Year of the Monsoon (33 page)

He let Nan pick him up, licking her face and becoming surprisingly calm when she turned him on his back, cradling him to her.

“Is it too soon?” Lyn asked worriedly. “I know how much you and Leisa miss Bronwyn, and I wouldn’t have interfered normally, but this puppy literally fell out of nowhere.”

“Sometimes, those are the ones that are meant to be,” Nan murmured, watching the beautiful brown eyes staring up at her.

“So?” Lyn held her breath. “Do you think this is someone you might want to take home, just to see what Leisa thinks? If she doesn’t want him, I will come get him tonight and bring him back to the breeder,” she promised.

Nan looked up at her, and then back down at the puppy. “We might as well see what she says.”

When she pulled up in front of the house, Nan wisely set the crate down in the front yard to let the puppy out before taking him into the house. After he had emptied his bladder, she carried him inside. “Leisa? Where are you?”

“I’m back in the den,” Leisa responded.

Nervously, Nan walked partway down the hall and set the puppy down, letting him enter the den on his own. From inside, she heard, “What –?”

Nan peered around the edge of the door and froze.

“Surprise,” Leisa smiled, sitting on the floor with the puppy in her lap.

There, where a chair and lamp used to be near the window, sat a piano.

“What –?”

Leisa watched her anxiously.

Nan walked over and ran her hands over the smooth walnut. Sitting at the bench, she touched the keys, but didn’t depress them.

“You won’t hurt it, you know,” Leisa said from the floor. “If you don’t like it, it’s returnable, or we can exchange it for one you like better. I don’t really know anything about pianos, so I wasn’t sure what you would like.”

Nan looked over at her, the puppy gnawing playfully on her fingers. “And Lyn promised he could be returned to the breeder if you don’t think it’s time. He’s an orphan.”

“He’s beautiful,” Leisa murmured, picking him up and cradling him under her chin. “Play us something,” she suggested, shifting so her back was against the couch, letting the puppy down to explore.

Turning back to the piano, Nan tentatively hovered her hands above the keys, and then, slowly, softly, began to play a long-ago memory. Entranced, Leisa listened, and she realized the puppy was listening also as he sat, his head tilting from one side to the other as the notes reverberated in the air.

“That was beautiful,” Leisa said when Nan stopped. “What was it?”

Nan smiled. “Something I learned for Marcus.” She came over and sat next to Leisa on the floor. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she murmured, taking her hand. “It’s like a whole piece of me has been locked away all these years, ever since the church mob forced Marcus to leave.” She shook her head. “Marcus, Todd. I’ve lived too much of my life walling off parts I didn’t want to think about. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

The next evening, Nan and Leisa and the puppy, along with Jo Ann and Bruce, were invited to Maddie and Lyn’s for a cookout.

“Lyn will be home soon,” Maddie said as she picked the puppy up and snuggled him. “He is adorable. What’s his name?”

“Gimli.”

“Really?” Maddie chuckled as set him down and handed out drinks.

“Gimli? What kind of name is Gimli?” Jo asked.

“It’s perfect.” Bruce smiled as he played tug of war with the puppy, who was growling as fiercely as he could through a mouth filled with rope toy. “Doesn’t ‘corgi’ mean ‘dwarf dog’ in Welsh?” he asked.

Leisa grinned. “Exactly.”

Lyn came in a short while later. “Oh, my gosh,” she moaned as she dropped, exhausted, into a kitchen chair. Leisa handed her a Corona with a slice of lime pushed into the mouth of the bottle. “Thanks,” Lyn said, closing her eyes and taking a long pull on the bottle. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I said I would work Memorial Day weekend.”

“Was it not worth going in?” Nan asked. Her eye was caught by Puddles’ positioning herself safely on a kitchen chair, her back to the puppy. She watched as the cat deliberately let her tail drop over the edge of the seat, twitching the tip like a wriggling worm luring a fish. Gimli sat down, snapping his jaws, trying to catch the tail with each twitch.

“It was packed!” Lyn exclaimed. “We probably sold more paintings this weekend than we have all year, but I didn’t expect it to be that busy.”

“That’s why we don’t go to the beach any more on this weekend, remember? Any place near the water is going to be nuts,” Maddie reminded her as she sprinkled seasoning on the hamburgers and chicken. “You relax; we’ve got dinner almost ready.”

Lyn looked down at Gimli, who had gotten bored with the aloof cat and was now tasting her sandal straps and deciding he liked them. She picked him up and held him, rubbing her cheek against his soft fur. She looked at Leisa and said, “I think this is just what you guys needed.”

Leisa and Nan came in from a walk with Gimli. Exhausted, the puppy walked into his open crate in the kitchen and promptly fell asleep. Leisa turned on the television, and Nan went to the den. A short while later, Leisa heard the sound of the piano. She smiled. Nan had spent some time almost every evening playing, usually by herself with the door closed.

“It seems to calm her,” Leisa had said to Maddie and Lyn after Nan finally showed them the piano, something she was reluctant to do at first.

“I don’t want to play for anyone,” Nan warned Leisa before she would agree to tell them.

“It’s probably like meditation in some ways,” Maddie suggested.

“Did you know she played?” Lyn asked curiously.

Maddie shook her head. “No,” she said thoughtfully, “but it doesn’t surprise me. I think with Nan, you could know her for a lifetime and still not know everything.”

Leisa was startled now by the ringing of the telephone. “Hello?”

“Hello,” came a Southern accent Leisa recognized immediately. “This is Georgina Taylor. Is Dr. Mathison at home, please?”

“Yes, Mrs. Taylor. Just a moment.” Leisa carried the phone down the hall and knocked softly. “It’s Todd’s mother,” she said. She handed the phone to Nan and went back to the living room, her heart pounding as she prayed they weren’t going to get bad news.

Nan came in several minutes later and sat on the couch.

“Well?” Leisa prompted, her heart sinking when Nan didn’t say anything right away.

Nan looked at her and said, “Todd’s fine. Health-wise. But apparently, he’s staging a little rebellion. He’s refusing to go to their family reunion, he says he won’t have any more chemo,” she paused, “and he says he wants to come live with his real mother.”

“Oh, crap.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you say to her?”

Nan shrugged. “I said all the things a good psychologist should say – that he’s just acting out, he’s angry, it’s a phase, it’ll pass. I reassured her that I am not going to agree to his coming up here to live. She thinks he’ll try calling me soon.”

“Has he called yet?” Lyn asked a couple of nights later.

Leisa glanced at Nan. “He called last night,” she said when Nan didn’t reply immediately.

Maddie looked up. “What did you say?”

“You understand me so much better than they do,” Todd said. “You and Leisa both.”

He hadn’t come right out and said it. Yet.

“Todd, it often feels like other adults understand you better than your parents, because it’s temporary. They’re only around for the good stuff, and they don’t have to discipline you,” Nan said. “But your parents are still your parents.”

“No, they’re not,” he burst out angrily. “They adopted me, but you’re my real mother.”

There it was. Nan closed her eyes, steeling herself.

“I am not your mother,” she said icily. “You were an accident. I didn’t want a kid then, and I sure as hell don’t want a kid now. Whatever is going on with you and your family is not my problem and not my responsibility. You need to deal with it.” She listened to the deafening silence on the other end of the line. “I have to go now.”

“What did you say?”

Nan pushed away from the table. “What I had to,” she said, calling the puppy to go outside.

“I’m sorry,” Lyn said, berating herself for asking.

“It’s okay,” Leisa reassured her, filling them in on Nan’s conversation with Todd.

“Is she all right?” Maddie asked, looking out the kitchen window at where Nan stood, arms crossed as she stared at the ground, oblivious to the fact that Gimli was happily rolling on his back under one of the trees.

“Not really,” Leisa replied. “She said she thought the monsoon was over, but it feels like we keep getting battered over and over again.”

“You know,” Maddie mused, her eyes narrowing as she tried to recall, “I can remember the old Indonesian woman telling us that after the worst monsoons, victims would still be found months, even years later, and some people were washed away and never found. It was something they had to learn to live with.”

Nan suddenly burst into the kitchen, holding the puppy at arm’s length with her face screwed up. “Poop. He was rolling in poop,” she growled as she carried him to the bathtub.

“Well, that certainly puts things back in perspective, doesn’t it?” Maddie said as Leisa and Lyn cracked up laughing.

Maddie buzzed down to Leisa’s office. “No big hurry, but could I talk to you when you have a few minutes?” she said.