скачать книгу бесплатно
“I don’t know,” Bonnie said, frustration welling up inside her. She glanced at the clear, blue Arizona sky—illuminated by a sun that was already heating this March day to Midwest summer temperatures.
She slid her hands into the pockets of her slacks. “Have you ever had the feeling that the role you’re playing isn’t significant?”
“Of course you’re significant, Bonnie!” Beth said, stopping to stare at her. “My gosh! This entire family revolves around you.”
“Only because I got here first,” she said. “It could just as easily revolve around you.”
“But you—”
“That’s not really what I meant,” Bonnie continued, cutting off Beth’s rebuttal. “And you’re right. I have no business feeling like I do and I’m just going to stop.”
She turned, heading back toward the day care.
“No.” Beth grabbed her arm. “Wait. I’m listening now. Talk to me.”
Feeling ungrateful and selfish, Bonnie tried really hard to convince herself that if she just kept working on it, she could make these feelings go away.
She’d been trying for months.
“I just feel my life is too small, that I’m not doing enough with it.”
Beth started to walk and Bonnie fell into step beside her. “With my education and capabilities, I could be helping the homeless or abused women, making some kind of real difference. Sounds crazy, huh?”
“No. Not at all.”
“The world is filled with people who need my help more than the relatively privileged, well-loved kids who come to my day care.”
“We don’t have a lot of homeless people here,” Beth said softly. “And though I’m sure there are some, there probably aren’t many abused wives, either.”
“That’s part of the problem, I think. Shelter Valley is such a protected—and protective—place that I’m isolated from larger realities.”
“So you want to leave town?”
“No!” Bonnie ran her fingers through her hair, trying to massage the ache from her head. “Of course not. Maybe I just need to feel needed.”
“Which you are, of course, by so many people.”
“Yeah, but not in the way I mean.” She tried to find words to articulate things she wasn’t sure she understood. “Last week, after the fire, Shane Bellows helped me clean up. All I did was talk to him for an hour and yet I left feeling I’d really used my life for a greater good. He was responsive and just so happy to be part of an adult conversation. He needs a friend, Beth, someone who’ll treat him like a grown man with something to contribute, instead of the half person he’s sort of become. It’s that kind of satisfaction I’m missing. I think.”
“Be careful with Shane, Bonnie. You’ve got a history with him that could trip you up.”
“No worry there. He’s not at all the man he once was. That history is dead and gone.”
“From what I understand, even the doctors aren’t completely sure how much Shane’s mind has been altered.”
“He’s completely harmless, Beth, if that’s what you’re getting at. His doctor didn’t think there was any problem with him working around small children, which he certainly would have if Shane posed any kind of threat.”
“Just be careful.”
Beth waved as a car passed. Mr. and Mrs. Mather. They’d been one of her house-cleaning clients, Bonnie remembered.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you.”
Bonnie wished Beth’s opinion didn’t matter so much.
“No.” As if by previous consensus, they both turned the corner, slowing their pace as they started down another deserted street. “As a matter of fact, I completely understand.” She spoke in a low voice, holding Bonnie’s full attention.
“You know how I spent my youth, Bonnie. Training to be a concert pianist is completely consuming, draining every ounce of energy you have and then demanding more. I gave it everything and somehow managed to get my business degree, as well. And then, after my parents were killed and I was on my own, I suddenly found myself with skills and discipline and drive, and nothing important to contribute. People were dying every day while I played scales.”
“Hardly.” Bonnie still got chills every time Beth sat down at the piano. The woman brought something elemental, spiritual almost, to everything she played.
“It’s how I felt,” Beth insisted. “And that feeling drove me straight into the trap James Silverman and Peter Sterling set.”
It was the first time Bonnie had ever heard her friend mention her ex-husband and his partner. The two men who’d, in the end, contracted a killer to ensure her death.
“I wanted to make a difference, to stand for something, to help save the world in some significant way.”
Taking Beth’s arm, a silent support, Bonnie ached for her friend, ached because of the memories Beth would never completely escape.
“The cult allowed me to believe I was contributing something huge, and that feeling drove me for a long time, Bon. Far longer—and farther—than it should have. It drove me into turning a blind eye to things that were not only immoral but illegal, as well.”
Sterling Silver, the cult run by Beth’s ex-husband and his doctor partner, had been shut down the previous year when Greg had gone searching for the identity of the woman he loved. James Silverman and Peter Sterling were currently serving life sentences in separate Texas prisons.
“So you’re saying I should just ignore this feeling and be thankful for the life I have.”
It was exactly what she’d been telling herself.
“I don’t know,” Beth said, turning with Bonnie as they reached another corner, heading back toward the day care. “I don’t think there are any easy answers.”
Bonnie didn’t think so, either.
“You said Keith noticed something’s wrong. What does he say about all this?”
“Nothing,” Bonnie said, kicking a pebble into the street. “I can’t tell him I need more out of life than he’s giving me, Beth. It would kill him. And it’s not fair to him, either. Because there’s nothing he can do. Besides, I might wake up tomorrow and be perfectly satisfied again.”
“I doubt it.”
“Me, too.”
They walked on, their silence broken only by an occasional passing car. And there weren’t many of those.
“But I still can’t tell him,” Bonnie eventually said. “I can’t hurt him like that.”
“I couldn’t, either.”
“That letter from Diamond today…”
“Yeah?”
“It was the third one of its kind. He’s got a buyer for the property, contingent on me relocating. The developer has a rule against day cares in strip malls.”
“Mike Diamond’s selling?”
“I guess.”
“Wow. That surprises me. I thought he was planning to expand, not get out.”
“I know. Me, too.”
“So what are you going to do?” Beth asked, slowing as the day care came in sight.
“I can’t move without building a place,” Bonnie said. “I’d already exhausted all the other possibilities when Diamond’s place became available.”
“Can you afford to build?”
“Maybe. Probably. If Keith and I take out a loan. But how can I even contemplate putting us deeper in debt when I’m not even sure this is what I want?”
“I’m guessing you haven’t talked to Keith about it.”
They stopped at the corner across the street from Little Spirits. Bonnie looked at her sister-in-law. “How can I—without getting into the whole ‘I’m not satisfied with my life’ thing?”
“So tell Diamond no.”
“I’m planning to.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
They crossed the street, the traffic noises not nearly loud enough to hide what Bonnie hated to admit.
“Because I can’t quite turn my back on the chance to get out of the two years I have left on my lease.”
CHAPTER THREE
THERE WERE SOME THINGS that just shouldn’t change. Stockings was one of them. Lonna Nielson rolled the silky material up her right leg, ignoring the varicose veins she passed along the way, and clipped it into place with two quick pinches of her fingers.
Women had been wearing stockings since before she was born. They hid imperfections. They gave a woman a sense of dress, of polish—a personal finishing that served as an invisible shield between her and anything the day might bring. Those silk stockings told the world that she took pride in herself.
And they had to be real silk stockings, pulled up one at a time and hooked to the garter belt. None of that panty stuff for her. There were certain places a woman just needed to breathe.
Besides, everyone knew that garters were far sexier.
Didn’t make a whit of difference that she was seventy-six years old or that she’d been a widow for more decades than she’d been a wife. Feeling a little bit sexy was important to her.
Taking a deep breath to prepare for the pull in her lower back, she reached down for the second stocking, her mind sliding over the list of things she had to do that Friday morning. First was the Beautification Committee meeting. Not the most important, perhaps, but those idiots wouldn’t get anything right if left to their own devices. She’d been living in this town longer than most anybody else here and knew how to hide her imperfections.
Second stocking in place, Lonna picked up the navy slacks and polka-dot blouse she’d ironed after her five-mile walk and before her granola-and-fruit breakfast that morning. It was almost seven o’clock, and she had to hurry or she wouldn’t have time to get over to Grace’s, fix breakfast and wait for her to finish eating so she could do the dishes before her eight-thirty meeting.
Missing the cat that had been lying on her bed for seventeen years, Lonna worked buttons through holes that had grown curiously tighter and harder to maneuver over the years. Buffy, her snarly calico, had died six months ago, and while Lonna was probably lonelier than she’d admit, she was loath to start all over again.
Besides, kitty litter was damned heavy to haul around.
Purse over her forearm—navy to match her slacks and low-heeled pumps—she was almost out the door before she remembered the list of new books she was recommending to the library board later that morning. It was still on the printer Keith had installed to go with the computer he’d bought her for Christmas. The boy meant well. And he’d been right. The blamed machine made keeping up with her jobs somewhat easier.
But it was a love-hate kind of thing. Refusing to look at the screen that revealed more information than Lonna had ever had or ever would have, she grabbed the sheet she’d printed out before going to bed the night before.
The phone rang.
She was late already, and even if she didn’t get Grace’s dishes done, she couldn’t just make breakfast and leave the woman to eat it alone. Grace looked forward to their morning chats.
And Lonna did, too.
The machine could get the phone. She slid the paper into the leather zip folder Becca Parsons had given her for her last birthday, stiffening as the phone rang again.
Someone needed to talk to her.
And who was Lonna to determine that whatever he or she had to say wasn’t important?
With an exasperated sigh she picked up the phone.
And three hours later, sitting beside Dorothy’s hospital bed, she assured her friend of seventy years that she would not have to go into a Phoenix nursing home. She would not have to leave Shelter Valley or the home she’d lived in all of her adult life. Dorothy’s heart and soul were her essence, and they were still in one-hundred-percent working order.
Lonna would help her while her broken hip healed.
She’d find the time.
And the energy.
She always had.
THE FILM WAS EVOCATIVE. Intense. Full of energy. Keith just wasn’t sure that what it evoked had anything to say to their audience. Or to anyone except maybe the people involved. Or people like them.
Of course he’d been preoccupied with the conversation he’d had with his grandmother earlier that day. He’d been trying to talk her out of a trip to Phoenix by herself. Friday-afternoon traffic was hell. He’d told her Dorothy would be just fine until later that day when he could take Lonna Nielson to the hospital to see her friend.
Had his grandmother listened?
Of course not.
She’d climbed into her Buick and sped to her friend’s side.
This seemed to be a pattern in his life. His word apparently had little value to the women he cared about.
“You don’t like it.”
Keith glanced at his new program director and smiled. Martha Moore, at least, respected his opinion.
“I didn’t say that,” he said, smiling at her before turning his attention to the monitor.
“You don’t have to say it.” Her words were soft as she, too, focused on the film they were previewing. It was a work a student had found and suggested for the following week’s Fine Art feature on MUTV.
