Lucia and I looked at each other. “I live here, too,” I said.
“So let me in.”
Almost fearfully, I jammed my key in the door and pushed it open. My gaze darted around—I was half expecting to see Candy standing there with a shotgun. Instead I heard the water running in the kitchen, and the normal sounds of the boys horsing around near their mother. Candy was pretending she had nothing to do with Lucia and her intrusion. Willfully oblivious.
I set TJ against my shoulder, and Lucia followed me up the stairs. A line formed between her eyebrows as soon as she saw Eddy. She set her bag at the end of the bed, like a country doctor, and gave him a quick examination with her eyes and hands. “How long has he been asleep?”
“Since around seven last night.”
She pulled back the covers and felt around on the mattress. “Dry.”
“That’s good, right? That he still has control of his bladder and all.”
Her head gave a slight shake. “No. It’s kidney failure.” She braced her hands beneath his arms and looked to me to grab his ankles. As I did, I saw the fabric of her skirt pull tight across her belly and realized she was pregnant.
“No,” I said. “You can’t carry him.”
“I carry wood every day. Don’t concern yourself about it.”
I hesitated, then looked toward the steep and narrow stairs. For one long, uneasy moment I tried to accept her reassurance, but all I could think about was the moment I’d come across the plastic hospital-issue bag with my clothes in it from the night TJ was born, the fabric dark and stiffened with blood. One slip of Lucia’s foot could end in a calamity I couldn’t bear. “No way,” I repeated. “If you have a phone, we should call an ambulance.”
“No time for that. Go get Scooter.” I raised an eyebrow, and she said, “Well, he lives right over there. He’ll help, Jill. This isn’t the time for petty loyalties. He’ll know that.”
“All right. Can you handle Candy if she comes in?”
“Of course I can handle Candy. Candy isn’t anything.”
I passed TJ over to her. As she shifted him to her hip with her capable hands, I ran down the stairs and out the door toward the Vogels’ farm. Scooter lived in the walk-out basement, one with a door that was never locked because this was Frasier. My pulse pounded in my ears as I raced across the gray asphalt road and through the overgrown grass, past Sara Vogel’s neat vegetable patch with its pie tins rattling on stakes and strings, to Scooter’s rain-beaten basement door.
Without a knock, I pushed it open and shouted his name. He looked up from where he lay on a battered sofa, playing Atari games on a television three times his age. A few words about Eddy’s state were all I said, and in an instant he had shoved his feet into his boots and was rushing past me out the door, flying across the lawn in his untied boots and unbelted jeans. By the time I arrived back on our property I could hear Candy shouting from inside, and Scooter was shuffling out the front door with Dad over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Lucia followed close behind, TJ on her hip.
“Sorry,” said Scooter, edging toward the porch stairs. “Tried to wait for you, but Candy was making a scene. Which car?”
Lucia opened the rear door of her truck, and I helped ease Eddy onto the seat. “I hope he’s all right,” said Scooter. “Poor old dude.”
“Say a prayer,” said Lucia. She passed me TJ and climbed into the cab of her truck, gunning the engine.
“Wait,” I said. “I need the diaper bag. It’s just inside the front door.”
Scooter shook his head. “Stay here and I’ll go with her. I know all his information. You call Cade, get him to come to the hospital.”
His idea made more sense than mine. I couldn’t give proper attention to Eddy’s needs with a baby in my arms, and there was no chance I would leave TJ with an unstable Candy. I stepped back and Scooter climbed into the passenger seat, barely pulling the door closed before Lucia backed out of the driveway.
From inside I heard Candy yelling at one of her boys. I took a deep, shaky breath, then loaded my son back into the Jeep. I could call Cade from the U-Store-It office and give him the news about his dad, then stay there for a while until Candy had a chance to calm down. No way was I about to go back inside. She frightened me now.
Chapter 29
When the Vogel girl first started coming around, I didn’t pay her too much mind. She knew Candy from church, and I wasn’t all that keen on that church of theirs. I go with her now, but mainly to get out of this house for a bit, since I never did learn how to drive, and being inside all the time gives me cabin fever something fierce. And I like to sing. I keep the songs going in my head while the pastor is talking, so that way I can get through the whole service.
That Vogel girl—her name was Lindsay—she was younger than Candy by a couple of years, and unmarried. Despite that they were friends, and I felt torn about that situation. On the one hand I remembered what it felt like to be a childless woman in a room full of mothers, how they elbowed me out without even knowing they were doing it, and so it was kind of Candy to reach out to her in friendship. But on the other hand this was Candy, and something in me hated for that vulnerable, sheltered Vogel girl to get wrapped up in my daughter. Sometimes they’d be talking at the table, the way Lucia and I used to, and I’d picture Candy standing at that rabbit hutch with her back to me, the suppressor on the .22 reducing each shot to a distant firework. Maybe I thought if I was cool to Lindsay, she’d soon enough be safely on her way.
It was the season when both of my sons went away and then came back. Cade went off to college that fall, and Elias had been away at basic training and infantry school. It had taken him an extra month. He had written to me that he got “recycled,” which is the army way of saying you couldn’t do enough push-ups or run fast enough, so they make you train all over again. But when he walked in that door after all of that—more than four months after last I saw him—he looked ever so much better. Hardly had any stomach on him at all, and his arms looked strong. It was like I could finally exhale—after all those years of reassuring him he was just fine the way God had made him, finally God had granted him a reprieve from being a butterball.
As soon as Cade got home, too, the two of them went out together to meet some old friends down at the quarry. I guess they had a snowball fight, because when they got back both of those ninnies were covered in snow, with big splotches of it on their backs. I made them turn right around at the door and come in through the back porch. Once they shook off their coats and wraps, they came inside laughing, with hands and cheeks rose-red from the cold. Candy and Lindsay were sitting at the table with their coffee, and Candy jumped right up to pour some for the boys. She poured lots of sugar and milk in Eli’s, the way he liked it, and he reached for that mug like he was holding his hands up to a campfire. Even though he looked like a soldier now, I could still so easily see the little boy in him. He’d rather have a cup of cocoa and we both knew it, but he was a man now and it would be coffee for him.
Candy was bustling around the coffee machine, and when I looked at Lindsay I saw she was staring right at Elias, smiling in this shy, surprised way. She was a plain-looking girl, with a heart-shaped face and hair that had never been cut, and she wore those smocky flowered dresses like Candy and the other church women. Elias didn’t seem to notice. He was still bantering with Cade, the two of them joking over who had gotten in the best shots of the snowball fight. Lindsay Vogel was his same age, had lived up the road all his life, but her family had homeschooled her and so he hardly knew her at all. When I saw the look she was giving him I thought about Piper, with her straightened hair and model figure, her made-up eyes, and I thought Lindsay might as well march that notion right back out of her head as fast as it had come in.
Candy turned around with the coffeepot and opened her mouth to ask her friend if she wanted more, but stopped before a word came out. She looked from Lindsay to Elias and back again. Then, with a noisy clatter, she set the pot down and called her children over to say hello to their uncles. John was just a baby, pushing his cereal pieces around on the high-chair tray, but the other two came barreling over and threw themselves at their uncles’ knees. Lindsay took a lemon cookie from the plate at the center of the table and waved it in front of John’s face, playing with him a little before she let him have it. I went upstairs after that, and so that’s the way I remember
