Love the Sinner

by Lynn Bulock

  When I was instant messaging with Dennis it had been cool. With Ben, I probably found out more that way than I would have if he’d been in the same room. Typing on the computer he tended to forget once in a while that it was his dear old mother on the other screen. Of course I had to put up with some of the same language he would have given his chat-room buddies occasionally, but it was a fair trade-off for the breezy, open conversations with my son. Being that he was seventeen, that was worth gold, especially when we were separated by this many miles.

  Tonight I was too tired to deal with Ben’s high energy level. Besides, what would I tell him? “Oh, by the way, your stepfather is still in a coma, but now he seems to have a pregnant fiancée.” That wasn’t communication that would fit in an instant message, at least not for me.

  I picked up Heather the next morning about eight. Heather looked better dry and fixed up. Her jeans and white oxford shirt looked pressed and neat, and her hair was combed.

  The fun began at the Conejo Care Center ten minutes after we got there. We sat in the family lounge where there seemed to be unwritten rules about the seating arrangements. Edna would sit next to me or next to what I assumed was Becca, but the four of us couldn’t sit together. Especially not after Heather showed up, which drove the other two across the room to talk in low whispers. We were all waiting to go into Dennis’s room while they finished his morning cleanup and a little physical therapy.

  “So much for being one big, happy family,” Heather said. “They do know who I am, don’t they?”

  “Edna does. Becca, the daughter, hasn’t even met me yet. So don’t expect her to get real chummy. It will get better, though. We all have one very important thing in common.” I tried to sound a lot more hopeful than I felt, watching those two in their corner.

  This was all so surreal. I should hate Heather. In all probability she was carrying my husband’s child. But somehow this vulnerable young woman was harder to hate—or at least dislike strongly—than Dennis’s blood relatives, who had never been pleasant to me. None of them was worth a lot of distress anyway. I personally was going to save my fighting until Dennis was strong and well enough to be my adversary. If that ever happened.

  Before the accident, I’d thought Dennis and his mother were one big mutual admiration society. But even their little permanent lovefest hadn’t prepared me for Edna with her grandchild.

  Becca had her father’s chocolate-brown eyes, blond hair and a rounder face than I’d expected from Dennis’s daughter. Before the accident he wasn’t skinny, but there were definitely more angles to him than curves. Becca ran toward curves in a big way. Maybe her mother did, too. I hadn’t ever met Carol, either.

  Of course Edna insisted on going into Dennis’s room with her first when the aide said we could head in. “Becca’s got to go to work later. She won’t get much time to see her daddy,” Edna said as they breezed past me into his room. I wasn’t about to argue with either one of them, so I stood there in the waiting room and hoped one of them would come out soon. Four were too many to put in that room, especially when they weren’t getting along.

  Twenty minutes passed and we were still cooling my heels. “This is crazy. Come on.” Heather followed me and we went across the hall. If the nurses glared, I’d live with it. I caught Edna’s eye hoping that she’d be genteel and introduce me to Becca. Instead she huffed and left the room.

  Awkward, I decided, is meeting your stepdaughter for the first time over her father’s prone body.

  “Hi. I’m Gracie Lee. I’m glad to finally meet you.”

  She didn’t offer a “me, too” or even a “likewise.” Just eyed me up and down and went back to staring into her father’s face.

  “And this is Heather Taylor,” I said, motioning next to me. Heather was as rapt looking at the prone form between us as Becca was.

  “I know who she is. Nana told me while we were having breakfast.” Becca didn’t sound too thrilled about the knowledge. Of course, she’d been avoiding me all this time, so what could she possibly think of another interloper like Heather, this one even younger and prettier than her evil stepmother?

  Heather reached out and stroked Dennis’s hand. “Was I right?” I almost hoped I wasn’t, but her expression had already told me that Dennis was Jack Peterson. The way Edna reacted last night to the name had given me confirmation that Dennis had led a double life. I made a mental note to ask her why that tipped her off.

  “He may still be quiet, but he looks a lot better today.” And he did, too. I wasn’t just saying that. Maybe the staff’s projections that he could be coming around were something we could start believing. I hadn’t wanted to before, just not to be too hopeful. It had been months now, and we hadn’t seen much to be hopeful about.

  “I have to leave for a minute.” Heather’s lip was trembling. “I’ll be back.”

  “Good riddance,” Becca muttered under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear as Heather fled. I started to snap at her, but then held back. Dealing with this kind of trauma took you back a step. I could remember back five years to when my dad died. Even at thirty-three, I’d felt younger than my twelve-year-old son. I could just imagine what it would do to your mind when you were only in your early twenties, and Becca couldn’t be any older than that.

  “Hey, this is a shock for her. Imagine if you had told someone you were expecting his baby and he promptly disappeared.”

  Becca shrugged. “No such luck. I married Brandon first, and then had the baby. That’s the way most people do it.”

  “I know, but Heather didn’t get that chance. And now I imagine we’re all short of sleep dealing with all of this.” Becca made a face.

  “Yeah, well, even if I wasn’t coming here I would have been short of sleep. Ollie’s teething and he kept me up most of the night.”

  “That’s your son? How old is he?” It was strange making small talk like this, but what else could I do?

  “Eight months. I bet you think that’s a weird name—Ollie.”

  I wasn’t going to agree with her, even though it did sound a bit odd. But then, “Abigail” is right back up on the hot names list for little girls, and it sounds like something from 1890 to me, too, so who was I to say what was odd? At least he wasn’t named Hunter.

  “His daddy is a skater. Semipro. So he’s named for the trick.”

  Hmm. I had no idea what Becca was talking about. Not a clue. Sometime later today I knew that Ben would be rolling his eyes all the way from Missouri when I asked him about all this. So I’m a hopeless, clueless old person. Sue me.

  We both shut up at that point and just paid attention to Dennis, each on our own side of his bed. After a couple minutes Becca broke the silence. “The nurse in here earlier said she thought he might be waking up. That he’s had some eye flutters and stuff.”

  She sounded hopeful but a little withdrawn. If there had been evidence of the eye flutters while I’d been in the room, I’d missed it. He looked so much better, though, anything could be possible.

  “I hope she’s right.” Not for the same reasons that his daughter did, probably. Mine were less unselfish by now, and I wanted a lot of answers to questions.

  “Come on, Dennis. We’re all pulling for you.” I squeezed his hand and thought I felt a squeeze in return. Maybe today was the day everything got better, or at least clearer in this strange new life of mine.

  Throughout the morning, visiting time was tense, to say the least. As it happened most days when I was there for longer periods, the staff would occasionally boot everybody out to deal with Dennis’s needs of various kinds. When they let us back in at eleven I thought I was going to have to arm-wrestle Edna for first dibs in the room. I held my ground, though, and insisted that Heather was going in first and I went in with her. Nobody else was going to join her, that was for certain.

  We stayed about fifteen minutes and switched places with the Peete women. By the time they came out of Dennis’s room I was ready to lay down the law.

&
nbsp; “This has got to get more civil. If they’re right and Dennis is finally waking up we could be in here together for days. Once Dennis is really awake it will stress him out if he sees us fighting. Why don’t we practice getting along now so that it’s second nature by the time we need to?” It all sounded reasonable to me, but not to Becca.

  Her lip curled and she stepped away from me. “Why don’t we not? I don’t see any reason to get along with either of you. Nana and I will go have lunch next door. Maybe when we get back you’ll be gone or something.”

  “Wow. That was real mature.” Heather watched the two of them retreat.

  “My life feels like a high school soap opera right now. Nothing is mature.” Standing up suddenly took too much effort, and I plopped down on one of the benches.

  My husband’s fiancée was actually consoling me while we waited to see if he’d come out of a coma. This was worse than a soap opera, I decided. When Becca and Edna came back from their lunch, Heather and I went out to eat. By now I was pretty familiar with all the offerings in every place in the strip mall next to Conejo Care.

  We settled for the deli in the Ralph’s supermarket. At least today it was nice enough to eat outside at the picnic tables in the center. Nothing looked real appealing, but I got the better looking of the two soups out of a kettle, and a roll to go with it. Maybe I’d actually drop some of the twenty pounds I always wanted to lose while life was crazy.

  Maybe not, I thought as our route back took us past a high-end coffee shop. Heather got a dark roast decaf while I decided on healthier green tea for a change. Tea from one of these places was another one of those things that stumped me at first in California. Instead of a normal tea bag, every place did these custom designer things that involved loose tea in a long open bag that got tucked into the rims of a pair of cups put together. I figured it was to make it all look worth the two bucks or more a simple cup of tea cost in these places. I also got a cookie for myself and two cups of herbal tea for Edna and Becca. It couldn’t hurt to come bearing a peace offering.

  It was received coolly, to say the least. Edna took the tea with very little enthusiasm, said, “Thank you, Grace” and set it down beside her on a table.

  Becca looked at hers as if there were a bug floating in it instead of a tea bag. “You didn’t happen to ask what’s in this herbal tea, did you? I’m still nursing Ollie and there’s a lot of stuff out there I wouldn’t want to pass on.”

  That might have been a little more information than I wanted. “Plain old Lemon Zinger.” I couldn’t recite the ingredients list off the top of my head, but I didn’t think it involved anything you wouldn’t want to share.

  “Oh, well, thanks just the same, Grace.” I told myself I would not growl at this aggravating young woman, who was perceptive enough to sense the tension between her grandmother and me, and pick up what Edna called me. Other things demanded my attention right now.

  We still had more than an hour until two o’clock when they would let us back into Dennis’s room after lunchtime and therapy. If Becca really was leaving to go to work, she sure wasn’t rushing any. So here we all sat in separate camps. I didn’t see any of the other family groups acting this way. There seemed to be groups of two and three people together everywhere acting more civil than the four of us. But then, if two of those groups were really warring factions of the same family, how would I know?

  “This is so strange.” Heather was sniffling a little. “You’d think that we could all talk about Jack—I mean Dennis—together. Try and figure out what we’re going to do in a day or two when things are closer to normal.”

  I hated to tell her, but normal was going to be a relative term from now on as far as I was concerned. “Did Dennis mention being married after Carol?” It had been on my mind since I found out about her.

  Heather blushed. “He said he’d had a close call. But he wanted to hold out until he was really sure about things, so he waited….” Her lip was trembling a little.

  Great. So I was “a close call.” How strong was Dennis’s heart? I wondered if it could take waking up to the two of us sitting by his bedside together. If he woke up lucid, I’m sure he’d have an explanation to take care of everything. Looking back on our life together, Dennis had never lacked for glib explanations of a lot of things.

  I reached over and took a sip of my tea. It wasn’t piping hot anymore, but it was still drinkable for a little while. “This is really ridiculous, Heather. If you and I can call a truce, you’d think those two could join in. What have they got to lose?”

  She stood up, wiping any lingering tears away from her face. “I’m going to go find out.”

  She did, too. Marched right across the room and sat down in an empty chair close to them and started talking. For a few moments it looked like they were going to ignore her, but even Edna didn’t have that much willpower. Especially when Heather was asking about her favorite subject, her son.

  “His middle name was Jack, you know. When he was little sometimes I called him Jackie. And my maiden name was Peterson. So maybe he wasn’t stretching the truth so much after all.”

  The woman could put a good face on anything if it involved Dennis. As Granny Lou would have said, Edna was sure he hung the moon.

  After a few minutes I sat down at the edge of the group, putting my tea down on the table next to Becca, where hers, I noticed, was still untouched. Amazingly, as if to make amends, she took a sip of it, and then grimaced. “Way too cold. How about yours?”

  I nodded and she took both cups and went to the other end of the room where a doorway opened onto a kitchenette that family members were allowed to use. I could hear her put both cups in the small microwave to heat. She came back in a minute or two with our cups. I tried to pay attention to Edna.

  She was still on Dennis’s many accomplishments, having gotten all the way up to his speech at his eighth grade graduation. I think she knew that one by heart. And if I had to listen to that one again, I was going to go a little batty right here in this waiting room. But wasn’t this what I wanted? Everybody getting along and playing nice?

  Maybe this was just a little too nice. What was different about Heather that made the two of them warm up to her while treating me like something to be avoided? Now I was the one way too close to tears. Dashing past Heather, I finally obeyed my impulse to bolt out of this place. This place made me a little crawly on the best of days, and the oddities in this one had just gone past my endurance point.

  The patio courtyard outside between Conejo Care and the strip mall was sunny again today. There was a gardener pulling dead blooms off some bright pink flowering plants around the base of a large tree. I still didn’t know enough about California flowers to know what this one was called.

  When someone came up behind me and laid a hand on my shoulder I just about levitated. I know I squeaked.

  “Wow, what were you expecting?” Linnette Parks came around where I could see her. “I didn’t think I was that scary, Gracie Lee.”

  “You’re not. I was just off in another world.”

  “Does it include Heather? She called my place this morning and left a message about going to see Jack and where you all would be. I came up to see if the two of you were here, since I couldn’t get anybody to answer the phone at her place and you hadn’t shown up for school.”

  “She’s inside with Dennis’s mother and his daughter, Becca. I’m sure Edna is still regaling her with details of her son’s charmed childhood and perfect youth.”

  There were those tears again. My hands were balled up in fists. Linnette, bless her heart, put her hands gently on my shoulders and eased me up off the bench. “Come on. We’re going to take a walk or two around this parking lot. You need to blow off some steam and move for a while.”

  She was right. It took more than one round of the perimeter of the big double lot of the care center and strip mall before I could really put coherent thoughts together. Every time I got to developing a question out loud, another one
cropped up even while I was talking.

  “I mean, what do I tell Ben about this whole mess? And my mother? I can just imagine that conversation. She’s never been that fond of Dennis from the outset.”

  Linnette just let me walk and wave my arms while she made sympathetic noises once in a while and walked along with me. It was amazing to me that she didn’t jump right in and try to answer all these questions for me. Most people would have, even though there weren’t any right answers.

  Finally I ran out of questions, except for that one. “Okay, how come you’re just letting me go on here without playing Dear Abby or something?”

  We kept walking, at a slower pace now than the fast clip we’d taken off at. We’d been close to twice around the parking lot complex. “Christian Friends is basically a lay ministry program that helps people in crisis. And the first thing I learned in training is that God gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason. We need to listen at least twice as much as we talk.”

  We walked on for a minute more. “Thanks,” I told her. “I don’t need Dear Abby anyway. Maybe the name of a good divorce lawyer. We’ll see in a couple weeks, I guess.”

  Linnette started to say something, but before she could get far, my cell phone started ringing in the pocket I’d shoved it in hours ago.

  “This is Kara from Conejo Care. You need to get back up here immediately. Are you close to the center?”

  “Almost at the front door,” I told her.

  “Then hurry. You won’t believe what’s going on.”

  I filled Linnette in and we started inside. Once we got out of the parking lot my nerves got the better of me and I stopped in the closest ladies’ room. Kara was still bubbling ten minutes later when we got to Dennis’s hallway. “Wait until you see what’s happened. It’s better than we’d ever hoped for. Come on and I’ll fill you in as we go.”

  Better than anyone had hoped for? That was a switch. Kara was hustling down the hall and turning her head to talk so often I was afraid she was going to walk into a wall. Linnette was still trailing me. I’d insisted she come on along instead of waiting in the family room.