.
“Now I know what you meant. As always, you were right.”
***
“You’re a good driver, Beau.” For Lauren, who normally preferred to be the one in control when she was in a car, that was a generous observation. From the edge of her vision she caught his nod of satisfaction in the glow of the dashboard lights.
He turned from the county road onto the quarter-mile gravel road that led to the hundred-and-eighty-acre McCaffrey farm.
“Beau usually drives the same way he does everything else,” Brooke said from the backseat.
“Don’t start on me,” Beau said. “I do not drive like Grandma.”
Brooke cleared her throat. “Well, most of the time you do, except for last week when you—”
“Almost got us killed.”
“No, I was actually going to say when you probably saved our lives.”
“Oh.”
“I feel safe riding with you,” Brooke said. “Even if I could have gotten us here fifteen minutes sooner.”
“If we’d lived through it.”
“Not cool! I just paid you a great compliment. It wouldn’t hurt you to be nice to me sometimes.”
Lauren allowed the current conversation to flow over her. She had long ago learned that the argument mode in which the twins usually conducted most of their conversation seldom held anger or aggression. In this particular word battle she would have sided with Beau but considered it wise to remain silent.
She indeed felt safe riding with him. He never tailgated, he never lost his temper, he always signaled. He drove with consideration not only for his passengers but also for the other drivers—as Brook
e said, pretty much the way he did everything else. Lauren had appreciated his skill for the past hour as he traversed the twisting curves and steep hills of the highway from Dogwood Springs to Knolls, with Brooke’s constant chatter from the backseat of their repaired Volvo. Brooke hadn’t called it a boat since the accident.
The better Lauren had gotten to know this wounded family, the more she discovered how similar Beau and his father were in taste and temperament. Even Brooke showed signs of a serious side when she let her guard down. Most of the time, however, she allowed few people past her bold facade.
She could be intimidating, as Lauren had discovered last spring at their first uncomfortable meeting. She had proven since then that there was a brain behind the beauty and a very soft heart hidden beneath the humor.
Beau pressed the brake and gave a low whistle. Cars gleamed in the glow from their headlights, lining both sides of the driveway, lurking halfway into the shadows of roadside trees and shrubs. There was barely room to drive between them.
“Where should I park?” he asked.
“Anywhere you can find an open spot is fine,” Lauren said.
He pulled in behind the last pickup truck on the right-hand side and parked beneath the overhang of sassafras trees that still retained a few of their brilliant orange leaves.
“Whoa, this place is packed,” Brooke said. Yard lights illuminated more cars parked in a strategic circle around the huge front yard where Lauren and her two little brothers had played tag and statue and hide-and-seek after her older sisters had outgrown her.
She recognized most of the cars but some were unfamiliar. She saw Lukas and Mercy Bower’s car and Buck and Kendra Oppenheimer’s pickup truck. Most, however, belonged to family—cousins, aunts, uncles.
“Why do relatives always wait until a funeral to get together?” she asked herself aloud.
Brooke unbuckled her seat belt. “Probably because they don’t like each other.”
“Lauren’s family is different from ours,” Beau said. “They’re nice.”
“Ours can be nice for short periods of time,” Brooke said. “Grandma and Grandpa are nice as long as they don’t have to think about each other.”
Lauren opened her door into the low branches of the sassafras tree but Beau had left plenty of room for her to maneuver. “I have some relatives like that too. Everybody does, I guess. The more relatives you have the more likely it is that there’ll be some kind of spontaneous combustion amongst some of them.”
As she walked around the car to join the kids on the road she became aware of a tension tightening inside her. She didn’t want to go into the house. She didn’t want to see the faces of family and confront the real reason she was here. What she wanted to do was stand out here in the darkness talking to these two fascinating individuals, continuing to push present reality into some hidden corner of her mind.
She wanted to remain in denial.
Ever since she had left work at seven this morning she had struggled hard to push the pain to a more comfortable distance. She had arrived home in time to help Brooke and Beau with breakfast and give them the bad news. Brooke had announced at once that they would come to Knolls with her. Beau had agreed—although later Lauren had overheard him accusing Brooke of using this as an excuse to see Lauren’s seventeen-year-old cousin Jason McCaffrey.
After they’d walked out the front door in typical argument mode, Lauren had taken two over-the-counter sleeping pills and waited for drowsiness to come. When it did, her dreams had been nightmares and she’d awakened in a sweat long before noon. The day had gone downhill from there.
Thank God for Brooke and Beau.
The fragrant crispness of the air assaulted her with the impact of a country holiday season. The spicy sweet smell of finely aged leaves forced her to remember years long past, when she and Hardy had been in charge of hanging colored Christmas lights around the eaves of the house the week after Thanksgiving.
The crunch of footsteps on gravel echoed against the cars and Lauren took a deep breath as she allowed the past to engulf her. “When Hardy and I were growing up it was our job every year to rake the leaves in the yard and throw them out in the feedlot.”
“But this is a huge yard,” Brooke said. “Didn’t you have a riding lawn mower?”
“We had a push mower. My parents had five kids. They didn’t believe in riding lawn mowers.” Closer to the house Lauren heard the sound of dozens of voices through the screen of an open front window—late November in southern Missouri could be mild. Today the thermometer had reached 65 degrees.
The buzz of several simultaneous conversations drifted out across the front porch. Typical McCaffrey get-together. Lauren’s tension mounted, and her steps slowed. From the corner of her eye she saw Brooke glance at her.
The voices grew louder and a burst of laughter surged through the window screens. Lauren recognized the voice of her oldest sister Sarah.
Through that same window, cousins Ruthie and Brenda were visible on the sofa in front of the fireplace and their chuckles joined Sarah’s.
Lauren knew they meant no disrespect with their laughter. In fact, in her extended family the pre- and post-funeral gatherings were often accompanied by copious amounts of boisterous talk and laughter, particularly when they shared stories and loving memories of the deceased. Hardy had been such an entertaining character there would be a lot of stories to tell. Such a gathering had played itself out at several different times during Lauren’s life.
But those other times had been for Grandma and Grandpa and Great-uncle Edmund and Aunt Dixie. They had lived full lives. They’d raised families. Their deaths had been peaceful passings, rich with celebration and family.
Hardy was different. He’d left a dependent family—a wife and two little girls—who loved him with total devotion. What would they do now?
The shock of loss felt raw inside Lauren. As she walked closer to the yard she felt more and more as if a part of her had been ripped away and devoured by greedy jaws. She’d left a million things unsaid.
Had Hardy known how much she’d always loved him? Being only eighteen months younger than her, he was a part of her deepest blood ties, her earliest memories. Even though they sometimes hadn’t seen each other for months at a time after they became adults, the minute they got together again they could read each other’s thoughts and complete each other’s old, tired jokes. They were family.
Brooke put a hand on Lauren’s shoulder. “Ready to go in?”
“No.” She didn’t realize her answer until she’d spoken it aloud. “Not yet.” Her throat closed with fresh grief. Tears spilled over and sobs spilled out before she could stop them.
Brooke’s arms came around her and Beau hovered nearby. Lauren couldn’t help it. The pain of loss held her in its grip.
***
Jay leaned back in his office chair and stretched. He looked as tired as Grant felt. “I made some calls this morning. It isn’t likely we’ll get a summary judgment on your case.”
“I didn’t expect one.”
“However, the deposition is being postponed until next Thursday, which will give us more preparation time. We’ll need it. My secretary has rearranged some appointments the next couple of days and I’ll do more reading. Are you sure you don’t want to delay this deposition further? You should have been told about it weeks ago.”
“If we can prepare for it in time I’d like to keep it as is. If the drug issue doesn’t come up, I don’t see a problem. Even if it does, I never pressed the limit. I never overdosed.”
Jay held up the stack of personal financial records Grant had produced for him. “Not a lot of assets for a doctor who’s been in the business as long as you have.”
“I spent most of our savings on cosmetic surgeries for Beau’s face.”
“I didn’t realize the damage was that bad.”
“The visible scars were minimal. The worst injuries were to the nerves on both sides. He doesn’t have a normal smile. Until recen
tly he didn’t have a smile at all. Some of the nerves seem to have regenerated in the past few months but now when he smiles it doesn’t look friendly. It looks like a leer. I’ve taken him to the three best surgeons in the state. They weren’t covered by our insurance.”
Jay closed his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t know how I would have endured what you’ve been through, Grant.” He shook himself and straightened in his chair. “Let’s see, your house is paid for and it has your sister’s name as joint owner. Good move.”
“Rita’s name is also on my savings and retirement accounts. She’ll take care of Brooke and Beau if something happens to me.” Probably. If things didn’t change in the next few months. He thought of Lauren, a recently developed habit of his.
“I’ll get to work on this stuff tonight.” Jay pushed away from his desk. “Are you hungry? Want to grab dinner again?”
“I promised my mom I’d take her out to eat tonight.” Grant noticed a slight stiffness in Jay’s expression that hadn’t been there before their initial meeting. It was barely detectable—maybe just his own paranoia. “Jay?”
“Mmm-hmm?”
“Do you mind telling me how much a case like this would cost a paying client?”
Jay’s mouth pursed and he glanced at the wall behind Grant instead of looking at him. “You know the costs could vary wildly.”
“I know it would be staggering,” Grant said. “Up to fifty thousand for discovery. Up to a hundred thousand if a case goes to trial.”
That earned a direct look from Jay. “I’m a man of my word. You know that. A case like this, for you, will cost nothing but time and painful memories...and maybe a tiny bit of public embarrassment if everything comes out. I just hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“I think I’ve surprised you. Maybe disappointed you, too.” It bothered Grant more than he’d thought possible. He had always enjoyed the high regard in which Jay had held him for years.
Jay walked over to the hall tree where he’d haphazardly flung his suit coat. “I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You were taking legal medication for a good reason.” He turned back to look at Grant. “You haven’t disappointed me, my friend. I think maybe ... I don’t know ... you’ve caused me to take a look at myself. You’re taking this legal drug thing so much more seriously than I ever would have.”
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