The In-Between Hour. Barbara White Claypole

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СКАЧАТЬ Theory is her brakes went, which is pretty suspect. Smacks of a cover-up if you ask me. But nothing I found says he’s married. Used to be a player, these days he seems to be a monk. What a waste of that body.”

      “I’m changing the subject. Tell me what you know about Jacob.”

      “Not much to tell. Sundays were skeleton staff days at Hawk’s Ridge—the director told me sweet-shit-nothing about the residents. Jacob has short-term memory loss, adored his wife, worships his grandson. Figured all that out by myself.”

      “And Will?”

      “Didn’t know Jacob had a son until I butted into Will’s meeting. Bad blood between them, if I had to guess. What’s the Galen update?”

      “He’s coming home next week. Inigo’s promised to pay for his ticket and give us a two-week pass before he visits. Until he can check his melodrama at the door, Inigo’s a problem I can’t handle. He was completely hysterical in California. It was like having a third child.” Hannah sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, allowing me to marry at nineteen.”

      “Could they have stopped you?”

      “No.” Hannah smiled. “He was hard to resist in those days—the exotic name, the Celtic heritage, that sexy smile.” Her in-laws had scheduled Inigo for greatness from inception, hoping he would become a famous architect like his namesake, Inigo Jones. And Inigo carried himself with a confidence that suggested he believed the family propaganda. But he alienated his parents in three easy steps: he married a high school classmate who wanted only to be a country vet, then he became an English professor, and for his pièce de résistance, he changed his sexual orientation.

      “Of course, now my ex is a dick.”

      Poppy snorted out a laugh. “Finally, after six years she trashes her ex. Proud of you, girl. So, it all worked out, then. With the cottage.”

      Will balanced the bag on his hip as he tugged open the screen door.

      “I guess,” Hannah replied, chewing the inside of her cheek.

      * * *

      The screen door slammed and Will turned to watch the two women on the porch drinking red wine.

      Hannah and Poppy were clearly plotting, leaning toward each other in a female conspiracy. Maybe they were discussing him and his dad, trying to figure out their relationship. Good luck on that one. Thirty-four years of living the relationship and he couldn’t figure it out.

      Will placed the last bag of groceries on the kitchen table and headed upstairs to check on the old man. Exhausted from the stress of food shopping, his dad had gone upstairs to lie down the moment they’d returned. Wise move. Normally, grocery shopping was heaven on earth: the smells, the tastes—grazing around the free samples, concocting recipes in his head. Before Freddie’s death, buying fresh produce was the closest Will came to a hobby. Today, with his dad, it had ranked on par with drug-free wisdom teeth removal. Next time, he’d hire a dad-sitter.

      The stairs creaked as Will dragged himself up by the banister. The ceiling of the stairwell was midnight blue and covered with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, the same ones he’d stuck all over Freddie’s bedroom. When the interior decorator had finished, Will had balanced on a stepladder for hours, creating a perfect constellation for his two-year-old. After the accident, he’d destroyed it in minutes—ripping down stars, paint and drywall. When he returned to New York, he would hire another decorator, a cheaper one, to erase the evidence of grief.

      The upstairs hallway in the cottage was empty except for a large black-and-white photo framed and hung at the far end. The photographer had captured the woods at sunrise in early April. Dogwoods, in full bloom, rose like ghosts through a veil of early-morning fog.

      Everything else in the hall was white like the edges of a dream. Interesting how different white could be. White in Hannah’s hands seemed to be warm and calming. White in his apartment was cold and sterile. And since all his furniture was crafted out of pale wood, the only color came from his lime leather sofa. One of his ex-lovers had referred to it as the bilious margarita.

      Will ran his hand over the hall railing, reading the grain. Wood could reveal a thousand stories. He’d done some carving as a kid, inspired by his dad’s garden sculptures of downed tree limbs. He and Ally had once imagined them to be fantastical creatures. By the time he was a teenager, Will saw them for what they really were—talismans.

      He pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing against the crouching headache, the throbbing pain. Nothing about this trip was turning out the way he’d planned. Not that he’d had a plan other than get in, get drunk, get out. He would never start a climb without a strategy for descent, and yet in this situation he was behaving like a frantic novice about to bomb.

      His dad used to have a horde of cousins in the area. They’d spent their adolescent years together, toe-to-toe, as Uncle Darren used to say. Were they still alive? Should he reestablish contact with the tribe? Maybe his dad just needed to be part of a community again. Yeah, right. Whatever his dad needed went way beyond socializing and probably involved a retirement home upgrade from independent to assisted living. From stage one to stage two.

      Will eased open the door to the larger of the two bedrooms. A twenty-four-hour crash course in the care of the elderly had taught him that the old man’s balance was seriously off-kilter when he woke up. The shortest possible distance to the nearest toilet had been the deciding factor in the bedroom allocation—unless he wanted to start cleaning up his dad’s shit. Literally.

      The old man had collapsed onto the bed like a battery-operated toy run out of juice. A very large, very broken toy. Jacob Shepard used to have such presence—his height, his ability to say a great deal with a handful of words, his snippets of self-made philosophy.

      Even now, Will could hear his dad’s voice teaching him to hunt rabbit. Got your bow, Willie? Don’t get excited now. That rabbit, he’s under the wheat straw, but he’s gonna zig and zag. Will didn’t believe him, and when the rabbit performed as predicted, Will fell on his butt. His dad had howled with laughter.

      Will slid down the wall to the pale gray carpet and watched the man with his white hair tugged half out of its ponytail. The man who had taught him to hunt and fish, to whittle wood and identify animal bones. The man who had been a devoted husband and yet had failed to teach his son how to love a woman so she loved him back.

      Uncle Darren had said, “Your daddy, he loved your mama his whole life. Like she cursed him. He waited for her to grow up. He waited through her mistakes with other men. He waited with nothing more than the faith that, one day, Angeline would love him. And one day she did.”

      Once upon a time, Will had applied that philosophy to his feelings for Ally. For so many years, she was the only good part of his life. Such a fierce friend, Ally was the one person he trusted, the one person who—until the lie about Freddie’s Great European Adventure—knew Will’s every secret. But somewhere along the way he’d found hard cynicism. Or maybe he’d just been smart enough to realize she would never love him as more than her best friend. He’d dated other women, never seriously, but then Freddie had entered his life and filled the hole Ally had left in his heart. And now? Now it was as if he were slowly bleeding to death.

      A small thought escaped: he should have brought Freddie’s ashes. Death had finally granted Will full parental rights, and he didn’t need a headstone. He carried Freddie in his heart. Maybe Freddie’s spirit could be happy here. The few times they’d visited, he’d loved the forest.

      Will СКАЧАТЬ