Claire was checking her phone again. “How is work at the county attorney’s office?”
“Busy. I thought Deep Haven would be more peaceful.”
Claire laughed. “Oh, the summer is just getting started. We’re sleepy in the wintertime, but we grow 200 percent during the summer. That’s when the fun really starts.”
“Super.” She sighed. “How did Darek’s wife die?”
“A terrible car acci—”
Claire’s cell phone buzzed on the step beside her. She picked it up. Grimaced.
“Good night, Claire,” Ivy said as Claire answered it.
She waved to Ivy. “Hi, Mom.”
Ivy moved out of earshot and up to her garage apartment. Turned on the light and dropped her briefcase on the table.
Listened to the silence, the waves on the shore, the wind in the poplar outside her window, and wondered what it might be like to have a tribe like the Christiansen family welcoming her home.
“Grandpop’s fine, Mom. He survived the trip back to Deep Haven just fine.”
Claire watched Ivy walk away in her trim black suit, her auburn hair tied up in a prim ponytail, her heels clicking on the pavement.
Claire didn’t own a business suit. She reached up and pulled off her beret, working her fingers through her hair.
“I just keep thinking about what might have happened if he hadn’t found him,” her mother said. “I always thought he was a nice boy.”
Jensen. She was talking about Jensen. The connection was dismal at best, a fifteen-second echo behind every sentence. Claire could hear her own voice repeat her words on the other end. They were probably calling from their hospital line, had probably spent the last thirty minutes dialing over and over to get out. Or maybe they were both huddled over the phone in some still war-torn or primitive village, even at a public phone booth, the smell of dust and heat in the air. She wished they’d just opted to go to the mission headquarters in the capital city of Sarajevo and call over Skype. Then she could read their faces, assure them that she hadn’t left her grandfather alone, hadn’t been the cause of his accident.
Did they have any idea how hard it was to corral a Vietnam War vet who had a mind of his own?
Or how hard it might be to convince her parents that yes, she had everything under control? An e-mail updating them on his condition should have sufficed.
A mosquito buzzed over her head, landed on her bare leg. She slapped it and flicked it away. Ignoring her mother’s comment, she continued. “They expect a three-to-six-month recovery time, but you know Gramps—he’s already talking about going home. I am going to take some time off—”
Well, mandatory time off. Because how could she become a restaurant manager and care for her grandpa? She was still thinking it over, but it felt like the right decision. Right?
“Don’t worry about it, honey. He’ll be fine in the Deep Haven Care Center. He knows so many—”
“Mom, I have everything under control. Grandpop will come home with me and I’ll look after him until he gets back on his feet—”
“Besides, we’ll be home soon anyway.”
Those last words silenced her. She could hear the overlap of her final words repeated on the far end of the phone. Then, nothing.
“Honey, did you hear me? I said your father and I are coming home. We’re working on temporary replacements, and we should be home in a few weeks.”
Claire scrounged up her voice. “Why? Grandpop is fine.”
Her father’s low, solid voice took over. “Darling, we’ll be packing up his house, having a garage sale, getting the place ready to sell. We had an offer a year or so ago from the Christiansens, and it’s time we moved your grandfather into someplace more secure. And I’ll bet you’re ready to move on, huh?” Laughter punctuated his words.
She didn’t have to smile for their benefit, because, well, they couldn’t see her. In fact, she doubted if they’d ever really been able to see her. See how she loved Deep Haven.
She slapped another mosquito. The night had suddenly turned into a war zone.
“I’ll bet you’ve got a tidy nest egg saved up after all those years at Pierre’s,” her mother said. “It’s probably not too late to start applying to colleges. You know, I just read an article about a woman who graduated for the first time with a medical degree at the age of fifty-five. So you’re not an oddity, honey. Plenty of people wait to continue their education.”
Keep saying it, Mom, and you’ll believe it.
“I . . . haven’t . . . I’ll look into it, Mom.”
Oh, what was wrong with her that even at the age of twenty-five, she couldn’t just tell them the truth?