She waved lazily at a man in a passing pickup because that was what people did here. Coswell had only about two thousand residents now, but it had been closer to three when she’d been in high school. In a town that size, you knew everyone, and almost everyone in the surrounding county too. Certainly you knew someone’s cousins or one of the family’s kids. Everybody was intertwined. A net of people that reached out and out to the curves of the horizon. And Hannah had been a puzzle to all of them.
Not an outcast, really. Not hated. Just . . . nothing like the rest of the Smiths.
Rachel and Becky had been more like twins than simple siblings. They’d both been homecoming queens. Valentine’s Dance sweethearts. Cheerleaders. Not even mean-girl cheerleaders, but the upstanding kind who cared about their community and classmates. They’d been members of 4-H, raising rabbits to show at the state fair. Hell, they’d even been successive vice presidents of Future Homemakers of America. A legacy family!
Hannah snorted at the very idea of FHA, wondering whether that club was legal anymore. Surely not. Or if it was, the name had been changed to Rising Household Engineers or something.
Hannah had skipped homemaking classes and 4-H. Her biggest interest had been music, and not the country kind everyone else in town had loved. She’d been into punk and alt-rock. Though she’d never gone for a full punk look, she’d had four piercings in her right ear and she’d chopped her hair into a pixie cut when big hair had been the fashion. Instead of saving her money for Jordache jeans and stylish jackets, she’d saved it for bus trips to see the Ramones play in Minneapolis. Or L7. Or Sonic Youth. Sometimes she’d had to skip school to do it. Once she’d even disappeared for two days, only to be grounded for two months afterward.
Not that she’d been all “buck the system.” She’d gotten As and Bs in high school and had chosen accounting pretty quickly in college. She’d never been a bad kid, really; she’d just been full of an energy that had vibrated at a different frequency from the rest of her family.
She’d embraced feminism and women’s studies while her sisters had announced engagements. She’d concentrated on her career while her parents had been absorbed with their new grandchildren. Her family had loved her. Always. But they’d loved her cautiously because they’d never understood her.
Which was fine. She didn’t quite get them either.
Regardless of their differences, she was back now. Putting in the time. Here to relieve her sisters of their caregiving duties for a little while. Hannah would never contribute to the Smith gene pool, but she could contribute her time and love to this family, damn it.
It might even feel natural after a few more weeks.
She passed the old grain elevator at the outskirts of town, then the new grocery store. She should go in. Stock up. Maybe cook a good meal tonight.
She drove on by and headed into town.
Forty years ago there’d been a four-way stoplight where the highway bisected Main Street, but now it was just a flashing red. She slowed and looked both ways before rolling through.
She approached the older, smaller market. She’d viewed it as a fantasyland of possibilities when she’d been small. There had been five-cent gumballs that she could count on most of the time and twenty-five-cent cupcakes she could only talk her mom into once a month or so. Her dad, though . . . he’d been a reliable source of quarters.
But she didn’t stop there either. She was a terrible cook, she was hungry, and she was craving sushi. Good sushi. Not that there was a possibility of even bad sushi in this town. Resigned, she pulled into the off-brand fast-food joint some enterprising family had opened in the old Dairy Queen and walked in to order a fish fillet sandwich. “It’s almost sushi,” she assured herself as the door jingled shut behind her. The heavy grease on the air belied her words, but it also made her stomach clench with hunger.
Since returning home, she’d lived in fear of running into people she’d known in her youth, but she was trying to get over it. If the boy she’d lost her virginity to was now deep-frying fish for her, she’d just smile distantly and tell him he looked great. Luckily, the place seemed to be staffed by teenagers. She breathed a sigh of relief.
The sigh stuck in her throat when the customer in front of her moved away and she saw a familiar name on the flyer taped to the register.
Jensen. Common enough around here. But this Jensen was a five-year-old girl who was battling leukemia, and her parents needed help covering medical costs and travel to the Twin Cities. Olivia Jensen. Her parents’ names weren’t listed, likely because everyone else knew who they were.
“Ready to order?” the girl behind the register asked. Hannah nodded, but the words that formed on her tongue were Who are her parents? The words stayed there and dissolved. She was afraid to ask. She didn’t want to know if the bald, smiling girl in the picture was related to one of Hannah’s old friends. Jesus, she could be the daughter of her junior-high boyfriend, Alex. Shit, the girl could be his granddaughter.
“I’ll have the fish fillet,” she forced out. “And tater tots.”
“Anything to drink?”
Despite her dry mouth, she shook her head.
She paid for the food, then stared at the flyer. When the girl turned around to work on the order, Hannah hurriedly dug back into her wallet and withdrew a fifty. She stuffed it into the donation can, watching to be sure the girl didn’t see. After a few seconds, she took an additional forty dollars from her wallet and stuffed that in too. Palms sweating, she closed her purse and cleared her throat.
The girl wasn’t Alex’s, she assured herself. She wasn’t anyone Hannah might know. Probably.
There were just too many unsought connections in a town this size. No matter where you went, someone saw you, knew you, wanted something from you. Someone remembered the lowest point in your life and you remembered theirs. It was like dragging an open book around with you all day long, with the details of your family and your setbacks and all the ways you’d fallen.
Some people felt lost in a big city, but Hannah had felt free. Her emotions were hers to feel when she wanted, not surprises to be dredged up in every encounter.
Arms crossed, she waited impatiently for her food, then beat a hasty retreat to her car as soon as the bag was in her hand.
A few minutes later, she was home. The driveway was all hers now, and it felt so strange. No competing with her sisters’ cars and her dad’s truck. Their mother’s old Buick was still in the one-car garage. She needed to take it out soon. Drive it around to be sure the battery held a charge. This winter she’d move the old car outside and buy a cover for it so that Hannah could keep her own car snow-free.
Not that her mother would ever need her car again, but selling it felt wrong.
She shook her head as she hauled her purse and dinner to the kitchen door.
Lewy body dementia. That was the thing eating her mother’s mind away. Lewy body. A scourge she’d never heard of until her sister had spoken the words. They’d thought it was Parkinson’s disease when the first symptoms had started five years before. A frightening enough diagnosis on its own, but then the mood swings had started. Then the hallucinations.
That had been the clincher for the diagnosis, apparently. Most seniors with dementia didn’t see imaginary people. But Dorothy did. Not always, but often enough.
It must have been terrifying for Rachel, who’d been the one coming to their mom’s house every day at that point. It was still scary to Hannah, and she was surrounded by nurses and aides who were there to help at the drop of a hat.
She sighed as she set her dinner on the kitchen table and kicked off her shoes. It had been terrifying for her mother too, especially at the start, when she’d still realized how much she was losing. She’d tried to hide it. Tried to compensate. Just the trembling of her hands had been an embarrassment for her, a woman who’d always been so steady and never wanted a fuss.
Another wave of exhaustion hit Hannah, rolling through her skull and the taut musc
les of her neck, then all the way down until even her legs felt weak. She washed her hands, grabbed the bag of food and a cold beer, and made it to the couch before collapsing.
Why the heck was this so exhausting? All she did was sit there and talk with her mother, help her with lunch and the bathroom, keep her supplied with music and television shows. It was barely work at all, but Hannah felt weak as a baby.
She should go out for a run. Keep herself healthy. But one sip of the beer and she groaned and sank deeper into the overstuffed couch. This was heaven. She wasn’t going anywhere. Except to bed if she could make it.
She propped her feet up on the pile of divorce papers scattered over the coffee table and flicked on the television to lose herself in the latest iteration of her favorite crime show.
“CSI: Criminal Laziness,” she muttered.
Raising her beer in a toast to the TV, she vowed she’d do better tomorrow. Better at caring and committing and settling down like a good, decent Midwesterner.
“I’ll bake brownies,” she said. Her mom’s favorite treat. “I’ll clean the kitchen.” That felt all right too. “And I’ll . . . I’ll smile at everyone.” That one felt like utter bullshit, but she nodded solemnly. Time to finally learn how to be an Iowan. Really. She had to stop fighting it and fit in. How hard could it be if she applied herself? She’d lived here half her life.
CHAPTER 2
Hannah paid the sleepy-eyed cashier for the brownies and hurried to her car to transfer them to a plastic container she’d brought from home. Okay, they weren’t homemade, but did her mom even remember what homemade tasted like? And brownies were brownies. Hannah had never had a bad one, really.
After she pushed the empty supermarket container under the seat, she felt better. Small towns were breweries for paranoia. In any other place, it would be insane to think someone would see her buying brownies and mention it to her mother, but these things happened in Coswell, Iowa. Dorothy, you didn’t tell me Hannah was back in town! I saw her at the SuperValu, buying brownies, and I couldn’t believe it.
Of course, Hannah had the perfect immunization against gossip nowadays. Her mom would be just as likely to ask, Hannah who? as she would to realize Hannah had told a little white lie. In all likelihood, she wouldn’t remember that anyone had brought her brownies at all.
That wasn’t quite fair. Dorothy had good days when everything seemed almost normal. But those good days were becoming rarer. There had only been one in the past month.
Hannah had meant to make the brownies. She honestly had. In fact, she’d awoken at six thirty feeling more energetic than she had in weeks. Ten solid hours of sleep had done her good, and she’d grabbed a cup of coffee and started digging in to a pile of her parents’ documents, hoping to get through one stack before breakfast. There were so many stacks.
Her father’s death from stomach cancer had taken two years, and there’d been dozens of hospitalizations. Back then her mother had been sharp as a tack, and she’d demanded copies of every medical record he had.
After he’d died, and before anyone had realized Dorothy was getting sick, she’d also started saving every bit of mail that arrived. In the past month, Hannah must have thrown away five hundred credit card offers. But she was finally starting to make a dent.
Not that the house was in bad shape. The piles of paper were all confined to the den. Rachel and Becky were far too meticulous to have allowed their mother to slide into sloppiness.
So she’d meant to spend an hour going through papers before she made brownies and cleaned the kitchen. But at the end of that hour, she’d found something that had pissed her off. A thin file that contained her mother’s medical records.
Nothing too important. An X-ray report for the wrist she’d broken slipping on ice ten years before. An unfilled prescription for calcium supplements. Receipts for her Medicare payments. And a blood workup from a physical.
Hannah had glanced through everything to be sure they weren’t records the current doctors might need. But there must have been another, separate file with more important papers delivered to the care home at some point. Hannah had been about to tuck everything back into the folder when she’d noticed the blood type listed on the one-page report. AB positive.
“Jesus Christ,” she’d muttered. “Are they trying to kill her?”
Now, pulling out of the parking lot of the supermarket, she glanced down at the report in disgust. It was seven years old, so hopefully it wasn’t something that had been given to the current doctors, but what if they had it on file? What if they’d just entered the incorrect information without even checking it?
Hannah’s blood type was O negative, a fact she couldn’t forget if she wanted to. She was a universal donor, and the Red Cross sent her a postcard every six months reminding her to come in and donate. Her blood was the holy grail of emergency medicine, transferable to any accident victim who needed blood so badly they couldn’t wait for their type to be tested.
Anyone who remembered junior-high science knew that an O-negative offspring couldn’t have an AB-positive parent. It didn’t work that way. Someone at the lab had screwed up, and if her mom got the wrong blood, it could kill her.
So instead of baking brownies, Hannah had torn through a few more piles of paper, looking for more of her mother’s medical documents. When she hadn’t found any, she’d showered and headed out. She would present her mother with the brownies and the nurse on duty with the report.
Twenty minutes later, she breezed through the doors of the care center with a big smile. Irritated as she was by the mistake, she was also well rested and determined to stay positive today.
Thursday was movie day, after all. The activity director always chose upbeat movies. Hannah and the residents could lose themselves in hope and happiness for a couple of hours. Fake hope and happiness, but she’d take it.
She waved at the attendant behind the door of the care center’s memory wing and tried to ignore the fact that the lock sounded like a prison gate latching behind her once she was in.
When she drew close enough to the central desk to read the nurse’s name tag, she offered a greeting. “Hi, Tonya!”
“Good morning, Hannah!”
The nurse didn’t need a name tag to remember Hannah’s name, and she felt a quick jolt of familiar shame. She was selfish. She didn’t pay enough attention to people. She wasn’t part of the community.
Hannah smiled to hide her guilt. “Could you do me a favor? I ran across an old medical report of Mom’s that has an incorrect blood type. I’m hoping you can find out what you have on file here.”
“Absolutely.” She took the report Hannah offered. “I’ll check into it as soon as morning rounds are done. What should it be?”
“I’m not sure, but definitely not AB positive.”
“Got it. I’ll let you know what I find.”
First duty done, Hannah headed for her mother’s room, the bowl of lies clenched in her grip.
“Hi, Mom! I brought you brownies. Frosted. Your favorite. And don’t worry; I cleaned up my mess.”
Her mom smiled vaguely. “Hello, dear!”
Hannah tried not to let her smile waver. “Hello, dear” was the greeting Dorothy gave to people she didn’t remember. It had been silly for Hannah to count on something more just because she was feeling good today. At least her mom was upbeat this morning. Hannah would take that over sullen and frightened any day.
“Did you have a good breakfast?” she asked.
Her mom’s smile widened. “French toast. My favorite.”
Dorothy remembered the meal she’d had an hour ago, and she remembered which breakfast was her favorite, but couldn’t remember her youngest daughter.
Stop it, she commanded herself. Just smile and make her day a little better.
Why was this so damn hard to pull off? Why was it so easy for her to reassure obnoxious strangers about their millions of dollars and so hard to play along with her own parent?
“It�
�s movie day today,” she said with forced cheer as she retrieved a paper towel from the bathroom and presented her mother with a slightly squished brownie. “Have you heard what they’re playing?”
“I don’t think so . . .”
Right. Hannah wasn’t supposed to challenge her that way. “Let’s see, then.” She found the sheet of daily activities presented to the residents as if they were on a fun cruise instead of waiting to fade away. “Oh, it’s Grumpy Old Men. I haven’t seen that in years. I think you’ll love it. The movie isn’t until ten, but there’s a sing-along at nine.”
“Oh, I love singing!”
“I know! Should we pick out something to wear? Maybe throw on some lipstick?”
Despite her cheeriness, Dorothy’s hands were shaking badly today, so Hannah helped her eat the brownie first, then set about finding something bright for her to wear to match her mood. She supposed she should help her brush her teeth after the chocolate, but tooth decay wasn’t high on Hannah’s list of concerns at this point. She laid out the clothes, then scooted close to her mom to help her with a tiny bit of powder and blush, as if they were going to dinner and a show instead of to the rec room.
“You’re such a pretty girl,” her mother said.
“Thank you.”
“Do you have any children?”
God, she was disappointingly infertile even as a stranger. “No. No kids.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her mother reached out to pat her hand, and Hannah had to resist the urge to hold tight and curl in close for a hug. She missed being held. Her mother sighed. “Sometimes it’s just not meant to be.”
Well, it hadn’t been meant to be because of the birth control Hannah had been diligently using for nearly thirty years, but she didn’t mention that. Her mom had never understood Hannah’s desire to remain childless. Dementia wasn’t going to make the idea any easier to grasp.
“You must be married, though.”
“I used to be,” Hannah answered.
Her mother leaned close to whisper. “Not . . . not a divorce?”
Half Past: A Novel Page 3
