Million Dollar Dilemma

by Judy Baer

  And the new little neighborhood cheerleader had given him flowers. He didn’t bother to tell her that if he were to get flowers every time he did a touch-and-go in this apartment, the place would be a dead-bouquet graveyard. He eyed the strange conglomeration of flowers that was mostly daisies with a single carnation and a bird-of-paradise thrown in. It was odd, but he rather liked it.

  He turned around and was astounded to see her still standing in his doorway. Adam observed her anxious expression, wringing hands and the way she stood like a penitent child. Not a child, exactly. The aquamarine knit top she wore skated smoothly across her curves and the body beneath the crisp white slacks was long legged and fit. All she wore for jewelry was a gold necklace from which hung a simple cross. Her fingers were bare of rings, but she wore a slender gold toe ring on her second toe that peeked tantalizingly from her sandal.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  She would excuse him, wouldn’t she? It alarmed Adam a little that she looked as though she’d settle in for the duration. She was eyeing his tattered leather luggage plastered with old decals, port-of-entry and customs stamps and held together with a sturdy leather belt, and comparing it to the pristine cowhide carrying case for his laptop computer.

  “I don’t know what you do for a living,” she murmured, “but it must be very interesting.”

  “Don’t mind the bullet hole. A minor accident. No one was hurt.”

  “Hmm.” She bent to drag a dainty pink-tipped finger over a burn mark on the corner of the suitcase. It was a memento of a spirited argument around a campfire during which one of his companions had tried to throw both Adam and his luggage onto the pyre.

  Mentally Adam renewed his vow to find another job. This one was just too hard on him.

  Though he was tempted to encourage Cassia to mind her own business and get back to her apartment, it occurred to him that there was no casual inquisitiveness or recreational prying in her expression. She was genuinely interested. He could hardly fault her for asking questions, since he made a living doing the same thing. Her face was completely open and without guile, a quality so scarce he’d barely recognized it. Her loneliness and embarrassment were apparent. Adam prided himself on his ability to read people and their emotions. It was disconcerting to realize that, for this woman at least, he actually cared what she felt.

  Touchy-feely he was not. Or hadn’t been…until recently. But despite the fleeting compassion he felt for Cassia, he was relieved when she finally backed through the doorway waving goodbye.

  Man, oh, man, did he need a shower and a nap.

  The little skeleton twitched as though it were still alive. It couldn’t be, of course. There was nothing left of the child but tissue-paper-thin skin stretched across an emaciated body. Its skull was too large for the wasted body and the eyelids, like bits of waxy paper, did not quite close, revealing slits of white fringed by sparse lashes.

  Dazed and drunk with misery, Adam picked up the shovel and began to dig another grave. Surely he was hallucinating from heat and exertion. The eroded earth was hard and dry as chalk, over-grazed by cattle on this marginal land, leaving it unprotected and exposed to the elements.

  He couldn’t go very deep with this one. Taking off his brimmed canvas hat, he wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand. He tasted the saltiness of his lips and felt the visibly shimmering heat embracing him. His water bottle was back in the tent and his tongue was growing thick and parched. He’d have to get this done soon and go back to rehydrate. There weren’t many good-sized rocks in this area either. Not enough to cover a grave. He’d used them all for the others. Perhaps there weren’t enough rocks and dirt in Burundi to cover all the dead bodies. Even though there’d been a tenuous peace in Africa’s Great Lakes Region since the end of the civil war, famine was just as efficient at eradicating life as war had been. Sadly, it took the infants and children first.

  He did the best he could, scratching out a shallow hole in the hard earth before turning to pick up the tiny carcass he’d come to bury. He cradled the frail frame in his arms for just a moment. It was like holding a cluster of pencils—tiny sticks of arms and legs, limp and nearly weightless….

  Adam heard himself scream as the fragile form moved in his arms. Eyes, large and dark as black holes in a distant universe, opened to stare at him.

  “You’re dead! Dead!” Adam shouted. But the baby wasn’t dead, not quite. The eyes stared at him accusingly, as if he were the one responsible for its suffering.

  At least he could wake himself up from these dreams, Adam thought, taking deep breaths. He was on the verge of hyperventilating, shivering and damp from head to toe with sweat and nerves, a sheen of perspiration glistening across his pectorals and the soft, dark furring of his chest. He worked his jaw and willed himself to relax. His pajama bottoms rode low on his hips, and he felt a rivulet of sweat pouring down his backbone to soak the elastic at his waist. As he stood at the kitchen sink slugging back glasses of ice water, he began to shiver. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have sworn he had the shaking, chills, muscle aches and exhaustion of malaria. He would have traded the dreams that haunted him for malaria any day. From this side of sleep, a nap no longer seemed such a good idea.

  Groping toward the shower, he stumbled over Pepto, who had stationed himself in the hall in front of the bedroom door. The cat who, abused as a kitten, could be provoked into a frenzy at the sight of anything closely resembling a human attack, didn’t even flinch. Even Pepto, the most self-absorbed creature ever born, sensed that Adam had reached his limit.

  As Adam stood in the shower, welcoming the sharp pinpricks of water on his body, he wondered anew when…if…the dreams would ever stop.

  CHAPTER 4

  Kiwi is God’s way of cracking a joke.

  I peeled another of the hairy little critters, sliced the bright green flesh dotted with its circle of black seeds and added it into my developing fruit salad, to be tossed in a concoction of cottage cheese, black persimmon pulp and honey. The recipe sounds pretty scary, but sometimes it’s good to live on the edge.

  Cooking helps me ease the loneliness I’ve been feeling.

  I went to church this morning, and came back reluctantly to my empty apartment. I’m “church shopping,” going in ever and ever bigger concentric circles in the area of my apartment. I’ve been praying that the Holy Spirit will give me a big “thumbs up” sign when I find my church home.

  The phone rang. I checked caller ID to make sure it wasn’t Ken again. Sometimes I’m just not up to being loved by him.

  “Hi, Grandma?” I took the phone into the living room and sprawled across the couch I’d borrowed from Jane. “What’s up?”

  “That’s what I called to ask you, my dear.” Grandma Mattie’s voice was robust and cheerful. I couldn’t help but smile just hearing her.

  “I went to the market yesterday.”

  “My, my, now what?”

  I suppose she has a right to be apprehensive. I’ve been going a little overboard at grocery and specialty stores. For me, unfortunately, everything from canned rattlesnake to sushi tastes like chicken.

  “Black persimmons—‘chocolate pudding fruit’? How could I resist?”

  “It would have taken a saint, I’m sure,” Grandma said tranquilly. “I’ve heard that grocery stores and Laundromats are wonderful places to meet men—so clean and wholesome. And men who shop and do laundry at night obviously aren’t frequenting nightclubs….”

  Visions of men too ashamed to show their dirty underwear by light of day invaded my thoughts. Ewww. “Grandma, have you been talking to Jane?”

  “Your sister thinks you’re lonely.”

  “My sister thinks a lot of things. That doesn’t make them all true. She’s sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “That’s where her nose has always been,” Grandma Mattie agreed cheerfully. “Are you lonely?”

  There’s no use beating around the bush with Mattie. “A little.
The people at work are great, but they live all over the city and none near me. My apartment building is quieter than I’d expected. In fact, I didn’t meet any of my neighbors until today…and I managed to make a royal fool of myself, too.”

  “Oh?” Mattie can pack volumes into a single “Oh?”

  “I didn’t expect the Cities to be like Simms, where I can dial a wrong number and talk for half an hour to whoever answers, but I also didn’t realize how much I’ve missed my friends until I followed a man into his apartment today.”

  There was a long, potent pause on the other end of the line. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “There’s nothing much to tell, really, but he has the most awful cat….” I unfurled for her my long, wretched story. To my surprise, instead of asking where I’d gone wrong in the common sense department, she changed the subject.

  “Do you like your job?”

  “It’s fine. I’m still learning.”

  “You’ll find something in your field soon. You didn’t get a degree in child development to waste it now.”

  “I need to finish my master’s and maybe even my doctorate in child psychology, Grandma. Right now I’m a well-educated unemployable.”

  “You left school to help your grandfather and me and didn’t complain once about your sacrifice. The Fifth Commandment and all.”

  Honor your father and your mother.

  Grandma, too, was accustomed to talking in biblical shorthand.

  I recalled the day my grandfather had had his first heart attack. That moment had changed my life. I had known for certain that I couldn’t let Mattie struggle alone, and once I realized Grandpa Ben was disappearing in inches, a little each day, it became crystal clear that my place was with my grandparents. I would only have felt remorse if I had decided my own life was “too important” to spare them the time and had missed the opportunity to share so many powerful weeks with Grandfather before he died.

  “You and Ben have been like my own father and mother in so many ways. You were there for us when our parents were away, foot soldiers right there in the trenches with us.”

  “I never considered raising you two a war, dear. Of course, there were a few skirmishes.”

  I winced, hoping she wasn’t thinking of that time Jane and I were so determined to play with the same doll that we pulled it in half. Or that nasty incident with the scissors while we played beauty shop. Of course, that did work out in the long run. Jane still wears her hair in a bob.

  I heard a knock and a voice in the background on Mattie’s end of the line. Then she said, “Can I call you back, dear? I’ve got company.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Gram. Call me when you aren’t busy.”

  Because I certainly won’t be.

  It should be the other way around. I should be telling my grandmother how to adjust, not vice versa. She has taken to city life like a duck to water. Mattie turns down invitations from Jane and me because her social life in the assisted living center is so busy. While Mattie is enjoying her social whirl, I already have all my photos in photo albums and my recipes typed nicely and filed in a box. I’m going to alphabetize the spices and the cleaning products next, then refold the bath towels in a new configuration I saw in Good Housekeeping. I’ve even started to iron.

  The phone rang again. Twice in a day. A new record. I picked it up without checking the ID, only to hear “Are you ready to come home yet?”

  The familiar, proprietary voice set my teeth on edge. “Hello, Ken. How are you?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Cassia. I miss you and I know you miss me. You can be here in time for the spaghetti feed before the baseball game tomorrow if you pack tonight. What do you say?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. How nice of you to call. Now, if you’ll just excuse me…”

  “Okay, okay. I’m sorry I jumped into it like that, but you are driving me crazy, darlin.’You don’t belong in Minneapolis. You belong in Simms with me.”

  I could just see him, hair the color of ripe wheat buzzed into submission, that intentional three-day stubble of beard that so many men wear these days, pristine white T-shirt with tight sleeves stretching over refined biceps. I could imagine his even white teeth with a wad of gum lodged between the back molars and his practiced sneer, an expression he hoped looked just like Elvis’s. A fine specimen of a man he is, even if Ken thinks so himself.

  “You don’t need me in Simms. The game will go on without me.”

  “So will the Twin Cities.”

  “We’ve discussed this a dozen times….”

  “And you never get it quite right. I love you, Cassia. I want you here with me.”

  “But I don’t love you. Not like that…”

  “Sooner or later you’ll realize that love isn’t about hearing bells and being swept off your feet. Love is about the time you’ve put into the relationship, the history you share.”

  But I want bells. I want to be swept off my feet. Besides, this romantic deductive reasoning comes from a man who considers venison, codfish and sauerkraut gourmet foods.

  “Then you should love your pickup truck and your dog, Boosters, very much. I know how much time and history you all have together.”

  “I can see this wasn’t the right time to call.”

  Finally, a glimmer of intuition on his part. I’d practically hit him over the head to make him understand that I wasn’t going to fall in love with him, but Ken refused to take no for an answer. His persistence had made him an unlikely success in the construction world, and the business he based in Simms had flourished across the state. Apparently when something worked once, Ken figured it would work again.

  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” he says, not realizing that there’d really never been anything between us to fix. But we had dated—showed up at the same places within twenty minutes of each other, actually. In Simms that counted for something. “Sooner or later you’ll have to realize that I’m not coming back to Simms to be your wife. I can’t be much clearer than that.”

  “Sure, that’s what you think now, but you’ll come around.” Gum snapped loudly in my ear. “Hey! The guys are here. Gotta go. We’re going skeet shooting at the gun club tonight. You hang in there, babe. Love ya. Bye.” And the phone went dead.

  My left temple pulsated and the pounding in my head increased. That conversation had been a total waste of time. Ken hadn’t believed—or even heard—a word I’d said. He is so convinced that the city is an immoral and inhospitable place to live—and that Simms is as close to Eden as one can get on earth—that he thinks I’ll wake up sooner or later and scuttle my little self back to paradise. And he’ll be waiting with a told-you-so grin on his face and his latest big showy house, ready to carry me across the threshold.

  “I’ll build you anything you want, Cassia,” he’d told me. “You name it—ranch, two-story, Colonial, saltbox, even contemporary. As many bedrooms as you want and a bathroom in every one of them. I’ll put a fireplace in every one, too. You want a pool? Fine. A bowling alley? I’ll see what I can do. I’ll even build a place for your grandma so she can be back in Simms and close to you. Won’t she love that?”

  If money or prestige had mattered even a whit to me, it might have been tempting, but grandiose displays of wealth turned my stomach. If Ken had offered to give away some of that money to help others, then maybe…

  But he hadn’t. He’s a good man, but it probably wouldn’t occur to him. He looks at the world in terms of dollars per square foot, concrete blocks per basement and the distance between two rafters. That, more than anything, made me sure I could never fully love him. Now I felt more empty and isolated than ever. Mattie was busy, Ken was being obtuse and Jane was doing who-knows-what. And I was all alone.

  I built myself up for a great pity party and was planning the exact moment I’d open the Chunky Monkey ice cream in my freezer—should it be before or after I finish the Oreos and the fruit salad? Then a cold, wet nose nudged itself into my palm. Beady
black eyes peered at me through a fringe of taffy-colored bangs and a raspy tongue laved my hand.

  I knelt and took my dog’s gigantic fluffy head in my hands. “You’re my best buddy, aren’t you, sweetie? I don’t need anybody else when I’ve got you. How about a brushing?”

  Unfortunately facing an evening of dog brushing and eating two quarts of Black Persimmon Surprise fruit salad didn’t exactly fill my social calendar.

  “The city isn’t that much different from Simms, Winslow. I’ll do exactly what I always did in Simms when I was in the doldrums. Remember how we’d take a plate of Mattie’s cookies to the neighbors and have a visit?” But I didn’t have any homemade cookies. I would have to make do with what I had on hand.

  I wondered how Adam Cavanaugh felt about tangelos and persimmons.

  I almost lost my nerve when I saw that the door to his apartment was open. I smelled frying bacon and heard the coffeepot gurgling. My cheery idea to be neighborly rapidly withered. After deciding that Cavanaugh was probably the last person who would want to see me, I decided instead to offer my salad to the people who lived on my floor. Unfortunately, no one was home. Adam’s was the only apartment in the building with any signs of life.

  Pepto lay in the doorway like a palace guard waiting to attack anyone with designs on the king. I studied him from a distance, gauging my safety. One incisor hung over his bottom lip, and his mauled, droopy ear made him look like the feline version of a marauding pirate.