He nodded and left to make his rounds.
Ginger mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand it. She tried again and I made out, “Should buy stock in this place.”
I patted her hand and bit back both my lip and my tears.
“No. Pity.”
Those words came out loud and clear, and I looked her straight in the eye. Her beady eyes shone fierce. I nodded, but I had no hope of speaking without breaking down.
Luke poked his head in the door early the next morning and motioned for me to join him in the hall. I tiptoed out and saw he came bearing two large Dunkin’ Donuts coffees.
“I love you,” I said breathlessly as I took the warm Styrofoam cup in both hands.
He stiffened, and I blushed. “It’s an expression?”
“Don’t try to explain it.” His small smile suggested he wished I’d left it at my first comment.
“Really, thank you for the coffee. The only thing better might be a masseuse, because I’m pretty sure my neck has been permanently damaged by the chair in Ginger’s room.”
“Maybe we could look into massage later,” he said with a twinkle in his eye that caused me to blush all over again. I punched his arm lightly.
“Ouch!”
I punched him again. Harder.
“Now I need a massage,” he said as he rolled back the offended shoulder.
“Exactly.”
Then it was his turn to blush.
“If you two are done flirting, I thought I might check on Miss Ginger.” Tiffany’s voice shouldn’t have surprised me, but I jumped through the ceiling anyway.
“She’s still sleeping, Miss Grumpy-Pants,” I said.
“Well, I wouldn’t know since someone sent me home.” Tiffany tried to cross her arms, but she didn’t have anywhere to put them but on top of her belly.
“Yes, I wouldn’t let the pregnant lady sleep in the hospital chair. I’m an awful human being.” I chugged the coffee, ignoring how it burned my tongue. Something else was bothering Tiffany, but I would have to wait to find out what it was because Dr. Perkins came out of the neighboring room. We had to move aside for him to take the chart from the plastic bin outside Ginger’s room.
“Is the patient awake yet?” he asked. He had shadows under his eyes. I started to ask him if it’d been a rough night, but I probably didn’t want to know the answer.
“Not as of a few minutes ago,” I said.
“Well, let’s see.” He pushed through the door, and I followed him. Ginger’s eyes fluttered open. Once again I was struck by how thin she looked underneath the hospital blanket.
“Ms. Belmont.” Dr. Perkins turned to her with a small bow. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Like shit.”
That one came out loud and clear. Dr. Perkins didn’t miss a beat. “We’ll see if we can get you feeling better by lunch then, maybe let you go this afternoon?”
“This afternoon?” My voice echoed off the concrete walls, and the good Dr. Perkins shot me a lethal look.
“I know this has been a traumatic event, but you are going to have to be calm for her sake. She’s already doing much better, and the symptoms should abate in less than twenty-four hours. You need to conserve your energy and be more concerned about trying to prevent any future strokes that could be more serious.”
I looked at Luke then Tiffany as Dr. Perkins spoke with Ginger, murmuring to her as he checked her vitals. He brushed past us with an admonition to have a good day, and Tiffany plopped down in my chair and took knitting out of her purse.
I shook my head as I watched her labor over what appeared to be a baby bootie.
“What?” Her brows scrunched over her eyes in a “Wanna make something of it?” expression. She was holding knitting needles, so make something of it I did not.
“Nothing,” I said with a shrug. I should have been happy a tavern waitress had taken up knitting. I shouldn’t have felt as though another part of my past life was missing. I looked over to where Luke leaned against the wall nursing his coffee, and, suddenly, I didn’t miss anything at all.
“You know, I didn’t think to bring something for you ladies—want me to walk back across the street and get a coffee and—” Luke looked at Tiffany. “A hot chocolate?”
“That would be wonderful,” she said.
We didn’t have to look at Ginger to know how she felt about the hospital’s decaf.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
Ginger struggled to sit up and said something I couldn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, Ginger, try that one again?”
I couldn’t make out everything, but I picked out “saint” and “sinner,” and the twinkle in Ginger’s eyes helped me figure out the rest. I felt the heat of my blush start somewhere around my collarbone and rise all the way up to my ears and across my cheeks.
Ginger half laughed and half gurgled.
“What?” Tiffany put down her needles with a definitive clack and stood to see what the fuss was about. Ginger used her good hand to form an O with her bad hand, then with her good hand she pointed to me then put her finger into the half-formed O.
“You did not!” Tiffany gasped as she looked me over with wide brown eyes.
At the rate I was blushing, I was in danger of turning purple. “Not yet.”
“Not yet means someday!” Tiffany squealed and clobbered me with a full body hug. The baby kicked me for good measure, creating an echo of longing in my own womb.
I looked over Tiffany’s shoulder to where more than half of Ginger’s mouth smiled. Even when it should be all about her, it became about others. I would be lucky if I could ever figure out how to be more like Ginger Belmont.
“I forgot to ask how Miss Ginger likes her contraband coffee.”
All of us turned to see Luke standing in the doorway. “Why are you all grinning?”
It was the good reverend’s turn to blush, although his eyes caught mine. “Do you women have to share everything?”
I held up my hands in surrender. “I didn’t say a word.”
He nodded with a smile. “Sure you didn’t.”
Ginger used her good hand to point to herself. I prayed she wouldn’t use the crude gesture again.
“Oh, so you’re the troublemaker, eh?”
She nodded slowly.
“Then I suppose I shouldn’t go get you any coffee, huh?”
Her eyes widened, and she used her good hand to draw half a halo over her head.
“Black with two packets of sugar,” I said with a grin.
“Done,” Luke said before pointing two fingers at his eyes and then at Ginger. “But I’m watching you.”
That afternoon Luke helped us get Ginger home since I didn’t want the massively pregnant lady lifting people, even if the person in question was as light as a feather.
Ginger, unfortunately, was a little loopy and kept asking Luke if he’d finally got laid.
“Is she asking what I think she’s asking?” Luke handled her with care, and I couldn’t look at his hands without thinking of other places they had been.
“Mmm-hmm.” I didn’t want to make eye contact with him, either.
Tiffany went ahead to unlock the door, and the rest of us crossed the threshold, an awkward threesome. Luke and I panted as much from trying to maneuver three people through the door as from the exertion of carrying Ginger.
“Hey, Tiffany, could you be a sweetheart and start a pot of coffee?” I asked as I read a text from John the Baptist saying he’d mixed the Happy Hour Choir CD for us and that I could pick it up whenever. It took me a minute to realize the house was too quiet. And smoky.
Tiffany stood stock-still at the edge of the kitchen, not hearing or, at the very least, not acknowledging.
Luke helped me ease Ginger into the chair.
“Tiffany?”
I tasted panic—the bitter, metallic taste of anticipation gone wrong. Did her water break? Was she going into premature labor? Had she hurt herse
lf helping me with Ginger?
Then I saw Carl Davis sitting at the breakfast room table. He was smoking a cigarette and dumping the ashes into one of the dainty saucers from Ginger’s fine china. An ornate collector’s pistol sat beside the saucer. His knobby fingers hesitated nearby.
“You’re looking good, Tiff-Tiff.” His stone-cold demeanor repulsed me more than his drunken delirium had.
I touched Tiffany’s arm to get her attention. “Why don’t you run upstairs?”
“Hey, I got something to say to you, girl.”
She stopped at the bottom stair and turned around. I wanted to stand between her and her stepdaddy. I wanted to tell her to run upstairs and never listen to another thing that came out of his mouth. But I couldn’t. This was her fight. I could support her, but I couldn’t fight it for her.
Something crashed to the ground out of Carl’s line of sight, and he picked up the pistol and pulled the hammer back. I looked behind me to see Luke in the living room with the phone in his hand. “Knocked over some books. That’s all.”
I nodded slightly before I turned back to Carl. I gauged the distance between him and me then between me and the closet where the shotgun sat, fully loaded and ready.
“It’s time to come home.” He took another drag of his cigarette, exhaling a plume of smoke in Ginger’s smoke-free house.
Tiffany couldn’t speak.
“She is home, Carl.” Ginger’s voice came out clear as a bell. “Now, you need to go.”
He narrowed his eyes at Ginger, and I stepped between the two of them. “You heard the lady. You’re in violation of our restraining order as well as having broken and entered—”
“Just entered. I ain’t broke nothing. Yet.” Carl pointed the gun at me. His finger curled around the trigger.
“Is that a threat?” Luke stepped in front of me. He was stalling, but he was also ready to take a bullet if he needed to. “Four witnesses. I’d leave if I were you.”
Carl stood. “Well, you aren’t me, now, are you, pretty boy? I ain’t gonna let you or anyone else take what’s mine.”
“I’m not your property.”
We all turned to Tiffany. Her knuckles shone white against the newel ball. She lost her balance, and it came off in her hand. Carl swung the gun to face her, and Luke backed me out of the way. Carl took one step toward Tiffany, but she took the newel ball and wound her arm in a flash of movement to give a quick, hard, underhanded pitch. The ball whizzed past me and smacked into Carl’s forehead. As he fell backward, he hit the back of his skull on the table with a sickening thud before crumpling to the floor. His glassy eyes stared up at the ceiling, his mouth agape in an eerie way.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Tiffany grabbed her side and sat down on the stairs and cried.
The police report later said that no one else—well, maybe Roger Clemens—could have thrown that newel ball with the same amount of force. The ball to the forehead felled him, but the blow to the back of the head on the table killed him. In the official report, Len left out the part where I described Tiffany’s pitch as a thing of beauty, but she had hurled that newel ball with ferocious grace. One would expect no less from a highly ranked fast-pitch softball prospect even if she was eight months pregnant.
While Declan Anderson put the body on a gurney and took Carl off to a more respectful burial than he deserved, Tiffany spilled her entire story to them, and I held her hand as she did. Luke, Ginger, and I also gave our statements. In the end, they decided Tiffany had acted in self-defense—especially since Carl had brought a gun. I bit my tongue to keep from saying I only wished she could have acted in self-defense a lot sooner.
Tiffany was officially cleared of all wrongdoing not long before Thanksgiving, so we were all looking forward to the holidays. Luke and Sam were going to join us, and Ginger joked about finding a man who liked women with really short Brillo pad hair so she could have a date, too.
She tried to pretend she was fine, but I had a lot of time to watch over her that November, since I only worked at the church on Sundays and picked up just enough weddings and funerals to keep us afloat. She wouldn’t do anything when she knew I was looking, but I came home from the grocery store early one day to see Declan Anderson in the living room going over funeral arrangements with her yet again. The man had the patience of Job.
Another day I caught Ginger with more masking tape, putting little stickers on the backs of books, dishes, even pieces of furniture. I asked her if I could help, but she smiled and said, “No, thank you.” No explanation, no nothing.
And then there were the letters each morning. She would write as long as her arthritis allowed her. Her handwriting bobbled all over the place, and she stuck her tongue out a little as she wrote, reminding me of a second grader learning to write in cursive.
“So,” I finally said one day. “When are you going to let me read this letter you’ve been working so hard on?”
She looked up from the letter, her nonexistent eyebrow raised. “When are you going to get a full-time job?”
We both knew the answer to that question, but neither of us wanted to say it, so we kept up our game of her hiding things and me spying on her all the way to Thanksgiving. Of course, if I’d known then what was in her letter, I might not have waited so long to read it.
Might have saved us all a lot of trouble.
Chapter 31
The first person at the door on Thanksgiving morning was Luke. He took one step into the house, dipped me like Fred dipped Ginger, and kissed me the way Rhett kissed Scarlett.
“Well, I know what I’m thankful for today,” I said once I was back in an upright position.
“You two really need to get a room,” Tiffany groused on her way to the kitchen. I wanted to shout after her that she was just jealous, but I held my tongue. Then I marveled at how I had held my tongue. Then Luke decided to occupy my tongue a little while longer.
“Seriously,” added Ginger, who was leaning on a walker but moving around like a pro. “Can a gal get some coffee first?”
“Someone’s jealous,” I whispered to Luke.
“As a minister, I know I’m supposed to feel sympathy for them,” he whispered back. “But I don’t.”
“You know who you should feel sorry for?”
His eyes narrowed with concern. “Who?”
“The turkey.” I grabbed his hand and led him into the kitchen. I had started getting the bird ready at six in the morning, but I still needed to check on him from time to time. Luke stood to the side as I opened the oven, inspected my handiwork, and decided to use the baster to add more moisture.
“How is ol’ Bill?” Ginger took a dainty sip of her coffee.
Luke looked at her in confusion. “Bill?”
“Yeah, Bill ended up with two turkeys somehow,” Tiffany said with a pointed look at me. “And he gave one to Beulah so she named the turkey after him.”
“That was nice of him,” Luke said. “Well, Bill the man, that is.”
As I used the baster to suck up butter and turkey juice then squeeze it over Bill the turkey, I hoped Bill the man wasn’t feeling the effects in some odd voodoo sort of way.
The toaster oven dinged, and I retrieved the previously canned cinnamon rolls. Luke looked at me as he slid Bill back into the oven.
“Yup, this is the sort of great cooking you could look forward to with me,” I said as I spread the glaze over the hot rolls. I had meant it as a joke, but Luke’s gaze grew intense.
“Something the matter?” I asked.
He shook it off. “Why is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade not on? Unacceptable!”
He jogged to the living room to turn on the television then to open the door when the doorbell rang to announce Sam’s arrival. Tiffany ran to Sam, but she had to hold an arm under her massively pregnant belly to do so. She leaned up for a kiss like mine but only got a chaste peck on the cheek.
“Go ahead and kiss her good,” Ginger yelled from the table. “Luke
and Beulah were making out in the foyer.”
“We were not!” I narrowed my eyes at Ginger. I still loved her despite the effects of her brain tumor—in some ways I could only love her more. Sure, her uninhibited speech was at the bottom of the list, but at least I had a companion for my nightcap.
“Yeah, you were,” Tiffany said over her shoulder before she turned and pulled Sam down for a kiss that gave us a run for our money. He blushed a new and exciting shade of red, one of the deepest shades of red I’d ever seen on a human being.
Tiffany took him by the hand and led him into the living room to watch the parade. They snuggled up to each other on the couch.
“You should make her get in here and help,” Ginger grumbled under her breath.
I topped off her coffee. “She’s going to have her hands full in a month or so. Let her rest while she can.” I looked over my shoulder to yell, “Tiffany, get your feet up on that coffee table before they swell up!”
Ginger smiled and took my hand. “I always think I couldn’t be any prouder of you, but you keep on surprising me.”
Tears stung my eyes. What could I say to that? Not a damn thing, so I stood there in the kitchen and held her hand as long as she would let me.
“I love you, Beulah Lou.” She squeezed my hand.
“I love you, too, Ginger.” I choked out the words. “I love you so much more than you will ever know.”
She squeezed my hand again and winked. “I think I have a pretty good idea. Now, I think I’m going to go into the living room and ignore those skinny-ass, knob-kneed Rockettes long enough to take a nap.”
I pulled her walker in front of her. “But what about the dressing?”
“I think it’s time for you to take over the dressing,” she said with a yawn. My heart hammered against my chest. She was going to die during her nap; that’s why she was being so sappy and was finally ready to give over the secret dressing recipe. “But, Ginger—”
“Oh, calm the heck down.” She and the walker moved rhythmically across the kitchen floor toward the living room. “The recipe is in the pantry under the jar of pickles. Good luck deciphering it.”
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