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The piece was a dance performance. Sort of. It was a depiction of a human condition, one that every human being eventually faced.
An excellent depiction as far as Keith could tell.
He just had no idea why people would choose to watch other people act out the process of dying. It wasn’t something he wanted to put himself through.
But Martha was riveted. Her whole body leaned toward the monitor, almost as though she was going to jump on that stage with those writhing, painfully weak bodies. Eyes drawn to the slim neck exposed by her short black hair, Keith wondered why Martha was still single. Her husband had left more than two years before, and other than a few dates with the architect who’d done some work at Montford, Martha’s love life had been nonexistent.
As far as Keith knew, anyway.
And he couldn’t understand that. Not only was she slim and sexy and down-to-earth, the woman had a way of making a guy feel she honestly enjoyed his company. He wondered if she had anything planned for the weekend ahead; if so, he hoped it would involve something for her and not just for the four kids she was raising alone.
“What?”
She’d caught him staring.
“Nothing.” Jaw set, Keith turned back to the screen.
Keith made it a priority to support student initiatives as often as he could. Part of the MUTV mission was to give the students running the new digital cable station opportunities to recommend and even develop programming. His television motion-picture students had been the driving force behind Keith’s initial idea for the Montford University television station. Unlike many college and university stations, MUTV was not an education-access station.
They were in control of their own programming.
But this particular piece…
Bodies in nude-colored body things, showing the most godawful suffering…
“I think we’re going to have to give this one a miss,” he said.
“No!” Martha’s head spun toward him. “This is what we’re all about, Keith! We have to do it! This is absolutely the best thing we’ve seen in the six months we’ve been here!”
“We’re about positive educational experiences,” he reminded her. “Our programming enriches peoples’ lives in positive ways.”
It didn’t matter if they were showing actual college classes, university sports or a full-length feature film, the goal was the same.
“And it doesn’t get any more uplifting than this,” she insisted. Her brown eyes were turned to the screen again.
Keith stared at her. “It’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen! Those people are dying of AIDS!”
The depictions were real—performed by people suffering from the deadly virus.
“They’re alive, Keith.” Martha’s tone was low, but carried so much conviction Keith had to take another look at the screen.
“Think of the hours of rehearsal they put in here. Listen to the documentary. Hear the laughter. The love these people have grown to share. That’s what living is all about. No matter what,” she continued softly, slowly, “life isn’t over until it’s over.”
Okay. He supposed that was true.
So how come all he’d seen was dying people writhing on the floor?
“You can’t just watch something like this with your analytical mind, Keith. You have to see it, feel it, with your heart.”
A young bald man was making motions, as though he was grooming himself, but kept getting interrupted by an imaginary sore on his hand that wouldn’t stop bleeding.
“It’s horrible,” Keith said, wishing he had the guts to get up and leave.
“Look at the expression on his face.” Martha’s voice was soothing. A balm amidst the tragedy seeming to engulf the small room they used for viewing.
Keith looked.
“He’s alive. That sore or whatever it is isn’t stopping him. He’s still doing what he set out to do. Still accomplishing things.”
“Still living,” Keith said slowly, relaxing slightly as his focus changed, seeing, instead of the tragedy, the determination in the performer’s eyes.
And the deep-seated satisfaction as he completed his task.
“Victory,” Martha said.
Her eyes were filled with tears.
Keith had the most bizarre urge to hug her.
HUGGING HERSELF, Bonnie stared at the water at her feet, remembering Mike Diamond’s letter. Still, the flood seeping into her tennis shoes could easily pass for nothing more than bad luck. Toilets broke. Seals gave way. Curious children conducted flushability experiments with assorted toys and other nonbiodegradable items. The insurance form was already mentally half-written.
“I can help you.” She heard Shane’s thick, deep voice behind her. She hadn’t noticed the slushing of his tennis shoes in the inch-deep water pouring out into the hallway.
He was carrying a mop in one hand, pulling a wringer and bucket with the other.
“The toilet exploded.”
He nodded, started to mop. And then to wring.
Bonnie glanced back at the tile floor in the private teachers’ bathroom. With the wallpaper and area rug, the matching curtains and towels, wastebasket and soap dispenser on the sink, the wood cabinet in which the sink sat—the one she’d saved two months to buy—the place looked like home. Or it had. That cabinet wasn’t going to escape unscathed. She could already see the wood at the bottom starting to warp.
Another insurance form to fill out.
“I turned the water off,” she told Shane. And that was all she’d done. Except feel relieved that her husband had picked up their daughter a couple of hours before. She hadn’t even called Keith yet to tell him about this latest disaster, let alone phoned a plumber. Six o’clock on Friday night wasn’t a good time to get someone in, and it wasn’t as if this was a real emergency.
With one easy flick of the wrist, Shane pulled the lever to bring the rollers down over the mop and release the dirty water into the bucket beneath.
“Can you pick up that rug?” he asked, speaking slowly.
Bonnie hurried to do as he’d asked. The little rug was heavy with water. She dropped it into the sink and then got out of Shane’s way.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, touched that in spite of his limited capabilities, he was such a good friend. “Accidents happen.”
“But you just had a fire.”
“Yeah, maybe someone’s trying to tell me something,” she said wearily, trying to smile.
“Tell you what?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head and moved aside as he worked. “It’s just an expression, but much more of this, and parents are going to wonder if it’s safe to bring their kids here.”
“And your business would be in trouble.”
So why didn’t that thought strike terror in her heart?
He mopped and wrung, bending down to wipe a bit of debris off the baseboard behind the toilet with a paper towel he’d pulled from his back pocket.
“I’m really sorry about this.”
“It’s okay, it’s my job.”
The simple statement brought tears to her eyes.
Bonnie didn’t know what was wrong with her. She didn’t seem upset about what was happening to her day care—her life’s dream. And Shane Bellows’s mopping made her cry.
“I’ll go call a plumber,” she said, and escaped to her office before she could do something else she didn’t understand.
Like ask Shane to have dinner with her so she could figure out a way to help this shell of a man with whom she’d once been so in love.
Or use the flooded bathroom as an excuse to call her husband and tell him she couldn’t come home.
KEITH WAS LYING on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, three-year-old Katie astride his upper back. She was leaning forward with her chin near his ear as her green eyes intently followed along in the big book of children’s stories her father was reading to her.
If one could refer to Keith’s dramatic rendition of each scene as simply reading.
Closing the door from the garage into the kitchen, Bonnie stood and watched the two of them, filled with so much love she ached. Keith’s voice rose and fell, his head turning or nodding, his shoulders rising and falling, with Katie riding right along with him, her body responding to each change of cadence. Her little hands clutched her daddy’s sweater and patted his shoulders in excitement. Her eyes grew large. She laughed. Her dark curls seemed to dance. Then, as the story grew more serious, she listened quietly again.
Keith looked up as he played the part of a frog turned into a prince and caught Bonnie standing there. The grin on his face froze; his voice died. Katie looked up then, too, her wriggling body stilling immediately as she saw her mother. And the questioning look in the little girl’s big green eyes shocked Bonnie. It was as though, like her father, Katie was assessing the situation.
“Hi!” Bonnie dropped her purse and briefcase on the table. “Don’t stop,” she told Keith. “You were just getting to the good part.”
His face softened as she joined them in the family room. “How was your day?”
She thought of the flood. Of Shane.
“Fine.” She didn’t want to spoil the fun Katie and Keith were having.
Keith watched her for a minute more and then, without letting her see his thoughts, turned back to the book.
The tales continued and eventually, as Bonnie relaxed and laughed along with her daughter when Keith tried to play the wolf huffing and puffing at the straw house, Katie slid down from her father’s back and crawled onto her mother’s lap.
As she hugged her little girl close to her heart, savoring Katie’s warmth, and shifted just enough to let her toes rest against Keith’s thigh, Bonnie swallowed hard.
GRANDMA NIELSON called just as they were finishing the pizza Bonnie had made for dinner. Katie had sauce smeared on her nose, rimming her pert baby mouth, over her chin and on her chest. Bonnie couldn’t see Katie’s booster chair under the table, but there was probably sauce mixed in with a pile of crumbs on her lap, as well.
“She just got back from Phoenix,” Keith said, hanging up the phone.
“At eight o’clock? She drove home in the dark?”
Her husband frowned. And nodded. While he accepted his grandmother’s right to live her life the way she wanted to—encouraged it even—her health and well-being had become a constant worry to him.
“How’s Dorothy?” Bonnie asked, getting a damp cloth to wipe Katie’s cheeks.
“She doesn’t need a hip replacement.” Keith didn’t look too happy.
“That’s good news.”
It was testimony to the changes in their little family when, without a fuss, Katie lifted her face and only blinked when Bonnie wiped her clean.
“She’ll be home next week.”
Bonnie set Katie on the floor before tending to the mess on the booster chair and table. “Wow,” she said to her husband, never missing a beat in their conversation. “That’s a fast recovery, isn’t it? She’ll be able to get around that soon?”
“No.”
Cloth in hand, Bonnie stopped. “No?”
“The doctor suggested long-term care. Grandma’s determined to bring her home.”
“Who’s going to…” Bonnie didn’t need to finish the question. She knew the answer. Lonna Nielson was.
“She says she’s sure she can get people to come in shifts—at least for meals.”
And who would do the rest? Bonnie’s heart lurched when she thought of her adored grandmother-in-law doing any lifting or carrying while her old friend recovered. Hips could take months to heal.
“Is she coming over?” she asked Keith, satisfied that Katie was safely ensconced in front of her favorite animated video before she started the dishes.
Grandma usually joined them for a game of canasta on Friday nights. Maybe she could talk to her.
“She says she has paperwork to do.”
“You going to get her?”
“Of course.”
Bonnie grinned, her troubled heart filled with warmth as she heard her husband’s exasperated tone. It was always the same.
When Keith started college, his parents left Shelter Valley on a church service mission in Cairo. His father was Grandma’s only child. Consumed by their jobs as house parents at an orphanage there, they’d returned to Shelter Valley just once in fifteen years. Their deaths in a bus accident shortly after Katie was born had left Grandma and Keith as the only surviving members of their family. But no matter how lonely Grandma might feel, or how much she might want to be with the kids, she always made excuses. When Bonnie and Keith got married more than six years before, Grandma had determined that she would not interfere with their lives. Which was why her car was never seen in her grandson’s driveway. Whether for Sunday dinner, Friday-night canasta, holidays or anything in between, Keith more often than not had to go and get her or she wouldn’t come.
Wet hands in the sink, Bonnie looked over her shoulder, her eyes meeting his.
“You’re a good man, Keith Nielson.” The whispered words came from her very depths.
Almost as if they drew him, Keith moved toward her, then bent to press his lips to hers. The wealth of love she’d been feeling since she’d walked in the door that evening just continued, fueling the kiss. God, she loved this man. Wanted him.
There was never any doubt about that.
