“This is Margaret’s favorite spot,” Claire tells me before walking across the room and bringing over one of those folding chalkboards.
“I could have helped you with that,” I say when she returns and sets the board up in front of Margaret.
“Sorry. I’m just so used to our routine here. Once Margaret picks her cards, I clip them to the board because she can’t really see them if we put them on the table.
“Okay, gotcha,” I say, feeling overwhelmed by all of this, the crushing sadness of people unable to do for themselves and depending on what looks like a friendly but very overworked group of staff members who come running in and out of the room, depositing people and telling them good luck before they’re off to do something else. “This is insane,” I tell Claire, looking around as the room fills.
“What part?” She cracks a little laugh, having just grabbed a stack of bingo cards that she is now showing to Margaret.
I shrug. “All of it? I’ve never officially been in a nursing home.”
“No? Not even for grandparents?”
“My mom’s parents live in Wisconsin, still kicking, and my dad’s parents are both gone. I remember Grandpa’s heart attack, and he only lived a couple of years beyond that. I think my Grandma died a year later.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, laying her free hand on mine.
“It’s okay. Losing your dad had to be harder.”
Margaret is so focused on picking bingo cards that she doesn’t seem at all interested in our conversation.
“Losing anyone sucks,” Claire says with a smile, then takes a look around the room. “Do you want to maybe help one of the residents out? You could walk around and see if anyone needs some assistance with their cards.”
“Seriously? I don’t think I’d have a clue what to do.”
“Well, hello there!” An older man interrupts us, going around the other side of Margaret’s wheelchair and giving her a kiss.
“My hubby!” Margaret croaks out, her voice more jagged than before.
Claire’s smile is immediate as she takes in the scene, and then she turns to me and takes my hand, squeezing it lightly. It’s a great feeling.
“Hi, Mr. Latham,” she says. “How was golf?”
He laughs. “Not great, but there’s always next week.” Then he turns to me and puts his hand out. “Hello there. I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’m, ah, Tyler Duncan, sir. I’m here with Claire.”
“He goes to school with me,” Claire says. “And he’s my ride.”
“Well, that’s great.” Mr. Latham seems just as jovial as his wife.
Their positive attitude is great, but it’s hard for me to see how both he and his wife can be so happy when her body has been debilitated and she’s stuck here in this nursing home away from him.
“Mr. Latham comes to see his wife twice every day,” Claire says with what I can tell is fondness. “That’s a true love story.”
“Wow… that’s amazing.” And yet I still can’t grasp it, the willingness to look past so much bad and to smile about it as if you’d just won the lottery.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mr. Latham says, bending down to give his wife another kiss.
This earns me an additional smile from Claire who is lost in the sweetness of it all. And maybe I’m just looking at it all the wrong way because of my experience with Laney and the way her acceptance of me faltered. After the shock of her cheating on me, I’d attempted to excuse what she’d done because of us being young, because she’d coasted through her life without having to face any real hardships—she’d said as much to me. But Claire has faced her father’s death, and here she is volunteering in a place most people would find really depressing.
It’s obvious to me Claire doesn’t break easily.
“We’ve got this covered for the next couple hours,” Claire tells Mr. Latham, “if you had your errands to run.”
“Oh, I suppose I’ve got some things to do,” he says, and for the first time I see a chink in his armor in what looks like relief that he’s allowed some extra reprieve from the nursing home today.
“I’ll see you later, hubby,” Margaret says, still excited about the game and visibly okay about being left with Claire and me.
Within the next fifteen minutes, I find myself at a different table helping out a couple of older men. One of them has an oxygen tank and tubes in his nose, and the other guy is drained of color and looks like he’s the one needing the oxygen. They’re both having trouble keeping up with how fast the woman running this activity is calling the numbers, which isn’t very fast at all. It was a little weird sitting down with them at first, but I’ve relaxed, and I’m surprised at how helping someone with something so simple can make me feel pretty damn good about myself.
I’m across the room from Claire now, but I still keep an eye on her—how could I not? She’s made more beautiful by the way she’s helping Margaret while lending a hand to a few other residents. The woman might be decades older, but it’s easy to see she and Claire are friends and that this is about more than volunteering. Claire genuinely cares for her.
Claire catches me looking at her a few times, but I don’t feel embarrassed or turn red like I did when I saw her that first day at school. When she smiles back, it’s not hard to jump from the fact that I really like Claire to the idea that I might be falling in love with her.
CLAIRE
“He’s very handsome,” Margaret tells me during a break in games.
“He is kind of, huh?”
“You make a very nice couple.”
“Well, actually…” I’m about to correct her and tell her we aren’t quite to couple stage yet, but why?
“Yes?” she asks.
“I was just going to thank you for saying that, about us being a nice couple.”
“Oh, well I’m telling the truth.” She’s beaming now.
“What’s the secret to a long marriage?” I’m hoping to turn Margaret’s thoughts back to her own long-standing relationship, but I’m curious too—I’ve asked before, and she always gives me a different answer because I assume there are many secrets, one no less valuable than the one before.
Her eyes narrow in deep thought, and I’m about to tell her it’s okay if she can’t come up with just the right words, but then she announces, “Laughter.”
“You guys like to laugh together, huh?”
“Yes. You have to laugh with someone. Love is important too, but my hubby tells the corniest jokes, and I can’t help but laugh. He laughs at me too, you know? It makes the bad times seem less bad.”
“You two are pretty inspiring. Remind me how many years you’ve been married?” Margaret loves telling me how long, so I keep on asking.
“Forty-five,” Margaret says with pride. “And we have three children, two girls and one boy.”
“And how many grandchildren?” I know the answer to this too, but sometimes asking the same questions helps with her recall, but it also makes her happy to think about her family.
She takes a moment or two to think on this. “Three… no, wait… I think it’s five.”
“Yes, I think five is the correct number.” I’ve seen the pictures in her room and I’ve met one of her daughters and her son and a few of the grandchildren.
“They don’t like to come here,” Margaret says without any note of sadness. “It’s not a good place for children.”
“I’m sure they like seeing you though,” I offer.
She smiles in easy agreement.
After another round, which Margaret wins, she picks out a prize, a chocolate bar that she can’t eat because there is a tube in her stomach that feeds her, but something she’ll enjoy giving to her husband.
“When are you getting married?” Margaret asks me after I’ve helped clean things up and given direction to Tyler on how to help out in collecting the cards from the tables.
“Married?” I can’t help but laugh.
“Didn’t
you say you were marrying that boy? What was his name anyway?”
“Tyler,” I say, noting Margaret’s short-term memory loss, perhaps caused by age or the effects of her disease. Sometimes I’m surprised she even remembers my name.
“Yes, that’s him. Well, I hope it’s a wonderful marriage like mine. I think it will be.”
I don’t challenge her any further on that. In Margaret’s head, Tyler and I are getting married, and if that makes her smile, then I’m glad to let her believe it. But as I catch sight of him stacking up the last of the bingo cards and dutifully putting them away, then being stopped by an elderly gentleman and appeasing the man’s desire for what looks like some kind of one-sided discussion, I’m not sure Margaret is too far off. Maybe, just maybe, marrying Tyler will happen someday.
TYLER
“Thanks for having me along,” I tell Claire after we’ve grabbed some food and are now on our way out of the city.
“Of course,” Claire says, pulling herself away from the window she’d been leaning her head on, looking out at the passing landscape. “You’re a natural. Maybe you might like to go into medicine or rehab or something like that after all.”
“I don’t think so,” I respond with a chuckle. “I’m not sure it’s for me, and that nursing home—it was nice, but that smell.”
She laughs. “I’ve smelled worse, but yeah, that’s just the way it is. Most of those places are for profit, so they keep the staffing as low as possible. That’s why you see everyone running around like crazy and the residents suffering. It’s not much different at the place I work at in Basin Lake.”
It was so different from the shiny new hospitals and clinics I’d grown up going to in Denver, places I hated even if they didn’t smell like pee. I guess those places just made more money, though I was never clear on who was paying for all the surgeries I’d gone through. All I knew was that there was a payout from Pepper’s owner, Mr. Jeffries. He moved away after the attack, after Pepper had been put down. For some reason, that still made me sad. Sure, she basically fucked my life, but she was just a dog having a really bad day—she didn’t know any better.
“That sucks,” is what I finally settle on telling Claire about the nursing home.
“Thankfully my dad never had to go somewhere like that. But if he’d lived long enough and needed a trach, he probably would have.”
“Maybe he didn’t want that?” I venture the guess, trying to picture Claire’s dad in my head. She’d told me he was young when he died, and I couldn’t imagine he’d have wanted to be stuck in a nursing home.
“Maybe not. I guess it’s different for everyone. Somehow it works for Margaret and her husband.”
“You really care about her. I could tell.”
Even though I’m keeping my eyes on the road ahead, I can’t help but notice a slight shaking of Claire’s chin and a glint of moisture in her eyes.
“She’s like part of my family,” she says with emotion edging her words. “I’ve been volunteering once a month there since I was in ninth grade, so I know her. She always amazes me, and sometimes I wish I could just snatch her out of that place and take her home with me.”
At that, I reach over and take her hand and hold it tight. “You’re pretty amazing yourself,” I say, swallowing hard and turning my attention back to the road, but not letting go.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CLAIRE
November
“This is gonna sound weird, but I feel kind of fairytale-ish tonight,” McKenzie says while we put the finishing touches on our makeup and hair in my room.
“I’m not sure I’d equate the word fairytale with our lame harvest dance,” Nina says.
“Oh, get over yourself,” McKenzie chides. “Just because you can’t wear that pink monstrosity in your closet doesn’t mean the harvest dance can’t be fun, even if it’s in a totally ironic way.”
“It’s not a monstrosity,” Nina argues. “It cost five hundred dollars, and now I have to wait until prom to wear it because the dumbasses on the dance committee overruled my Pastels of Fall idea.”
“That was kind of a stretch,” I tell her.
“If you say so,” she replies dismissively. “But I could picture the entire dance being built around that dress. I’m apparently the only one with any real vision in this town.” She flops down on my bed in the pretty amazing red dress she’s had to lower herself to wear instead. “And now I’m just going to look like everyone else at prom with that dress in my closet just… well, just waiting for me. Where’s the fun in that?”
I can’t keep up with Nina’s whims or the apparent never ending supply of gifts, like five-hundred-dollar pink dresses, that her father allows her, even though I’m pretty sure her family has already had to file bankruptcy twice.
“That’s what you get for buying a pink dress for the harvest dance,” McKenzie piles on. “Next time, don’t buy the dress until after the dance committee votes.”
“Um, we all graduate this year, dummy. There won’t be a next time.”
McKenzie rolls her eyes and shrugs, steps next to me and surveys us in the full-length mirror. With her hands wrapped around my shoulders, she says, “I think we look pretty damn good.”
She’s right. We so totally do. She’s wearing a black dress, yellow and black striped leggings and a pair of black laced-up boots. Her hair, still a bright shade of red, is cut a little shorter than her usual while I’ve been growing my still virgin brown hair out a little longer, wearing it down, curled and parted at the side. My dress is an emerald green empire style that I’d scored at a second-hand shop in Spokane with some black, ankle-strap heels I basically only wear at dances.
“Our boys are going to get hard-ons when we walk in,” McKenzie teases.
“Gross!” Nina yells over to us. “I don’t even want to think about Nick with a hard-on.”
“Well, you did ask him to go,” McKenzie says.
“Don’t remind me.”
In between boyfriends, Nina had offhandedly asked Nick to take her to the harvest dance in chemistry class. At first I figured she was joking, but she didn’t have even a trace of mischief in her eyes. But Nick, probably wondering if she was up to something, hadn’t jumped at the chance. That seemed to irritate her, but when he said yes after two entire days, she looked relieved.
“You can pout all night and try to convince us you aren’t totally hot for Nick, or you can forget about that stupid pink dress and have some fun,” I say.
I usually wouldn’t be so forward, especially with someone like Nina, but I just don’t care tonight. I think about Margaret and how she’d probably love to be able to go to a dance again, regardless of what she had to wear.
“Okay, Mom,” Nina says, bouncing back up from the bed and squeezing between us in the mirror. “Maybe this dress isn’t as awful as I thought.”
Mom has to make a big to-do about pictures. Since Kate is going to this thing as well, our very small living room is crowded with her, her date and four of their friends along with me, McKenzie, Nina, James, Nick and Tyler. I could definitely do without all of it, but I’m making sure not to complain in front of Kate because it’s basically a miracle she’s going, and I sure as hell don’t want to sound as spoiled and entitled as Nina did up in my room.
“You look amazing,” Tyler tells me as we pose for pictures, his lips close to my ear.
“You don’t look so bad yourself,” I whisper back as we smile.
“In this old thing?” He laughs, just as Mom implores us all to say, “Cheese!”
I’ve known Tyler now for about two months, and while I hadn’t wanted to have any sort of relationship that would potentially interfere with my future plans, I seem to be making an exception. Tyler looks so very handsome in slim tweed pants, a crisp blue shirt and a bowtie he’s able to pull off and still look hot in.
“I figure guys who harvest stuff would wear bow ties to their square dances or wherever the hell they go to let off steam,” he told me when he fi
rst arrived.
I’d pretty much laughed nonstop at that for three minutes before I could catch my breath.
“I’m glad you think I’m funny,” he said after all of that was done.
I do, and that’s good. Margaret did say it was important to be with someone who makes you laugh.
Mom insists on driving Kate, her date and two of the friends in her car while I go with Tyler, McKenzie and James. Nina and Nick take Nick’s car, along with the two extra stragglers from Kate’s party.
The stragglers pretty much burst out of Nick’s car a few minutes later when we all arrive at school.
“They’ll definitely be calling their parents for a ride home,” Nick says while Tyler and I walk toward the gym with him, Nina having run ahead with a couple of her cheerleader friends that we’d run into in the parking lot, one of them in tears about something.
“Probably just a breakup,” she’d said, “but I’m head cheerleader, so duty calls.”
“Nina scared the crap out of them, huh?” Tyler asks, so at ease around his new friends.
“More than that. She scarred them for life.”
“How’d she do that, specifically I mean?” I can imagine about a million different ways.
“Listed off her favorite sexual positions… which was an eye-opener… and kind of a mind-fuck if she was being serious.”
“Wow,” Tyler says.
“Then she asked them if they’d ever done it and told them all the porn sites they should check out for pointers.”
I shake my head, but I’m really not surprised. “Kind of corrupting for being our head cheerleader.”
“She an enigma all right,” Nick says, and I can tell he’s still into her, maybe even more so now after she scared the crap out of those kids but following it up by comforting one of her friends.
While Nina is keeping a watchful eye out for her cheerleaders, I’ve already decided I’ll be doing the same for Kate tonight. Her hair is still mostly black, though her roots are growing out, which makes for an interesting look, but she’s managing to pull it off with just the right makeup and a dress that McKenzie helped pick out for her, one that is more edgy than what Kate is used to.
Between the Girls (The Basin Lake Series Book 3) Page 16