Blue Wide Sky

by Inglath Cooper

  I push open the door and step inside the room, closing it behind me.

  Sam instantly opens his eyes. His left hand goes to the bandages around his head.

  “Hi,” I say, standing at the side of the bed. “How do you feel?”

  He looks at my face, his eyes narrowed as if he can’t quite place me.

  “Do you know who I am, Sam?”

  He doesn’t answer for several moments, and then, “No. I’m sorry.”

  The answer hurts. I won’t deny it. “I’m Gabby,” I say. “Gabby Hayden. You know me. Knew me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again with worry in his eyes. “Can you . . . open please the curtain? I like to see the blue wide sky.”

  Tears blur my vision as I cross the room to open the heavy drapes. Light spills across the bed. Sam’s face breaks into a smile. He stares through the window, his eyes drinking in the sunny day beyond this room.

  And I think that is as good a place to start as any. With a blue wide sky.

  Sam

  Epilogue

  I have always loved the spring. It’s as if the world around us has been reborn, the tiniest of buds popping from tree limbs, green with life.

  If I had to compare myself to anything right now, that’s what it would be. Spring. It feels as if I’ve endured the harshness of winter, and life has revived within me.

  It’s April, almost a year since my surgery. It’s hard to believe that much time has passed or that I’ve reached the place where I am now.

  I’m sitting outside under the budding apple tree in Gabby’s front yard. Our yard, actually, I correct myself. After our wedding three months ago, we decided we would live here, leaving my parents’ lake house for Ben and his family to use on visits, which I am thankful to see, have been frequent.

  I don’t know what I would have done without him, without Gabby and Annie. Without Evan and Analise too. I’ve wondered many times what it must have felt like for them to think I might never regain any memories of our history together. It hasn’t all come back, but enough that at some point, I began to feel my connection with each of them. To realize that they weren’t strangers to me.

  For weeks after the surgery, during my time in the hospital, and after I returned to the lake house with a fulltime nurse, it felt as if I had been dropped into a world I didn’t know. But with time and healing, things began to return, bits and pieces of my history.

  Eli has been napping in a limb of the apple tree. He hops to the ground and then onto my lap, stretching for a back rub. I comply, and he rubs his face against my hand. Since the day I came home from the hospital, he hasn’t been more than a few yards away from me, having appointed himself my full-time guardian.

  I hear laughter coming from the kitchen now. Gabby and Kat are cooking, and from the scent following their giggling out the open door, Gabby has burned the pine nuts again. Kat and I have decided it’s not a big deal really. We just buy extra when we go to the grocery store and stock them in the freezer. We do love to tease her about it though.

  She comes out on the deck and waves at me. “Hey, you. Need anything?”

  “You,” I say in a voice I hope doesn’t reach Kat’s ears.

  She smiles a beautiful smile. “Be right there.”

  She sticks her head back inside, says something to Kat, and then, closing the door, runs down the stairs and through the yard to join me under the apple tree.

  “You rang?” she says, one hand on her hip.

  “I did,” I say, reaching out with my left arm to pull her onto my lap. Eli concedes the spot and retreats to the apple tree.

  Gabby curls up against me, pressing her face to my neck and saying, “You smell so good.”

  “You smell like an Italian kitchen. My favorite.”

  She laughs. “Not the sexiest scent.”

  “Anything on you is sexy.”

  “Hmm. Would you like to go upstairs and follow through on that suggestive tone of yours?”

  “Yes, actually, I would.”

  She leans in and kisses me, softly, and then with the hunger that never seems to get satisfied between us. I start to lift my right hand to the back of her hair, but it drops to my lap halfway up.

  Still kissing me, she picks up my arm and wraps it around her waist, holding it there because I have little to no function on my own.

  “It’s not always going to be like this,” she reminds me. “Ben said it will mostly resolve over time.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m not complaining.”

  “It has to be frustrating though.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “You amaze me.”

  “You amaze me,” I say, kissing the side of her neck.

  “No, really,” she says, looking into my eyes. “You’ve handled all of this with a patience I’m not sure many people could.”

  “I’m alive, Gabby. And I have you, and Kat and Evan and Analise, Ben and his wonderful gang. I’ve been given a miracle.”

  She leans her forehead against mine, and we sit like that for a bit. I haven’t said anything I haven’t said before, but it is sobering to consider how differently things could have gone.

  The door off the deck opens, and Kat walks out, cupping her hands to her mouth and calling out, “It’s almost ready! You two lovebirds coming up?”

  “On the way, honey,” I call back.

  She does a curtsey for us and then pops back in the house.

  “Actually, we’ve had more than our share of miracles in this family,” Gabby says softly. “I still can’t believe she doesn’t need to use her wheelchair now.”

  “David did an incredible job.”

  “He did. It’s just so wonderful to see her walking around without pain.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “She’s so excited about Analise coming to visit in June. She’s making a list of all the things she wants to show her around here.”

  “Analise is pretty crazy about her.”

  Gabby covers my hand with hers and looks deep into my eyes. “I was going to wait until tonight for this, but I don’t think I can stand another moment of keeping it from you.”

  I lean back, worried now. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “We are, actually. Okay, I mean.”

  “You and me?”

  “Yes. And your baby and me.”

  It takes a few moments for her words to sink in. I blink once and then, “Are you telling me—”

  “I am,” she says, nodding, her eyes lit with happiness. “We’re going to have a baby.”

  “Gabby.”

  “I know. Another miracle.”

  I turn my hand and press my palm to her still flat belly. “Oh, Gabby. I never thought we—”

  “Me, either,” she says. “You can’t make any assumptions about where life is going to take you, can you?”

  “No,” I say. I slip my arm around her waist and pull her up close against me. “Come here, beautiful woman of mine.”

  “Um, I love that part.”

  “Which part?”

  “The mine part.”

  “Me too,” I say. We sit there in the chair together, kissing like we did when we were sixteen and everything in the world seemed possible.

  Turns out, it is.

  Coming Soon! Book Two in the Smith Mountain Lake Series: Pink Summer Sunset

  Dear Reader,

  I would like to thank you for taking the time to read my story. There are so many wonderful books to choose from these days, and I am hugely appreciative that you chose mine.

  If you’d like to try another of my books – Good Guys Love Dogs – for FREE, please click here.

  Please join my mailing list for updates on new releases and giveaways! Just go to http://www.inglathcooper.com – come check out my Facebook page for postings on books, dogs and things that make life good!

  Wishing you many, many happy afternoons of reading pleasure.

  All best,

  Inglath


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  About Inglath Cooper

  RITA® Award-winning author Inglath Cooper was born in Virginia. She is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a degree in English. She fell in love with books as soon as she learned how to read. “My mom read to us before bed, and I think that’s how I started to love stories. It was like a little mini-vacation we looked forward to every night before going to sleep. I think I eventually read most of the books in my elementary school library.”

  That love for books translated into a natural love for writing and a desire to create stories that other readers could get lost in, just as she had gotten lost in her favorite books. Her stories focus on the dynamics of relationships, those between a man and a woman, mother and daughter, sisters, friends. They most often take place in small Virginia towns very much like the one where she grew up and are peopled with characters who reflect those values and traditions.

  “There’s something about small-town life that’s just part of who I am. I’ve had the desire to live in other places, wondered what it would be like to be a true Manhattanite, but the thing I know I would miss is the familiarity of faces everywhere I go. There’s a lot to be said for going in the grocery store and seeing ten people you know!”

  Inglath Cooper is an avid supporter of companion animal rescue and is a volunteer and donor for the Franklin County Humane Society. She and her family have fostered many dogs and cats that have gone on to be adopted by other families. “The rewards are endless. It’s an eye-opening moment to realize that what one person throws away can fill another person’s life with love and joy.”

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  FREE Chapter from Nashville - Part One - Ready to Reach

  CeCe

  I’ve been praying since before I can ever actually remember learning how. Mama says I took to praying like baby ducks to their first dip in a pond, my “please” and “thank you” delivered in a voice so sweet that she didn’t see how God would ever be able to say no to me.

  Mama says my praying voice is my singing voice, and that anybody listening would know right off that the Father himself gave that voice to me. Two human beings, especially not her and one so flawed as the man who was supposedly my Daddy, would ever be able to create anything that reminiscent of Heaven.

  I’m praying now. Hard as I ever have. “Dear Lord, please let this old rattletrap, I mean, faithful car Gertrude, last another hundred miles. Please don’t let her break down before I get there. Please, dear Lord. Please.”

  A now familiar melody strings the plea together. I’ve been offering up the prayer for the past several hours at fifteen-minute intervals, and I’m hoping God’s not tired of my interruptions. I’ve got no doubt He has way more important things on His plate today. I wonder now if I was a fool not to take the bus and leave the car behind altogether. It had been a sentimental decision, based on Granny’s hope that her beloved Gertrude would help get me where I wanted to go in this life.

  And leaving it behind would have been like leaving behind Hank Junior. I reach across the wide bench seat and rub his velvety-soft Walker Hound ear. Even above the rattle-wheeze-cough of the old car’s engine, Hank Junior snores the baritone snore of his deepest sleep. He’s wound up in a tight ball, his long legs tucked under him, his head curled back onto his shoulder. He reminds me of a duck in this position, and I can’t for the life of me understand how it could be comfortable. I guess it must be, though, since with the exception of pee and water breaks, it’s been his posture of choice since we left Virginia this morning.

  Outside of Knoxville, I-40 begins to dip and rise, until the stretch of road is one long climb after the other. I cut into the right hand lane, tractor-trailer trucks and an annoyed BMW whipping by me. Gertrude sounds like she may be gasping her last breath, and I actually feel sorry for her. The most Granny ever asked of her was a Saturday trip to Winn-Dixie and the post office and church on Sundays. I guess that was why she’d lasted so long.

  Granny bought Gertrude, brand-spanking new, right off the lot, in 1960. She named her after an aunt of hers who lived to be a hundred and five. Granny thought there was no reason to expect anything less from her car if she changed the oil regularly and parked her in the woodshed next to her house to keep the elements from taking their toll on the blue-green exterior. It turned out Granny was right. It wasn’t until she died last year and left Gertrude to me that the car started showing her age.

  What with me driving all over the state of Virginia in the past year, one dive gig to another, weekend after weekend, I guess I’ve pretty much erased any benefits of Granny’s pampering.

  We top the steep grade at thirty-five. I let loose a sigh of relief along with a heartfelt prayer of thanks. The speedometer hits fifty-five, then sixty and seventy as we cruise down the long stretch of respite, and I see the highway open out nearly flat for as far ahead as I can see. Hank Junior is awake now, sitting up with his nose stuck out the lowered window on his side. He’s pulling in the smells, dissecting them one by one, his eyes narrowed against the wind, his long black ears flapping behind him.

  We’re almost to Cookeville, and I’m feeling optimistic now about the last eighty miles or so into Nashville. I stick my arm out the window and let it fly with the same abandon as Hank Junior’s ears, humming a melody I’ve been working on the past couple days.

  A sudden roar in the front of the car is followed by an awful grinding sound. Gertrude jerks once, and then goes completely limp and silent. Hank Junior pulls his head in and looks at me with nearly comical canine alarm.

  “Crap!” I yell. I hit the brake and wrestle the huge steering wheel to the side of the highway. My heart pounds like a bass drum, and I’m shaking when we finally roll to a stop. A burning smell hits my nose. I see black smoke start to seep from the cracks at the edge of the hood. It takes me a second or two to realize that Gertrude is on fire.

  I grab Hank Junior’s leash, snapping it on his collar before reaching over to shove open his door and scoot us both out. The flames are licking higher now, the smoke pitch black. “My guitar!” I scream. “Oh, no, my guitar!”

  I grab the back door handle and yank hard. It’s locked. Tugging Hank Junior behind me, I run around and try the other door. It opens, and I reach in for my guitar case and the notebook of lyrics sitting on top of it. Holding onto them both, I towboat Hank Junior around the car, intent on finding a place to hook his leash so I can get my suitcase out of the trunk.

  Just then I hear another sputtering noise, like the sound of fuel igniting. I don’t stop to think. I run as fast as I can away from the car, Hank Junior glued to my side, my guitar case and notebook clutched in my other hand.

  I hear the car explode even as I’m still running flat out. I feel the heat on the backs of my arms. Hank Junior yelps, and we run faster. I trip and roll on the rough surface pavement, my guitar case skittering ahead of me, Hank Junior’s leash getting tangled between my legs.

  I lie there for a moment, staring up at the blue Tennessee sky, trying to decide if I’m okay. In the next instant, I realize the flouncy cotton skirt Mama made me as a going away present is strangling my waist, and Hank Junior’s head is splayed across my belly, his leash wrapped tight around my left leg.

  Brakes screech and tires squall near what sounds inches from my head. I rock forward, trying to get up, but Hank yips at the pinch of his collar.

  “Are you all right?”

  The voice is male and deep, Southern like m
ine with a little more drawl. I can’t see his face, locked up with Hank Junior as I am. Footsteps, running, and then a pair of enormous cowboy boots comes into my vision.

  “Shit-fire, girl! Is that your car?”

  “Was my car,” I say to the voice.

  “Okay, then.” He’s standing over me now, a mountain of a guy wearing jeans, a t-shirt that blares Hit Me – I Can Take It and a Georgia Bulldogs cap. “Here, let me help you,” he says.

  He hunkers down beside me and starts to untangle Hank Junior’s leash. Hank would usually do me the service of a bark if a stranger approached me, but not this time. He wags his tail in gratitude as the big guy unhooks the snap from his collar, tugs it free from under my leg and then re-hooks it.

  Realizing my skirt is still snagged around my waist, my pink bikini underwear in full view, I sit up and yank it down, nothing remotely resembling dignity in my urgency.

  “What’s going on, man?”

  I glance over my shoulder and see another guy walking toward us, this one not nearly so big, but sounding grouchy and looking sleep-deprived. He’s also wearing cowboy boots and a Georgia Bulldogs cap, the bill pulled low over dark sunglasses. His brown hair is on the long side, curling out from under the hat.

  He glances at the burning car, as if he’s just now getting around to noticing it and utters, “Whoa.”

  Mountain Guy has me by the arm now and hauls me to my feet. “You okay?”

  I swipe a hand across my skirt, dust poofing out. “I think so. Yes. Thank you.”

  Hank Junior looks at the second guy and mutters a low growl. I’ve never once doubted his judgment so I back up a step.

  “Aw, he’s all right,” Mountain Guy says to Hank Junior, patting him on the head. “He always wakes up looking mean like that.”

  Grouchy Guy throws him a look. “What are we doing?”