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She gave him a quick hug. Good. One of his cheerful days. “Great, handsome. How are you today?”
“Hungry! What are we having?”
“Vegetarian sausage and cheese omelet, and I brought you a few fat-free brownies for later, but don’t eat them all at once. Like you did the lemon bars, remember? Walgreens ran out of Tums because of you.”
He followed her into a small but well-equipped kitchen. Photos of his wife and children covered the refrigerator. “I had no regrets,” he said. “Those were the best lemon bars I’ve ever binged on. Want to get married?”
She turned the heat on under a frying pan and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Not today, Vinny. I have a meeting later with John Baldrich about you guys buying the Cooper Building to use as a seniors’ center.” She added sausage to the pan.
“What kind of meeting? I thought all we had to do was form a nonprofit corporation and the city would let us have it. We did that.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There’s another buyer involved.”
He frowned. “Who?”
“Not sure. But I like to think city council will give priority to the seniors.”
“What does city council have to do with it?”
“They make the decision on whom to sell it to, because the city took possession of the building when the owner defaulted on three years’ worth of taxes.”
“What’s the decision based on?”
She turned the sausage and then added the omelet mixture she’d brought in a plastic container. “I think it all depends on how the city’s code is written. John’s checking it out.”
Vinny nodded. “He’s a good guy. I can’t imagine he makes a fortune. His rate for having you come every day during the week for an hour is ridiculously reasonable.” He grinned at her. “And you always do more than you need to. I hope he pays you more than I pay him.”
She made him toast, poured his orange juice and served his breakfast at a small table in a sunny window. While she cleaned the kitchen, she listened to stories she’d already heard about his great-grandchildren and his daughter’s promotion.
After breakfast she drove him to the seniors’ center in a building that the owner had decided to boot the seniors from to refurbish for a tenant who could pay higher rent. She helped him out of her car and walked him to the door. He leaned on his cane and squeezed her hand with his free one. “The omelet was delicious. Thanks, Sarah.”
“Have a great day, Vinny.”
“You too, gorgeous.”
His friends came to greet him and she left him in their care, probably to play pool and solve the world’s political problems. She drove on to Margaret’s.
* * *
AN ELEGANT WOMAN in her early eighties, Margaret Brogan lived in a little apartment in a downtown complex. She used a walker because of a fall that had left her with a painful limp. She dressed in soft, pretty colors, and her carefully tended helmet of white hair looked precisely the same every day. She always wore jewelry and lipstick and smelled of some spicy floral scent.
She always prepared her own breakfast of fruit, granola and yogurt, but loved to have morning coffee with Sarah. Suffering from mild depression, she refused medication, wanting instead to work through the issue herself. Her doctor thought the regular visits of someone who cared might help.
Margaret’s apartment was spotless. It had a blond coffee table with matching end tables, and a comfortable burnt-orange sofa and chairs. The tall, filigreed birdcage that stood by the window had plants in it, tendrils of ivy spiraling out. Three dining stools were lined up in front of a white Formica-topped bar that separated the living room from the white-and-yellow kitchenette. The rooms looked dated but stately, like Margaret herself.
“What did you bring today?” Margaret asked as she led the way to the kitchen.
“Blueberry muffins from the Bountiful Bakery. You got coffee going?”
“Yes. You have a date tonight?”
Margaret was very interested in Sarah’s social life. She, herself, had had a very active one as a young woman. It had resulted in a long marriage, three children scattered across the country and a lonely old age.
“I do, as a matter of fact. Ben and I are going to the Farmhouse.” Sarah put the muffins on plates and retrieved low-fat margarine from the refrigerator. She helped Margaret sit at the table.
“How’s Jack doing now that he’s back? My daughter lived a few houses down from Jack and his biological mother, Charlene Manning, when Jack was a boy. I used to babysit my grandson Marty at my daughter’s while she worked. Marty’s a lawyer now, you know...” She trailed off, then came back to the subject of Jack. “He and Marty often played together. Jack wasn’t wounded, was he?”
Sarah remembered the nightmare that had landed her on top of a very agitated Jack. “No, no serious injuries. I haven’t known him very long. I met Ben after Jack was deployed to Afghanistan and met Jack for the first time a couple of weeks ago.”
Margaret cut her muffin in two. “It’s unfair that a boy should have to go through even more than he did as a child.” Margaret seemed to be looking at an image in her mind and shook her head at what she saw there. “Charlene was a terrible mother, but she was as beautiful as a movie star. She used to sing, you know, but after Jack’s father died, men came and went from that house as though she sold sporting goods.”
Sarah arched an eyebrow at the appropriate simile. “A few of them were not very good to those children. I often heard angry shouting. I called the police several times, but they never took action. I don’t know what she told them, but those children stayed with her till the day she shot and killed that last boyfriend.”
Ben had told her a little about Jack’s childhood and the murder that had resulted in him becoming one of the Palmers. But she didn’t know very much about Jack’s mother. “You wonder how that can be allowed to happen.”
“That family was all over the front page of the newspaper. It doesn’t seem right that a child should witness a murder at eight years old and then have to go to war and see men get killed when he’s an adult.”
“It’s a rotten world sometimes.”
“It is. More for some people than for others.”
Ben had told her Jack had been blown up in a Humvee on two separate occasions, involved in several firefights and nicked in the earlobe by a bullet while he’d been loading a mortar shell on his last deployment. She couldn’t imagine how life altering it must be to come so close to death.
“I gave them things to eat on more than one occasion,” Margaret said. “If it hadn’t been for that boy, those little girls would have gone hungry. He took care of them all the time. And then that murder happened.” She shook her head despairingly.
No wonder Jack had nightmares, Sarah thought.
“Well, shall I tell him you said hello?” Sarah asked, poking at her half of the muffin. Her appetite was waning. “Would he remember you?”
Margaret nodded and smiled. “I think he would. Tell him I’m the lady with the peanut butter cookies.”
“I will. How come I’ve never had your peanut butter cookies?”
Margaret reached out to pinch her cheek. “Because you’re not a hungry little waif with a world of sadness in your eyes.”
* * *
JOHN BALDRICH, WHO’D been an ER nurse before he’d started Coast Care five years before, welcomed Sarah into his small downtown office at the back of Johnson Medical Supply. He was tall and professional looking with gray hair and glasses. His office, too, with its dark paneling and wall of medical books, looked scholarly and tweedy.
After exchanging pleasantries and asking about her clients, he smiled, his manner becoming paternal.
“Sarah, I know how you feel about your experience in caring for children, but it’s almost criminal that you’ve signed on here as a home-care worker rather than as a licensed nurse. You cook and make beds and do laundry, rather than assess your clients’ conditions, give medications and make more important contributions to their health. You’re like an orchid disguised as a daisy.”
He grew orchids at home and won competitions all around the state for his perfect specimens. She appreciated the sincerity of his compliment. “Thank you, John. But I really like what I’m doing now.” She wanted nothing to do with a more important role in patient care. She liked this one.
He nodded, though the expression in his eyes seemed troubled. “Margaret calls me once a month to tell me how much she likes you. That you’re caring and conscientious and go the extra mile.”
“Good. I’m glad she’s happy.”
He shuffled papers on his desk and shifted position in his chair, clearly preparing to change the subject. “About the Cooper Building,” he said.
“Yes.”
“All the agencies that serve seniors are getting together to put on a fund-raiser to help them buy the building. Each group is sending a representative to form a committee. Will you be ours? I’ll clear you for whatever time you need to make meetings and do whatever you have to do. And I’ll pay you for that time because I know you’re living partly on savings.”
“Goodness, John...”
“I’d like this to work for the seniors,” he went on. “It would be nice if they had a place of their own where they couldn’t be ejected on a landlord’s whim. I’m not sure of the status of plumbing and wiring, but that can always be fixed once they have the building.”
“That’s expensive stuff.”
“It is, but I know a guy...” He grinned. “So, will you do it? Represent Coast Care?”
“I guess. Usually, I’m not much of a meetings person. I like to do what I want to do without a lot of haggling.”
“It’s not haggling, it’s negotiating, compromising. And anyway, a lot of the prep work is already done. Also, somebody knows a thirtyish member of the Cooper family who originally owned the building. Bobby Jay Cooper’s not exactly a country-western star, but he does the state fair circuit and has a few CDs that have sold very well. He’s willing to come to Beggar’s Bay to perform for us. Plus, we’ll have a talent show and he’s agreed to be the judge.”
“A talent show,” she repeated doubtfully.
“Your client Margaret Brogan taught music in the school system for years. She should be able to recommend some participants for you. As well as participate herself.”
“Why do we need that if we have a country-western singer?”
“Just to get more people involved. People love to come out and see their neighbors embarrass themselves.”
She had to smile at that. “Sure. I’ll do it. As long as I don’t have to sing.”
“Great.” He handed her a slip of paper. “First meeting is next Tuesday. Library meeting room.”
* * *
JACK MADE FOUR piles in the backyard to organize the redistribution of the contents of the four rooms in the carriage house. It had a main room with a small fireplace, a small bedroom, a tiny kitchen and a tinier bathroom. He had a pile for lumber his father had saved from various projects—Gary Palmer owned a construction business—and one for empty boxes that could be useful sometime but were in the way right now; he could break those down and tape them together when the need arose. Plastic tubs of Christmas decorations were handier to have in the carriage house than in the basement, where they had to be hauled up and down steep steps, but he or Ben could do that when the time came, and there were a few boxes of childhood toys and games his mother still brought out when friends with children came to visit.
He filled a trash barrel with pieces of wood that had warped. A branch from an old cedar tree had gone through a window at the back during the last windstorm and had apparently not been noticed. The box that had been stored under it was wet.
He pulled the shards of glass out of the window and placed them in an empty box. Then he used the bottom of another box to cover the hole until he could replace the window.
He hauled the barrel and the box of glass outside and surveyed the now almost-empty carriage house. He felt himself drift backward into the memory of hiding out in here when he and Ben were seven, before his mother had killed Brauer and his life, such as it was, had fallen apart. Ben had broken a kitchen window with an awesome but slightly misdirected two-base hit and Jack had been staying out of Roscoe’s way. Roscoe Brauer had been the fourth man in his mother’s life that he recalled, and the worst.
When he was three, his father had died somewhere over the desert when the light plane he was transporting illegal drugs in experienced engine failure and crashed.
After that, his mother had taken up with Miguel Ochoa, who’d kept her supplied with cocaine. Elizabeth Corazon—they’d called her Corie—Ochoa was born when Jack was four. She’d been pretty homely, but had grown a little prettier and been a complete pain in the neck. She’d broken every toy Jack owned.
Miguel, who’d been a relatively nice guy despite his occupation, left a year later after many prolonged arguments with Jack’s mother. That had begun her serious descent into despondency and mindless addiction to methamphetamines.
Cassidy, or Cassie, had been born the following year, the result of his mother’s brief and tragic relationship with a counselor who’d tried to help her and fallen victim instead to her charm and beauty when she was sober. It was brief because she’d lasted less than three months in the rehab program, and tragic because Donald Chapman had left.
His mother had played a game with the Department of Human Services people. She had been sober when they’d visited and able to express sincerely her desire to keep her children, a declaration they’d believed because it had played into their mission of keeping families together. But when they’d left, it was back to life as usual.
A drug dealer named Roscoe Brauer was her next conquest. Or, rather, she’d been his. Roscoe had been big and menacing. Jack had avoided him whenever possible and kept Corie and Cassidy away from him.
Though Brauer had been a nasty piece of work, he’d been a good provider and, unlike the times their mother was without a man, there had been food to eat, oil for the furnace and clothes for school.
Until she’d killed him and the girls had been sent to their fathers. Because Jack had been fatherless and, then, motherless—Charlene had signed away all rights to him—he’d been adopted by the Palmers.
Impatient with himself for thinking about the past instead of going forward—such as spending time looking for his sisters—Jack closed the door behind him and went back to the house.
But it wasn’t easy getting his head out of the past. He didn’t understand why he’d successfully suppressed his childhood most of his life and now, finally, when he was free of the army and able to do what he wanted, all he could think about—and have nightmares about—was his childhood.
He put a mug under the Keurig and went to the refrigerator for the take-out ribs he’d bought for dinner, since Ben and Sarah were going to be out. The self-indulgent rehashing of his past stopped now.
* * *
A LIGHT RAP on the back door was followed by Sarah poking her head around it. A waft of fragrant September air swept in as though she’d brought it.
Jack took a moment to appreciate how pretty she was. Her light brown hair, usually tied up in a knot or caught back in a ponytail when she was on her way to see her clients, was flying free. It highlighted the beautiful shape of her face, her smooth, eggshell-delicate skin and her blue-gray eyes. She smiled, her lips a moist rose color. He experienced that arrhythmia again.
“Ben home yet?” She stepped into the kitchen, her pink dress dropping to a vee just above her breasts, hugging her waist and moving gracefully around her knees. A covered casserole sat on the flat of her hand.
“No. What’s that?” he asked.
“Broccoli, chicken and potatoes in a light cheese sauce.”
He smiled with difficulty. Even cheese sauce couldn’t save broccoli. “Thanks, but I’m having ribs tonight.”
“Jack...”
“Sarah, the army has set me free, and while I appreciate your efforts to make me healthy, I started back to work today—well, I cleared out the carriage house—and think I deserve to spoil myself.”
She shifted her weight and studied him consideringly. He tried not to notice how the fabric of her dress moved with her, clinging here, swirling there. “What are you having with it?”
“Potato salad.”
“From the market?”
“Yes.”
“You know that’s as much mayonnaise as potato.”
“I do.” He smiled widely. “And I don’t care.”
“There’s some leftover three-bean salad in the refrigerator. Would you consider having that instead?”
“No. And I’m probably going to add a brownie. You have to deal with it, Sarah.”
She shook her head with disapproval in the face of his unapologetic smile. “If your cardiovascular system is still functioning tomorrow,” she said, “I’d appreciate your help with something. If you don’t mind that it’s Saturday.”
“Sure.” He went to the kitchen table and pulled a chair out for her, then sat across the table. “What do you need?”
