by Laurie Cass
By the time we were approaching Rowan’s house, I’d come to the conclusion that Julia was right, that I was going overboard. But with snow piled up on the sides of the road, there was no good spot on this stretch of road to turn the thirty-one-foot bookmobile around, so we were committed.
I was rehearsing both my delivery speech to Rowan (“Ding dong, bookmobile calling”) and my apology speech to Julia (“You were right, I was wrong, and I’m sorry”) when Julia sucked in a sharp breath.
My mouth opened to ask if she was okay, but what came out instead of a question was my own gasp.
“No, no, no . . .” I stammered, staring wide-eyed at the shape lying in Rowan’s driveway. The long, person-size shape.
I’d already started braking, but Julia was flying out the door and into the snow before the wheels stopped turning. Eddie’s howls rose as I set the parking brake and took off after my coworker.
We’d both taken multiple first aid courses and the training kicked into gear. Julia turned Rowan onto her back and checked for a pulse. She shook her head, unzipped Rowan’s winter coat, and started chest compressions. By the time I was on my knees next to Rowan, I’d already pulled out my phone and dialed 911.
“Emergency dispatch,” came the welcome voice. “Where is your emergency?”
I gave the location, then said, “We need an ambulance right away. She fell in the snow. We don’t know how long she was here. She doesn’t have a pulse. She doesn’t have a pulse, she doesn’t—” I heard the panic in my voice, stopped, then started again. “She’s in her driveway, she has a history of heart problems, and I’m afraid that . . . please . . .” I was holding the phone so hard it hurt, but I didn’t want to loosen my grip. If anything, I wanted to grip even harder, so help would arrive faster.
“We’re sending an ambulance right now, ma’am,” said the dispatcher calmly. “They should be there in less than ten minutes.”
“Stay. Alive,” Julia gasped out, the words coming out in time with the compressions. “Stay. Alive.”
“Are you able to perform CPR?” the dispatcher asked.
“Doing it,” I said. “Is there anything else we can do to help?” I looked around wildly, not sure what I was looking for. “There’s a snow shovel,” I said. “She must have been shoveling her driveway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. She asked about visible cuts and bruises, and I’m sure I answered her, but my attention was on Rowan and Julia.
“Stay. Alive.” Julia was still talking. “You turned. Down my. Sister’s. Second. Mortgage. She lost. Her house. But don’t. Die. Don’t. Die.”
I stared at Julia. No wonder she didn’t like Rowan. But here she was, doing her best to make sure a woman she had good reason to hate survived a heart attack. My throat tightened and I leaned forward, hands flat and ready. “My turn,” I said, and started compressions as Julia pulled away and sat back on her heels.
We knelt there, switching back and forth, until the ambulance arrived. The EMTs hurried out and took over. In seconds, Rowan was in a gurney with a uniformed EMT walking alongside doing compressions. Then she was inside, the back door shut, and they were off with lights flashing and siren blaring.
“She’s not going to make it, is she?” Julia asked quietly.
I watched the taillights of the ambulance recede into the distance. “No. She’s not.”
Chapter 2
That night I sat on a stool in Rafe’s dining room. Or what would eventually be a dining room. Right now it was partly a room where he was installing crown and floor molding, but mostly it was a storage room for his boxes of stuff. The boxes migrated as he went through renovation phases, and I’d lost count of how many times he’d moved his belongings from one room to another. Why he hadn’t rented a storage unit, or at least moved them to a room he’d declared as renovation-free, I had no idea.
And what any of the boxes held, I was pretty sure he had no idea about that, either, because when he’d moved into the house last summer, there hadn’t been a concerted labeling effort when he’d packed his apartment. The box at which I was staring was a prime example. The only indication of its insides were two words written in Rafe’s distinctive scrawl: “Heavy Stuff.” A half hour earlier, when I’d walked in with dinner, I’d seen the box and asked him what might be inside. He’d said, “Not sure. Could be anything from books to free weights. When we open them it’s going to be like Christmas.” At that point, he’d grinned and slapped his flat stomach. “Hope there’s food inside some of them. Nothing like a two-year-old bag of potato chips to take the edge off.”
That had been when I’d started crying. His look of shock was quickly replaced with concern. He’d immediately taken me in his arms and hugged me tight. “Minnie. Sweetheart. Holder of my happiness. What’s the matter? Just give me the word and I’ll do whatever it takes to fix it. Climb mountains. Slay lions. I’ll even drive downstate and get you those doughnuts you like so much.”
His nonsense made me cry even harder, but my tears eventually dried up and I pulled away. “Sorry about your shirt,” I’d said, wiping my eyes with a napkin I’d brought from Fat Boys Pizza and blowing my nose with another one.
He didn’t even look at the vast wet splotches. “It’ll wash. What’s wrong?”
On some deep level, I recognized how much I loved this man, and how lucky I was that he loved me back. The rest of me was filled with sadness for what had happened that afternoon. I’d started texting him about Rowan half a dozen times, but I’d always put the phone away before hitting Send, not knowing what to say, figuring I’d tell him in person. And now that time was here.
By the time Rafe had finished eating, I’d finished the story, which ended with me stopping at the Charlevoix Hospital and getting confirmation that Rowan had indeed died. I’d tracked down an emergency room nurse that I knew and wheedled out a little more information, primarily that Rowan had most likely been dead long before Julia and I had arrived.
“But that doesn’t make you feel any better, does it?” Rafe had asked.
I’d shaken my head.
“Eat something,” he’d told me. “You probably don’t think you’re hungry, but just try eating, okay?”
Two pieces of pizza and three breadsticks later, I was feeling better. Part of which could be attributed to the massive amount of carbohydrates I’d just ingested, but a full stomach on top of the comfort Rafe had given me was edging me from shocked grief to a dull sadness that only time would ease.
Rafe was now up on a ladder with a putty knife and a can of wood filler. I spent a few minutes admiring the way his broad shoulders tapered to his waist, but since it wouldn’t do to inflate his ego, I asked the obvious question. “Why are you bothering to fill nail holes that are too small to see?”
“Minnie, Minnie, Minnie.” His sigh was dramatic and overwrought, nearly Julia quality. “Haven’t you learned the first rule of home improvement?”
Was he kidding? “I know all of those rules. Number one: It’ll take forever. Number two: Anything you do will cost half again as much as you think it will. Number three: Nothing is ever delivered on time. Number four is—”
Rafe’s voice cut through my recitation. Which was too bad because I could have continued for a long time. “Once again, you have not been paying attention to all that I have been teaching you.”
He was partly right, but not completely. “I know that measuring twice and cutting once is more than just an aphorism. And,” I said proudly, “I know the difference between flat, Phillips, and offset screwdrivers.”
“The first rule of home improvement,” Rafe said, ignoring me, “is to hide things.”
I frowned. “What exactly are you hiding? There’s no room up there to hide anything.”
“Mistakes.” Rafe peered at his handiwork, added a microscopic amount of putty, and peered again. “You have to cover up your mistakes completel
y or you’ll be staring at them the rest of your life wishing you’d done a better job.”
“Better?” I asked in disbelief. “I’ve lost track of the things you’ve ripped out and reinstalled because they weren’t quite right. How could anything in this place be less than perfect?”
He gave the crown molding one last critical glance and came down the ladder.
That he hadn’t replied to my comment was an unusual occurrence, but there was also a suddenly odd feel to the silence in the room.
A silence that was weighted down with . . . something. The back of Rafe’s head wasn’t giving out any clues, so I started thinking about what I’d said. Started thinking about changes he’d made to the house while my best friend Kristen and I had rolled our eyes about his indecisiveness. Thought about the times he’d asked my opinion about paint colors. Thought about last October, when Rafe told me he’d been renovating the house for me all along. The conclusion was stunningly obvious.
“You kept making changes,” I said slowly, “because you wanted me to be part of the renovation.”
“For someone who’s really smart, you can be pretty stupid sometimes.” He grinned sideways at me, his teeth white against skin that was an attractive reddish brown color, thanks to some key Native American Anishinaabe ancestors, the same ancestors that had bestowed upon him thick black hair. “I should write up a change order invoice and send it to you.”
“I’d love to see that.”
He stopped moving the ladder and turned. “You would?”
“Absolutely. I’ll have it framed. We can hang it right over there.” I pointed to a blank spot. “It’ll look great next to the portrait of Eddie.”
“Nice to hear you getting into the spirit of decorating.” Rafe slathered more wood putty on the knife. “But I’d rather hear you make a decision about hardware for the kitchen cabinets.”
“I don’t like to rush these kinds of decisions. What we need is research.” I hopped off my stool and pulled a book out of my backpack. Hopping back up, I said, “What I have here, courtesy of your local library, is a history of kitchens that I will be happy to read to you. Shall we start with the preface, or the first chapter?”
“How about we start with the section on cabinet hardware?”
Smiling brightly, I said, “The preface it is and I completely agree with that opinion. The author wrote it for a reason and we need to find out what it is.” Disregarding what sounded like a bleat of despair from my beloved, I started to read.
* * *
• • •
When I got back to the boardinghouse, Aunt Frances was lying on a living room couch, looking very comfortable. The blanket over my aunt’s legs was covered with Eddie and Eddie fur. A fire was crackling merrily, and the book she was reading, Why We Run, by Bernd Heinrich, was opened at the halfway point. My aunt, who was active throughout the day, had never understood the point of formal exercise. She did, however, have an odd interest in ultraendurance, and had crowed with pleasure when I’d brought the book home from the library.
After my coat and boots were stowed away, I flopped on the opposite couch. “Want to know how he finishes the race?”
Still focused on her reading, she said, “Tell me and you die.”
I didn’t say anything, and she glanced up and immediately put the book aside. “What’s the matter, dear heart?”
The tears that had been absorbed into Rafe’s shirt must have been my allotment for the day, so I was able to tell the story of Rowan Bennethum’s death with only a couple of sniffles.
“It’s so sad,” I finished, blowing my nose with a tissue. The nose-blowing was hampered somewhat by Eddie, who’d heaved himself off my aunt’s lap and trundled over to mine. His purrs were so loud that I could feel them in my inner ear. “Neil’s going to be lost without his wife,” I said, “and the twins have lost their mother forever. Yes, they’re in college and don’t need her like little kids would, but it’s still going to be hard.”
Aunt Frances eyed me. “You’re not blaming yourself, are you?”
“No.” I laid my hand on Eddie’s back. “She was gone before we got there, so—” I stopped. “If we’d arrived earlier. If I hadn’t waited until the end of the bookmobile stop. If—”
“Stop.” My aunt got up and came over to sit next to me. “Don’t go there. Don’t you dare go there. Your overdeveloped sense of guilt may lead you in that direction, but you are not responsible.”
“Mrr,” Eddie said, twisting his head around to glare at me.
I smiled faintly. “It seems to be unanimous.”
“We can widen the sample if you’d like.” Aunt Frances gave me a quick hug. “I can call Rafe. Then I’ll call your parents. Your brother and sister-in-law. Kristen and your college roommates and everyone at the library. They’ll all say the same thing. It wasn’t your fault. And I’m willing to bet if the tables were turned, you’d say the same thing to me.”
“Probably,” I murmured. Then, after thinking about it for a moment, I said, “You’re right. I would tell you that.”
“Then it’s settled.” She gave me a quick hug, patted Eddie’s head, and went back to her couch. “No more guilt. Yes, Rowan’s death was a shock, but you did everything you could.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I saluted her.
“Quit that.” She tucked the blanket around her legs. “Now you can ask about my day.”
I blinked. It was a very un-Aunt-Frances-like statement. If she had something to tell me, she simply told me. “How was your day?”
“The classroom was fine. There’s nothing like the combination of power tools and nineteen-year-olds to get the blood flowing. It’s the other stuff that makes me want to pull my hair out.”
My aunt’s hair looked fine, so whatever it was couldn’t be too horrible. “What kind of things?”
She slumped down. “Wedding stuff,” she said darkly.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Wedding problems were solvable, and my aunt’s wedding problems were ones for me, the maid of honor, to deal with. I sat up and put my shoulders back. If I listened carefully, I might be able to hear the William Tell Overture, a clear indication that someone was riding in to save the day. “Any particular issue, or just in general?”
Aunt Frances sighed and slid a few inches farther down. If I squinted a little, I saw her as she might have looked forty-five years ago in the throes of teenage angst.
“It’s not the wedding so much as the guests.” She crossed her arms and dropped her chin to her chest. “Makes me think we should have just walked to the county building and been married by the magistrate.”
That ship, however, had sailed months ago. She and Otto, who bore a strong resemblance to Paul Newman, had told oodles of people about their plans for a destination wedding. If they changed their minds at this point, they’d be opening themselves up to the public censure a small town could deal out. Aunt Frances would shrug it off, but she and I both knew that Otto, a newcomer, was still figuring out how to fit into the fabric of Chilson life. A sudden change in wedding plans would not help.
“What’s wrong with the guests?” I’d helped my aunt and Otto put together the list and it wasn’t very long, which was part of the point of having a destination wedding in the first place. “Is anyone complaining about having to go to Bermuda?”
The hotel they’d chosen was reasonably priced. And Otto, who was retired but had been a very successful accountant, was subsidizing the cost of the airfare for a few people, myself included. (I’d protested, but not very loudly.)
“It’s not the guests we invited,” Aunt Frances said. “It’s the ones we didn’t. Two teachers at the college asked when their invitations would show up. When we were in Harbor Springs the other day, getting sandwiches at Gurney’s, we ran into my bridge partners from thirty years ago, who wanted to know about their invites. And a few m
inutes ago, I got an e-mail from an old high school friend who’d heard about the wedding and wanted to know the date so she could make her plans!” she almost wailed.
I slid Eddie off my lap and went over to the other couch. I put an arm around my aunt. “There, there,” I said soothingly. My aunt Frances was the most unflappable person I’d ever met. To see her like this was wholly unexpected.
“You think this is funny, don’t you?” she asked.
I could not tell a lie. “A little.”
“Please don’t tell Kristen,” Aunt Frances said.
My best friend, Kristen Jurek, was a force of nature and was in the middle of planning her own wedding. I was her maid of honor, too, but Kristen was in Key West for the winter and to date my involvement had been limited to confirming Kristen’s choices. “Scout’s honor,” I promised, making the official salute.
“Excellent.” My aunt pushed herself up. “Having her know I’ve gone all bridezilla is not something I want to live down.”
“You’re as likely to be a bridezilla as Eddie is to stop shedding hair. This is your wedding and you have every right to make your own guest list. You two wanted a destination wedding and a small group of friends and relatives attending. It’s your dream and you need to hold fast to it.”
Aunt Frances looked around. “Where’s the soundtrack? That speech should have been scored with harps and violins.”
I shook my head. “Trombones and trumpets.”
“No arguments,” she said severely. “I am the bride, remember?”
“Mrr,” my cat said.
“See? Eddie agrees with me.”
“He would,” I muttered, but on the inside I was smiling, because my aunt’s dark mood had lifted. There was no way that I was going to sleep well because I’d keep reliving that afternoon’s eternal minutes of kneeling in the snow, but at least Aunt Frances had a good shot at it.