Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
“That’s nice,” I said distractedly, already trying to rearrange my week so I could make the four-hour trip to the sleepy northern Michigan town where she lived. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay, dear. See you soon.”
As soon as we hung up, I called my mother. She didn’t answer, and then I remembered that when she’d called earlier in the day to wish me happy birthday, she’d mentioned dinner plans with Phil, her longtime companion. I left her a message asking her to call me and dialed Emme.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me.”
“You doing okay?”
“Yes, but have you talked to Grams lately?”
“Grams? Yes, I had to call her a couple weeks ago to get some family addresses for invitations.”
“Did she seem odd to you? Say anything strange?”
“No. She guilt-tripped me about not visiting her, but she seemed sharp as a tack. Had all the information I wanted and rattled off decades-old stories about every relative on the list. Why?”
“Because I just spoke with her, and she seemed … off.”
“Off how?”
“She said she’s not driving anymore because she’s losing her eyesight and her hearing.”
“What? She didn’t mention that to me. And Mom talks to her almost every day, doesn’t she? Wouldn’t we have heard that by now?”
“She also said she had to speak quietly because Gramps was asleep in the bedroom.”
Silence. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“That’s weird.”
“I know. And she said she’s in pain, and she wants me to come up there and drive her to her doctor’s appointment, which is Thursday.”
“Can you do it?”
“I think I have to. She said there’s no one else to take her.” For a second, I remembered the neighbor she mentioned, the one who’d installed her “newfangled” cordless phone. But she’d called him a boy. Maybe he wasn’t old enough to drive yet.
“Can you get the days off work?” Emme asked.
“I think I can manage it. I’ll have to reschedule a bunch of clients, but I have some vacation time built up at the clinic.” I frowned. “And what else do I have to do with it, right? It’s not like there’s a tropical honeymoon in my future. Might as well go spend time with my ninety-two-year-old granny who’s probably pretending to be senile so she can have company at happy hour.”
Emme laughed. “Maybe you can find your fuck fling up there.”
“In Hadley Harbor, Michigan, in October? Population one hundred and ten? Average age sixty-five-point-two? Not likely.”
“Probably not, but you never know,” she said. “Pack your skimpiest knickers.”
“I don’t own any skimpy knickers.”
She sighed. “We really need to go shopping.”
Three
Grams
Well, of course I was pretending.
My eyesight was just fine, and my hearing was even better. I still drove myself around town nearly every day of the week, and I hadn’t gotten a ticket since 1975. In fact, I was probably a better driver than half the bozos on the road. And though my heart broke a little every time I thought of it, of course I knew my beloved Frank had been gone for ten years. Oh, I still talked to him from time to time, but I wasn’t losing my mind.
But the boy I mentioned, the one that lived next door who put in my fancy new phone? His mind I was worried about.
He’d moved in four months ago, and I hadn’t seen one person come or go from that house in all that time. No wife, no kids, no family or friends … At first, it didn’t make sense to me at all. He was handsome as the devil, built nice and strong, and a real gentleman—he started taking care of my yard work whenever he did his own without my asking, and he wouldn’t take a penny for it!
He was handy indoors, too. He was doing all kinds of work on that big old house next door, which had fallen into disrepair after the previous owner died a few years back and the family had been unable to sell it. Mary Jane at the beauty parlor told me she heard from her cousin Darlene, who’s married to the real estate agent who had the listing, that Mr. Woods—that’s the handsome fellow’s name—was only renting the house, and that he’d agreed to do some refurbishing on it in exchange for lower monthly rent.
Mary Jane also heard that he’d gotten a job as a groundskeeper at Cloverleigh Farms, which used to be just a family farm but was now a winery, an inn, a restaurant, and a place for big, fancy weddings. (In my day, you went down to the courthouse in the morning, had a champagne brunch if you were lucky, and hooray, you were married. Now people have such elaborate weddings they have to take out loans to pay for them! But everything was simpler back then. Even boy meets girl.)
Mary Jane said she didn’t want to spread gossip—since when, I nearly asked her—but she’d also heard that he was a former Marine who’d had trouble readjusting to civilian life, and his wife had left him. That’s why he’d moved up here all by himself.