“I’ll wait to hear from you. Don’t work too hard.”
She looked at her desk, at the calendar, at the stack of files. “Okay, sure,” she said, and clicked off the phone. “Dammit!” she cursed. Again she hadn’t said goodbye. And Dennis was already feeling wounded. No wonder he wanted to postpone the wedding. He was probably feeling completely unloved.
But she honestly didn’t think about it…or him…again.
The court hearing was a painful plea from her clients to turn off the respirator and disconnect the IVs from their nineteen-year-old son. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t require a court hearing, but there was apparently some brain activity. He was morbidly injured, however. Even if he survived, it would only be with partial use of his mind, devastating injuries and terrible pain.
The court was convinced. Charlene was unable to feel a great deal of victory in that. She wished her clients well and promised to stop by the hospital later in the day to see how things were going.
The next appointment of the day was a stately woman of sixty to whom she had to deliver potentially tragic news. Mrs. Polk was convinced her husband was having an affair with a much younger woman. “I’m afraid our detective brought us much more damaging information than you suspected. It seems Mr. Polk has another family, including children, whom he keeps in a very nice home in San Jose. We were unable to ascertain whether he has committed bigamy, but the relationship appears to have been long term.” She passed Mrs. Polk a file folder that included pictures of her husband with a woman in her late thirties and two teenage children. “I’m not certain whether these teenagers are your husband’s. How would you like to proceed?”
Mrs. Polk pursed her lips and lifted her chin. Charlene could see her struggle against tears. The Polks were quite well-to-do. It would give Charlene considerable pleasure to settle Mrs. Polk with a handsome retirement and let the old fool live out his days with the other woman.
“With this information at hand, we could secure a no-fault divorce and—”
Mrs. Polk lifted her hand regally, to indicate Charlene should stop. “I’m going to have to think about this,” she said. Her voice was faint. Weak. “I’ll be in touch.” She stood to leave, took three steps toward the door and fainted.
“Shit,” Charlene swore, jumping from her desk. “Pam!” she yelled. She was always ready for tears, but she was never prepared for a faint. It didn’t happen all that often, but it wasn’t unheard of.
“Call 911. I’m not letting her drive home.” By the time she’d said that much, Mrs. Polk was already coming around, but because of her age she was taken to the hospital for an examination.
Charlene had promised to meet Sherry Omagi, the owner of the goose, Frankie, and go with her to her ex-husband’s house. Kim Omagi had taken the goose in a fit of anger, but had finally relented and agreed to return Frankie. “What I won’t do for money,” Charlene said to Pam as she left for the day.
Fifteen minutes later, exhausted by the typical events of a long day in family law, she pulled up in front of Kim Omagi’s house and parked right behind Sherry’s car. These people are nuts, she thought, and not for the first time. Even though she’d represented people in custody fights over dogs and cats and horses, even over a tankful of fish once, she couldn’t get over feeling that this was beyond crazy.
Sherry got out of her car and waited on the sidewalk. She was wearing a big grin. “I have a surprise for Frankie. I got him a playmate. Johnny. I might be going into the goose business pretty soon.”
“Well, now, that makes some sense,” Charlene said. But she didn’t ask any questions because she was pretty sure Sherry had no intention of breeding these geese for down comforters or Christmas dinner.
Sherry rang the doorbell. She was bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet. “I knew he’d come around. He’s been so angry with me for getting the divorce. He isn’t even interested in Frankie…or in animals of any kind.”
They heard someone yell for them to come in. Charlene opened the door to the very pleasant aromas of dinner, and was reminded that she hadn’t eaten much all day.
“Oh my God!” Sherry gasped. She clutched at Charlene’s arm. “Oh my God!” Then she ran into the house and began shrieking.
Charlene followed. There, in the dining room, on a candle-lit, beautifully appointed table, was a stuffed and roasted goose.
It was nine o’clock before Charlene was able to call Dennis as she drove toward her house. She described her day and apologized once again. She did not have another ounce of energy for anyone, not even him. “But tomorrow doesn’t look as bad, Dennis. If I promise to call you about dinner, will you forgive me again?”
“Yes, Charlene,” he said. “I’ll wait for your call.”
On Thursday, just after lunch, Lois was in the house listening to music and paging through a catalog while Jasper cut the grass in the unseasonably warm weather. Then Lois got a notion. She closed her magazine, picked up her purse and walked to the house next door where her car was still parked in the garage.
Even though the necessary paperwork had been signed to allow Stephanie to make decisions without Lois’s permission, it had not seemed necessary to take away her keys. She hadn’t driven in a very long time, after all. Not since that embarrassing episode in the grocery-store parking lot. And, of course, she still had her checkbook and credit cards and saw no point in giving them up until such time as she missed payments, for example. But none of this came to mind now.
She had always loved books, so she drove to the book superstore and began to browse, soon deciding that this was definitely the place to be if you had an interest in birds. Before long she had loaded fifteen large picture books into the back seat of her car. She went back and got some more—standard hardcover editions, paperbacks, Audubon Society resource books, large print. In some cases two or three copies of the same title. The cashier said, “You must be setting up your own store.”
“I have a purpose, believe me,” Lois replied.
She went to another bookstore, this one the competitor at the end of the very same strip mall. She didn’t have nearly what she’d been wanting in the way of books about Africa, and not just the large picture books, but also the travel books, novelizations, guidebooks, animal books, children’s books and political books. They also sold movies.
In the two bookstores in the mall, she decided to stock up on American Indian lore and literature. And women’s suffrage. Fair Oaks alone had a couple dozen bookstores, Sacramento must have a hundred, Rancho Cordova had probably twenty, from small independent stores to megastores. Lois preferred the megastores because they had carts. But this was harder work than it might look. Books were heavy.
Lois had been, before her retirement, the acquisitions librarian at the city library. Every day she went through magazines and catalogs, read reviews, studied sales figures, examined her budget and bought the books that stocked the shelves. Even though she absolutely never went to a store to buy the books, it did not seem in the least bit unusual to her to fill up her car with books.
The moment Jasper noticed that Lois was gone, he called both Stephanie and Charlene. They chose to drive around the vicinity in search of her, while Jasper stayed at home. And though Charlene thought it was too soon to panic, she didn’t think a little police intervention would hurt. She called Jake—an idea enthusiastically endorsed by Stephanie—and an all-points bulletin was issued to squad cars. Jasper thought the odds were pretty good that she’d eventually just drive herself home, because her periods of dementia were relatively short and widely spaced. And she did return.
She had only been gone for a little over three hours when he called Stephanie and Charlene back and said that Lois had come home. When they got to Jasper’s house they found Lois seated in the family room, leisurely sipping a cup of tea while tall stacks of books, totaling one hundred and seventeen, teetered and rocked around her.
“Mom?” Charlene asked, dumbfounded.
“Peaches?” Stephanie echoe
d.
“Your Peaches has been to a few bookstores,” Jasper informed them. “Thanks to the car and the credit cards.”
Lois smiled, sipped her tea and looked perfectly serene, totally at peace with this decision to buy all of these books.
“She has all the receipts. It seems she favored the hardbound books, mostly nonfiction and quite a number of coffee-table books, at a cost of roughly three thousand five hundred and ten dollars.”
Charlene gasped and Stephanie choked. Then they looked at each other and slowly, tremulously, their lips began to quiver. They started to tremble with barely concealed laughter and had to cover their mouths with their hands and flee the room. Thank God they had Jasper to stay with Peaches, though at the moment she was not the least disturbed by their behavior. She was in another place altogether, enjoying her tea and her purchases.
Jasper ignored the younger women and sat on the edge of his sturdy coffee table. “Looks as though you’ve had an exciting afternoon.”
“All in a day’s work,” she informed him. She looked at him in a way that had become familiar to him—she couldn’t place him at the moment.
“You must be very tired,” he said.
“Why?”
“Carrying all those books to the car. Then into the house.”
“Oh that. I had help. At the store, then here. You helped, so it was easy.”
“Did it seem like something you just had to do?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Not at all…just something that…” She frowned. In fact, she couldn’t remember why she’d done anything at all. “Albert?” she asked. “Where in the world did all these books come from?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, you bought them. Took your car out of your garage, drove to a few bookstores and brought them home.”
“Oh my,” she said. “This is going to absolutely piss off what’s-her-name. You know.”
“Charlene?”
“Her, too.”
At that moment, Charlene and Stephanie came back into the room and stood like naughty children before Jasper and Lois, still trying to control their laughter. “So, Mom, you feel like doing a little reading?”
And Stephanie crumbled into a heap of helpless laughter. It became contagious and Jasper found himself trying to stifle a chuckle. Then Lois joined in, laughing lightheartedly, though she wasn’t sure what she was laughing at. Pretty soon the four of them sat on the couch, embracing each other fondly and giving in to the laughter until tears ran down their cheeks.
Later, Charlene and Stephanie began the difficult and time-consuming process of loading one hundred and seventeen books into Stephanie’s car, gathering up the receipts and driving around town to return them. Jake met them at the first store and lent a hand, toting heavy books and helping to pick through the stacks to find which books went to which stores. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before,” he said. “Manicdepressives do this kind of thing—go on sprees—but they almost always buy frivolous and unaffordable things like jewelry. Only Peaches would load up on books.”
“It’s not as though it makes no sense,” Charlene said. “She was a librarian all her life, for heaven’s sake.”
“And she just about could be again,” he pointed out. “She has a good start on it.”
Not surprisingly, it took almost twice as long to return the books as it had taken Lois to buy them, even when they split up and went in three directions. But it was with great relief that they found the store managers understanding and willing to take them back.
By the time this project was complete, Charlene and Stephanie had laughed together enough to feel closer than they had in a while. They were leaning against the trunk of Stephanie’s car, in the parking lot outside the last bookstore, commenting on their sore arms, sore enough to have been stacking wood, and wondering how little Lois had managed to heft all those books, when Jake pulled up.
“That it?” he wanted to know.
“That’s it, Jake,” Charlene said.
“Thanks, Dad. You’re a sport.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a sport. A hungry sport. It’s after eight. How about a pizza?”
A stricken look came over Charlene’s face. “Damn!” she whispered. And then thought, I am in so much trouble!
Dennis’s shift ended at three-thirty; there were no messages from Charlene. He had time to kill while waiting to hear from her, and the late-April weather was so warm and sunny and inviting that he drove to his sister’s house to see what the kids were up to after school.
He didn’t bother to ring the bell at Gwen’s house because he heard the squeals of the kids coming from the backyard, mingled with the other familiar but premature sounds of summer—splashing, the boing of the diving board and that telltale “No running!” coming from his sister. It was still a little nippy for swimming, but they were kids. They’d start begging on the first warm day and wouldn’t let up until they won the fight to dive in. And if he knew Gwen, she’d probably heard enough and said, “Fine. Go in.” She would sit lifeguard for the ten minutes it would take them to freeze and then she’d pull them, blue, from the icy water. She would ask, “Cold?” and they, with chattering teeth and purple lips, would shake their heads and say, “N-n-n-no.”
He came around the corner. “Well,” she said, smiling. “Just in time for dinner. What a surprise. You bring Charlene?”
“Ah…no,” he said. He indicated the kids with a nod of his head. “You gave in, huh?”
“I give in earlier each year. My only firm rule is the pool doesn’t open before taxes are due. We almost made it to May. But next year I’m just going to let them swim all winter. That oughta cure ’em, huh?”
“Got beer?”
“Sure. I hide it in the refrigerator.”
He went into the kitchen, came out with a bottle and lowered himself into the patio chair next to Gwen. He took a long pull, followed by the requisite, “Ahh.”
“Is Dick around?”
“Nope. Work. How about Charlene?”
“Good question.”
She turned in her chair and stared him down. “What’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you bring your sulking self over here more often lately. Alone. You’ve never been more morose than since you announced to me that you’re getting married. Your fiancée has invited me out to lunch tomorrow. And for the first time since you started seeing Charlene, you have no idea where she is? Do I look stupid, or what?”
A childhood memory reached out and pinched him, made him smile. “Yeah, but you’re probably not.”
She whacked him across the arm and turned back to the kids. “Okay, that’s enough. Get out now! You’re blue! And Uncle Denny says you’re going to be sick.”
“I did not,” he yelled out. “I told your mother she’s sick. In the head.” Then to Gwen he said, “Relax. It’s a beautiful afternoon. Probably not warm enough for the pool, but they’re kids…they have no brains.”
“No kidding. So, don’t keep coming over here looking all depressed if you’re not willing to talk to me.”
“Fair enough. But it’s going to put you in a bad spot if you’re going to lunch with Charlene tomorrow.”
“Not to worry. I’m a consummate liar.”
“You might be sorry you asked.”
“I usually am, but I’m insatiably curious.”
“Charlene came to this decision to get married very suddenly. First it was just a dash off to city hall, then it evolved into a wedding. I’m not sure how that happened. I think because I said if we were getting married, I wouldn’t mind having guests. A wedding and reception. Stephanie and Lois egged her on, then there were all these upheavals. Lois’s health problems, her house fire, et cetera.
“Charlene likes to pretend she’s handling all of this—especially this situation with Lois going through these upsetting bouts of dementia—with her usual cool and calm control. But she’s not. Almost from the moment she agreed to have this wedding, she??
?s moved away emotionally. Become distant. Aloof. She’s been crying.”
“Well, Jesus, Dennis, what do you expect? Here she’s made a major life change, a huge commitment for a woman who’s been single and independent all her adult life, and at the same time her elderly mother is falling apart mentally. And practically killed herself!”
“I’ve made myself available to be her support through this, but I don’t seem to be what she wants or needs right now. In fact, I seem to be the last thing she needs.”
Gwen shrugged. “Maybe this is a family thing…something she and Stephanie and Lois have to manage together. I mean, they’re actually not used to having men in the family, are they? She sounded perfectly normal when she called me the other night, inviting me to lunch.”
“She doesn’t want to do this, Gwen. She won’t even talk about it. But when I suggested that she not worry about any wedding right now and just take care of Lois and her practice, she insisted we go through with it. She said everything would be fine, she’ll have things under control when—”
“Wait a minute,” Gwen said, stopping him. “Wait a minute,” she said again, as though she had a thought that was starting to gel, then vanished. She grabbed the beer bottle out of his hand by the neck, took a swig and handed it back to him. Then she got up, pulled a thick fluffy towel from the pile on the nearby picnic table, shook it out and quickly filled it with a skinny, bluish, shivering little boy. Right behind him, quivering from head to toe, was her daughter. She enveloped them, rubbed them and sent them into the house with instructions to take warm showers and shampoo.
Then she sat down next to Dennis again. “Wait a minute.”
“You said that already. I think you’re the one who’s getting dotty.”
“Oh, that goes without saying. But Dennis, you’re the one who doesn’t want to get married.”
“Where did you get that idea from?”
“I got that idea the first time we talked about it. It took making an official announcement for you to realize that, while you’re very fond of Charlene, you’re not in love with her in the way one must be to get married.”