Dying Wishes (8 page)

“Better,”
I assured him as I dripped water onto the newly placed weather mat just inside
the entrance. Trust Ginny to be on top of the weather along with everything
else. Rain, snow, sleet or mud, Vista Views’ floors would remain unsullied.
“You went out for a walk in this?”

He
buttoned his raincoat more firmly under his chin and prepared to return to the
elements. “I made it from my building to this one before I decided to call it
quits, and then I saw a lady in distress. Now that I’ve done my good deed for
the day, I’ll head back to my lair.” He pointed in the direction of a Phase Two
apartment building across the way. “At least I can tell the doc I gave it a
try.”

I
looked around at the silent lobby and put my hand on his sleeve. “I’ve got a
better idea. Business won’t exactly be booming today. In fact, I’d be surprised
to see a single prospect appear at the sales desk. How about having a cup of
coffee with me in the dining room?”

He
glanced outside at the dismal weather and promptly set his dripping umbrella to
one side of the door. “So I won’t forget it on my way out,” he said,
unbuttoning his coat again and offering me his arm. “Shall we?”

I
dropped my briefcase and raincoat at the sales desk, and we were off to the
dining room, giggling like two kids playing hooky from school. Although the
appetizing aromas of freshly brewed coffee and warm cinnamon pastries greeted
us at the door as usual, the hostess’s station was deserted, as was the
residents’ seating area. A few members of the cleaning crew, whose shifts
started very early in the morning, were clustered around a single staff table,
hands wrapped around their coffee mugs.

“Looks
like we’ve got the joint pretty much to ourselves. What are you having,
Gorgeous?” Bert draped his coat over a chair at a table by the big windows and
waggled his eyebrows at me. “Money is no object. I’ll even split one of those
cinnamon thingies with you.
The hell with the doctor’s
orders.”

“My
treat, I insist. I invited you, remember?” I protested. “How do you take your
coffee?”

“That
far down the road to cardiac arrest I cannot go, but some of that decaf would
go down very nicely.”

The
bored cashier looked startled to have a customer but rang up my order
efficiently. I brought everything to the table on a small tray and carefully
cut the warm pastry in half.

“
Mmm
,” Bert sniffed appreciatively.
“Reminds
me of my wife’s baking, God rest her soul.”

“You
were married, Bert?”

“Forty-two
years, and I was a late starter.
You?”

We
filled each other in on our family histories as we sipped and munched
companionably, and after twenty minutes we felt like old friends. As I was
reluctantly preparing to do my duty at the sales desk, Tommy Garcia entered the
dining room from the kitchen. He carried one of the bins he used to collect
used dishes and cutlery. He nodded at me and gave Bert a jaunty salute, which
Bert returned.

“Just one lady friend this morning?
You must be losing your touch, man,” Tommy kidded as he collected mugs from the
now vacant staff table.

“That
will be the day,” Bert returned with good humor, “and this lady is very
special,” he called after Tommy as he retreated to the kitchen.

“What
do you think of him?” I asked impulsively.

Bert
looked surprised.
“The Garcia kid?
Pleasant, hard
worker, good with the old ladies,” he twinkled over a last sip of tea. “We have
a lot in common,
he and I
.”

“Oh,
I know all about you. I’ve seen you in action with your bevy of adoring female
fans, but what about Tommy? What’s his power over the ladies?”

“Aside from the obvious?”
Bert put down his mug and once more waggled those bushy eyebrows as he gave it
some thought. “He’s a natural flirt, of course. I have some talent in that area
myself, they tell me.”

“Takes
one to know one,” I agreed.

“They
all see right through that stuff, though. Women always do, however much they like
the attention, but with Tommy it’s more than that. He genuinely likes them and
doesn’t patronize them or talk down to them the way their kids do now that
they’re getting on in years. He’s a real people person, sees right past the
wrinkles and the walkers and appreciates them for who they still are.” He
grinned self-deprecatingly. “Bert Rosenthal, instant analysis on call.”

I
thought about what he’d said and found his observations insightful. “That makes
sense. It also matches up with his studies in massage therapy. Only someone who
really cares about other people would take that up as a profession.”

“Yeah,
the kid gives a hell of a good rubdown. I let him practice on me once in a
while. A lot of us do, especially the ladies, which brings us back to Garcia’s
obvious
asssss
-sets.”

He
dragged out the first syllable, and I laughed as we made our way back to the
lobby. “I hope massage is the only service he’s offering,” I said lightly,
inviting Bert to comment further. He looked at me curiously but didn’t take the
bait.

By
noon the weather had done one of those surprising New England about-faces, and
the skies had cleared. Except for the leaves strewn across what had been
meticulously raked lawns just yesterday and an occasional puddle at the side of
the road, you would never know it had rained. Ginny and I couldn’t resist a
short post-luncheon stroll around the green. I repeated what John
Harkness
had told me about her suspicions.

“At
this point all we have to go on is intuition and speculation,” I summed up.
“There’s simply no evidence to support our uneasiness about these two deaths.”

“You
mean my suspicions,” Ginny amended. “You’re being diplomatic, but you think I’m
overreacting, too, and maybe you’re right.” She looked tired again, I noticed.
In addition to a demanding job five days a week, she’d had a complicated
weekend, not to mention a major life change to handle, and Ginny herself was no
kid. If she wasn’t sleeping so well lately, who could blame her?

“How
are things going on the home front?” I asked her. “Have you and
Rog
made a decision about selling the house?”

Her
smile was wan. “I can’t seem to make a decision about much of anything these
days. I have trouble choosing what to have for dinner, let alone where to live
for the rest of my life, and
Rog
is no better.”

“What
do you mean?” We had completed one circuit of the green and embarked on a
second by tacit agreement.

“We’re
both kind of stuck. We want to be involved in our grandchildren’s lives, but
neither of us wants to leave Wethersfield. We have such good friends here,
great neighbors. Our support system is totally in place. We know where to shop.
We have season tickets for the symphony. We like our doctors. I’ve had the same
dentist for over twenty-five years, can you imagine? Heck, even our veterinarian
knows our kids’ names and asks after them.” She chuckled briefly. “I can’t
imagine starting from scratch on all of that, and then there’s the house. We
love that house. It’s full of good memories for us, and the thought of leaving
it makes me very sad.”

I
could well imagine. The years following my divorce, however amicable it may
have been, had been tumultuous. I had raised two teenagers, adjusted to
condominium living, met and married
Armando,
launched
a business with
Strutter
and Margo. After all that
upheaval, I looked forward to a peaceful old age in the same place with the
same people.

“There’s
no chance that Denny and his wife will ever want to move back to New England?”

“See,
that’s another thing. Say
Rog
and I do commit to this
change, sell the house,
make
the move. What’s to say
that in two years or five or ten Denny and Joy won’t get a hankering to come
back to where they grew up? Then where would we be?”

I
pondered that for a few more paces.
“How about Joy?
Where are her parents?”

“Her
mom’s been gone since Joy was in high school, had an early coronary. Her dad
remarried quickly, as middle-aged men with kids tend to do, and Joy never
really hit it off with her stepmother. They’re somewhere in the Midwest, so
that’s not really an issue.”

We
completed our second lap and approached the Building One entrance.

“It’s
the grandparent thing that’s so problematic.” Ginny paused with one hand on the
door. “I never dreamed it would be so important to me to see Denny’s kids grow
up. I thought I’d be the benevolent-but-detached type. I guess you can’t know
about these things until you get there.”

That
brought me up short. At the moment, I didn’t know for certain what sort of
grandmother I would be, but I was about to find out—in spades.

“It’s
tough stuff,” I agreed. We returned to our duties, both deep in thought.

~

Late
in the afternoon I heard Emma’s boss Jimmy, or maybe Isabel, clatter down the
stairs and depart for the day. Feigning nonchalance, I carried two mugs of
fresh coffee up to Emma’s workspace. She was on the phone, a perpetual state of
being for a real estate paralegal, but she finished up quickly and
disconnected. Before we could be interrupted by another call, she punched the
series of buttons that switched on the voicemail system and accepted her coffee
gratefully.

“Thanks,
Momma. What’s up?”

“I
just wanted to shoot the breeze with you for a few minutes. I’ve hardly seen
you to talk to since Friday.” I sank into her visitor’s chair and put my mug
down carefully between two stacks of documents on her desk. To the untrained
eye the office looked chaotic, but I knew better than to disarrange anything.

“I
know
,
it’s been crazy up here. It’s not just your
referrals. Jimmy’s been networking again, and now we’re hooked up with a broker
who specializes in problem
refi’s
, God help me. I’m
drowning in packets. We’re doing two to four closings a day.
It’s
nuts.” She closed her eyes and sipped a little coffee. I took advantage of her
momentary inattention to survey the area for books and spotted the tote bag in
a corner with Emma’s purse. I wondered why she didn’t just leave the books in
her apartment, since she couldn’t possibly have time to read at work.

“How
are you adjusting to the idea of being Auntie Emma by springtime?” I carefully
avoided looking at the corner.

“Better
than you’re adjusting to becoming Granny Kate, is my bet,” she retorted. I
winced.

“Sounds
like an apple you’d use for baking pies. Can’t I just be Kate?” I pleaded.

“Nope.
You have to be
Gramma
or Nana or something. It’s in the rulebook.”

I
lunged at the opening, however miniscule. “Been reading up?” I allowed my gaze
to stray to the bag spilling over with books.

She
smiled knowingly. “Aha, now we get to the real reason behind the apparently
casual visit from Mom. I was wondering when you’d get around to it.”

“Once
a mother, always a mother,” I confirmed, hoping she wouldn’t miss my double
meaning. “The worst part is
,
it was Armando who picked
up on it first.”

“He
is a perceptive little devil,” she sighed. “Remind me never to play poker with
him. I was going to talk to you about it, but I wanted to do some research on single
parenting first, get my ducks lined up. I’ve done a lot on line, of course.
These,” she waved at the books, “are just to give my eyes a break. I stare at a
lighted screen all day as it is.”

“I
hear you. So what have you learned so far?” I chose my words and my tone
carefully, something I seem to need to do more often now that my children
aren’t children any more. I no longer have the authority to lay down the law.
Opinions and suggestions are my stock in trade at this stage. I know those
should be put forth only when requested, but sometimes I can’t seem to help
myself.

Emma
shoved back her chair and propped her feet on the desk, holding her coffee mug
on her chest. “Not a great deal that I didn’t already know. I’m sure you think
this is all very sudden and was prompted by Joey’s and Justine’s news last
week, but the truth is, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

“Huh.
You never mentioned motherhood to me outside of an occasional
someday-when-I-get-married conversation when you were heavily involved with one
fellow or another.”

She
smiled wryly.
“Yeah, or another or another or another.
There have been so many, and none of them ever works out in the end. Sooner or
later I realize I’d be much happier on my own and cut them loose. You know
that.”

I
did know that. Emma’s good looks, loving nature and natural exuberance had
attracted a steady stream of boyfriends since she had turned fifteen. A few of
those relationships had been serious and endured for a year or two. Most,
though, had been brief romances that evolved into lasting friendships. Emma had
a talent for keeping the people she loved, or had once loved, close to her, and
the endings to her involvements were rarely acrimonious.