15 Tales of Love (3 page)

Startled, she asked, “Where did you hear all that?”

“I heard Mom talking to Uncle Peter. She thinks he’s all wet. She says you need to be independent as long as you can.”

“Oh. Well, thank you, George.”

She put the ring on again, and on Thursday she discussed it with Henry over tea and fresh peach tarts, a treat she hadn’t made in years.

“I would listen to young George,” he said. “Stay here.” She could hear his own regret over past decisions that he could not now reverse.

On Monday, she called on James, another old friend who had been her attorney and advisor for many years, although he was now long retired.

“Of course,” he said over a cup of good coffee. “You can do as you wish. George left no strings attached to his money. Your health is good, for someone our age. If you want to help young George with college, I would do it, maybe in memory or honor of George if you need an excuse.” He added, smiling a little sadly, “If you don’t mind upsetting Peter.”

“Peter can be quite upsetting,” she agreed. “Has he talked with you?”

“He has inquired of me about your future, knowing that I was a good friend of George’s,” James said. “But I could not, in conscience, tell him anything.” He smiled at her again. “I reminded him that you have a perfectly sound mind.”

On Tuesday, while they were strolling toward the park and enjoying a lovely late fall day, she told Henry what she had decided, that is was time she did what she wanted to do. It was her life.

“I will stay here, in my own home, as long as possible and have tea with you on Thursdays, and I think I will tell Peter, finally, to mind his own business. I cannot help George a great deal, but I will do what I can.” She knew, but did not say to Henry, that she had never disclosed her will to anyone. Peter had simply assumed, she guessed, that he, as the older son, would be the main recipient.
Was that why he spent Saturday morning with her? Was he anticipating?
The idea hurt a little.

But she did tell her son what she had decided about college costs. “George is such a sweet boy,” she said. “He brings me flowers. I think he deserves a little help.”

Peter said he was hurt and did not understand. “Don’t I take care of you?” he asked.

“My hands hurt.”
I could add, and my heart.
What is it he wants?

“I’ll call the doctor,” he said, and left.

She knew there were pains far worse than arthritic joints: pains of the heart that cannot be healed by doctors, however well meaning. She caressed the ring on her finger, feeling the warmth of Henry’s concerns for her. She would make brownies for Thursday tea. She had not done that in a long time and maybe she should do more of that kind of thing. And, she decided, she would confide in Henry a little more. And maybe George should be her main heir, after all. Why not? It was her life, what was left of it, why not take a little more charge of it?

And she need not leave Peter out entirely. Maybe just let him think she had.

A ROSE-COVERED COTTAGE

Rose Ellen McEverett had a dream, a vision she kept firmly in mind through all the long, dark weeks of illness, sorrow, disappointment, and despair. Sometimes it was all she had, and she had clung to it, desperately trying to keep her sanity.

That vision was a Thomas Kincaid painting of a shingled cottage, with pink roses climbing a trellis beside the front door. A fieldstone chimney at one end suggested a cozy fireplace, and the mullioned windows glowed invitingly, as Kincaid cottages always do. A gently curved path led over an arched stone bridge above a brook. She could almost hear the brook burbling. Tall old trees crowded behind the house and a soft light covered it all with peacefulness. Rose Ellen would one day live in such a house. She did not know when, or how, but the dream was all she had.

She showed the picture once to a cousin, but had never again showed it anyone.

Trudy had laughed. “Sentimental twaddle. Romantic nonsense. Places like that don’t exist. Get real.”

But what’s wrong with sentiment, with romance, with having a dream?
Rose Ellen said simply, “I like the picture. It’s comforting.”

But she put the picture in a drawer, out of sight. It wasn’t even a real picture, just one cut from a magazine advertisement. She couldn’t afford even a print of a Kincaid painting. She had thought about getting a frame for her picture, but hadn’t done so
. Better to keep it hidden. Why let people walk all over my dream? Life has done that already.

Rose Ellen tried not to think too much about the future; the past had been terrible, and the present weighed too heavily, taking too much of her energy. She didn’t want to recall her mother’s lingering illness, the two years of a growing dementia that had forced the sale of her much loved family home to pay for her parents’ move into assisted living, and then her mother’s final placement in a nursing home. Her mother’s death had been a sad relief, but it had taken too big a toll on her frail father.

My father would have managed in the assisted living apartment
. Rose Ellen tried to squelch her anger at the world and what seemed to be the relentlessly cruel fate dogging her gentle father, Andy McEverett.
Daddy would have recovered strength enough to enjoy life, return a little to society
,
to be himself again. And so would I.

But that didn’t happen. Andy had taken his usual walk on a sunny afternoon, the easy exercise prescribed by his doctors. He was slowly recovering from his years of caring for his beloved Hannah, beginning to smile sometimes and enjoy simple things again, and Rose Ellen had begun to hope. Seventy-five is not too old, she told herself, and Andy had a strength of character that had seen him this far.

But a hit-and-run driver had left Andy beside the road with broken bones and internal injuries. Only the actions of a passing Good Samaritan who had called for help had saved his life. Many surgeries had followed, putting his broken body back together again. There were weeks of pain numbed by narcotics, days when Rose Ellen despaired for his life, but now he was in rehab, cautiously learning to use his legs again, to get around with a walker. One day he would be moved to a residential nursing home, but he would never again be independent. The doctors said he had been hurt too badly, that he was too old to recover completely. He was lucky to be alive, but Rose Ellen sometimes wondered if it would it have been better for them all if he had succumbed.
Will he ever be happy again living like this? Will I?

For Rose Ellen, an only child of her parents’ older years—her mother had been over forty when Rose Ellen was born—it had been a long and sorrowful siege. She cut her work time as much as possible so she could help with her mother’s care while she was at home, and then again to help her father after his injury. Her savings were gone, and she was barely getting by. Jim Cross, the man she had planned to marry was also gone, unable to cope with her grief, the loss of Rose Ellen’s company when he wanted to travel, and the postponing of his own future. He grew tired of waiting and had been visibly relieved when she broke the engagement. They had parted as friends, but with that door forever closed.

And now
here I am, almost thirty, and nothing to show for it
. She had returned to full-time work in order to survive and pay her bills, but it was in a different position with the investment company, on a different track requiring her to learn new skills. They, too, had been unable, or unwilling, to wait for her.

The only bright spot in all of this was Timmy Hagan. She met him when he was her father’s roommate in the hospital. He had been badly injured in a fall on a construction job.

“The staging broke,” he said during one of the times he was drug-free enough to be able to talk. He had fallen about twenty feet onto a cement pad. “I landed on my side, my right hip and arm. I should have landed on my head and finished it all.”

She had looked at his mop of unruly dark blond curls, his cheerful, round, freckled face, bright blue eyes, and even in his pain an engaging grin. “You wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“I don’t know. This is pretty tiresome.”

He rarely mentioned the pain—which must be considerable—or complained.

But Timmy was young, the same age as Rose Ellen. He had a naturally optimistic nature and he could heal. As he improved, they talked casually of inconsequential things, passing the time while her father slept. Rose Ellen looked forward to her hospital visits, and began to suspect that she was falling for Timmy. She had almost forgotten what such feelings were. Jim’s departure had left her numb. But romance, past or present, was one subject Timmy never mentioned, and she could not bring it up.

She knew he had few visitors outside his family and the men he worked with. His mother came frequently. He had introduced the only other woman who came for a visit as a cousin.

“They tell me I’ll be almost as good as new,” Timmy said almost cheerfully, after one more surgery to repair the shattered hip. “In a few months or so.”

Rose Ellen heard his underlying uncertainty, his unexpressed fears, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. ”Of course you’ll be fine. Isn’t everything going like the doctors say?” She sighed. “Not like my father,” she said, suppressing her own sorrow. “He’ll never heal completely. You will.”

Timmy shrugged but did not dispute her comment. “Oh, Andy has his good days. Sometimes he talks to me, tells me about things he did when he was young. He’s very interesting.”

Andy had held an inspection job for a large company that took him many places. She agreed. “He had a good life, back then.”

Neither of them said he would never get it back.

With only his left arm usable, Timmy had a problem holding a book or an e-reader, although he kept trying. “You can only watch television for so long,” he said. “It numbs the mind.”

So on those evenings when Rose Ellen sat by her sleeping father, hoping he would rouse enough for her to talk to him, she read to his roommate. Timmy’s choice of reading material was eclectic: history and biography,
National Geographic
and
Smithsonian
magazines. She had questioned his choices, knowing his education had ended with high school, not that her own associate’s degree in business science was all that academic.

All he ever wanted to do, Timmy told her, was to build houses, and he had joined his father and uncle’s construction company as a teenager. “I always liked to read about different stuff. I kind of liked school and thought about going to college, learning to be a draftsman so I could design buildings, but I never did. I was doing what I wanted to do. I always liked repair work, fixing other folks’ mistakes, or restoring the old places.”

A few times he called her Rosie, a nickname she had never cared for very much. “You look like a Rosie. But not the Riveter.” She knew, at those times, that he was in pain and trying to hide it under forced drollery. But he apparently realized she didn’t like the name and stopped using it. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she didn’t mind, that she rather liked the way he said it.

She enjoyed his light-hearted conversation and the discussions of what she had read to him, and assumed that he did, too.

But now, Timmy had moved into rehab and he was gone, leaving her wondering where he was and if he was mending properly.

He came back a couple of times, to visit her father he said, but it was difficult for him to get around with his leg cast and he hated the wheelchair. The other bed had held a series of older men she could not relate to, and she missed Timmy and his cheerful face more than she wanted to admit. But Timmy always talked of present or past things and she couldn’t think about the future yet. It occurred to her once to wonder why his visits to her father had been when he knew she would be there, but she dismissed it as coincidence.

She didn’t know where Timmy had gone. There were several possible places, but Rose Ellen decided not to ask the nurses. She didn’t know where he lived, so she couldn’t call him.
And what good would that do, anyway? If he wanted to talk to me, he’d call, wouldn’t he?

Rose Ellen sat in the cheerless rehab waiting room while her father went through another of the painful, thrice-weekly exercises the doctors had prescribed. They always left him exhausted, and she tried to be there for him at least once a week so they could talk afterward, go to his favorite restaurant for an early dinner, and give him a little break from his dull routine in the nursing home. He had found no compatible residents, no one he could talk to.

The physical therapist said her visits were very helpful and that her father talked about their little excursions. “It gives him something pleasant to look forward to.”

The reading material in the waiting room was not new, but Rose Ellen found a house and garden magazine to leaf through. She admired pictures of lush gardens she could not have but not reading about them. She did not hear Timmy when he stopped beside her.

“Hey,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see you here today. I thought you’d gone back to full-time work.”

She looked up at him, her heart stopping for an instant. He was leaning on crutches, grinning at her. He still had a full cast on his right leg. She managed, “Well, hi, how are you? You’re on your feet again.”

“I’m coming along. Very slowly. I saw Andy’s name on the schedule when I came in last week.” He maneuvered himself into a chair, manipulating the cast. “So I came by today to see him, see how he’s doing. It’s great that he’s come along this far.”

“I manage to get here one day a week so I can take him out for a ride.” She glanced sideways at him and met his bright gaze for a moment. “So why are you here?” It sounded inane, even to her
. Duh.
This is rehab and he’s still healing.

“Mostly for my shoulder and to get some strength back into my arms, now that I have two of them again.” He cautiously flexed his right arm. “It sort of works again. They’ve finished the surgery on my hip and leg, I think.”

“Wonderful.” She smiled at him but suddenly found herself tongue-tied. There were so many things she wanted to say but couldn’t. Timmy had to say them first.

“I guess.” He laughed. “At least I’m at home. I’m not sure my mother appreciates having me under foot, no matter what she says.” He nodded toward the therapy section door. “How long will your father be in there?”

“It depends on how well he does.” She sighed. “I wish he didn’t have to go back to the nursing home. He hates it there, but he can’t do very much for himself.”

“Bummer.” After a long moment, during which she could think of nothing noncommittal to say, he asked, “That magazine you’re reading, are you planning some home upgrades or something? New gardens?”

She sighed. “I wish. I live in an apartment where there are no gardens, just a little patch of grass and a couple of bushes by the entrance.” She knew her unhappiness with that showed. It was getting harder to hide it. She needed that rose-covered cottage.

“So what would you like?”

She hesitated, warmed by the interest in his voice.
Does it hurt to share a dream, even an impossible one?
“A Thomas Kincaid kind of place.”

“Kincaid?” He frowned slightly, obviously thinking. “Isn’t he the guy who paints those pretty greeting card pictures of houses with the lights in the windows? Real expensive pictures?”

Rose Ellen laughed. “I think they’re called bucolic. Country scenes.”

He shook his head, almost laughing. “No country houses I’ve ever seen, but I’m used to big old New Hampshire farmhouses with barns and tractors and chickens in the yard, and driveways that tend to be mud or ice and not pretty lanes. The kind of house that always needs repairs and keeps my family in business.”

“That’s realism, my cousin Trudy says.” She knew her sadness was showing thorough in spite of her resolve and sighed. “I should know better.”

“Hey, keep that dream. Mine is a big Harley and a cross-country trip. I won’t get that, either.”

Rose Ellen glanced at the cast on his leg. “But you’ll be well again, and you’ll get back on your bike.” He had mentioned his motorcycle several times, but just as getting good gas mileage.

“I guess.” He released a long breath. “Once all this is paid for, and I can get real work again, I’ll probably be too old for such things.”

Rose Ellen didn’t answer. He had told her once that there had been a problem with the insurance company not wanting to cover the accident but Timmy didn’t want to talk about it.