Stranger

  “I want to see you again!”

  I stopped, then, and turned, grateful the rest of the crowd had already gone. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  I shook my head. “Not a good time for this discussion.”

  “I’ll call you!”

  “No, Sam!” I was almost to the hearse when I stopped this time. “No. Don’t.”

  He shook his head to get his hair off his forehead, and the sun again caught his earring. It caught his smile, too, which was twice as shiny as the diamond. “I’m going to call you.”

  I shook my head again, but said nothing this time. Arguing would be undignified. I went around the front of the hearse and got in the passenger side. Jared looked up as I slid into my seat. He reached to turn down the music, but I stopped him.

  “Leave it. I like this song.”

  Jared gave me a look. “You do?”

  Since we’d often teased each other about musical preferences, I knew he could tell I wasn’t being truthful, but I just wanted to get out of there. “Sure. Emo is my new favorite flavor.”

  Jared laughed and cast a curious glance out the window, where Sam was loping away over the grass-covered hill toward the parking lot. “Does that guy know where he’s going?”

  “Does anybody?”

  Jared laughed and revved up the car. “Deep, Grace. Very deep.”

  I let him think I was being flip, but as I watched out the window for Sam’s car to drive away, I wondered the same thing.

  I made it through the Stewarts’ service and the one later in the afternoon, but then was finished for the day. I needed coffee. Shelly usually made it, not as strong as I liked to drink it but good enough to get me through the midafternoon lag.

  The day had seemed interminable, probably because of my lack of sleep and the amount of paperwork I had to do. I was yawning when she poked her head in again, this time with a plate of cookies.

  “I baked. Want one?”

  “Sure.”

  She brought the plate to my desk. “Chocolate peanut-butter chip.”

  “God.” I bit into one. “Sooooo good.”

  Shelly beamed. “I got the recipe from my baking magazine. I think I’m going to try pecan roll next. With cream-cheese filling. What do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to have to buy new pants if you keep this up.”

  She giggled. Shelly was really a sweet girl, even if she was prone to attacks of excitability and easily made to cry. She ate a cookie, too, but looked as though she was analyzing it rather than enjoying it.

  “I think next time I’ll use white chocolate chips, instead.”

  I finished my cookie. “These are great. Why mess with perfection?”

  Shelly shrugged. “How do you know it’s perfection unless you try something else that might be better?”

  “The same could be said for more than cookies,” I said.

  Shelly snagged another cookie and broke it into pieces to eat each one slowly. “Like men?”

  I sat back in my chair. Shelly had had the same quiet boyfriend since she started working for me. Duane Emerich had taken over his family’s farm and had, according to Shelly, been hinting at marriage. Whether or not Shelly herself wanted to get married I didn’t know, but she hadn’t shown up with a ring on her finger yet.

  “Depends,” I answered.

  “On what?”

  “On the man?” I took another cookie but only nibbled it. Savoring it. “What’s up, Shelly?”

  She shrugged prettily. “Nothing. Just thinking about living on a farm for the rest of my life, that’s all.”

  The idea held absolutely no appeal for me, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “Thinking about Duane, you mean. He’s a good guy.”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “But…”

  I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. “But…?”

  Shelly looked up at me. “Well, he’s…a little…”

  Duane was a little of a lot of things, none of which I wanted to give an opinion about.

  “He’s a good guy, Shelly.”

  “With shit on his shoes,” she said.

  I don’t know which shocked me more, the fact she’d criticized him or the fact she’d cursed. I didn’t know what to say and shoved more cookie into my mouth so I wouldn’t have to think of something. Shelly sighed again.

  “You go out with lots of different guys, don’t you, Grace?”

  I chewed and swallowed and sipped coffee to clear my mouth. “Not that many.”

  “I’ve been going out with Duane since we were sophomores in high school.” She looked at me. “He’s the only boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, you know.”

  “I know.” Shelly shrugged again. “But he’s just so…good.”

  “Good isn’t something to sneeze at,” I told her.

  “By good I mean boring,” Shelly said.

  “Boring isn’t so good.”

  We laughed.

  “I just don’t know what to think. We do the same things all the time. Go to the movies. Eat pizza on Sunday nights. I can tell you exactly what he’ll get me for my birthday. I can tell you what color shirt he’ll wear on Thursday.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with any of that,” I said quietly.

  Shelly nodded. “Yeah. I know.”

  Part of her must have questioned it, though, else she wouldn’t have been talking to me about it. Shelly and I weren’t close enough for me to offer her advice, if I’d had any to give. So I ate another cookie, and so did she, and in another minute the phone rang and she went to answer it.

  Thinking about what she’d said, I spun in my chair while I ate yet another cookie and sipped my coffee and looked out my window to the back parking lot.

  I tried to tell myself it was the plateful of cookies that had soured my stomach, but the truth was, I didn’t like facing the memory of my earlier envy. I closed down my computer and made sure to grab my phone, then headed out to Shelly’s desk.

  “I’m going to run some errands. I don’t have any appointments today, but if something comes up, give me a call. Jared can handle pretty much anything until I get back.”

  I was uncertain of where, exactly, I wanted to go, just that I wanted to get away from Frawley and Sons for a while. Traffic decided for me, making it easier to turn right than left.

  Five minutes’ drive took me to my sister’s house, the front yard uncharacteristically scattered with toys. I pulled into the driveway but sat in the car for a minute. What would I tell my sister about why I was here?

  She didn’t give me long enough to figure it out. The front door opened and Hannah peered out through the screen door. Of course she did. This was Annville, after all. I’m sure all her neighbors were peering out, too.

  She opened the door as I got out of the car. “Grace?”

  I waved. “Hi.”

  She held the door for me. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh…just thought I’d stop by, if that’s okay.”

  She closed the door behind me. The living room was a minefield of blocks and action figures. Like the front yard, this wasn’t the norm for my sister, who’d inherited our mother’s neatness genes.

  “Where’s Simon?” I asked unnecessarily, since from the basement rec room I heard the drone of cartoons.

  Hannah pointed. “Downstairs rotting his brain. Come into the kitchen.”

  It was also a disaster, at least according to the normal standards. Dishes were piled high in the sink and on the counter, with the remains of lunch on the table. The sliding door that normally imprisoned the washer and drier hung open, two baskets of laundry sprawling in front of them.

  “I didn’t have time to clean,” Hannah said when she noticed me looking.

  “I see that.”

  “Coffee?” She went to the pot and lifted a cup.

  “Sure.”

  I watched her carefully. She didn’t usually wear a
lot of makeup, but today she wore none but the shadows of sleeplessness. She’d pulled her hair on top of her head in a messy ponytail and wore a pair of velour track pants and an oversize T-shirt that hung to her thighs. I took the cup she handed me.

  “Sugar? Milk?” Hannah was already pulling them out and taking them to the table before I could answer.

  “Thanks.”

  We sat, a plate of misshapen cookies between us. My sister took one and broke it in half but ate both in rapid succession. Then she took another.

  “Simon wanted to make cookies.” She wiped crumbs from her mouth. “Aren’t I the best mom ever?”

  “You are a good mom,” I told my sister.

  She laughed briefly. “Yeah, that’s why he’s downstairs, glued to the TV.”

  “A little television’s not going to kill him. Cookies won’t, either.”

  Hannah and her husband had always been adamant about Simon’s and Melanie’s consumption of sugar and cartoons. Never having had children, I hadn’t ever felt qualified to comment, but though I thought they might be a little too stringent sometimes, they weren’t hurting their children with their restrictions, either. If anything, not plopping her kids in front of the electronic babysitter had been harder on my sister than if she’d let them sit there for hours.

  She’d always been a crafts-and-cookies mom, the sort who made homemade Halloween costumes and never failed to make something for the bake sale.

  “I’m just tired,” she told me abruptly.

  The washer spun to a stop and beeped to indicate the end of the cycle. Hannah stared at it, then took another cookie.

  “I’m just so tired of all of it,” she said.

  I’d never heard her talk that way before. “Of what?”

  She gestured. “This. The house. The kids. The husband. I’m tired of picking up other people’s crap all day long. I’m tired of never being finished. Not ever.”

  She put her hand to her face while I stared, not knowing what to say. She shook her head slowly, grimacing. Then she took her hand away and ate another cookie grimly and without joy.

  “I’m tired of never having anything that doesn’t get broken,” she added with a look toward the sunporch.

  I followed her gaze. A blue-and-white pot holding a peace lily lay on the tile floor in pieces, dirt and leaves scattered everywhere.

  “I don’t blame you,” I said.

  She laughed again and gave me an older sister’s semi-scornful look. “Oh, what do you know? You’re young and single and go out with a different guy every week. What would you know about it?”

  My mouth parted at her attack, but I managed not to retaliate. “The grass isn’t always greener, Hannah.”

  She raised a brow in a gesture I’d often felt on my own face. We didn’t look much alike, her with blond and coiffed hair and me with my dark, straight cut, but that expression was one I’d felt many times on my own face. Proof we were sisters.

  “You want to trade?” She got up and yanked open the washer and drier doors and began transferring the wet clothes, stopping every now and then to violently snap the wrinkles out of Jerry’s dress shirts and hang them to dry. “You want to wash four or five loads of laundry at a time, trying to make sure you find all the stains so you can pre-treat them and remember to hang up the dress shirts because they get wrinkled in the drier? Do you want to have to fold it all, too, only to have more in the hamper before you’re even finished?”

  “No. But you act like I don’t have to do laundry, Hannah.”

  “You do laundry for yourself!” Her voice snapped as violently as the wet shirts had.

  “There’s a big difference. Everything you do is for yourself!”

  I sat, smacked into silence by her vehemence while she slammed the drier shut and stabbed it into its cycle with her fingertip. She went to the table next, grabbing up the barren cookie plate and shoving it into the dishwasher, then starting to do the same with the dishes in the sink.

  “You just have to take care of yourself,” she repeated, not even rinsing the dishes before she put them in the washer. She’d be sorry later when the dried mac and cheese didn’t come all the way off the porcelain, but I wasn’t brave enough to point that out.

  “Well, yeah,” I said, like I was saying “yeah, duh.” “I’m not married. I don’t have kids.”

  My sister’s laugh sounded like something from a horror movie. “No shit.”

  Hannah never swore. I sat back in my chair, not bothering to hide my gaping mouth. She turned, defiant, eyes glittering with anger or tears, or maybe both.

  “What? I can’t say shit? Shit, shit, shit!”

  The basement door creaked open and Simon came up, clutching a handful of action figures in one small hand. “Oooh, that’s a bad word!”

  Silence surrounded us. Hannah turned back to the dishwasher and her assault on the silverware. I gestured to my nephew.

  “Hey, buddy. How about we go to McDonald’s?”

  His face lit up with the sort of joy only a small child can channel, and he flung his arms around my neck. “Auntie Grace, you are the bestest aunt in the whole wide world!”

  I looked at the angry hunch of Hannah’s shoulders and the way she kept stabbing plates and cups into the dishwasher. “Let me take him out for a while.”

  I thought she’d protest, especially the part about McDonald’s, but she just waved a hand without turning around. “His booster seat’s in the van. Make sure he buckles up.”

  “How about I pick up Melanie from school?” I added with a glance at the clock. My niece would finish in half an hour. “I’ll take them both for an early dinner. Bring them home after.”

  Hannah nodded without turning around, but she stopped loading the dishwasher. She gripped the sink. Even from my place at the table I could see her knuckles had gone white.

  “Great,” she said, her voice strained. “Thanks.”

  “Sure.” I kept my voice light. Easy. “C’mon, buddy, let’s find you some shoes.”

  With Simon babbling the entire time, I didn’t have to speak to my sister, and I didn’t. We got his shoes and jacket and the booster seat from the van. We picked up Melanie from school and I was again greeted with the announcement of being the “best aunt in the whole world,” a title I wasn’t about to argue.

  I took them to the dollar store and the pet store to look at the animals, then to the burger place where they got junk food and junk toys.

  When we pulled into Hannah’s driveway the van was gone but Jerry’s car was there, and it was he who opened the door when I knocked. The kids tumbled through the doorway with excited stories about the exotic pets and French fries. The house had been transformed while we were gone, the kitchen cleaned, the laundry gone, the broken pot removed and the dirt swept up.

  “Where’s Hannah?”

  Jerry looked blank. “I don’t know.”

  I wasn’t going to touch that with any length of pole. If my sister had gone out without letting her husband know, that was his problem. I’d safely returned their children and had nothing more to do there.

  “She didn’t leave anything for dinner,” Jerry said. Clearly this was befuddling him.

  “The kids already ate,” I told him. “I told her I’d take them out. You don’t need to feed them.”

  Jerry looked around. “Did she ask you to bring me anything?”

  I made my face carefully blank, as hard as it was not to slap a hand to my forehead. “No, Jerry, she didn’t.”

  I liked my brother-in-law. He was a nice guy. He’d never told me offensive jokes or given me bad advice. In fact, mostly he left me alone and didn’t bother with me much at all. But right now I wanted to shake some sense into him.

  “Huh,” he said while his kids ran like hooligans up and down the hall without a glance.

  “She didn’t leave anything for me.”

  “Good thing there’s peanut butter and jelly.”

  He gave me a blank look. If he’d asked me to make him som
ething, I might have had to smack him, but fortunately for both of us Jerry just nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “Are you under control here?” I eyed the kids, now wrestling on the living-room floor.

  “Oh, yeah.” He nodded.

  I didn’t quite believe him, but it wasn’t like he was going to let them hurt themselves. Woe to him if something else got broken while Hannah was out, but that also wasn’t my problem.

  With another set of hugs and squeezes for my niece and nephew I headed out, back home.

  I caught Jared just as he was leaving. “Nothing going on?”

  He shook his head. “Everything’s locked up.”

  “Oh, good. Thanks.”

  Jared nodded. “I’m on call tonight, right?”

  “You asked for it, remember?”

  “I know. I know.”

  We smiled at each other and he headed off to his battered pickup truck. As I opened the door to go in, a slightly breathless Shelly came out. Her cheeks had flushed faintly pink and a few tendrils of hair had escaped from her French braid to frame her face. She looked as if she’d put on lip gloss.

  Jared turned, waving. Shelly dimpled and edged past me with a murmured goodbye. She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at Jared’s truck.

  “My car’s in the shop,” she explained half over her shoulder. “Jared’s giving me a ride home.”

  “Okay,” I said, as if either of them needed my permission, or I needed an explanation.

  Shelly waved. I stood in the doorway until she got into his truck. Shelly sat as close to her door as possible, staring straight ahead. Jared smiled, his mouth moving as he chatted, but all I saw Shelly do in response was nod her head stiffly once or twice as he pulled out of the parking lot.

  Interesting.

  Chapter 07

  The knock on the door didn’t startle me, but I pretended to be surprised when I opened it, anyway. “I didn’t order a pizza.”

  The man standing outside the door wore a blue shirt and matching ball cap, and the box in his hand undoubtedly held a pizza. “Are you sure?”