by Delia Parr
The woman raised her eyes and looked at Andrea. “Considerin’ most folks would start yellin’ or makin’ a real fuss, that might be a refreshin’ change. Go ahead. Make your case, not that it’ll matter much. It just might be more interestin’ than this magazine.”
Andrea nodded. “Miss Huxbaugh is dying, and she’s going to die alone unless you let me visit her. I’ve lost four members of my family, and not one of them died alone. But Miss Huxbaugh doesn’t have any family. I just came because too many people die alone, that’s all.”
“But you’re not related to her?”
“Only through faith.”
The woman’s gnarled fingers gently caressed the old silver cross for a moment, before she handed Andrea a turquoise pass. “There’s a chapel you might want to visit. Go down the hall and take the second left, not the first one. If you take the first one, you’ll be in the east wing. You don’t want to go into the east wing because if you do, you’ll pass right by the coronary-care unit and you can’t go anywhere near there because Miss Huxbaugh isn’t takin’ any visitors. Now if you do make a wrong turn and somehow end up where you’re not supposed to be and Miss Huxbaugh starts yellin’, you hightail it outta there and explain you got lost goin’ to the chapel. Understand?”
Andrea returned the woman’s wink with one of her own. “Perfectly.”
“Good. Now all I need for you to do is put your name and telephone number on this here slip of paper.” She handed Andrea a pen and a piece of memo paper.
Without asking why, Andrea did as she was told and handed both back.
The old woman tucked the paper under the sleeve of her sweater. “I’m eighty-one years old come October. Got no family. I might need to call you up if I get real sick. That okay with you?”
Andrea’s heart trembled. “You call me anytime. Day or night,” she whispered, and started toward the hall. She took the first left, found the coronary-care unit without a single person to challenge her and slipped into the dim cubicle, where she found Miss Huxbaugh lying in bed, as expected. She was connected to a heart monitor and an IV, which probably carried some nutrition as well as medication.
Andrea approached the bed quietly. Miss Huxbaugh was resting peacefully with her eyes closed. If the stroke had weakened any of her muscles, they weren’t the ones in her face. She just looked very old and frail, quite the opposite of her personality. Her breathing was slow and shallow; Andrea had to listen very hard to hear it. She carried a chair to the side of the bed and sat down.
After bowing her head, she said “The Lord’s Prayer” silently. As she prayed, she placed her hand on top of Miss Huxbaugh’s right hand, so very pale and cool to the touch. When a nurse suddenly appeared to check the IV bag, she wrote down something on the chart and smiled. “I didn’t realize she’d changed her mind about visitors. I’m glad you’re here. Even though she’s sleeping right now, she’s still lucid at times. The stroke hasn’t affected her speech, so you may get to talk to her, though she’s very weak. She doesn’t have much longer.”
Andrea swallowed the lump in her throat. “How much time—”
“Maybe till morning, but probably not that long. Under the circumstances, you can stay as long as you like. I can bring an extra pillow for you, or maybe a blanket? It gets a little chilly at night.”
“No. Thank you. I’ll be fine.”
“Ring the buzzer if you need anything, or when the time comes,” the nurse whispered before she left, closing the curtains around the bed and giving Andrea and Miss Huxbaugh a little privacy.
Andrea rested her forehead against the side of the bed and dozed off and on between prayers for what seemed an eternity. Once or twice, she thought she felt Miss Huxbaugh stir, but when she checked, the woman’s eyes were still closed and she was still asleep. Andrea woke with a start when she heard a cart rumbling past the cubicle. She checked her watch. It was almost midnight.
The noise, however, had disturbed Miss Huxbaugh. She opened her eyes. When she saw Andrea, her eyes widened and filled with panic. With her right hand, she yanked on Andrea’s sleeve. “Closer. Come…closer.”
Andrea rose and leaned her face toward the woman’s face.
“Get my keys…from my pocketbook.”
“Your keys? You want me to get your keys from your pocketbook?”
“Hurry.”
Andrea knew better, but she searched under the bed and the small metal chest of drawers anyway. Valuables and personal items were always stored away when patients were admitted to a hospital. “I’m sorry. They must have everything locked up for you for safekeeping. Your pocketbook isn’t even here.”
Miss Huxbaugh closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she tugged on Andrea’s hand until she had bent down closer to the woman’s face. “Under a rock…in my garden…by the front door. There’s a key…hidden there.”
Andrea leaned even closer. The woman’s voice was so low now she could barely hear her.
“Take it. Go inside. Under…under the bed, there are…boxes filled with…letters.”
“I understand,” Andrea whispered. “What do you want me to do with the letters?”
Tears streamed down Miss Huxbaugh’s face. “Burn them. Don’t…just throw away. Burn them. Please…burn them for me. Don’t let…don’t let anyone read them after…I’m gone.”
“I will. I promise,” Andrea crooned.
“Good girl. Good…girl…good…”
Miss Huxbaugh closed her eyes and drew in one last breath before she passed from this world to the next. Her hand slipped down to the bed. Andrea put the old woman’s arm beneath the covers, but she remained where she was at the side of the bed and closed her own eyes.
There had been times in Andrea’s life when she had felt close to God, but there had been other times when she had felt His very presence.
Times like now.
She had experienced the same feeling each time she had witnessed the passing of a loved one. First, Kathleen, then Daddy and Mother and, finally, Sandra. When they had passed, their sickrooms had filled with such holiness and inspired such awe, Andrea had felt as though she had been witnessing one of life’s greatest wonders: the reunion of a soul with the Creator.
She filled with awe. She felt the holy presence of God. And she prayed for the soul of Miss Jane Huxbaugh. May she finally find the joy in heaven she had never found in her journey here on earth.
Chapter Thirty-Two
By the break of dawn, it would be too late for Andrea to keep her promise to Miss Huxbaugh. With flashlight in hand, she searched the bed of rocks in front of the house, found the key and slipped inside.
She was not a burglar, though she felt like one. If any of the neighbors caught a glimpse of light in this house at three o’clock in the morning, they would certainly assume the worst. The last thing Andrea wanted to do was to have to explain herself to the police, especially without Miss Huxbaugh alive to corroborate Andrea’s story.
She kept the beam of the flashlight low. She got into a musty, first-floor bedroom that faced the street without any problem—until she walked straight into a rope of some sort that hit her in the chin. She yelped and her heart lurched against the wall of her chest. When she raised the flashlight beam from the floor and looked about the room, she gasped.
If she had not seen this with her own eyes, she would not have believed it. Clothesline hanging from hooks on the walls crisscrossed the room and still held a few pieces of laundry. Andrea lowered the beam and swept it over the carpet. Sure enough, lines of mold and mildew were like shadows beneath the clothesline overhead.
She backed out of the room. Why the older woman had chosen to hang her laundry indoors in a bedroom did not really matter. Andrea needed to find those letters and leave before anyone discovered her inside the house.
She had a little better success in the next room, which held a bedroom set straight out of the 1940s and smelled of old-fashioned toilet water. Andrea lowered herself to the floor, first on one side of t
he double bed and then the other. She was so exhausted she was tempted to put her head down and close her eyes. Unfortunately, her search only yielded seven pairs of slippers in varying degrees of disrepair, one screw-back earring, a free sample box of bran cereal, and a telephone directory from 1981.
She shoved everything back beneath the bed, brushed the dirt and dust from her hands, and moved on past the bathroom to the last bedroom at the end of the hall. Inside, she found a single bed against the wall, covered with an old chenille bedspread. When she reached beneath the bed and her fingers touched a box, she prayed she would find letters inside.
She slid the box out from beneath the bed. Before she stood up, she decided to shine the flashlight under the bed again, just to be sure she had not overlooked a second box. That turned out to be a good idea. She did find a second box and a third and a fourth and a fifth! There were envelopes filled with letters in every one of them.
As far as the letters were concerned, Andrea did not see much. She only lifted each lid high enough to see there were letters inside before she closed the lid and moved on to the next box. Not that she was not curious. She was just more afraid of being caught rummaging through the house.
Stacked on top of one another, the boxes were perhaps two-and-a-half-feet high, and each box was the size of a man’s shirt box. Andrea carried the boxes out the front door and set them down for a moment to bury the key again. She had parked her car around the block for fear someone would hear the engine or see the headlights. She looked up the street and saw nothing to indicate anyone in the neighborhood had been alerted by her presence.
She waited in the shadows until a transit train passed by before she headed back to her car with the letters that could perhaps unravel the fifty-year-old mystery surrounding the day Miss Huxbaugh had been left at the altar.
By the time she got home, Andrea only had enough energy to drop the boxes inside her front door, set the alarm and fall into bed with her “girls.” She was asleep almost before her head hit the pillow.
Andrea woke with a start and a growling stomach. Groggy, she lifted her head, read the illuminated numbers on the digital clock and dropped her head back to the pillow. It was 10:41 p.m. She had slept through breakfast, Sunday services, lunch and dinner. She had also slept so late, Jenny had not only come back from her weekend away but also left for her night shift.
With a groan, Andrea got up, headed straight for the shower and towel-dried her hair before she put on a nightgown and robe. She poured fresh food into the cats’ bowls and chose a Southwestern omelet combination of some sort from a freezer full of entrées, and popped it into the microwave. She practically inhaled a couple of glasses of orange juice while she waited. Still flush with last night’s success at retrieving Miss Huxbaugh’s letters, she now faced a new challenge: how to fulfill the rest of her promise and burn the letters.
As far as she knew open, outdoor fires of any kind had been banned in Welleswood for years. Without a fireplace in her home or one of those newly popular garden chimineas, she had no way to burn the letters, at least not that many letters.
If she had found only a handful of letters, she would have been tempted to put them into one of her big pasta pots and set the letters on fire. Five boxes of letters made it easy for her to nix that idea. She could go to Madge’s house. No one was home to see what she was going to do. Madge had a fireplace. A gas fireplace, she remembered. No help there. Jenny had a wood-burning fireplace in her house, but Andrea was reluctant to involve her or anyone else in Welleswood. It was only the end of September. Someone would be bound to question why anyone would be using a fireplace when it was still so warm.
Madge’s beach house would have been perfect, but it had a gas fireplace there, too. That left…A possible solution slowly dawned. She would need to make a telephone call to be sure, but it could work. She knew it could.
When the bell on the microwave rang, she put her meal onto a plate to rest for the required two or three minutes. She went down to the basement, got an old suitcase and scrunched all five boxes of letters inside before she stored the suitcase under her bed.
If her idea did work, then she only had to wait until tomorrow to fulfill the rest of her promises to Miss Huxbaugh and to Madge. By the time everyone found out on Monday that the elderly spinster had passed on, the secrets in her letters would be gone, too. By the time Jenny had to go to work again Monday night, she would know what had happened to Madge.
She sighed and sat down to eat. Everywhere she turned lately, she had found nothing but sadness. Tomorrow did not look to be an easy day at all.
Late the next afternoon, Andrea decided she had been wrong. Monday had turned out to be a rather productive day that took a rather dramatic turn at five o’clock.
Like most everyone else along the avenue, Andrea had gone outside when the fire whistle sounded and four fire trucks responded to a fire at the senior-citizen high-rise, only a few blocks from her office. Apparently, one of the elderly residents on the fifth floor had forgotten about a pot cooking on the stove. Miraculously, no one had been injured, but the one apartment had been heavily damaged by the fire and several other units had both smoke and water damage.
Rush-hour traffic had been blocked on the avenue for over an hour and side streets were clogged with detoured cars, trucks and buses. Conversation about the fire and senior citizens in general quickly sparked debates filled with gossip and innuendo that put the passing of Jane Huxbaugh into the category of old news.
Andrea decided the old woman would have liked it that way.
She drove to Jenny’s house to talk to her about Madge. She had a little time before she needed to go home, switch to Russell’s car, pick Bill up at work and drive to Sea Gate to pick up the Jeep and keep her promise to Miss Huxbaugh before coming all the way back to Welleswood. She parked in Jenny’s driveway and followed some enticing aromas to the back patio. She had not planned on crashing supper, but she did not have a choice. She had to pick Bill up at seven o’clock.
When Andrea found Jenny at the barbecue grill instead of Michael, she was surprised. When she saw whole lobsters grilling alongside skewers of shrimp, she was impressed. “This must be some special occasion,” she teased.
Jenny was beaming, but shrugged nonchalantly. “You might say that. I’m glad you stopped by. Michael bought tons too much.” She turned one of the lobsters. “If you don’t stay for supper, this little guy will go to waste.”
“Normally, you wouldn’t have to make me feel guilty to stay, not where lobster is involved. But I have plans for tonight. I can’t stay. Where are Michael and the girls?”
“Picking up dessert.”
“At the bakery?”
“Only for the girls. Michael made Aunt Elaine’s coconut cake for us.”
Andrea groaned. “Not the pound cake with fresh coconut and that special icing that makes you want to lick the bowl and the cake?”
Jenny laughed. “Like there’s any other?”
Andrea took a long, delicious whiff. “So, are you going to tell me what the special occasion is, or are you going to keep me in suspense?”
Another nonchalant shrug. “Take a guess.”
For a moment, Andrea caught her breath. “You sounded like Daddy just then.”
“I did?”
“He used to do that with our birthday presents, remember? He’d wrap them up, put them on top of that old console TV at least a week before our birthdays, and make us guess what was inside.”
Jenny chuckled. “I remember. Even if we guessed right, he’d just shrug, so we never really knew for sure if we were right or not until we opened the gift. It used to drive me crazy, but I think if he’d ever stopped the tradition, I would have been disappointed.”
“You can’t do that to me. If I guess the reason for your celebration, you have to admit to it.”
Jenny shrugged again, then laughed. “Go ahead. You have three guesses. If you get it right, I finish grilling dinner. If you don’t, then you
have to take over. Fair?”
“Fair. Okay, let’s see…let’s start with the obvious, not that your tummy is all that big yet. You had an ultrasound today and found out you’re having…twins!”
“Wrong.”
“You’re having a boy?”
Jenny frowned and flipped a skewer of shrimp. “Wrong again. Besides, you know Michael and I don’t care about the baby’s gender. We both love little girls. You have one guess left before I hand you the tongs.”
“I have two guesses left. The ultrasound was one guess.”
“One left,” Jenny insisted. “Make it a good one.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Andrea did not have another good guess, so she blurted out the most incredible possibility she could think of. “Michael sold his book and got such a fabulous advance, you called work today and resigned so you can be a stay-at-home mom.”
Jenny smiled and handed Andrea the tongs. “Nice try, but you’re wrong again.”
Andrea let out a sigh of defeat and took over at the barbecue, but she noticed Jenny’s smile had turned the corner from teasing to smug. “What? Aren’t I grilling to my lady’s satisfaction?”
“No, you’re doing just fine. But I like it when you’re wrong. It doesn’t happen very often. As it turns out, you were almost right about everything, except the last part. I’m not going to resign until tonight when I get to work.”
Andrea stilled, then looked at her sister as her heart grabbed on to what Jenny had said and her mind let the words register. “Michael…sold his book?”
“To the highest bidder! There were three publishers fighting over it all day!”
“No!”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
Andrea threw the tongs up in the air. They embraced. They whooped and hollered and danced up and down. They cried and they laughed together until they both smelled the dinner burning. While Andrea retrieved the tongs, which had fallen to the lower deck, Jenny used an oven mitt to shove the dinner away from the hottest part of the grill. When Andrea returned, she flipped the lobster and shrimp and sighed. “I thought for sure dinner would be ruined.”