by Laurie Cass
“Mrr,” Eddie said.
I opened the door and pointed at him with a librarian’s index finger. “Tidiness,” I told him, and shut the door before he could get in the last word.
• • •
That was a bookmobile day, which was happily free of any unpleasant incidents or medical emergencies, and the next day was a library day that was crowded from open to close with a multitude of patrons needing assistance, a children’s author reading, a Friends of the Library meeting, and a delivery of brand-new books.
I slept like a rock that night. The next morning, my morning off from the library, I pulled on dress pants and a dressy T-shirt and drove up to the Charlevoix Hospital.
When I explained to the receptionist that I’d been the one to bring Mr. McCade in, she said he’d been asking about me and let me straight through.
“Hello?” I knocked on the doorframe of Russell McCade’s hospital room. In my hand were flowers from Oleson’s, a local grocery store. “Mr. McCade? Mrs. McCade?”
The man sitting up in the hospital bed and the woman in the chair next to him looked up at me. I remembered the woman’s just-shy-of-heavyset build and shoulder-length graying brown hair, but it was the first time I’d had a chance to really look at Russell McCade.
Despite the stroke-induced sagging of his left side, I could see that he had those craggy features that many women found attractive: bushy eyebrows, wide forehead and mouth, and a cleft chin. Sitting, he had a small belly, but that might disappear if he stood and sucked in. His hair was similar to his wife’s, half brown and half gray, and though their features didn’t look that similar, they gave off a sense of fitting together like a right hand in a left.
“Yes?” Mrs. McCade looked at me with a polite, yet distant smile. “May I help you?”
Rats. They didn’t recognize me. Not a huge surprise, but how exactly do you introduce yourself in a case like this without embarrassing everyone involved? “Um…” I proffered the flowers. “I brought these for—”
She let out a half squeal, half shout. “It’s Minnie!” She leapt to her feet and ran to me. The momentum of her hug sent me staggering a step backward. “Oh, my dear, I’m so glad you stopped by, so very glad.” She squeezed me hard enough that my eyes popped a little. “Cade, this is your bookmobile angel.” She grabbed my hand and tugged me to the bedside.
“There is nothing that I can possibly do,” Mr. McCade said, the words slow and slurred but clear enough, “to repay you for what you did. Barb and I are in your debt forever.”
I wanted to squirm. Did, just a little. “Anybody would have done the same thing.”
“What most people would have done,” he said, “is call nine-one-one and keep driving. You went far and above the call of kindness. Thank you, my dear. Thank you very much.”
He reached out for my hand and patted it. I could feel a slight heat on my cheeks and knew I was blushing. “You’re welcome,” I said. “Glad I was there at the right time.”
His wife relieved me of my small burden (“Let me take care of those flowers”) and put it on the windowsill while she extracted a promise from me to call them Barb and Cade. “Minnie, can you stay for a few minutes?” she asked. “Please do.”
“For a little while,” I said. “But I can’t stay too long. I have to work this afternoon.”
“Is that why you don’t have your furry friend with you?” She smiled. “What fun to have a bookmobile cat.”
“Is this afternoon another bookmobile trip?” Cade asked.
I pulled up a chair and perched on its edge, explaining my split roles of assistant library director and bookmobile driver. Halfway through the explanation I stumbled a little, because I suddenly realized why I was taking such a fast liking to this man I barely knew. He looked like and had a personality similar to my first-ever boss, the library director in Dearborn, the town where I’d grown up. Mr. Herrington had given me a summer job and he’d even kept me on part-time my senior year of high school.
Then I stumbled over my words a little more, because Mr. Herrington had passed away when my parents and I were in Florida over Christmas break, visiting my older brother. Mr. Herrington had died of a sudden heart attack in the library, during the hours I would have been there working, and I’d never quite forgiven myself for not being there to help him.
I blinked a time or two and stumbled back to my current narrative. If either McCade had noticed my falterings, they were both too polite to say so.
“Well,” Barb said, “I’m glad the Chilson Library has a bookmobile. If it didn’t, Cade here might not be making such a fast recovery.”
“Long way to go.” Cade looked down at his left side. “Pity I’m left-handed.”
“You’re… left-handed?” My mouth went dry. “But…”
“Don’t worry about his painting,” Barb said. “He’s such a nut to paint that he’ll learn how to do it right-handed if he has to.”
Cade lifted his right hand and flexed it. “Learning new techniques is what keeps me young. Well, that and learning how to use Facebook.”
Barb snorted. “Waste of time,” she said. “I know, I know, your agent thinks it’s giving you a better connection to your legions of fans, but it’s so artificial. How can typing two sentences to a stranger mean anything?”
“Better to use social media than have to tour,” her husband said. “Pick your poison, my dear.”
“Scotch,” she said promptly. “On the rocks.”
“Gin and tonic for me.” He chuckled. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we, Mrs. McCade?”
She held his hand, the hand closest to her, his left hand, his weak hand, and kissed it. “Indeed we are, Mr. McCade.”
Cade’s eyes faded shut. “Indeed.”
The moment was rich with love and comfort and security. With all my heart, I hoped that my marriage would be as strong as this one. When I got married, that is. Not that I was thinking about weddings or anything.
“Minnie,” Barb said, watching her husband. “Is that your full name?”
“Nope.” I didn’t say anything else, and she chuckled.
“When I get out of here,” Cade said, opening his eyes, “when I’m better, Barb and I are going to treat you to a night on the town. Dinner, drinks, dessert.” A smile curved up one side of his face. “All the best D’s possible. Dancing, if you want it.”
I grinned. “Disco?”
“Done.”
“Do-si-do?”
“Indubitably.”
Barb looked at him askance. “That’s not a D word.”
“No, but it feels like one. Say it out loud and you’ll see.”
So there we were, saying the word “indubitably” over and over again and getting a serious case of the giggles. Since it was a hospital, we tried to keep the noise down, but that made my stomach start to cramp. “Don’t,” I panted, “it hurts. Don’t.”
“D word,” Barb managed to get out, and we were off again.
A male voice intruded. “As I thought. It’s Minnie Hamilton, out and about and making trouble.”
“Tucker!” I jumped to my feet and went to him for a quick hug. Not a big one, because he was in doctor mode, but even a little one felt good.
Barb looked from me to Tucker and back. “Our bookmobile angel and our emergency room doctor hero are an item?” She clapped her hands. “Oh, how perfect this is. How absolutely perfect!”
“Stop her,” Cade said, “or she’ll be making calls for your wedding caterer.”
“We’ve only been dating a few weeks,” I said, my face once again going warm.
“Good weeks, though, right?” Tucker kissed the top of my head. “Good to see you’re doing well, Mr. McCade.”
“Thank you again, Dr. Kleinow,” Barb said. “Thank you so very much.”
He smiled. “Just doing my job, ma’am.” He nodded a good-bye, g
ave me a quick hug, and left.
“I should get going, too.” I stood. “I’m glad you’re doing so well, Cade.”
Barb stood, too. “I’ll walk you out, Minnie.” She leaned forward. “Go to sleep, my sweet. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Mmm.” Cade’s eyes were already closed. By the time Barb and I reached the door, he was snoring.
Out in the carpeted hallway, Barb stopped. “Minnie…” But whatever words she wanted to say got lost somewhere and she just stood there, looking at me with eyes full of emotion.
My throat clogged up a little. “You don’t need to say anything, okay? I’m glad I was there to help. Truly.”
“You’re a lovely girl.” Barb laid her hand on my cheek for a brief moment. “Your parents must be very proud.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but hey, maybe she was right.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “We’ll set a date for a nice lunch. I should have called before, but I’ve been a little…” She looked back down the hall.
“Busy,” I supplied. “Don’t worry about it. My cell number’s on my card. Call whenever you want.”
“Thank you, Minnie.” She gave me a hard hug. “So very much.”
I watched her walk back down the hall to her husband’s room, sniffled a little, and felt a sudden urge to talk to my aunt Frances.
• • •
“Minnie, my sweet. How are you?”
Even though I wasn’t feeling bad, not really, hearing my aunt’s voice made me feel better. She had a knack for making people feel not just better, but happier. And beyond that, more comfortable with themselves and who they could be.
It was a mild push from Aunt Frances that had gotten my friend Kristen thinking about opening a restaurant, and it was an Aunt Frances suggestion that motivated a neighbor of hers to make the move from composing music for friends and family to selling it over the Internet and eventually to making a mint writing movie sound tracks.
I glanced through my office doorway. No one in sight. “Just wondering about breakfast on Saturday. And how things are, you know, going.” Because Aunt Frances ran more than a summer boardinghouse and she did more than amateur career coaching; she was a secret matchmaker.
My aunt sighed. It was an uncharacteristic sound from my permanently cheerful relative. “There are what you might call issues.”
Every spring Aunt Frances took careful stock of the boardinghouse applicants for the upcoming summer. Though she didn’t have a Web site or even a Facebook page, she did have years upon years of happy boarders who referred friends and family and near strangers. The stack of letters and e-mails from people asking to stay was thicker than the phone book for the entire county.
Aunt Frances studied each letter carefully, and if a candidate looked at all probable, an intense series of letters and phone calls followed. To explain the unusual setup at the boardinghouse, Aunt Frances would say, and go on to explain that the summer’s fee included a daily breakfast, with one catch. On Saturday, a boarder cooked for everyone else. The daunting task of cooking for the six boarders, Aunt Frances, and often her librarian niece had made more than one applicant back away.
The cooking of breakfast, however, was a requirement Aunt Frances would never change. Because the real reason she took so much time studying the applicants was that the entire summer was a secret matchmaking setup, pairing boarder with boarder.
“There’s no better way to get a person’s measure than to see him or her working in the kitchen,” she’d said to me privately. And she had a gift for pairing up her boarders. In all the years she’d been running the boardinghouse, which had been ever since her husband died so young that I barely remembered him, she’d never once missed. Until now.
She sighed again. “It’s a downright mess.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
There was a pause. “Not really.” Then she spoke in a lighter tone. “It’ll work out. I’m sure of it.”
Because this year, early on, her carefully selected summer pairs had mismatched completely. The lovely twenty-six-year-old Deena and the fifty-year-old Quincy had taken to each other with a liking that seemed far more than friendship. This had pushed fifty-three-year-old Paulette, Quincy’s theoretical match, into the companionship of sixty-five-year-old Leo, which left twenty-three-year-old Harris, Deena’s supposed match, to spend a lot of time with Zofia, a grandmother who wore clothes of many colors and a baker’s dozen of rings. But Zofia had been matched with Leo. It was a problem and my matchmaking aunt was ready to pull out her hair.
“Well,” I said, “there’s always breakfast to look forward to. And that’s one of the reasons I called. Tucker and I both have the day off and I was wondering if it would be okay to bring him.”
“Oh, honey.” Aunt Frances laughed. “Of all the Saturdays to bring your young man to breakfast, you pick this one.”
“What’s up?”
“Harris,” she said succinctly. “He’s been making a mess of the kitchen all week, working on a culinary creation of his own.”
“Not good?”
“Horrible. I can’t count the number of eggs he’s gone through, and I have to tell you, the smell of burning maple syrup isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.”
“You don’t have an enemy in the world.”
“I’ll have a houseful if I don’t have a backup plan for breakfast this Saturday. Do you have any ideas where I could hide a few boxes of cereal?”
I suggested the trunk of her car, thanked her for the warning about breakfast, and went back to work.
• • •
Saturday morning, the first Saturday I’d had off in weeks, started off with a dawn so bright and shiny that the world felt brand-new.
I’d taken my aunt’s warnings to heart and had asked Tucker to come by the houseboat later that morning, but I found some courage, took a deep breath, and headed up to the boardinghouse.
“Good morning, favorite niece,” Aunt Frances greeted me on the front porch. She had a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. “Would you like a cup? It’ll be the best thing about breakfast.”
Since I was her only niece, I didn’t let the favorite comment go to my head. “Is it going to be that bad?”
She sipped her coffee. “You be the judge. But you know the rules.”
“No making fun of the food and always compliment the cook.”
She smiled. “A credit to the family, that’s what you are.”
I glanced at the front door. “So, how are things going in there? Apart from the breakfast, I mean.”
Her smile fell away. “Horrible. Simply horrible.”
It disturbed me to see my normally cheerful aunt look so morose. “I’ll be the judge of that,” I said, and opened the wooden screen door for her. We passed through the spacious living room, oak floorboards creaking, past the end tables and coffee tables built from driftwood, past the maps thumbtacked to the walls and the fieldstone fireplace, and entered the dining room.
I exchanged morning greetings with five of the six boarders, and within five minutes, I understood what my aunt had meant. The young, funny, intelligent, beautiful Deena was pouring coffee for the middle-aged and balding Quincy. She added sugar and a little cream, stirred it, then handed it to him and watched anxiously until he sipped it and nodded. Her resulting smile was bright and happy and I didn’t dare look at Aunt Frances.
My favorite boarder of the summer, Zofia, stood at the window, smiling at the view of the bird- and tree-filled backyard. Zofia had a tendency to wear flowing skirts and dangling earrings, clothing to match her Gypsy-sounding name. She hadn’t been able to wear that type of thing when her husband was ladder-climbing for a major car manufacturer, but after his death she’d spread her wings.
The white-haired Leo was sitting at the table with Paulette at his side. Paulette, tawny-
haired and comfortably plump, had been matched with Quincy, but she’d shown no interest in him whatsoever once the dapper Leo appeared on the scene.
My aunt’s plan had been to match Zofia with Leo, but Zofia seemed to be comfortable with her single status and hadn’t shown a hint of interest in the man.
Unless something changed fast, this was going to be Aunt Frances’s first matchmaking failure ever. Well, not a complete failure, because four of the six boarders would be matched up, even if not according to plan, but that would leave two of them alone, and that would just about kill Aunt Frances.
“Breakfast!” Harris called. “Morning, Minnie. Could you ring the bell?”
“Sure.” I went out to the screened porch that lay adjacent to the dining room, and pulled on the rope that went from the porch to the top end of a bell. Years ago, the bell had been taken from an old train engine and installed in the branches of a maple tree for this very purpose. The bell dinged once, twice, and three times, summoning one and all to the breakfast table. Everyone was there already, but ringing the bell was a tradition that dared not be broken.
We sat down to toast, orange juice, and a breakfast casserole made of… well, I wasn’t quite sure what. Eggs, certainly. Bacon? Green peppers? And was that… it couldn’t be pineapple, could it? A few silent minutes went by while eight people chewed, seven of whom were searching for something complimentary to say. Harris, who had recently graduated from college, and who had been matched with Deena, didn’t seem to care about his romantic loss. What he seemed most concerned about was our reaction to the food.
“Harris, dear,” Zofia said, “the coffee is outstanding this morning.”
“Absolutely.” Leo held up his mug. “Never better, young man.”
Aunt Frances cleared her throat. “It takes ingenuity to create your own recipe, young man. You’ve shown great courage.”
“You bet,” Deena said quickly. “I would never have dreamed of making up something. Not ever.”
“Interesting combinations,” I said. “I’ll have to tell Kristen.”
“Just think,” Paulette added, “maybe Kristen will name a new entrée after you.”