Follow the Stars Home. Luanne Rice

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СКАЧАТЬ Shivering in his T-shirt, he left them on the seat. She was divorced. She worked in the ER, and she had a six-year-old son. Alan felt like a creep who deserved the cold he’d caught. He knew he’d never call her again. Truth, when it came to romance, had never come easy for Alan. He thought back to how he had pretended to forgive Tim for stealing Dianne, when instead he had wanted to kill his brother.

      He sneezed.

      “Gesundheit,” the reference librarian whispered loudly.

      “God bless you,” Mrs. Robbins said simultaneously, coming around the corner with a stack of new magazines.

      “Thank you,” Alan said to both of them.

      “Are you coming down with something?” Mrs. Robbins asked.

      “I always catch the kids’ colds,” he said.

      “Then you shouldn’t be running.”

      “I need the exercise,” he said.

      “Exercise, my foot. Get yourself home and spend your day off in bed,” she said sternly, but then her face softened into a wonderful smile. “If the doctor won’t mind my saying so.”

      Alan sneezed again. His throat hurt, and his chest felt heavy. Mrs. Robbins put her hand on his forehead. It reminded him of his grandmother.

      “You have a fever, my boy,” she said.

      “Hey, how’re Julia and Dianne?” he asked, trying to sound offhand. “Things seem to be working out okay with Amy?”

      “Never mind Julia and Dianne,” Mrs. Robbins said. “Never mind Amy. You go lie down and try taking care of yourself for a change. Okay?”

      “Okay,” he said. Chills came over him suddenly, and he shivered. He was really sick. Being cared for felt strange. Again he thought of his grandmother. Dorothea had done her best after Alan’s parents had absconded into their misery. But she had lived on Nantucket, a sea voyage away, and Alan had hardly ever seen her.

      “And call me in the morning!” Mrs. Robbins said.

      His grandmother might have joked the same way.

      The minute Lucinda Robbins got home, she took two cans of chicken broth out of the cupboard. When Emmett used to get sick, she would boil a chicken and make the stock from scratch. But for now, she made do with canned, throwing in some shallots, carrot, celery, peppercorns, bay leaf, and thyme from the garden. She set the pot to simmering.

      The girls were in Dianne’s studio. They were listening to Carly Simon today: The love songs floated on the air, straight into Lucinda’s open window. Dianne loved Carly. She always had. She’d listen to that voice – full of passion, singing about lost love and a broken heart and the joys of her children and hope about tomorrow – as if only Carly could express the things Dianne felt so deeply inside.

      Dianne was a wizard with wood. She had her father’s carpenter hands, his common sense, and his patience. Patience, above all, was the key to good carpentry. The ability to take a careful measurement, down to the last fraction of an inch, to fit pieces of wood together in a tight squeeze with no gaps of buckles. And faith: that she was making the right cuts, that she wasn’t going to ruin a piece of expensive wood with carelessness.

      Dianne had all that patience and faith when it came to wood.

      But Dianne had no faith at all about love. Why should she? Sometimes Lucinda looked at Dianne’s life and wondered how she had survived the despair. To be madly in love, the way Dianne had been with Tim, to marry him in the wedding of her dreams, to have his baby, and to lose him when the baby didn’t turn out to be the right kind.

      Dianne had nearly died. Literally. Lucinda had spent those early days after Tim’s departure caring for Julia while Dianne was too sad to get out of bed. For so many days, once she realized the extent of Julia’s problems, she was flattened by postpartum depression, and the only thing Dianne could do was cry. Julia had pulled her through though. Eleven years ago, that tenacious little baby with her terrible troubles and fierce needs had saved her mother from dying of love.

      But Alan McIntosh helped too. He had stopped by every day. There weren’t many doctors who made house calls, but he had never considered not making them. He was a forgiving man to look past Dianne’s leaving him for his brother. He’d come over straight from the office, minister to Julia’s peculiarities. Her third week alive, she’d had surgery to repair a twisted intestine, and they had attached a temporary colostomy bag to catch her little baby bowel movements.

      Dianne, wild with grief, had fumbled with the bag. She had pulled the adhesive away from Julia’s stoma, the open place in her tiny belly, and Julia was screaming in pain.

      Lucinda still remembered the pandemonium. Julia wailing, Dianne sobbing. Alan had walked into the kitchen, put his black case on the table, and taken Julia from Dianne. He held the infant against his chest, calming her down. A little trail of yellow baby poop stained his blue shirt, but he didn’t seem to mind.

      “I hurt her,” Dianne said, trembling as she wept.

      “No, she’s fine,” Alan said.

      “When I went to change the bag, I pulled too hard, and the connection ripped right off! Her skin’s so raw already, she’s been through so much …”

      “You didn’t hurt her,” Alan said more firmly. “It was like taking off a Band-Aid, that’s all. It’ll sting only for a minute. We’ll get a new one, get her all set up.”

      Gently handing Dianne her daughter, he rummaged through his case. He tore open the packages. Within two minutes he had cleaned Julia’s stoma, attached a new bag, wrapped her in her baby blanket.

      Lucinda had stood back, paralyzed. She had raised a healthy daughter, hadn’t had a clue about how to fix a colostomy bag, how to help Dianne from losing her mind. In awe of her own daughter, she had felt afraid to move.

      Alan had brought the courage to carry them all. Although he never pretended Julia was normal, he never acted as if she were different. Dianne had given birth three weeks earlier, the same week Tim left. She was pale and nearly insane, a quivering wreck with her dirty hair and blue robe. Afraid to hold her own baby, she had stood in the corner, tearing at her hair.

      Lucinda would never forget what happened next. It was summer, and the marsh was alive with crickets. Starlight burned the black sky. A wild cat howled, and it had reminded Lucinda of her own daughter. Alan had walked across the kitchen, tried to put Julia in Dianne’s arms. But she wouldn’t take her.

      “She’s your baby,” Alan said.

      “I don’t want her,” Dianne wept.

      You don’t mean that, Lucinda wanted to say. But maybe she did. Dianne lost her husband and so much more: her sense that love could overcome everything, that the world was a safe place, that good people had healthy children.

      “She needs you,” Alan said.

      “I want Tim,” Dianne begged. “Make him come back to me!”

      “He’s gone, Dianne!” Alan nearly shouted, shaking her arm to wake her up. “The baby needs you!”

      “I’m СКАЧАТЬ