The Older Woman (10 page)

“You have to watch out for bees,” Doyle said.

“Yeah,” Scottie said with a little giggle in his voice.

“So what’s this one,” Doyle asked, pointing to, but being careful not to actually touch, a small ragged piece of turquoise.

“Chewing bubble-gum sharing rock,” Scottie said solemnly.

“Wow,” Doyle said, glancing over the boy’s head. His mother was really crying now. He could see Meehan reach out to put her hand on her arm.

“And this one?” he asked

“Green garden kinder rock.”

“What about that one?” he asked, pointing to the fool’s gold.

“Golden crispin,” Scottie said without hesitation, and Doyle smiled, wondering where he’d gotten his creative rock names.

“You really know your rocks.”

“Yes,” Scottie said. “My mommy’s crying.”

“Yeah,” Doyle said. “I think she is.”

The boy looked at him sharply, as if the truth was the last thing he expected. He turned his red velvet bag upside down as if to clear out any rock that might have remained.

“I have to stay over here.” It wasn’t quite a question, but Doyle answered it, anyway.

“Yeah. For right now. We’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not going to cry,” he said.

Doyle didn’t know what to say to that, or even if the comment was meant for him. The boy looked up at him.

“I don’t want my mommy to be sad.”

“Well, I think your aunt Kate can make her feel better—like she made you feel better when you hurt your leg.”

“Aunt Kate can make her feel better,” Scottie repeated. He gave a little sigh.

“Tell me about the rest of your rocks, okay?”

Scottie went back to naming his collection. When he reached the “white recklin rock,” Doyle saw the boy’s mother hide her face in her hands, but by the time he’d identified a “blue tiger falgon” and a “purple shark seaweed,” she seemed to have gotten control of herself—which was a good thing, because they were running out of rocks.

But the two women continued to talk. Meehan was obviously listening—and not particularly liking what she heard. Doyle knew her well enough to recognize the body language. It was something on the order of when he was still a patient on her ward, and she found out Rita had smuggled him an ice-cold beer in her purse. The fact that he hadn’t drunk the thing made no difference whatsoever.

He realized suddenly that Scottie was looking at him.

“How long has it been since you washed these things?” he asked, relying on his own boyhood memory of how much he liked to play in water.

“Forty days and nights,” Scottie said, and Doyle grinned.

“That long, huh? In that case, we better find some water.”

Thankfully, it was a short trip to the nearest outside water spigot. It stuck up out of the ground, not too far from the driveway, handy for washing cars and watering Mrs. Bee’s little patch of tomato plants.

He was allowed to hold the rocks in his hands while Scottie turned the water on. And off. And on again. They both got wet, but it couldn’t be helped. Meehan had asked him to keep the kid occupied, not dry.

They carried the rocks back to the picnic table for a meticulous one-by-one, hand drying—with the tail ends of their T-shirts. Scottie kept up a running conversation, admiring what he imagined was a decided improvement in the appearance of his collection.

When the drying was done, they made up new, off-the-wall rock names as Scottie dropped each one back into the red velvet sack. The kid had a sense of humor, for all his worry about his mother. It didn’t take much effort on Doyle’s part to make him giggle.

Doyle looked up at one point to see Meehan heading in their direction. The sister had disappeared, he supposed, into the house.

“Come on, Scottie,” Meehan said, holding out her hand. “Time to go.”

“Is my mommy happy now?”

“She will be when you get there,” Meehan said, lifting him down to the ground.

“Tell Bugs bye.”

“Bye,” he said. “We can play some more later.”

Meehan gave him a look, one Doyle had no problem at all deciphering. It was: See? I told you you were too young.

He grinned—and kept his mouth shut for once. Meehan looked back as she walked away with Scottie in tow, mouthing the words, Thank you.

You’re welcome, he thought. You are welcome.

He eventually took up his usual perch on the porch swing, and he sat there a long time, thinking about Meehan and whether he’d gained any ground here or not.

Probably not. But he didn’t think he’d lost any, either.

He was just about to go inside when Meehan and her sister came out of the house.

“I’ll be back to get Scottie in a hour. I promise,” the sister said. Then, “Don’t look at me like that! I have to see him! I love him with all my heart, Kate!”

“And you’re stupid with all of your head,” Meehan said.

He couldn’t hear what she said next, but clearly she didn’t hold back with family any more than she did with overzealous paratroopers.

He had no idea what the situation was here, but from what he did know, he could only come to one conclusion:

Poor old Scottie.

Chapter Six

M
rs. Bee was definitely on a trip down memory lane. She’d been listening to big band music all afternoon—some of which he recognized from having lived with grandparents. At the moment, a girl singer was doing a torchy rendition of “More Than You Know.”

Mrs. Bee was also baking. Ordinarily, she took a nap in the afternoon, but not today. Man, the smells that were coming up from the kitchen. Apple pie, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had homemade apple pie—not since his grandmother had died, two weeks before Christmas when he was eighteen. After the funeral Pop had been determined to have the house decorated the way she always did—

the red cedar Christmas tree hung with all kinds of kid-made ornaments and crammed into a corner of the living room, the multicolored lights strung across the front porch. But there were no kitchen smells. He and Pop couldn’t manage that. By the next Christmas, he had graduated from high school and had joined the army.

No more homemade apple pie. Life as he knew it was over.

He’d forgotten how much he missed it.

So far, he hadn’t made the effort to get downstairs to see exactly what was going on. His best guess was that the church ladies were about to ride again—this time well provisioned. It was probably time for the church’s famous chicken pie supper, and Mrs. Bee was manning the desserts.

For the last two days he’d been trying to keep a low profile—so he wouldn’t get roped into doing anything else unexpected. Little old church ladies, he was beginning to understand, were not all that predictable. There was still the matter of the notorious magazine, for one thing. Besides that, if he made the trip downstairs, he might be tempted to keep right on moving and go push his luck with Meehan. Restraining his well-honed inclination to take charge of the situation wasn’t easy. He’d clearly found his misplaced audacity again, and he wanted to know if she was upset with him. He especially wanted to know about when she was sick, how bad it was and if she was okay now. She looked okay. She looked better than okay.

He could ask, of course—and probably would have a few days ago. It wasn’t just his innate, cat-killing curiosity that made him so bold about making inquiries. It was his ongoing quest to understand the people around him. His emotional survival depended on it, just as much as his physical survival had once depended on his ability to go outside his food chain.

Or he was permanently stuck in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Number five. The one he’d missed on the final exam.

“The need to know and understand.”

He smiled to himself, surprised that he remembered even that much of the college course he’d taken in his better, precrash days.

But in spite of the motivation, he had to bide his time and stay out of Meehan’s way for now. He’d said what he wanted—needed—to say, and that was that. It was all up to her how much it bothered her that he was younger than she was and that he knew she’d had cancer.

He could hear a different song coming from downstairs.

“Anytime,” the guy kept singing.

His sentiment exactly.

Anytime, Meehan. Anytime and anything.

For lack of something better to do, he took a shower—which he fully expected would turn out to be the high point of his day.

When he came out of the bathroom, he saw a narrow, folded piece of white paper lying on the floor, half of it still under the door.

“Maybe not,” he said.

He hobbled over to pick it up. It took a while. His name was written on the outside. He didn’t recognize the handwriting. It wasn’t Mrs. Bee’s. Hers looked just like the row of cursive letters they had had up over the blackboard when he was in grammar school. Even her grocery lists looked like they had been done by the schoolteacher she was.

He unfolded the paper and began to read:

Doyle:

I couldn’t get you to the door and I couldn’t wait. We’ve been invited to dinner this evening at seven. I’ll be back to get you.

Meehan.

P.S. Refusal is not an option.

Refusal is not an option.

What did that mean?

It sounded like something
he
would say. She should know by now that he wouldn’t be refusing anything.

He read the note again, then looked at the clock. He had a little more than an hour to try to figure it out.

Dinner.

No problem. That part he got.

But who would invite the two of them—together—and why? He didn’t get it.

Not that it mattered. This was the “anytime” he’d been looking for. He didn’t care where they went. The fact that they were making the trip was enough for him.

He took his time shaving. He even put on a little aftershave. Ordinarily, he didn’t care for the stuff unless he happened to have a really hot date—and how long had it been since
that
happened? He didn’t actually have a hot date now—or at least he didn’t think he did. He wasn’t quite sure what he had going on here—but whatever it was, he was up for it. Aftershave was definitely in order.

He stood in front of the mirror looking at the final result. He’d had first-and second-degree burns on his face, but there was practically no scarring. His eyes hadn’t changed much, in the months since the crash. He and Lieutenant McGraw—and the men in the pictures in Mrs. Bee’s World War I book downstairs—all had that same look. It was as if the part of him that had seen Hell itself had crawled up from some dark place and looked out his eyes. He had seen Hell—they all had—and they couldn’t tell anybody about it. He couldn’t, anyway. He always did a little verbal dance around the army shrink’s questions. He was damn good at it, too. Years of practice, thanks to Nina and dear old Mom.

When you forgive yourself.

Meehan’s comment suddenly popped into his head. He didn’t want to think about that. He wanted to think about dinner and her. How she would look and how she would smell. He was determined to get close enough to find out about the perfume part—was it or wasn’t it flowery?—and maybe tonight was the night.

The uniform of the day was the same as always—cargo shorts and a golf shirt. There wasn’t much he could do about it. What he had available had to be weighed against what he could tolerate. His mind went immediately to Rita’s wedding. He’d done some suffering there. Military uniforms and still-new surgical scars weren’t the least bit compatible.

Rita.

He hadn’t been thinking about her much of late, but he no longer worried about it. His stomach rumbled. The aromas from the kitchen—meat loaf?—were driving him crazy. Wherever they were going, he hoped the chow was good.

He spent some time policing the apartment—making sure everything was stowed where it should be. There wasn’t much straightening up for him to do—he was neat by nature. No, he was neat by the sheer force of his old drill sergeant’s will. Even so, if Meehan was actually coming up here, he wanted everything squared away.

He looked at the clock. He still had time to kill. He should have brought “Michael Mont” and “Fleur” upstairs.

He drank a glass of water, washed the glass and a coffee cup left over from this morning.

Music.

He needed some music to pass the time—except that he already had music. Mrs. Bee’s really old oldies were still coming from downstairs.

He decided not to sit down—which left looking out the window a distinct possibility. After a moment he walked across the room to do just that. Meehan’s car was parked in the drive.

Someone knocked. He made an about-face and tried to hurry—but not too much—to answer the door. He didn’t want to keep her waiting and he didn’t want to seem as eager as he was, either. Meehan didn’t scare easy—he knew that—but he didn’t want to take any chances.

He took a deep breath and opened the door. There she stood in the hot, stuffy upstairs hallway. It smelled of meat loaf and baking bread and apple pie. And she looked…

Fine.

He looked her over again to be sure, and he saw no evidence that she’d ever been ill. He didn’t let himself even consider how extensive her surgery might have been.

She wasn’t wearing the opaque dress again. She had on khaki shorts and dark-red T-shirt and sandals. He liked her in shorts. A lot. He liked her in anything.

“Hey,” he said. “I got your note.”

She didn’t say anything.

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately. If this dinner thing had fizzled already, he wanted to know up front.

The big band music from downstairs suddenly stopped.

She looked over her shoulder. “Oh—I’m just a little worried about Mrs. Bee. Are you ready?”

“Roger that,” he said.

She stood back so he could come out the door.

“So where are we going?” he asked as he hobbled by her, not quite close enough to identify the scent she was wearing—unless it was meat loaf.

“Downstairs,” she said.

“Besides

that.”

“Downstairs,” she said again.

“And

that’s

it?”

“That’s it,” she said. She started to help him by taking his arm, purely a nurse kind of touch. Even so, she apparently thought better of it and let her hand fall.