Autumn Dreams (17 page)

Will held his mug aloft. “Thanks, Dad,” he said in a voice devoid of inflection.

“Yeah, thanks,” echoed everyone.

Lew preened. “You’re welcome. Enjoy.”

As Cass placed her certificates and pen in her gift bag, everyone rose and prepared to leave. In the quiet chaos of collecting purses, jackets, and coats, Lucy said, “Cass, you never told us what you really wanted for your birthday.”

“Yeah, BB,” Will said. “What is your deepest wish?”

“Yeah, Aunt BB,” one of Will’s kids said, the one who had gotten the statue.

Dan saw Cass’s jaw tense. She remained in her seat for a minute without moving while everyone looked at her. Then she took a deep breath and looked up smiling. She gave the royal wave. “What I really want for my birthday is world peace.”

Everyone laughed.

“And what did you want for your birthday?” Charlotte asked Lucy brightly.

“My wish was much more selfish and much easier to attain. I wanted a day at a spa with all the trimmings.” She grinned. “I have to do something to hold the ravages of age at bay.”

Dan looked at petite Lucy and saw not a single ravage. “Did you get it?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Lucy said, smiling sweetly at her husband. “Will was wonderful.”

“Especially since Mom told him what she wanted every day for a solid month,” said the key chain boy.

Lucy shrugged. “Whatever works.”

Dan’s attention was drawn from Lucy by a hand on his arm. Lew Merton looked at him, clearly uncomfortable and slightly belligerent.

“So Cass wants you to look over my money situation.”

Lew was obviously unhappy, and Dan didn’t find that at all surprising. The man knew he was going to be told he was misusing his money, making wrong and unwise purchases, wasting his resources.

“I want to know how she found out about those overdrafts.”

Dan ignored the question. “Lew, from what Cass has told me,
you shouldn’t be getting notices like that.”

“It’s none of her business.”

“She loves you guys, Lew. She’s concerned.”

“Let her be concerned about her mother.” Lew watched Charlotte exit the restaurant, his eyes tortured. “I’m fine.”

Dan nodded. “No problem there. Cass is very concerned.”

“She’s why I do it, you know.”

“Cass is why you’re overdrawn?”

“No, no, not Cassandra Marie. Charlotte. She’s why I play the sweepstakes.”

“She urges you to?”

“No.” Lew ran his hand nervously down his navy-and-red striped tie, patted it, pulled on it. “I’m afraid for her,” he finally said. “No, I’m terrified for her. I want the money to guarantee she’s cared for like she should be.” He blinked, scowling at Dan as if daring him to notice the tears.

Dan’s throat constricted as Lew’s pain wrapped around him. He turned Cass’s father toward his silver car. “Come on. Let’s you and me drive to your place without the ladies.”

Numbly Lew nodded and let himself be tucked into the passenger seat of the BMW. He buckled his seat belt with shaking hands.

Dan opened the driver’s door and, one foot in the car, looked for Cass. He saw her beside her parents’ car, talking with her mother and Lucy. He caught her eye and pointed to Charlotte. “Drive with your mother,” he mouthed.

She nodded, tucking her hand onto her mother’s arm. “Come on, Jenn, Jared. We’re driving with Grandmom.”

Before anyone had a chance to question the arrangement, Dan drove off. He headed away from Scallop Street. He and Lew rode in silence for several blocks. Then Lew started to talk, and once started, he couldn’t stop.

“Forty-nine years. I’ve been married to Charlotte for forty-nine years. I barely remember life without her except for my time in the service. D day. Battle of the Bulge. Korea. I remember that all right. I was never so cold and lonely and scared in my life. But within two months of mustering out, we got married. She was so beautiful.” He sighed. “She is so beautiful. You might not understand this, not being married and all, but I love her more today than I
did when I married her—and I was crazy about her then.”

Dan thought of his parents and the quiet, deep river of affection that flowed between them. It had been the bedrock of his life from his earliest memories. Cass and the brothers had been equally blessed.

“We didn’t have any money back then,” Lew said. “I managed to get a job with the post office, no small thing with all the veterans looking for work. It’s a good thing I got that job because Will was born ten months after we married. Then Hal two years later, Tommy two years later, Bud two years after that. And then came Cassandra Marie.”

Lew’s eyes crinkled at the memory of his baby daughter. “She was a Gerber baby, so beautiful it hurt to look at her.”

“She’s still beautiful,” Dan said.

Lew’s eyes sharpened on Dan for a minute before his memories claimed him again. “We had a good life, Charlotte and me and the kids. Not extravagant. Good. The Lord was kind to us. I saved a little bit, but putting five kids through college took all we had and more. Charlotte worked as a receptionist for a doctor from the time Cassandra Marie started high school until retirement. After everyone graduated from college, we saved all Charlotte’s salary. When we sold the family house and bought the little place on Scallop, we invested the difference. We’ve been careful. By and large we’ve been healthy. We’re on Medicare and we have Medigap insurance.”

Dan parked in the empty lot at Seaside Chapel and gave his full attention to Lew.

“But I’m terrified it’s not going to be enough,” Lew said, his eyes filling again. “You’ve seen her at her worst.” A sob choked his voice. “My lovely Charlotte. She doesn’t even know me when she has one of her spells.” He shut his eyes against the pain. “Somehow she knows Cassandra Marie, but she doesn’t know me.”

Dan wished there was something he could say, something he could do. There wasn’t. All he could do was plead,
Father, wrap Your comforting arms about Lew. Ease his pain
.

“We were going to go to Hawaii for our fiftieth anniversary.” Lew looked blankly out the window. “Not now. I’ve pleaded with God to make her well. On days like today I think maybe He’s listening. But tomorrow or the next day I’ll know He’s not.”

Dan stared at the cross that hung in the peak of the roof over the front door of the chapel. That cross was the symbol of eternal healing for believers but no guarantee of temporal healing for a hurting man like Lew.

“So you’re entering all the sweepstakes with the hope of making a killing that will cover any care Charlotte may need in the future,” Dan said quietly.

Lew nodded. “Dumb idea, huh?” His voice quavered. “Like I’d ever really win.”

“Desperate maybe, but not dumb. You love her.”

“Yeah, I do. What’s happening to her is killing me.”

“And you’re buying things that the sweepstakes offer, like the magazine subscriptions you gave Cass, hoping to increase your chances of winning.”

Lew frowned. “I got a letter last week that said I had won a hundred thousand dollars, and an armored truck was driving to our house from Atlantic City to give me the cash.
Thank You, God!
I thought and rushed to tell Charlotte. She was having one of her good days, and she took the letter, showing me the catch in the wording of the announcement. I think the phrase was ‘when you mail in your winning number.’ ”

“Ah,” Dan said. “And when you mail in your nonwinning number, which is the case for 99.999 percent of the people, you don’t get the truckful.”

Lew just sighed and continued to stare out his window at the cloudless sky. “I want to leave an inheritance to my kids, too. I want to leave them something to ease their financial pressures what with the grandkids’ college expenses and all. I want to leave Cassandra Marie something extra because she’s a woman alone, something to make certain she’s cared for. I want to take them all on a cruise, even the grandchildren. I want to take them to Hawaii.”

He swallowed hard and closed his eyes. “It’s not going to happen, is it? None of it’s going to happen, at least not without the sweepstakes.”

Dan looked at the broken man and felt as if he were about to kick a cowering puppy, but he knew he had to speak. “I’ve got something sort of hard to say here, Lew.”

The man turned to him with apathetic eyes.

“Have you ever thought that God just might want you to trust and obey instead of finagle?”

Lew closed his eyes and dropped his head to his chest. “Yeah, I know. But it’s hard to trust when He lets something like this happen to you.”

C
ASS WOKE UP
on Monday with a giant headache. Forty today. She stared at the sloping ceiling above her and dreaded getting up. When she looked in the mirror, she’d see an aging woman, wrinkles furrowing her brow, crow’s-feet creeping from her eyes, jowls hanging like a turkey’s wattle. Well, it wouldn’t be that bad, but still.

Forty!

Why forty bothered her so much when she wasn’t an especially vain woman—the brothers had knocked any vanity out of her years ago—was a mystery to her. Maybe it was because her life was now half over, and it was all downhill from here. Maybe it was that forty represented the final nail in the coffin of possible child-bearing. Maybe it was because of the void she felt more and more deeply in her personal life.

I’m so lonely, Lord
. She felt tears gather.
And I’m so pathetic that I didn’t realize how lonely until the kids came to stay. And Dan
. Goose bumps gathered on her arms and legs, and it wasn’t from the cool morning air.
I know You should be enough for me, but
w
hat will I do when they all leave? When he leaves?

Climbing out from under the warm covers into the brisk chill, she pulled on her navy sweats. She combed her tousled hair with her fingers and crammed the
blond strands into a ponytail caught by a hot pink scrunchie that used to be Jenn’s.

“I’ll never wear that ugly color again,” Jenn had said as she threw the scrunchie in the trash. “Derrick hates it.”

Cass had reached in and claimed the offending circle of elastic and fabric. It had come in handy on many a morning, and it was certainly easier to pull out of her hair than a rubber band.

She went quietly upstairs to the bathroom where she washed her face and brushed her teeth, not looking in the oval hanging over the sink for fear of what she might see—dark pouches under her eyes, hairs growing on her upper lip, cheeks pleated with wrinkles. She sighed.

You’d better get over it, girl. You’ll never be any better than you are now
.

All the more reason to jog. She went downstairs and checked the thermometer that hung next to the kitchen window. Forty-three degrees. She went back to her little room under the stairs for a pair of light gloves. It wasn’t until she’d disarranged everything in her three dresser drawers that she realized the gloves were upstairs in her real room, Jenn’s room.

She quailed at the thought of going up for them and waking Jenn before her alarm went off. She’d just pull down her sleeves and hold them over her hands. How painful could a few minutes of nippy weather be?

The cold might not have been too bad if it hadn’t also been so breezy. The wind flayed her, cutting through her sweatshirt, finding each little air hole in the weave of the fabric. When Dan, looking gorgeous and bright-eyed, joined her as she warmed up, she felt positively ancient.

“Happy birthday, Cass!” he said with such enthusiasm that she wanted to wrap her hands about his neck and squeeze. She didn’t want to kill him—he was too gorgeous for that. She’d just strangle him a bit until he turned as grumpy as she felt. Instead, she bent at the waist to hide her aging face.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

They ran without talking, and Cass was glad. She knew she wasn’t good company this morning. She who was never temperamental had a blue mood that would make woebegone Eeyore look like a cockeyed optimist.

They were briskly walking the last block toward home when the Seaside garbage truck rolled toward them. Its fragrance rose on the wind, and Cass couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could stand being near the truck in high summer. Even though it was shiny, red, and almost brand-new, it reeked even in the cool fall air. Two of the most disreputable-looking young men Cass had ever seen clung to the back handrails.

The truck stopped and the cab window rolled down. Cass smiled her first genuine smile of the day as she looked at the driver. “Did you come to wish me happy birthday, Clooney?”

“Not me, darlin’,” the man said as he rested an elbow on the window ledge. “You might just expect a present.”

“You mean you haven’t anything in your stash of ill-gotten goods that you’d be willing to share?”

“Lean times is all I can say.”

Cass grinned, not believing a word from this man she’d known since forever. Clooney was a Seaside celebrity of sorts, a decorated and disillusioned Vietnam vet who refused to use his keen mind in any pattern that could be perceived as conformity to the system. He searched the beaches all year long with his metal detector, and there wasn’t a Seaside kid who hadn’t trailed after him, fascinated. There also wasn’t a kid who hadn’t gotten one of the treasures he dug up. Cass still had the key ring with the silver butterfly medallion and five keys Clooney had given her the year she was fourteen, all legs, bosom, broad shoulders, and self-consciousness.

She had gone with the brothers and their friends to the Twelfth Street beach one July Saturday. She was there because her mother made the boys bring her. She was the price for them to have use of the car. Unfortunately, the brothers weren’t happy they’d been forced to bring her, so she sat on her beach towel slightly apart from the rowdy guys.

Clooney saw her, huddled over a book, constantly trying to pull her bathing suit neckline up to her collarbone. She still remembered making believe she didn’t feel conspicuous and failing spectacularly. Then Clooney knelt beside her and held out the key chain and medallion.

“This is for you, Cassandra,” he said loudly enough for the brothers to hear. “One of these days you’ll be that beautiful butterfly.” He tapped the embossed wings, ignoring the brothers when
they began to hoot. To them,
beautiful
and
Cass
were not analogous, and sadly she agreed with them. Clooney rattled the dangling pieces of metal. “And these are magic keys.”