It's Never too Late

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “Do you love me, Ella?”

  She lifted her chin, in spite of the tears on her cheeks. “You know I do.”

  “And you need to know that even if I went, I’d be back for you.”

  “I’m going to the pig roast, Mark.”

  * * *

  IT MIGHT BE SUMMER, but in the mountains of Colorado the evenings were still chilly.

  Addy had a cup of tea. Dressed in her favorite jeans, the short ones that she could wear with flip-flops rather than two-inch heels, she hugged the warm rose-embossed china with both hands, legs curled beneath her, and stared at the photo on the living room wall.

  The woman in the picture was beautiful. With long dark hair falling softly around high cheekbones and a rounded chin, Ann Keller had always had a kind word for everyone. In most of Addy’s memories, Ann was smiling, her brown eyes glistening with love like they were in that picture.

  Except for the times when she hadn’t been. Those had mostly involved Addy’s father. And only toward the end.

  Shuddering, she looked away, toward the backyard oasis she’d built behind her small, one-bedroom, one-bath house. The landscaping and yard art, all carefully chosen in greens and blues and yellows, surrounded a pond with a waterfall that ran 24/7, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

  Rock, paper, scissors. She used to play the game with Ely. Paper covered rock, scissors cut paper, rock pounded scissors.

  And water killed fire.

  No, that wasn’t part of the game. Fire had come later.

  She listened for the water, a sound that soothed, and glanced back at the photo. Addy was there, too—a pixieish five-year-old with a big gummy grin and missing front teeth. Her straight blond hair was up in a ponytail. She’d loved that red polka-dot sundress. Maybe because of the red patent leather shoes she’d had to go with it—Dorothy’s shoes, she’d told her mother the day they’d bought them. Maybe she’d loved them so much because her mother had had a dress and sandals that matched. Or maybe because she could still remember the shopping trip, the day that they’d picked out the attire. It had just been her and Mom that day and they’d played Princess and Queen while they’d tried on lots of different outfits. Addy and her brother, Elijah, were going to be in a publicity photo with their mother, who’d just been signed to her own cooking show. Two years older than she was, Elijah had been gung ho about the photo—but not about tagging along to buy clothes. He’d opted out of the shopping excursion.

  But her big brother had been just as excited as Addy had been the morning the three of them had gotten ready—she and Mom in their dresses and Ely in his new suit and red tie—and then piled into the car and taken off for the studio in Phoenix, ready to embark on a great adventure.

  After the pictures, Mom had taken them to a nice restaurant and eaten hamburgers and French fries with them—even though she much preferred the fancier foods she’d become known for. And then they’d changed clothes in the lush bathroom just off the dining room, and headed to the zoo.

  It had been a great day. Perfect. The best ever.

  It had also been the last day Ann and Ely spent on earth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I DIDN’T EVEN graduate high school, Nonnie. College isn’t for me.”

  “You graduated, Mark.” Eighty-one-year-old Gloria Heber glanced pointedly at the GED certificate that she’d lovingly framed and hung on their living room wall next to a cheap Mona Lisa print that she’d also lovingly framed.

  Mark didn’t put a lot of stock in a certificate he’d hardly had to work for. But he’d already played his age card. His grandmother didn’t think thirty was too old to start college. Not by a long shot. She’d spouted off a list of people, one of whom was in her sixties, that she’d heard of from so-and-so and such-and-such, who’d graduated from college.

  “I’m a Bierly boy,” he said now, feeling like a twelve-year-old again as he faced down the determined curmudgeon who’d had him quaking in his boots since he wore baby booties. “I’ve never lived outside this town. Hell, I’ve never lived outside this house. And you want me to go all the way to Arizona? It’s a desert out there! And hot as Hades.”

  Ella thought he was leaving. She’d gone to the pig roast. And then pretended like she’d had a good time. She’d also asked if he’d made his decision yet. And he figured, just as soon as he wrote and officially turned down the scholarship, she’d agree to marry him.

  “What’s wrong with summer all year long?” Nonnie’s tone was strong. “I’ve never known you to have a problem with the heat.”

  Yeah, well, he didn’t like to sweat. At least the kind of sweating she made him do.

  “You’re good at what you do, Mark, but there’s so much more you could be doing. And you ain’t goin’ to get there from here.”

  Nonnie quoted a familiar saying in their small West Virginia town.

  Technically, wherever he went, Arizona included, he’d get there by way of Bierly. But...

  Perching on the edge of the armchair across from Nonnie’s wheelchair, he leaned over, elbows on his knees, to face her head-on. “I’m not going to leave you, Nonnie. You can’t take care of yourself. They’re offering me money for living expenses, but there’s no money to hire someone to look after you, and even if there was, I wouldn’t do it. You took care of me from the time I was born and now it’s my turn. Period. End of story.”

  He didn’t often use that tone of voice with her. Almost never. He didn’t use it much at work, either. Didn’t need to. But when he did, he got results. Always.

  “Fine.”

  He blinked. “Fine?” He’d been sweating over nothing? She’d never really expected him to accept the scholarship offer that had been delivered by the U.S. postal service the week before?

  Nonnie must have written to this scholarship committee on his behalf. He sure hadn’t applied. But why would she have done that if she hadn’t expected him to go?

  “I’m going with you.”

  “What?”

  She handed him a folder. It was half an inch thick, mostly stuffed with pages she’d printed off the internet. Glancing through it, Mark saw housing for rent in Shelter Valley, cost-of-living estimates and driving directions from Bierly, with a map. There were lists of local shopping establishments in the area—privately owned, nonfranchise places with one exception. And a couple of receipts.

  “You rented a duplex for us?”

  “Two bedrooms are more than we need, but the price was right in line with the scholarship allowance, and I liked the woman who owns the place. Caroline Strickland. She’s a Kentucky girl from right around the corner. Moved to Shelter Valley eight years ago and is a little lonely for her own kind.”

  Nonnie probably knew the woman’s birth date and deepest fears, too. She just had that way about her.

  “If she’s not happy there, how do you expect us to be?”

  “She loves Shelter Valley! Says moving there is the best choice she’s ever made. She’s just glad to have us joining her.”

  “You’ve lived in Bierly for eighty-one years. You were born in this house. And you expect me to believe you want to leave?”

  “I want you to have this chance, Markie-boy.” She used the nickname she knew better than to utter outside their private communications.

  Eyes narrowed, he studied the indomitable woman trapped in a frail body that was all sunken skin and brittle bones—helped along by the multiple sclerosis that had been slowly weakening her over the past fourteen
years. “You wrote to the scholarship committee, didn’t you? You read about it on the internet and you wrote to them.”

  “No.” Her chin lifted. Mark wasn’t going. He adored Nonnie, owed her, but he was a hands-on learner, not a classroom type of guy.

  And she’d never survive the trip.

  “What about Ella?”

  “If she loves you she’ll wait for you.”

  Four years was a long time to wait when you were in your childbearing years. So why hadn’t he been in a hurry to start a family before the scholarship offer had turned his life upside down?

  “I have no idea what to study,” he said. “The scholarship says that I have to complete a four-year degree or pay the money back.”

  Nonnie’s snort would have fit in better at the bar she used to tend than it did in the clean and pretty home she kept.

  “You got ideas springing out your ears, Mark. It’s time someone besides me and the dinner table listens to them.”

  “I just know what could be done better at the plant. And I know better than to shoot my mouth off down there.”

  “You got life-altering ideas, Markie-boy. I’m old, but I’m not out of touch. Our world’s changing fast and the things you talk about, the way things are being redone so fast and the danger in those gases that aren’t being tended to, you know how to fix some of that. Look at all the work you’ve been doing in fire forensics. Hell, even ten years ago they was still using mostly guesswork to determine things about them fires, and you already brung modern science to Bierly with your volunteer fire work. Maybe, if you had the schooling and the position it would give you, you could have saved Jimmy.”

  An explosion on the line the previous winter had killed his best friend. And now Rick Stanfield was working in Jimmy’s place.

  “Jimmy didn’t follow the handbook, Nonnie.”

  No one did. The rules in the book didn’t coincide with the cost-saving methods upper management expected them to use. But that was his issue to take up with the bosses.

  “You’re wasting your God-given talents here.”

  She was his grandmother and, for all intents and purposes, his sole parent from the day he was born. Her perceptions were a tad bit skewed where he was concerned.

  “What will we do with this place?”

  “Rent it out, furnished, as soon as someone answers the ad I put out on the internet. Just need enough to pay taxes. Wilbur’ll watch it for us in the meantime.”

  Looking around him, taking in the scarred solid cherry-wood tables he’d learned to dust when he was four, the beige tweed couch that still carried the faded stain of the cherry Popsicle he’d thrown up after he’d had his tonsils out, the threadbare carpet that Nonnie had taught him to dance on because he was refusing to learn with other boys as mock partners in gym class, Mark couldn’t come up with any more excuses.

  “We aren’t going, Nonnie. Twenty years ago, you could have dragged me to the truck by my ear and made me go, but not now. You need me now. And I’m staying here.”

  It bothered him to play the health card, but leaving Bierly would kill both of them. Nonnie didn’t have many years left—not enough to risk four of them in an unfamiliar world across the country while he wasted time learning things he would never use just to have another piece of useless paper hanging on the wall.

  Chances were she wouldn’t live long enough to frame the damn thing.

  He watched as Nonnie’s shoulders dropped inward, her chin falling to her chest as her body leaned forward, and hated that he’d had to cause such abject defeat in the woman who had always championed him. Always fought for him and her right to keep him with her.

  And then he saw the folder she’d bent down to retrieve from the thin wire basket he’d designed to fit on the outside wheel base of her chair. A second manila folder. Also half an inch thick.

  The mass shook as she reached out bony, blue-veined fingers to hand it to him.

  Confused, Mark opened the file. It also contained printed pages from the internet. Housing availability. And receipts. One for a sale. And one for the rental of a room in an assisted living facility.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She stared him down silently.

  “You just said you were coming with me.”

  Nonnie was the only person he knew who could deliver a taking-down without saying a word.

  “You sold the land?” Ten acres behind the house. Her garden.

  He glanced again at the second folder.

  She had her own power of attorney. There’d been no reason for her not to have it. She was of sound mind.

  But he had her heart. That had to count for something....

  The folder stared up at him.

  “Either we go to Arizona together, or I go there.”

  Slamming the folder down, Mark crossed his arms and glared at her.

  “You are not going into a nursing facility, Nonnie. You are staying with me until the end. We’re family you and I. We stick together. Take care of each other. That decision was made fourteen years ago. And revisited when you gave me medical power of attorney...”

  And then he got it.

  That agreement, his promise to her, was what she was counting on.

  She had him.

  Ella was right. He was moving to Shelter Valley, Arizona.

  To become a thirty-year-old college student.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “HI, WILL, IT’S Adrianna Keller returning your call. I can be reached—”

  “Addy?” She recognized his voice as he picked up, interrupting her midsentence. “It’s so good to hear from you.”

  It had been a couple of years. She should have called more often. “How are your folks?”

  “Fine. They’re trying to arrange a trip to Disneyland with all of the great-grandchildren before school starts.”

  Will’s family—his parents, three brothers and sister—were lovely, not that she actually knew any of them anymore. She hadn’t been in touch with his parents, other than exchanging annual Christmas cards, since she was in high school.

  “Are they still in the big house?”

  “Yes, though Dad finally consented to hiring a full-time landscaper and live-in housekeeper.”

  The elder Parsonses had bought the desert mansion fifteen miles outside of Shelter Valley when Will was in high school. And ten years later Addy had been a very brief member of their household.

  “And how’s Bethany?” Addy asked of the baby girl Will and his wife, Becca, had conceived after twenty years of marriage and numerous miscarriages. Becca had finally given birth at forty-three.

  “Twelve going on twenty,” Will drawled, but Addy heard the adoration and pride in his voice.

  “Getting nervous about the next few years, Papa?” she asked, grinning.

  “No more so than I’ve been for the past twelve. In this town she’s not going to get away with much without her mother or me hearing about it.”

  “Becca’s still mayor?”

  “Reelected by a landslide.”

  “And Kaelin?” The Korean boy Becca and Will had adopted four years after Bethany was born.

  “Just made first baseman on his Little League team and can’t wait for play-offs so that he can spend every waking hour on the field at the park.”

  A flash memory of summer days spent at the park in town, watching Elijah play ball with his friends, and then going across the street for ice cream, haunted Addy. She sipped he
r tea.

  “How are you doing, Addy?” Will’s tone softened.

  “Fine. Busy.”

  “I looked at your website. You’re managing on your own without joining a firm, which is impressive. I knew you were doing educational law, but you’ve got a long list of wins. You’ve only been out of law school, what, six years?”

  Seven. And she only took cases she believed in—something she could do being her own boss. Right was right and wrong was wrong and she of all people couldn’t afford to blur the line.

  With only herself to support, she could be picky.

  “Don’t let the list mislead you. I eat dried noodles for dinner more often than most of the folks in my profession,” she joked. And spoke the truth, too.

  She couldn’t even afford a secretary.

  “I have a favor to ask, Addy.”

  Leaning her head back against the couch, she relaxed. “I’ll do anything I can for you, Will, you know that. What’s up?”

  “This is a big one.”

  Bigger than welcoming a lost little girl into the family and taking time to make her feel as special and welcome as everyone else there? It had been a long time ago. They’d all moved on. Had completely separate lives. Didn’t really even keep in touch. But she’d never forgotten.

  “I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “How soon could you get away for an extended vacation?”

  “I’m waiting on a verdict on a case involving a diabetic kid who was suspended for having needles out during class, and then I’m free. I quit taking new cases as soon as I saw that this was going to trial.”

  She could only do so much on her own.

  “What do you need? Research? Case law?”

  It made perfect sense that Will, as president of a prominent university, might need some educational law advice.