Harrington bit his lip. Victory.
“See? The past is written in the present.” The look on Harrington’s face was the look of a man needing to put a value on the food in the walk-in fridge and decide whether a two-week-old karaoke machine had depreciated. “I’m getting samples, and I’m going to test the hell out of the place, but I know what I’m going to find.”
“You’ve convinced me.” He took a step, then turned back. “Okay, but now you have me curious. If a guy getting saved from losing everything by a malfunctioning dishwasher is almost enough to have you believe in God, what would it actually take?”
Amber looked at him over her shoulder, eyes narrow. “Raising a guy from the dead.”
Harrington grinned. “I think at least one major religion has that.”
“Wrong guy.” She bent to get another sample. “You’ll have a copy of the report as soon as it’s written, even if the Old Man wants my head in a bag again.”
“He’d never put your head in a bag,” called Harrington as he left. “You’re the reason he can stroll around checking smoke detectors rather than spending mornings out here with a shovel.”
Amber collapsed into the driver’s seat of her Subaru Outback. At nearly noon, she’d already spent four hours investigating the remnants of that restaurant, and her back ached.
Two calls had come in on her cell phone while working, both of which she’d sent to voicemail. The first was from her sister Olivia. “So, um, you may want to cover up your head or run over your phone. Mom had a great idea: you need to buy a house. She says a sign went up for sale on a nice starter home on Curve Street.”
Oh, yeah, the old Martin place. Three bedrooms, tiny overgrown yard with blackberry brambles engulfing what used to be a white picket fence. Mom might be in need of a hobby, but at least she’d picked a place with charm. Of course Amber would love nothing more than to snow-blow her walk every morning from November to April and maintain a three-bedroom gable all by herself for the next sixty years.
“She says there’s even room to grow a garden, which I know is something you lie awake every night wishing you could do, right? Right. Well, I warned you. You can thank me later.”
Amber gave that message all the attention it deserved: she deleted it. She proceeded to the second, and the number that showed made her stomach lurch.
“Hello, Amber,” began the message, and then, as if Amber could ever forget this voice, “This is Carmen Mateo.”
Amber’s fingers tightened on the phone, and she set her jaw.
“I hope you’re doing well,” Carmen continued, “and I’d love to catch up with you sometime.”
Of course you would. Just a regular should-have-been-mother-in-law doing a normal bi-decennial check-in with the woman her son never married. What do you really want?
“Um, this is about Rocket.” A hesitation before continuing, something you heard a lot with lies. “Marcus’s cat. I was thinking maybe I should let you have him after all.”
Four years later? Four years and suddenly Carmen thought she should let her have the cat after all?
Carmen said, “So if you want him, I need you to come get him soon.”
Or what?
“Call me back,” Carmen said. “It will be good to hear from you!”
The whole call was a crap sandwich. Start with the buttery greeting and end with the sweet closing, and in the middle slip in an offer that Carmen should maybe give back the cat she’d stolen. And why? Maybe the cat needed chemotherapy and Carmen didn’t want to pay for it. Maybe Carmen wanted to go on a month-long tour of Ecuador and found out what it costs to pay a cat-sitter.
Amber dialed the numbers she still knew by heart after four years. You told me you couldn’t let Marcus’s cat go, that you had to keep him because it meant so much to you and it was all you had left.
If this were an arson investigation, she’d already have had the chief of police on the phone, that’s for sure.
It rang three times and then rolled to voicemail. Trying to avoid sounding irritated, she instead sounded preternaturally calm. “Carmen, it’s Amber. I need you to tell me more about the cat.”
Maureen Brickman had just enough time after sliding the lasagna noodles into the pot to mix up the cheese. Into the metal mixing bowl went the container of ricotta, the shredded mozzarella, and the grated parmesan. She added an egg, broken first into a mug the way her mother had taught her, and then pepper and parsley.
While she worked, her daughter Olivia sat at the table, breastfeeding three-month-old Charlotte. Those sweet audible gulps had slowed, and it looked like once again, a baby was knocked out by a tummy full of milk. So cute. Olivia was saying, “No, really. I don’t think Amber would even get approved for a mortgage.”
Maureen huffed. “They’d give a mortgage to a talking parrot these days. Her apartment’s nice enough, but she’d just thrive in a place of her own.”
Olivia shifted the now-sleeping baby to the crook of her arm and straightened her shirt. Maureen grinned. Yep, that baby was good and out.
Olivia pointed to the lasagna. “You know you could just use no-boil noodles and dump in extra tomato sauce.”
Maureen’s nose wrinkled. “Yuck.”
Olivia laughed.
“There’s a reason you do things the right way.” Maureen glanced outside at the snow, glad for a pretty kitchen and a warm stove. The yellow curtains with their embroidered flowers couldn’t quite make it springtime, but she could pretend. Within a month, those flowers would be real.
Olivia added, “I think it’s funny. We’re going out for dinner, but you’re making dinner for one of your client-moms.”
Maureen turned with a grin, holding up a finger. “One. I’m making one dinner.”
Olivia laughed. “Still, I thought showing up at the door with dinner postpartum was the work of a mom, not a midwife.”
Maureen’s voice sharpened. “You need to remember you’re incredibly lucky. Not everyone has her mother an hour down the road, not to mention childcare at the drop of a hat. She’s young. Her husband’s deployed, and she has another little one to look after. Besides,” and here she didn’t even try to hide her irritation, “I don’t stop caring the minute I cut the cord and submit the insurance forms.” Not like a doctor. Who probably never cared at all.
Olivia shrank a bit. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
“No, I know. But we… Not everyone has family nearby.” And not everyone lived in a town like this one, where if you needed help you could count on a neighbor to stop by with a meal. Or an offer to babysit. Or a gas card. What did new moms do without neighbors?
Well, this one’s midwife was bringing her a lasagna.
Olivia excused herself from the table to lay Charlotte in the portacrib.
Her poor client. It hadn’t been a difficult birth, but it had been long. Maureen had sat with the laboring mom for twenty-six hours, much of that time spent rubbing her back or letting the mom lean against her. All that time, the touches, the reassurance, leading to that moment when the mom finished her hard work by birthing her baby into her own hands, raising him to her chest, and looking up triumphant. Stunned, but triumphant.
This afternoon at the one-week postpartum appointment, though, the mom was spent, just spent. The newborn period was too tough to go alone, especially with a toddler who hungered for all your attention. So no, Olivia was right, a midwife didn’t have to cook for her clients, but what did it hurt anyone to make sure a woman had a decent meal?
As Olivia returned, Maureen drained off the water and began creating pasta layers, her throat tightening. Young moms needed a tender touch, something she’d never gotten. A birth with them in control, not someone else. Again, something she hadn’t gotten. She should send brownies too.
As she slid the lasagna into the oven, she suddenly felt that familiar stared-at sensation. “Hey, get the phone, will you?”
On cue, the phone rang. Olivia answered, then handed it to Maureen. “Hell
o?”
“Maureen! It’s Dr. Jacobson.”
Maureen propped the phone against her shoulder as she washed her hands. “What’s going on? Have you got a referral?”
But even as she said it, she knew her tone was wrong, that he sounded too reserved for that. In general calls went from her to him, since when a woman was no longer a good candidate to birth at home, he was the only doctor she trusted enough to refer her clients to. On the occasion he’d called her to discuss a patient who wanted to homebirth, he’d adopted a mock hurt tone. “I can’t believe they’re rejecting me,” he’d say in his dusky voice. “But Maureen, if they’re going to birth outside the hospital, I want them to do it safely.”
But now, instead of “I have a woman who needs your care,” he said, “I wanted to let you know I’m retiring.”
Her heart thrummed. “But— When?”
“Two weeks.”
Two weeks? “Why so suddenly? Is it your health?”
“It’s complicated, and I’m not ill, but it’s time.” It’s time? Some garbage going down at the hospital? Did he lose a patient? Did his malpractice insurance premiums go up because premiums only go up?
Maureen paced the kitchen. She avoided Olivia’s probing look. “Are you selling the practice?”
“I’m phasing everyone out, over to Dr. Xiang.”
Ah, Dr. Xiang, whom Maureen once overheard telling a homebirth transfer, “It’s good you’re in the hospital, not birthing in a barn.” Did she know Maureen had given birth to Olivia in a barn? It wasn’t that Dr. Xiang wasn’t a good doctor. She probably was—but the system that formed her? The culture of hospitalized birth? Dr. Xiang exemplified it all.
As of this moment, Maureen no longer had a backup physician. If any of her clients had to transfer to an obstetric practice, she wouldn’t have a working relationship with it.
Maureen unclenched her hand. “Well... Thank you for letting me know. I wish you the best.”
“Thanks, Maureen. I’m sorry for the short notice.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Oh, wait. Before you go, I talked to Jody Errols at the hospital. Remember, the mom I referred to you with blood pressure issues?”
“As if I could forget.” No, Dr. Jacobson wouldn’t. Most doctors didn’t have the time of day for you unless they had your chart in their hands and could bill you for the effort, but he probably went home at night and prayed for each patient by name. “I trust she’s told you only good things about me?”
“I saw how well she’s doing. She adores you.” Maureen bit her lip. “She’s going to be very upset.”
“I’m planning to tell her myself tomorrow,” Dr. Jacobson said. “She’s a real trooper. Everyone’s rooting for her.”
Maureen’s throat tightened. Why was it always the good ones to go? “Well, thank you. And good luck. With your retirement.”
After she hung up the phone, she sat at the table, rubbing her temples and feeling as if she’d just lost an ally in a war she couldn’t bear to surrender.
Chapter Two
Amber pulled into Carmen’s driveway and kept her eyes off the house. Instead she noticed the lack of hedges in her headlights. Too much had changed. On the other side should have been an overgrown maple with its roots buckling the asphalt, but it was gone as well, the ground contoured over the spot where the stump should have been. Maybe Carmen had pulled it down. Maybe that freak snowstorm last October with the really high winds had brought down a tree limb that crushed the hedge, necessitating the removal of both.
Amber liked that theory best: it answered two questions at the same time.
For a couple of minutes, she sat staring at Carmen’s old car, ahead of her in the driveway. The woman was home. She couldn’t get out of it now, not really. Not unless her pager went off and she had to go to a fire, but when she framed it that way, someone losing his house was far worse than her talking to Carmen. So bracing herself, she got out of the car.
She refused to look at the house while picking her way through the remaining piles of snow, but that was easy because the outside lights weren’t on. She held onto the paint-peeling railing in case there was ice on the steps.
When she answered the door, Carmen looked her up and down while gushing out a greeting. Hunching, Amber thrust her hands forward in her coat pockets. Let the woman inspect her. Amber didn’t owe her anything. Not an explanation. Not an apology. Nothing.
Carmen gestured that she enter, and the smell hit her as soon as she stepped into the hall. The mix of carpet, cooking, people—it might as well have been four years ago, with Marcus waiting for her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter with a can of Coke in one hand and a Neal Stephenson book in the other.
She wanted to scream for it to stop. But she couldn’t back out now.
Carmen said, “You look really good! You cut your hair.”
About three years prior, yeah. Amber avoided the photos of Marcus on the walls. And the fireplace mantle: was that where Carmen had kept Marcus’s ashes until she finally got around to burying him? “Where’s Rocket?”
In the kitchen, the cat sat on the tile floor beside its food bowls. The brown striped tabby looked skinnier than she remembered, but he still had that cute white tip of the tail, and still the huge feet. Hi, guy. I missed you.
A pair of baby-gates, stacked one atop the other, barred off the entrance to the dining room, similar to the ones blocking the stairwell. A grandkid? Maybe Carmen was doing day-care. The litter box was in the bathroom just off the kitchen, and now Amber could detect a strong odor of Lysol. What was going on?
She knelt on the linoleum until Rocket noticed her. Then she extended a hand, not touching. He sniffed, then picked up his head, stepped closer, and sniffed again.
Carmen said, “Do you have a cat carrier?”
“I figured I’d use yours and bring it back.”
Carmen said, “I don’t have one.”
Amber frowned. “What do you use to bring the cat to the vet?”
Carmen said, “He’s never been.”
Not for the first time, Amber thanked heaven for the only silver lining in this situation: Carmen was not her mother-in-law. If everything had worked out as planned, Amber would have been the top poster at Mother-In-Law-Stories-dot-com, seconded only by Marcus’s posts about her own mother. Who knows—maybe their screen names would have given each other support online only to discover they were married? That would have been a riot. Marcus would have joked forever that he was leaving her for that enticing internet buddy who gave such awesome advice,
Rather than let Carmen see her grimace, Amber crouched near the cat and let him get her scent. Did he remember her? He let her scratch his head, then stretched.
Amber said, “He’s not up to date on his shots?”
Carmen said, “I never let him out of the house.”
“So he’s not up to date on his shots.” Of course not. “I can come back tomorrow with a carrier, I guess.”
“Actually, can’t you just take him now? It’s not a very long ride, is it? You still live around here?”
As if Carmen cared where she lived. Or had a right to know. Amber said, “I’m not sure it’s safe.”
“Just take him today.”
Why the rush? Amber felt him all over, but Rocket didn’t seem vicious or sick. Baby gates. Maybe the child they’d been installed for was allergic? But then why not say so? Then again, when had Carmen ever said anything straight-up? Other than when Carmen had been straight-up about keeping the damned cat in the first place. Marcus was my son. I have nothing else to remember him by.
As if Amber had that much to remember him by. Not even an engagement ring, but that was by her own choice. They’d gotten a telescope instead. She had Marcus’s letters and a photo album. Oh, and the grey Nike sweatshirt he’d let her wear home from their last stargazing trip. As for the rest? Nothing. Carmen had cleaned out the place before she’d even gotten there.
Amber sighed. “Sure. I’ll just p
ut him in the car.” He wasn’t a kitten anymore. Wasn’t likely to jump on her shoulders or crawl beneath the brake pedal.
Five minutes later, as she settled the cat in the back seat with the blanket she always kept in her emergency kit, Amber mused whether she were breaking the seatbelt laws. She ought to call the police sergeant she bantered with on slow mornings. Hey, Scott? What’s the proper restraint system for a cat? No, even better, she could call the folks who certified her as a car seat safety inspector last June. Except they’d be all grim and tell her not to. In an accident, an eight-pound unrestrained cat will function as a projectile and could strike you with six hundred pounds of force.
Carmen said, “What have you been doing?”
Amber shrugged. “Working.”
She slipped into the car, but before she got the door shut, Carmen said, “Are you using your archaeology degree?”
And why does it matter to you? You as good as blamed me for Marcus’s death, but now you care about my haircut and my job? I don’t think so.
She shrugged. “Wherever they’d hire me. You know how the economy is.” Amber pulled on her seat belt. “Thanks for Rocket.”
Carmen said, “It was good seeing you again.”
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