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“Twenty-six,” she corrected again, her teeth clenched to keep from shouting. “We’ve been married twenty-six years.”
He huffed impatiently. “Twenty-six, twenty-five, the point is, we’ve been married for a long time. I’m not about to start pretending that we’re still dating. That’s juvenile.”
It felt as if he’d just slapped her. “I’m being juvenile?”
He neither denied nor verified. He just built on what he’d said. “Maybe that’s why you related so well to Jim. He refuses to grow up, too.”
The phone rang, the sound wedging its way between them. Stacey ignored it. She was in the middle of an argument and all that mattered to her was getting Brad to understand how much his words, his actions, or lack thereof, hurt her. “Don’t drag Jim into this, Brad. This is between you and me.”
He looked toward the telephone. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“No,” she said flatly. “Not until you answer me.”
Brad threw up his hands. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” he snapped, rising. The phone rang again as he crossed to it.
They weren’t through yet. For once, she wanted a resolution instead of letting things just remain tangled until they faded away. “Whoever it is can leave a message.”
“It might be a patient, trying to reach me.”
Stacey got up, following him. “I’m trying to reach you,” she insisted.
But Brad was already picking up the receiver.
“Hello? What? Yes, this is Dr. Sommers. Could you repeat that, please?”
She sighed. Work had pulled him away from her again. Crossing back to the table, she picked up her mug and carried it to the sink. She was about to turn on the water to rinse the mug out when Brad held out the receiver to her. She looked at him quizzically.
“It’s for you.” His expression was grim.
CHAPTER 8
Stacey suddenly felt very cold. She was aware of the hairs rising along her arms and the back of her neck. Her fingertips were damp as she wrapped them around the receiver. Her imagination hit the ground running.
The neighborhood her son had moved to was considered unsavory and dangerous.
“Is it about Jim?” she asked hoarsely. When he didn’t answer immediately, she made a second guess. “Is it Julie?”
Brad merely shook his head. But his expression remained grim. Was that pity she saw in his eyes? Sympathy? A sense of panic mounted in her chest as she brought the receiver to her ear.
“Hello?”
A deep, resonant voice with a hint of a British accent asked, “Is this Mrs. Stacey Sommers?”
With lightning speed, her brain attempted to make an instant voice match. And failed. She didn’t know anyone with a British accent, slight or otherwise.
“Yes.”
“Mrs. Sommers, this is Ian Bryanne. I am—I was Titus Radkin’s attorney.” He paused, as if to allow the words to sink in. Her grip on the receiver tightened. Instinctively, Stacey knew what was coming. A sadness pooled through her. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to have to tell you this, but your uncle died last night. He went peacefully in his sleep.”
“Uncle Titus?” She said the name numbly.
The image of a tall, thin, gaunt-faced man with flowing, shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair materialized in her mind’s eye. Titus Radkin wasn’t actually her uncle, he was her great-uncle.
By last count, he’d been ninety-four and still going strong. Last Christmas she’d gotten a card from him. He’d included a picture of himself and his newest mistress, a woman of thirty-eight. “She’s a little old for me, but she has some very fine redeeming qualities,” he’d written across the back of the photograph.
Eternally young, that was the way she’d thought of her father’s uncle. He’d embraced a completely different generation, one in which people wore flowers in their hair, rioted in the name of peace and drove around in air-polluting VW buses while preaching about saving the environment and doing their damnedest to procreate and perpetuate the species one lovefest at a time.
As she recalled, Titus was a zealous advocate of free love.
Everything else, however, the man had put a price on. A rather dear one. Which was how he was able to buy his very own island approximately twenty years ago. The world had modernized too quickly, going in directions he had no desire to follow. So he had founded his own world. For the most part, or so the story went, he had left the demands of society to live out the rest of his years the way he wanted to.
It hadn’t been quite so because he’d gone with a full staff and had a great deal of money for his every comfort. She’d visited the island once, when the children were still very young. Titus had paid for the four of them to fly out. Brad had had to pass because of previous commitments.
“Does he treat you well, Stacey?” Titus had asked, looking at her with those piercing blue eyes of his.
“Yes,” she’d declared perhaps a little too quickly.
He had only smiled a half smile, the left corner of his mouth rising while the other remained stationary, and shaken his head. “In the end, that’s all we have, you know, the people who love us. Make sure he doesn’t take you for granted.”
At the time she’d thought those strange words to be coming from a man who had never turned his back on making love to as many women as he could.
Good-bye, Uncle Titus. I hope you died in the saddle and not peacefully, the way your lawyer said.
Stacey took a breath, processing what she’d just been told.
“How?” she finally asked. “How did he die—besides peacefully.”
There was a long pause, as if the man on the other end was trying to ascertain whether or not she was on to the truth. And then the attorney said, “He died of natural causes.”
Which could have meant, since this was Uncle Titus, that he died making love. Or that he simply died of being ninety-four. At least the germs he was so vigilantly on guard against hadn’t managed to fell him, she thought. Her mother had always joked that they had their own personal Howard Hughes in the family.
The irony of the whole thing struck her. Because Uncle Titus was so well off, her father had mentioned more than once that he looked forward to the day Titus went “to his reward and left us with ours.” Uncle Titus had wound up outliving both of her parents, she thought sadly.
And with his death, the last of her extended family was gone.
Granted, there was still Brad’s family. Brad had two brothers, one older, one younger, and a younger sister, all married—all with children and all living within the state. Two of them were only ninety miles away in San Diego, while the other lived up north in Santa Barbara. They all tried to get together for the holidays and on other occasions as well, but it still wasn’t quite the same thing.
Titus was the last of the family she’d once had. At forty-seven, she suddenly felt like an orphan.
“Will there be a funeral?” Her voice echoed back to her, sounding shaky. Stacey took another deep breath, trying to regain her composure.
“Yes. The services will be held this Thursday. On the island,” the attorney added. After another pause, he told her, “Mr. Radkin expressed the hope that you would attend.”
“Of course.” Stacey felt an odd hollowness forming at the pit of her stomach. Then it spread, taking in every inch of her and lacing it with sadness.
Other than the unexpected Christmas card, there had been almost no contact between them for years now, at least none that had been reciprocated. She sent Christmas cards and received none in kind. It got to the point that Brad teased her about sending them to the dead-letter office and cutting out the middleman. But she never stopped, always hoping that Titus would respond. He had sent a card and a fifty-dollar savings bond when each of the children had been born. And he’d included a handwritten note.
The note had meant far more to her than the bonds. She dutifully banked the former, which was the beginning of each of the children’s bank accounts. The latter she had placed in her box of treasures, things that she had collected over time. Things that meant nothing to anyone but her. She’d placed Uncle Titus’s last Christmas card there, along with the photograph.
“I’ll be there Wednesday,” she told the lawyer.
“I will have the airplane tickets forwarded to you.”
“There’s no need—” she began.
“It’s per Mr. Radkin’s instructions,” the lawyer told her.
“Oh. Well, then, all right,” she agreed. “Thank you for calling.” She was still fighting the numbness as she hung up the receiver.
Brad had remained beside her for the duration of the conversation. “You’ll be where Wednesday?” he asked.
“Attending Uncle Titus’s funeral.” It felt so strange to say that. She had gotten accustomed to the idea that the man was going to live forever. The way he’d always thought he would.
She realized that Brad was frowning and shaking his head. “I can’t make it, Stacey.”
Brad and Titus had met twice, once at a family Christmas and once at their wedding. Brad had thought the man odd, a throwback to another era, but she needed his support now. He couldn’t be falling back on prior commitments. Didn’t she mean anything to him?
“What?”
“The funeral. I can’t make it,” he said. “I have a six hour surgery scheduled for Wednesday. I cleared my calendar completely to accommodate the time it needed. The patient’s already given his own blood. Everything’s been set in motion. It can’t be rescheduled.”
She knew how difficult it was coordinating everything that went into performing a surgery. But this was her uncle Titus. The last living relative in her family. She needed Brad with her.
Stacey tried to think. “Could you fly out right after the surgery?”
Brad’s immediate response was to shake his head. “I’ve got another surgery for Thursday morning.” But then he paused, thinking. He didn’t want to be the bad guy twice in her eyes in such a short duration. “Maybe I can get Harris to cover for me—”
Stacey knew that neurosurgeons didn’t “cover” for one another. Not unless something like an earthquake or hurricane was directly involved. Each had his own area of expertise, his own small kingdom.
She banked down the bitterness that had prompted her to think the last part. “That’s okay. I’ll go alone.”
Brad peered at her face, his own uncertain. “Are you sure?”
She didn’t want to argue about this, too. Especially since she knew how it would turn out. Why waste the time? “I’m sure.”
Off the hook, Brad still didn’t like the idea of her flying alone. “Maybe Jim could go with you—”
She looked at him sharply. “Jim’s busy setting up his new life. I’m perfectly capable of flying on my own.” She blew out a breath, the impact of the news hitting her all over again. “God, I can’t believe that Uncle Titus is really gone.”
Brad nodded as he absently checked his pockets for his car keys. “I thought your uncle would go on forever.” Their eyes met for a moment. “Outlive us all.”
“Yes,” she said quietly, waiting for the ache to set in, the one that always came when she lost a loved one, “me, too.”
There was an awkwardness in the air. Brad felt he should say something more. He had no idea what. “He never married, did he?”
“Not officially, at least, not that I know of,” she amended, then smiled. “He was too much into ‘free love.’ Thought that monogamy was a waste of time, although he was pretty faithful to his ‘lady of the moment’ as he used to call them. When I was little, my parents used to have him over for the holidays because they kind of felt sorry for him.” There was irony for you, she thought. Titus was always smiling. Her parents never were. “I think he enjoyed life a lot more than they did in the long run.”
“At least he got to do it for longer.” Brad glanced at his watch. “Oh, hey, look at the time. I should have already been halfway to the hospital. I need to make my rounds before I go to the office,” he told her, striding toward the threshold.
He was halfway to the front door before he stopped and turned around. Hurrying back to the kitchen, he caught her off guard.
“Did you forget something?” she asked.
In response, he took her into his arms and kissed her forehead. “I really am sorry about Titus.”
He could have knocked her over with a feather. Stacey smiled up at him. She doubted that he realized it, but that was worth far more to her than the two hundred dollars he had left on the counter.
“Thanks,” she murmured.
Brad released her. “I’ve got to rush.”
She followed him to the door. “That really meant a lot to me.”
Brad nodded as he left the house. But he really didn’t understand why Stacey had said that.
CHAPTER 9
The long flight from LAX to Titus’s small Pacific island gave Stacey the opportunity to read for more than five minutes at a clip. She’d almost forgotten how to savor and enjoy a lengthy story. Everything these days came at her in tidy, bite-size pieces. Magazine articles ended within two pages. News stories came with highlights that summarized their content quickly for the rushed. The end result was that she no longer really knew how to immerse herself in something she was reading, had no patience to wade through deep prose, no matter how beautiful. Her brain seemed to lack staying power.
The first half hour of her journey was spent trying to keep her mind from straying as she struggled to focus on the written words before her. At the end of that first half hour she realized she’d been reading the same page over and over again. It took more effort than she would have ever guessed. So was keeping a lid on the impatience drumming through her. She kept wondering about things that she had left behind. Not the usual did-I-leave-the-stove-on anxieties, but misgivings about how Brad would fare in the house without her. He’d assured her he’d be fine, but she had her doubts.
And what if Jim needed her while she was gone? Or Julie?
She took a deep breath. They were all adults, all three of them. Even Brad. They would be fine. But would she?
Stacey propped the book up on the tray before her, trying again to lose herself in the pages of the mystery she’d purchased expressly for the trip. There was a time when she would curl up on any available space and read for hours on end, losing herself in whatever story—romance, mystery, historical biography—she selected. When had there stopped being time for reading for pleasure? For reading “just because”? When had life changed for her?
She couldn’t pinpoint a moment, an earth-shattering event, that had transformed her. It had happened in tiny increments, stealthily, so she hadn’t really been aware of the change. Until it had overwhelmed her.
The same was true of her marriage, she supposed. They’d started out being partners, two crazy-in-love partners, sharing every moment, every thought with each other. Living on love and dreams and not much in the way of creature comforts, but it didn’t matter. As long as they had each other. Now they were like two strangers who met at the same bus stop every morning. There was recognition, an exchange of a sentence or two, but very little else. Certainly no feeling of communion, or even camaraderie.
She hadn’t changed, had she? Not in the way she felt about things. Not about any of the things that truly mattered to her.
But Brad had.
Brad had changed, oh so much. Her mouth curved in a sad smile. She had married James Dean and woken up one morning to find herself sleeping next to Dennis the Menace’s Mr. Wilson. Conservative, grumpy and so not a risk taker.
She missed James Dean more than she could possibly put into words.
Stacey looked down at her book. She was twenty pages further along than she had been earlier—and couldn’t remember a single word of the story that had transpired, or how the mystery’s feisty protagonist had wound up standing in a grave.
Annoyed, Stacey flipped back twenty pages, hoping to be more successful in keeping her mind from wandering this time around.
C’mon, Stace, you can do this. You can read this book. You remember what it was like to read, don’t you? To block out everything else except for the characters in your book? Strike a blow for the not-so-distant past. Do it for Uncle Titus.
She smiled to herself. Uncle Titus loved to read. It was one of the forms that his rebellion took as society conspired to take its citizens away from the printed word and place them in front of a digital display.
For Uncle Titus, she thought, amused.
