intend to keep a close eye on him.”
Which meant, Ali concluded, that Sister Anselm didn’t trust the man and was unprepared to leave Hal Cooper alone with his injured wife.
Ali was about to text a response to Sheriff Maxwell when her phone rang. A glance at caller ID told her that this wasn’t the sheriff calling back. It was Athena.
“My daughter-in-law,” Ali explained to Sister Anselm. “She’s in town and was hoping we could get together.”
“Of course,” Sister Anselm said. “I think things are under control for tonight.”
“You’ll call if you need me?”
“Absolutely.”
By then Ali’s phone had stopped ringing, so she punched Redial. “Sorry I couldn’t answer before. I’m leaving the hospital right now. Where are you?”
“At the apartment,” Athena said. “Just off Apache in Tempe.”
It sounded like Athena was sniffling. June in Phoenix was hardly the time to come down with a cold or sinus infection. Ali wondered if she had been crying.
“What about grabbing something to eat? I’m starving,” Ali said. “Do you want to meet me somewhere?”
“Not really,” Athena said. “I’d rather you came here.”
Ali’s gut gave an ominous twist. Athena Reynolds was boundlessly enthusiastic, and always ready for whatever. This didn’t sound like her.
“Tell you what,” Ali said. “I’ll pick up something on the way. Give me your address so I can program it into the GPS.”
On her way down to the hospital lobby, Ali called her hotel, spoke to room service, and asked them to box up some food-fries and two burgers-that she could take with her. At the hotel, she left the car in the driveway and hurried upstairs to shed the red wig.
Ali knew instinctively that whatever was going on between Athena and Chris needed to be handled by Ali Reynolds rather than Cecelia McCann.
The Desert Dunes apartment complex had little to recommend it other than its proximity to the ASU campus. It was a grim-looking three-story place built around a courtyard with a few scraggly palm trees for landscaping. It looked as though the courtyard might once have included a pool. That was gone, filled in and covered over by a tiny basketball court where no one was shooting hoops through baskets missing their nets.
Ali followed Athena’s directions up two flights of stairs and down a long breezeway-a breezeway with no breeze on this hot summer night. The doorbell outside apartment 310 was covered with a three-by-five card reading Out of Order, so Ali knocked on the metal hollow-core door. Seconds later, Athena flung the door open.
Ali could tell at a glance that her earlier assumption was correct. Athena had been crying.
“I come bearing food,” Ali said, presenting Athena with the room-service burgers.
“Come in,” Athena said. With a notable lack of enthusiasm she took the bag and ushered Ali into the room. “It’s not much, but it’s cheap, and we’re only here for summer session.”
Surprisingly enough, the apartment was nicer inside than Ali would have expected. Someone-maybe an assistant professor rather than a grad student-had gone to the trouble of assembling a collection of good-quality secondhand furniture. Nothing matched, but the chairs covered with faded chintz were comfortable, and the end tables and bookshelves were sturdy if old-fashioned. The artwork on the walls was anything but old-fashioned. The unframed canvases provided explosions of splashy color on the otherwise landlord-bland taupe interior.
“Art student?” Ali asked.
Athena nodded on her way toward the galley kitchen. While Athena busied herself with setting out plates and glassware on the fifties-era Formica tabletop, Ali forced herself to take a seat and keep her mouth shut. She was dying to ask what the problem was, but she knew she needed to let Athena tell her at her own speed.
“I’m pregnant,” Athena said bluntly, once they were seated.
I’m pregnant, Ali noted.
Still, of all the news Athena might have given her, news of an expected grandchild was something Ali welcomed wholeheartedly.
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “I’m thrilled. What does Chris think?”
“I haven’t exactly told him,” Athena admitted.
“Why not?” Ali asked. “It’s his baby, too.”
“We didn’t plan on getting pregnant,” Athena said. “At least not so soon. Actually, I didn’t expect to get pregnant at all, but I got careless. I forgot a couple of pills. Now this has happened, and I don’t know what to do.”
Ali was mystified. Surely Athena wasn’t thinking about having an abortion.
“You’re married,” Ali said quietly. “You and Chris love each other. You tell him you’re pregnant, and the two of you deal with it together. What’s so hard about that?”
“My father never wanted me to join the military,” Athena said.
This seemed like changing the subject, but Ali suspected it wasn’t. “So?”
“And when I got hurt, he said I’d wrecked his chances of being a grandfather. That since I was a cripple, even if I had a baby, how would I take care of one with this?”
Athena held up her prosthetic arm and hand and stared at them as though she’d never seen them before. Ali understood that there must be a lot more to the story than what she’d heard so far. For one thing, Athena’s parents hadn’t come to the wedding. As far as Ali knew they had been invited but had declined to attend.
“Your father called you that?” Ali asked. “A cripple? Sounds like he doesn’t know you very well. It sounds to me as though he’s the one who’s decided to take a pass on the grandfather bit.”
“What if he’s right?” Athena murmured. “Maybe I
“Wait a minute,” Ali said. “You’re tough enough to go to war in Iraq, tough enough to almost die from an IED, tough enough to live through Walter Reed and do all the rehab, and you’re tough enough to spend all day, every day teaching high school kids. You expect me to believe that you’re scared of changing a baby?”
“Not just changing it,” Athena said. “Feeding it, bathing it. I just keep thinking of all the things mothers do-all the things mothers have to do. What if I can’t do them? What if my child grows up thinking his mother’s a freak?”
“But you
“That’s not what I mean,” Athena said.
“Kids always think their parents are freaks,” Ali said. “For instance, Chris thought I was a freak because I was on TV. As far as he knew, none of the other mothers did that.”
Athena, staring at her untouched hamburger, said nothing.
“Is this why you called off the trip to Minnesota?” Ali asked.
“Yes,” Athena said. “I told Chris I’m not ready to deal with my parents yet, and it’s true. I’m not.”
“Look,” Ali said. “I get it that you don’t have perfect parents. Nobody has perfect parents, but I can tell you from personal experience that throwing a grandchild into the mix can help resolve a lot of old, lingering problems. Look what happened with me and Chris’s other grandparents at the wedding. As I recall, you’re the one who made that happen.”
“Yes, but…”
“But what?”
“Those were Chris’s relatives, not mine, so it wasn’t as big a deal for me. My parents are a big deal. Besides, what if they’re right, and I’m not cut out to be a mother?”
“Because of your missing hand and leg,” Ali asked, “or is it for some other reason that you’re not mentioning?”
Again Athena said nothing. For almost a minute she and Ali sat in silence at the table while their untouched hamburgers turned stone cold.
