The police said they were already en route because of the ambulance call, but they hadn’t arrived yet by the time Kurt came to pick me up. The sun was already dawning and I felt completely exhausted.
“It’s going to be a long day,” said Kurt, shaking his head at the sight of the wrecked car and Grant Rhodes’s mournful expression. He wasn’t wrong.
Chapter 16
William Ashby had three broken ribs and a concussion, and his right arm was broken in three places. Kurt gave me the report that afternoon on the phone. I had just woken up from a long nap, feeling groggy and unattached to my own body.
“So he’ll be in the hospital for a while?” I had made my way downstairs to the kitchen, trying to drum up an appetite.
“A few days, at least,” Kurt said. “I’ve asked Sheri Tate to arrange for the Relief Society to send meals to the Ashbys for another few weeks.”
“And you want me to do something as well.” It was obvious from the tone in his voice.
“If you could pick up Alice from school and drive her to the hospital to see her brother, that would be helpful.”
“Of course,” I said. I thought about our conversation in the middle of the night and wondered if she would think it was her fault that this had happened. I felt it was mine.
If I had gotten there earlier . . . If I had reached out to William when I had first thought he was troubled . . . If I had thought to call Grant Rhodes before I went over to his house . . . If I hadn’t been in the way and startled William into crashing . . . If, if, if . . . It was a dangerous cycle of blame, as I knew very well. But having been through it before did not inoculate me from going through it again.
“Has Brother Rhodes already made his statement on the official report?” I asked.
“As far as I know from President Frost, all the police did was write up a few of the damages. Grant hemmed and hawed about who was driving, and the police think it was his own fault. They didn’t take a statement. Grant said that he wasn’t up to giving one because he was too upset.”
I felt relieved, but was surprised that President Frost had intervened yet again in this case.
“I was hoping that Grant might be willing to let William work for him and earn enough money to pay for the repairs,” said Kurt.
I raised my eyebrows, though Kurt couldn’t see that. “Let me guess. Brother Rhodes was not enthusiastic about that plan.”
Kurt sighed. “He said that there was no reason for him to believe that he could trust William after what had happened, and what sort of work would be useful for him if he couldn’t be sure of the person doing it?”
Which was a sensible response, if not a particularly compassionate one.
“I am still hoping that when the immediate emotions pass, he may be willing to reconsider, but at the moment, he says he is going to make a full report to the insurance company, and at that point, Emma Ashby may be liable for more than forty thousand dollars.”
“What if I tried to talk to Grant Rhodes?” I suggested.
Kurt paused. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said at last. “You could just make him angrier, you know.”
But I had to try something. After all, this already involved me. Grant could change his mind and name William as the driver. He could ask me to testify since I was a witness. I didn’t think I could bring myself to lie either to the police or in court, if it came to that. So I needed to do what I could to prevent such a situation.
Before hanging up, Kurt reminded me that I had promised to pick up Alice at school, and suggested that my talents might be better used calming her and her mother. I checked my watch and realized I didn’t have much time, so I hung up and got into the shower.
When I arrived in the high school parking area, I was late and Alice was the only student left. She got in the backseat and put on her seat belt, saying nothing while I apologized. She looked paler than she had the night before, and I itched to brush her hair. It seemed to be sticking out all over the place, but I wasn’t sure if that was an intentional style.
“I’m supposed to be taking you to the hospital to see William. Is that what you really want?” I asked, craning my neck to look at her. I wished she had chosen to sit in front with me, but I didn’t want to pressure her.
Alice shrugged. After raising five sons, I’d become fluent in teenage body language. This was not an “I don’t care” shrug. It was an “I have no words for all the feels I am feeling” shrug.
“I can take you home instead, if you’d rather,” I offered.
“Yeah?” She looked at me, staring into my eyes.
“I can do whatever you need me to do. I’ll take you to get some ice cream if you want, then drop you off at home. Whatever you want.” I could go over and see how William was doing on my own, make excuses for Alice.
“Because you think I’m an idiot,” she said flatly.
“No.” I could just barely reach her knee around the seat with my hand, so I touched it gently. “Because I think you’re a hero. You love your brother and you did everything you could for him last night.”
“And that’s why he’s in the hospital,” she said bitterly, looking out the window to the lake and the mountains to the west.
“No. He’s in the hospital because even God can’t stop other people from making stupid mistakes.” Apparently. “So why should you think that you can? Do you think you’re more powerful than God?”
“No,” said Alice, but there was no strength in the word. She was defeated.
“Then tell me where to take you. I think you have just proven how adult you are, and you deserve to be treated like you can make your own good decisions in your life.” Unlike her brother.
“Let’s go to the hospital. I want to see him,” Alice said, sounding slightly more energetic. “I didn’t get to see him this morning. Is he really all right?”
I listed his injuries for her. “He’s not going to look good, but he’s alive. I think you get some credit for that.”
“Hmm,” she said, and we didn’t talk much the rest of the short drive over.
When I parked in the Lone Peak Hospital visitors’ lot, Alice took off her seat belt but didn’t get out of the car. I waited with my hand on the door for her to say what she had been thinking about for so long.
The sun was so bright I put up a hand to block it. The mountains were behind the hospital building, completely stripped of snow at this time of year. They looked green and young and hopeful.
“William gets all the attention,” Alice said finally. “He’s always been like this. He goes off and does something stupid and then the rest of us have to fix it. He was like that even before Dad—”
She didn’t finish. She was biting at her lower lip again, and I was sure I could read her mind. She was angry at William, and feeling guilty for being angry, and angry at feeling guilty that she felt angry.
I didn’t think that William had tried to hurt himself, but he had been reckless. “Can I give you some advice?” I said, letting the sun pouring in through the windshield soak into my skin.
“Okay.”
“Be as kind to yourself as you would be to someone else.” I turned to face her.
“That’s it?” she said.
“That’s it,” I said.
I walked into the faceless stone of the hospital with her then, thinking about the amazing things I’d seen people do while grief stricken. But I’d also seen people become cruel and rude. We always said that you found out who people really were when they were under stress, but I wasn’t sure it was true. All you found out about people under stress was how people acted when they were under stress. Was that more real than when they weren’t under stress?
William’s room was in the intensive care unit. As non-family, I wasn’t allowed in, so I passed Alice off to Emma and paced around the industrial seats of the waiting area. F
eeling the need to clear my mind of anything too serious for a moment, I got out my phone, played a game on it, and when I got bored with that, downloaded a book. I didn’t have my glasses, which meant I could get about ten words on the screen at once in the font size I needed, but at least it was something.
An hour later, Emma and Alice both came out. “Visiting hours are over,” said Emma, whose eyes were bright red from crying and whose hands were shaking. “And Alice needs to get home to do her homework.”
“Would you like me to drive her? Do you need to stay here?” I wasn’t sure Emma should drive anywhere at the moment. This family did not need another tragedy.
“I need to get some rest, and William is sleeping in any case.” Emma tried to smile, but it started her crying again.
“I’ll walk out with you,” I said.
“Thank you so much for just being here,” Emma said, when we got to her car. She leaned on my arm and took a long, deep breath. “You were there at the right time, for both of my children. You know that, as a mother, I will never forget that.”
“Of course,” I said. I should have been grateful she wasn’t angry at my part in all of this, but I noticed instead how easy it was for Emma to once again let someone else take over. I wanted to help the struggling Ashby family, but at this point, I really thought that Emma needed more than just a friendly neighbor. Like maybe therapy. And possibly a vacation from her kids and everything here. When fasting and prayers didn’t work, that was when it was time to call LDS Family Services, a whole menu of therapy choices for those who were in serious need.
Alice had gotten in the car, but Emma’s hands were trembling so much, she kept fumbling with the car door handle. She looked back at me. “Kurt asked me about money this morning, and I’m afraid I was too scattered to answer him properly. But would you tell him that I don’t need the church to help with house payments or groceries or anything like that? I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I have Carl’s stocks, as well as that nest egg from Carl’s invention. Do you think Brother Rhodes would be willing to take—” Her voice squeaked and she swallowed before trying again. “Take a cash settlement rather than going through the police to press charges against William?”
Kurt had just told me not to do this. “Just leave it to me. I’ll talk to him about a settlement of some kind,” I said anyway.
“You can offer him up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said.
I was stunned. That was far more of a nest egg than I had imagined. “You should leave yourself a cushion, you know,” I said. She seemed to be acting out of desperation, not rationality. “Is that really how much you can afford to offer him?”
“I don’t know. I think so. What do you think?” she asked. “Less than that? A hundred thousand dollars? Would that work?”
“How about if I offer him about a third of that amount and see what he says,” I suggested.
“You don’t know how much it means to me that you have stepped in like this. You are a true friend. The only woman I have ever really been able to trust.” Emma embraced me and I could feel the trembling all through her body.
After a moment, she waved goodbye and closed her car door.
Once she was gone, I thought of how hot and cold she seemed to be. Pointing at me when the police asked if anyone had a grudge against Carl, her over-attentiveness to Kurt when he came to comfort her, and now this overflowing gratitude toward me. What were her real feelings toward me—if she had any besides what was convenient for her to express in the moment?
Shaking my head, I put my judgment of the woman out of my head and tried to think of the best way to approach someone like Grant Rhodes. I decided I would resort to the age-old Mormon woman’s trick: winning his heart through his stomach.
Chapter 17
I waited until Kurt had left the next morning for work and Samuel was out looking at apartments near the U. Then I called Grant Rhodes as a batch of fresh banana bread lay cooling on the stove. I didn’t think he had a strict schedule with his job at the university. If I recalled correctly, he wasn’t a full-time employee. But when I called his house the first time, there was no answer. An hour later, I called again, and after about ten rings he finally picked up.
“Hello, Brother Rhodes. This is Linda Wallheim. I have a little extra banana bread and I was wondering if I could bring it over today. I don’t want it to go to waste, and I’m afraid that with my boys mostly gone, I sometimes make too big a batch.” In fact, Kurt and Samuel could have finished off all four loaves without a problem. But the secret to all negotiations, I had learned, was to make it sound as if the person was doing you a favor by accepting what you offered them. If this tactic didn’t work, I had a history-related question about the church that I could ask him to explain to me at length.
“Well, I’m heading to the library in an hour—” Grant Rhodes began.
“I’ll be right over then. I don’t want to delay you,” I said, and hung up the phone before he could object.
I wrapped a cooled loaf in plastic, put a ribbon on it to make it look pretty and feminine, and drove over to Grant Rhodes’s house.
William Ashby thought—or at least, according to Alice, said he thought—that Grant Rhodes might have killed his father. I was headed, alone, to the house of someone whom at least one person suspected capable of violent crime, and I was doing so in order to offer him a monetary bribe to not be fully truthful with the police. Maybe I should have felt more nervous than I did, but a strange sense of calm washed over me.
I knocked on the door, and when he opened it, I held the loaf of bread out. “After all that excitement last night, I thought you could use a little pampering,” I said. “Here, let me put this directly on the kitchen table. It’s still warm and I wouldn’t want it to crumble on you.” I walked straight into the kitchen without waiting for an invitation.
“Well, thank you for thinking of me,” he said stiffly. He had followed me into the kitchen but kept his distance. “But I really do need to get to the library this evening. I have some significant research to do before my lecture next week.”
I realized he was uncomfortable having a woman in his house. And no wonder. The kitchen looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade, except for the microwave, which was filthy, and the garbage can, which was full of cardboard boxes from the freezer section of the grocery store. I wondered if the man ever ate fresh fruit or vegetables.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be off in just a minute. I wouldn’t want to interrupt your work.” It was time to launch into plan B, flattering my way into his confidence. “I can’t even fathom all the reading you must do. I mean, with your reputation as such a respected historian . . . ” I smiled. Was that spreading it on a little too thick? I’d worried about it beforehand, as I rehearsed the scene in my head. “I’m just a mother, after all.”
“Don’t say ‘just a mother,’” Grant Rhodes said quickly. Oh, what a relief. He was eating it up. “A mother is one of the most important roles in the building up of the kingdom.”
“Do you really think that?” I asked. “Sometimes it seems like all the things I do make no difference.” I decided to entrench myself with physical labor, and reached for a washcloth to wipe down counters. He seemed happy to let me do it.
“The prophets of every age come from the hands of attentive mothers. I would never have become an academic if my mother hadn’t read to me tirelessly when I was little.” He leaned against the wall, watching me with an air of distracted memory. “I was in all the remedial classes through elementary school, but my mother had confidence in my abilities. She never gave up on me, and it is to her that I owe my current success.”
“How proud she must be of you today,” I said, continuing to wipe and organize.
“That looks so good,” he said, nodding to the banana bread, and I knew I had broken him. “We
should share a slice.”
“What a good idea,” I said, and found some plates.
Grant Rhodes slathered his piece with butter, then took a few bites. “Mmm, delicious,” he said. He was making a mess of the bread, crumbs everywhere, but I took it as a compliment.
It was time for me to cut to the chase. “I am so sorry about what happened yesterday. That a boy would act so recklessly—such a shame.” I shook my head and tried to look stern and sad.
Grant Rhodes licked his fingers, and picked at the crumbs on his plate. “I spent fifteen years restoring that car,” he said. “And that’s not including the time it took me to find the pieces.” He seemed more peeved than angry now, which I counted a good thing. It was hard to be angry with a bellyful of banana bread, I’d found.
“What a labor of love,” I said. I cut another slice of banana bread and put it on his plate.
“That car is built with blood, sweat, and tears as much as it is with steel,” he said.
“What a wonderful talent you have. I’m sure that you are grateful to God for it,” I said. After a moment’s hesitation, I added, “Such a blessing must make you want to bless the lives of God’s other struggling children, in turn.”
This time I’d gone too far. Grant put down the bread and shook crumbs off his hands onto the floor. “I am not interested in blessing the life of William Ashby, if that’s what you’re here for.”
“I can’t believe that. You’re a thoughtful, kind man, Brother Rhodes. You had a mother who saw the best in you, even when you were at your worst. And as a mother myself, when I look at William Ashby, who has just lost his father, I can’t help but wonder what would happen to our Samuel if Kurt were suddenly gone. You knew Carl, didn’t you?”
I watched carefully to see his reaction, and I was sure he flinched.
“I knew Carl a little, yes,” said Grant Rhodes, wrapping the plastic around the remaining loaf. His tone was tense. He was hiding something, I was sure of it.
His Right Hand Page 12
