by Judy Baer
“How’s the pain?” Harvey asked.
“Still there,” Lily told him.
“You told me it was better,” Tyler said with a frown. Lily had a way of not divulging things to him when she thought he might worry.
“It is, but it’s still there.” Lily pursed her lips and cocked her head in the way she had when she was trying to charm someone. “I think my grandson is getting tired of taking care of me, doctor. Not that I blame him. I don’t sleep much.”
“Three to five hours a night is about it,” Tyler felt tired just saying it.
“And I like his company,” Lily added coyly.
“Four or more games of Scrabble every night.”
Tyler could feel the doctor’s appraising eyes on him. “You look exhausted.”
Tyler didn’t want to admit it, but the ninety-year-old woman was running him ragged.
“Have you considered live-in help?” Dr. Harvey asked. “Lily will be incapacitated for quite some time yet.”
“They all quit for one reason or another.” Tyler tipped his head slightly toward Lily to indicate the cause for the abdications.
“Oh, Tyler can take care of me. He’s doing a wonderful job.”
Tyler bit his lip to keep from disagreeing. He was mediocre, at best. And his business was suffering badly from his frequent absences.
“I know of someone who might help you. She worked for me while she was in school. If we’d had any openings, I would have hired her myself. She’s outstanding with the elderly. In fact, she even took care of my father for a time.” Dr. Harvey copied a phone number onto the back of his business card. “Call her if you want. She’s a widow with a young son. Her last name is St. James and she will do an excellent job for you.”
Tyler politely took the card and put it in his coat pocket. He’d hired other excellent caregivers for Lily and she’d worn them out. Though Dr. Harvey was a good judge of character, should he hire someone to care for his grandmother on a single recommendation? Maybe he was so tired he was grasping at straws.
He was going to bring up the subject in the car on the way home, but before he could, Lily announced out of the clear blue, “I wish that lovely young woman we met in Dr. Harvey’s office could help me, the one who ran into your car. She’s a Christian, you know. I could tell. She wore a cross around her neck.”
“A necklace isn’t sure-fire proof of anything. Besides, she obviously can’t drive. You’ll need transportation to and from the clinic.” Had the woman not been quite so lovely, Tyler might have objected to her more.
“I’m going to pray about it,” Lily said firmly and closed her eyes as if to start immediately.
Lily’s faith was rock-solid, Tyler knew. Living in Lily’s orbit had taught him many things. If she wanted to pray, more power to her.
Despite what he’d said to Lily, he did need to consider the idea of calling the woman Dr. Harvey had suggested. If he didn’t start paying more attention to his import and export business, it wouldn’t exist much longer. He needed to be in the office daily. In and awake, that is.
Lily’s eyes popped open and she said, “I’m thinking a little sunshine might be good for me. It would be nice if you closed up shop for a bit so we could go on a trip. Hawaii is always lovely.” She squirmed in her seat. “It’s just so boring with my foot in this cast.”
A trip? Hadn’t his grandmother heard a thing he’d said about falling behind at the office, that he needed to work more, not less?
Lily had just given him the reason to act. Tyler made up his mind. He would call the woman whose number was in his pocket as soon as he got home.
He’d simply keep her in line until he knew she could do the job to his satisfaction. That had to be easier than taking Lily to Hawaii.
Besides, he had an escape clause—he could always fire the woman if Lily didn’t run her off first.
* * *
Ty sat at his desk and stared out the window. Getting a good lead on someone to help Lily was a relief.
Lily hadn’t sounded completely delighted by the prospect, but Tyler didn’t care. Ever since they’d left the doctor’s office yesterday, Lily had doggedly insisted that he go right out and find that “sweet young thing” who hit their car. Lily said that she was the only one she wanted to care for her. She even promised to try not to be difficult, if she could get her way in just this one thing. He’d believe that she could behave when he saw it.
Lily even liked the idea of having a little boy in the house when Ty told her the caretaker the doctor recommended had a child. She and Ty’s grandfather had raised Ty from the time he was a small child. Ty’s father had died not long after he was born and his mother never quite recovered from the shock. Adele Matthews had had a difficult time dealing with her own life. She had nothing left to give to a small child. That left Ty in his grandparents’ care with a mother who flitted in and out of his life, until she’d passed away five years ago.
Lily went into a rhapsodic account of the wonderful times they’d had together when Ty was young. It would be just like “old times.”
He couldn’t argue with her. It was true. The whimsical, impulsive Lily and her indulgent husband were about as much fun to live with as any grandparents a child could have. They bought him a pony—Lily’s idea—and taught him to golf in the backyard, at his grandfather’s insistence. They’d also agreed Ty could eat ice cream for dinner for a week to see if he really could get sick of it (he didn’t.) More amazing yet, Lily had let him keep a snake in a big fish tank in his room. His grandfather didn’t even seem perturbed when it escaped and was lost for three days in the ductwork of the house. A maid discovered it, Ty recalled, right before she handed in her resignation.
Sometimes Ty thought he’d grown up to be more serious and mature than either of the adults in his life. At times he wished it weren’t so, like now, when he spent so much time trying to please his grandmother.
Lily had already chased off several caretakers with her demands and she was trying to behave. Hannah would learn soon enough.
Whatever Lily wants, Lily gets.
Chapter Two
“One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three...” Tyler was counting under this breath when he heard the tinkle of the small crystal bell. He’d given that wretched bell to his grandmother when he was twelve years old to commemorate her seventieth birthday. He’d never expected that twenty years later he’d be jumping to the sound of that same faint ringing that had once intrigued him.
With a sigh, he saved the document file and closed his computer. Then he put a smile on his face and walked across the hall to his grandmother’s bedroom. He’d lost count of the times he’d done this tonight.
“Hey, there. What are you doing awake? It’s after midnight.”
“Oh, Tyler, I just can’t sleep.” Lily Matthews looked like a petulant child in her pink flannel nightgown. “I think it’s that new medication I’m taking. Maybe some hot tea would help.” She looked at him slyly through those bright and ageless eyes. “And a game of Scrabble. That always puts me to sleep.”
“It does not. It winds you up like a clock. I have to go to work early in the morning, Grams. I can’t be up half the night playing games.” He was so tired already that his vision was blurring.
“Well,” she huffed. “I’m sorry I’m such an imposition. Just the tea, then. I apologize for breaking my foot and becoming such a burden to you.”
She was trying to guilt him into staying up half the night with her. He wouldn’t fall for it this time, he told himself.
“I’m sure you didn’t.” He smiled a little. As much as his often manipulative, occasionally cantankerous grandmother drove him crazy sometimes, he loved her with all his heart. If only...
“...if only,” she said, as if she’d read his mind, “that lovely woman you’d hired to help me hadn’t left. Then you wouldn’t have had to do everything for me. Did I ever tell you about the time...”
Lily Matthews was off and running. Ty
ler was too tired to listen.
The woman his grandmother was referring to hadn’t left, exactly. It was more like she’d run away. Like the one before her. And the one before that. They’d all stayed a while, tending to his grandmother, hopping to her orders. Then they always resigned for the same reason—Lily was too much. She slept little, chatted constantly and was, although she’d never admit it, often imperious and demanding. She thought nothing of waking someone during the night to watch QVC with her or send her breakfast back to be remade two or three times because the poached eggs weren’t quite to her liking. And taking her pills...that could be like World War III for a woman who was mentally somewhere in her thirties but trapped in the body of a ninety-year-old. Lily hated getting old.
She reminded him of a beautiful Ferrari with a purring engine whose wheels had been removed so the vehicle had been put up on blocks. Lily still had the engine but not the mobility.
It wasn’t all Lily’s fault, Tyler knew. His grandfather had spoiled her outrageously over the years and had never once complained about her strong personality or over-the-top demands. Lily was behaving just like she always had.
The difference was that Ty was not his grandfather. He didn’t have a staff of servants or a business manager and a massive team of people to run TDM Imports and Exports. After his grandfather had died and Ty had taken over his business, he’d trimmed much of the fat both personally and in the organization. Keeping it lean and trim had allowed him to be successful, even in the economic downturn. But he hadn’t counted on Lily breaking her foot and insisting that she move into his house to be cared for. Nor had he expected her to demand that he bestow the attention on her that his grandfather once had.
Running the business, traveling and watching out for Lily, with no one but an infrequent home health care nurse and an occasional cleaning lady to help, wore him out. It didn’t help that Lily was a night owl.
Still, he loved his grandmother. It was his turn now to take care of Lily. Honor your father and your mother—or your grandmother—had become his mantra, the thing he told himself when Lily was particularly irascible. It was all about her frustration at being unable to be as active as she once had, he reminded himself.
When he returned to his grandmother with the tea, she’d already dumped the Scrabble tiles onto the small table in front of her and she gave him that surely you don’t mean to deny me look. She took the cup, tasted it and smiled sadly. “Just a little warmer, dear. Do you mind terribly?”
Warmer, colder, higher, lower, deeper, wider. It was always something with Lily. A wave of tiredness spread through him. It was going to be another of those short, short nights of sleep. He would call the number Dr. Harvey had given him first thing in the morning. He’d ask the woman if she could start tomorrow.
Chapter Three
Hannah pulled into the circular drive in front of the massive two-story brick home. As she did so, the butterflies in her stomach multiplied. This interview simply mattered too much. She was on the ropes and had no where else to go. Tyler Matthews had called her first thing this morning and she’d immediately agreed to a ten o’clock appointment with him.
“Lord,” she whispered. “Please let this be the place.”
She rang the bell and held her breath as the door swung open to reveal a dark cavern of rich cherrywood and parquet flooring. A round table that looked old and valuable sat in the center of the foyer with a flower arrangement on it that was at least four feet high, the kind she’d seen in the reception areas of fancy hotels. Those flowers alone would have paid her phone bill for six months.
She reached out her hand to the gentleman at the door and said, “Hello, I’m Hannah St. James. You called me to...” Then she looked into his face and a single word slipped out. “You!”
He stared back at her, obviously equally surprised. “From Dr. Harvey’s parking lot? I had no idea...”
Of course not. There’d been no way to make such a connection. Dr. Harvey must have gone right into the next examination room and told these people about her. “Neither did I.” He’d never let her take care of his grandmother after what she’d done to his brand-new car.
“I was there looking for work,” she managed shakily.
“And he suggested we call you,” Tyler said, seemingly staggered that she’d turned up on his doorstep.
A faint bell chimed upstairs and they both glanced in that direction.
“My grandmother. I’ll be right back.”
“I could come and say hello,” Hannah offered, hoping to revise his first impression of her.
“Not yet. My office is to the left. We have to talk first.”
* * *
Feeling uncomfortable and tongue-tied, Hannah feared she wasn’t making a very good impression. What’s more, Matthews kept looking at her strangely as she sat at his desk in the chair across from him. Perhaps he expected her to do something silly...again. Still, there’d been a coffee service on the corner of the desk and he’d offered her a cup. The man had manners when one wasn’t crashing into his fender.
“I need someone who is willing to move in and live here in this house,” Tyler was saying.
“I can’t, Mr. Matthews. I own a home. I live with my sister and eight-year-old son. It wouldn’t be right to leave them.”
“No husband then?”
The next words out of his mouth startled her so that her jaw dropped.
“Bring your son along. He can live here with you. Your sister, too, if you like. My grandmother enjoys children. They could entertain each other.”
“My sister is in college. She’s old enough to live on her own, but Danny...you’d really permit that?”
Tyler sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Here’s the deal, Mrs. St. James.”
“Hannah.”
“Very well, Hannah. My grandmother is a spitfire. She has energy that some forty-year-olds don’t have. She’s not accustomed to being confined to a wheelchair and the lack of mobility makes her irritable. I have an import and export business that needs my immediate attention. I love my grandmother with all my heart, but I can’t make her happy and still run my business. I need someone to live in the house, be available to her 24/7 and to keep her busy. It isn’t an easy job. Frankly, I’m getting desperate.”
So desperate that he’d hire even her? Was that why he hadn’t turned her away at the door when he recognized her?
“That’s asking a lot.”
“You’ll have your freedom and time off, but you’ll need to work around my schedule. I want someone here for Grams if she gets into mischief. Grandmother doesn’t normally get into trouble, of course. She usually creates it.”
She studied him closely. He looked tired. Huge stacks of papers and files littered his desk. What’s more, she understood what he was saying about his grandmother. As people aged, their hours passed more slowly, and they craved contact with others and ways to fill those empty spaces. Lily would probably prefer that Tyler never leave her side at all except to sleep—and then for as few hours a night as possible.
“Frankly, Mr. Matthews, I’m surprised you’re even talking to me. After all, I’m the one who ran into your new car. You must think I’m irresponsible, yet you’re willing to hire me?”
His eyebrows rose and his blue eyes widened. A smile crept across his face. “Frantic is what I am. I wouldn’t let you drive Lily to the clinic, but if you stayed inside the house...”
Hannah couldn’t help smiling. If he could make a joke of it, so could she.
“There is one rather large problem, however.”
Her heart sank a little. “Oh?”
“Yes. I’d like you to start immediately. You can move in this evening. I realize you’ll have to go home and pack. Maybe you can bring what you need for the week and then take your time getting the rest.”
He was asking her to leave her home, move in with virtual strangers and raise her son in an unfamiliar place—all in a matter of hours? It didn’t
even sound rational. Was the Matthews home in a different school district? She didn’t know. She didn’t have gas money to be driving Danny back and forth to school.
“I need time to think.”
“I’m afraid I need an answer now.”
Hannah opened her mouth to protest, but instead “I’ll take it” popped out.
* * *
“Good. I want to let Lily know you’re here before she sees you. Then I’ll show you the house.”
He left Hannah in his office while he mounted the stairs to Lily’s room.
She was sitting in her rocking chair, knitting. Her white hair was a tumble of tight curls. She looked practically angelic in her pale pink velour outfit.
Looks could be deceiving, Ty thought wearily.
“You didn’t bring her up to meet me.”
“You have met her. She’s the woman who ran into us at the clinic.”
“With that dreadful little car? That sweet thing? Scoop her up.”
When Ty paused, Lily’s jaw hardened and her eyes turned flinty. “I liked that girl. If you can’t get her, then just toss me into the nursing home so you can tend to your business and get me completely out of your hair. Maybe I should just check myself in.”
Lily always threatened to check herself into some institution or another when things weren’t going her way. Ty’s grandfather had always considered Lily’s occasional petulance cute and bent over backward to fulfill his wife’s wishes. It had given him great pleasure, in fact, to spoil his Lily.
Tyler wasn’t like his grandfather, but he didn’t like to cross Lily any more than the older man had.
“I did hire her, Gram. I’ll bring her up. She has to go home to pack a few things, of course, but she’ll be back tonight.”
Lily’s face was suddenly wreathed with smiles. She reached out and patted his hand. “Darling boy.”
She looked so pleased that Ty couldn’t feel too badly about doing something so impulsive. He wanted only the best for his grandmother.
Lily had become forgetful lately. Dr. Harvey had casually said that it was likely a result of being upset about her fall and that he doubted that it was the early stages of dementia. Dementia. Ty had never before considered such a thing happening to Lily. It changed how he thought about his grandmother. Since that conversation, Ty had feared the worst and hoped for the best.
