Born only with the sophisticated help of the most advanced medical technology, still Alex would be a young man before the horse and buggy even gave way to the automobile.
A chromium child, growing up in a candlelight age.
"He's going to be just fine, this boy of ours," Myles declared, and Paige knew it was the truth.
A great peace came over her.
Myles sat down beside her, his strong arm supporting them both.
"Welcome home," he whispered.
—The End—
Yesterday’s Gold: Chapter One
Hannah Gilmore was hot and tired, and her patience was wearing thin.
It was early July, and the city of Victoria was experiencing a heat wave. This discussion she was having with her fiance wasn't exactly cooling her down, either. In spite of a sense of growing irritation, she did her best to make her voice quiet and reasonable, mindful of the other people also strolling in the waterfront park where she'd suggested they meet after work.
She’d thought a walk would be relaxing for both of them, but she’d been wrong.
Brad was holding her hand, and she could feel the tension in his grasp.
“I'll only be gone for the weekend, Brad. Well, four days, actually. I’ve taken off Friday and Monday at the hospital. I had some time banked."
“Four days?” Brad Langston’s attractively bony face tightened with displeasure, and his light blue eyes narrowed behind his fashionable glasses. "So you're leaving tomorrow?"
"Yes.” Hannah nodded. It had been wrong of her not to let him know earlier, but she’d kept putting it off. "That’s pretty short notice. And it just seems irresponsible to me, Hannah, going traipsing off to some ghost town in northern B.C. two weeks before our wedding. What're you going to do up there, anyway?”
Hannah shrugged. "Walk around. Visit the cemetery. Mom wants to find her great-grandfather’s grave.” She felt defensive. She hated feeling that way, and her stomach clenched the way it always did when she and Brad had a difference of opinion. They seemed to be having a lot of them lately, in spite of the fact that they were well suited in temperament, if not in background.
Well, at least they never actually fought about anything, she consoled herself. They could usually settle whatever minor differences they had with a quiet, rational discussion.
In this instance, the trouble was that she knew going to Barkerville at this particular time wasn't really rational, and for some reason that made her feel impatient and annoyed with Brad. Now why the heck should that be?
Maybe she was just having premarital jitters. Her friends at the hospital had warned her about them. This is the man you love, Hannah, she reminded herself sternly. Explain this properly, and he’ll understand.
She drew in a calming breath and deliberately wove her fingers through his, palm to palm.
"I promised Mom years ago I’d take her on this trip someday, and for some reason she's suddenly got it in her head she wants to go right now. Her great-grandfather was a prospector up there during the Cariboo gold rush and she thinks he’s buried in the old cemetery in Barkerville."
Brad let go of her hand and gestured in a way that reminded Hannah he was a lawyer. “He’s not going anywhere, is he? So why does this have to happen now? Or, if Daisy absolutely has to go this minute, why can’t she just take the bus up there herself? Barkerville’s only a couple of hours drive from Prince George, there must be bus tours. I’ll tell you what, I’ll pay for the plane ticket, the bus—I’ll even spring for a motel for the weekend for her, how’s that?"
Why did he always have to make her feel that money was the major issue, even when it wasn’t? Hannah tried for a smile and failed. “That’s very sweet, Brad, but you know Mother wouldn't consider flying because of Klaus. She wants me to drive her, and I’ve agreed." Not that driving for long hours with her mother and that neurotic dog was exactly Hannah's idea of a pleasant way to spend a weekend. Klaus had bad breath and an unpredictable temper, but he was her mother’s closest companion.
"They won't take dogs on the bus, and she wouldn’t put him in the baggage compartment of a plane. He's getting old."
"Well, in my opinion," Brad began, and Hannah could tell that he was about to make a pronouncement on Daisy and Klaus that she really didn’t want to hear. Hannah might criticize Daisy herself, but she didn’t appreciate having Brad do so.
She dodged a girl on a skateboard and interrupted him, which she knew he hated.
"This is the first time since my father died that Daisy's shown any interest in going farther than the supermarket,” she said rapidly. "You know I've been worried about her, so if it'll make her feel better to spend a couple of days tramping around a ghost town, I don't see any harm in taking her." She knew she was annoying him, doing what he called filling the air with unnecessary words, but she couldn't stop herself, and she didn’t want to anyhow.
She’d had a long, distressing day at work. A young boy she cared about had almost succeeded at a suicide try. She was hot and tired and discouraged, and now she was losing her temper.
"Brad, please. It’s over two years since my mother's ventured off this island, and even then it was just to take my father to that specialist in Vancouver. For all the good that did. When somebody's liver’s shot, it’s shot. Maybe going on this trip is something I should do for her. Maybe it'll get her out of the rut she's in, give her a new lease on life.”
Brad snorted. "You’d think our wedding would get her out of a rut if anything was going to. But"—his voice assumed a self-righteous tone that raised hackles on Hannah's neck— "You’ve got to admit Daisy doesn’t seem very interested in our wedding. It’s my mother who’s putting in twelve-hour days planning this whole thing. And you know how often she’s asked for Daisy’s input, with absolutely no response.”
Hannah bit her lip and told herself not to remind him that it was his mother, not hers, who’d wanted a wedding where the guest list included a sizable portion of the city. Lydia Langston made it plain that she wanted her youngest son married in the same elaborate fashion her two other sons had been wed, and all of Hannah’s desperate assurances and not-so-quiet insistence that she preferred a modest little ceremony with just family present had gone unheard and unnoticed.
After all, Lydia was paying for the wedding, as she reminded Hannah at frequent intervals, and so she felt she had the right to have the whole thing her way.
Hannah had even overheard Lydia say that the wedding was a perfect opportunity to pay back social obligations to certain people without having to invite them to the house for dinner.
And maybe Lydia did have the right to have it her own way, Hannah told herself wearily, trying not to feel bitter about the fiasco her wedding had become.
Lord knew Hannah and her mother had precious little money to spend on anything since her father’s death eleven months ago. They’d had to borrow to pay for the funeral, never mind finance a wedding. She supposed she ought to be grateful that Lydia was being generous and footing the bill.
The trouble was, Hannah couldn’t help but suspect the lavish preparations were more a control issue on Lydia’s part than a show of generosity, and she had black moments when she visualized what it was really going to be like to be Lydia’s daughter-in-law, living a short ten- minute walk from the huge stone house and landscaped lawns where Brad had grown up.
He’d insisted on renting a house for them in the same neighborhood his parents lived in, even though it meant spending more on rent than Hannah thought wise.
There were further inklings that weren’t reassuring about her future mother-in-law. Hannah’s thoughts went unwillingly to last Tuesday and the Emily Post Book of Etiquette that Lydia had given her as a shower gift. Hannah had opened the box in full view of twenty-three women, of whom only half were her friends. The rest had been strangers, invited by Lydia, and when Hannah lifted the thick, heavy book out of its gift-wrapped box, she felt a wave of hot embarrassment. Anger and humiliation followed as the implic
ations of this so-called gift sank in, and she was painfully aware of the telling glances that several of the guests exchanged, and the sympathetic ones her friends sent her way as she stammered her way through thanking Lydia.
She had felt more like smashing the heavy, gold-embossed book on her future mother-in-law’s perfectly coiffed head.
She knew Lydia thought her lacking in what the Langstons considered social graces, but giving Hannah the book at a bridal shower seemed an outright insult.
Daisy thought so too. She’d claimed to have one of her migraines the night of the shower, so she wasn’t present, but when she saw the book among the other gifts, she’d been outraged. "So that—that despicable woman thinks that I didn’t teach you any manners,” she’d fumed. "Just because we don't have money doesn't mean we’re ignorant. Doesn’t she realize that?”
Daisy’s wide, dark-brown eyes, identical to Hannah's own, filled with tears. "You come from good, sturdy stock, Hannah, and don't you forget it. My ancestors were respectable tradespeople, and your father's people were once lords in Scotland. Your father was a gentleman.”
Daisy's defense of him always made Hannah furious. A gentleman, all right, who died penniless, she wanted to scream. A gentleman who one way and another gambled his way through her mother's inheritance, a tidy fortune by anyone's standards. A gentleman who relied on his silver tongue and movie-star good looks to ensure that he'd be forgiven, no matter how many foolish risks he took with money, how many promises he broke.
But of course Hannah didn’t say any of those things to her mother. In spite of everything, and in Hannah's opinion there'd been more than enough of everything as far as her father was concerned, Daisy had adored Michael Gilmore, and since his death she'd mourned him so deeply and so passionately that Hannah had begun to have serious concerns for her mother’s health.
"I really wish you’d change your mind about this, sweetheart,” Brad was saying to her now in a cajoling way calculated to melt Hannah’s heart. "I’ll miss you. I’ve got that tax evasion trial coming up next week so I won’t get to see you much. I thought we’d go out for dinner Friday, maybe catch a movie. We could spend the night at your place.”
He looped an arm around her shoulders and drew her close, and for a moment Hannah seriously considered telling her mother she couldn't make the trip after all.
"I've got the stag on Saturday night, but you know Mom’s counting on us being there for Sunday dinner," Brad said.
Hannah’s resolve to go to Barkerville firmed up again in an instant. “I'll have to miss out this time, Brad," she declared without a shred of regret.
The dinners always followed the same pattern. Brad's father, Chuck, and the boys, as Lydia called her grown sons, disappeared all afternoon for endless games of golf while the women rode herd on eight grandchildren. In between chasing kids, the women were expected to help Lydia cook the enormous, heavy dinner.
Hannah hated cooking, and the women’s conversation drove her nuts. It was limited to hairstyles and fashion and who was divorcing whom on the television soap operas they all adored. Most of the time, Hannah didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about.
She preferred real people and their problems to television drama. Of course, she liked clothes, but her wardrobe was purchased more for comfort than the whims of fashion, suitable for her job as a social worker at the hospital. She'd tried countless times to discuss things she was interested in, like the astonishing rate of pregnancy among very young teens, or the closing of one of Victoria's shelters for battered women, but the others weren't interested. They quickly changed the subject back to skirt lengths and People magazine.
“I think you’re being really unreasonable, Hannah,” Brad declared, releasing her abruptly. "Your van isn’t even up to a long trip. You could run into trouble on the road."
"Barkerville's only a day's drive from Vancouver," she said defensively, admitting to herself that Brad did have a point about the van. It had belonged to her father, and it was the only thing of any material value that she had from him. For some perverse reason, she had a soft spot for the old thing.
"I'm a very careful driver, and I have a membership to the Automobile Association,” she reminded him, holding on to her patience with difficulty. “It’s July, so it’s not as if I’ll get caught in a snowstorm or anything."
“You're heading for northern B.C., and the weather up there's unpredictable," he said in an ominous tone, making it sound like the furthest reaches of Alaska.
Hannah straightened her shoulders, aware of the pain in her neck that had bothered her all day. She adored her job, but today had been tough. And getting married was proving to be stressful. It might be sort of relaxing, being alone with just her mother and the blessed dog for a while.
Maybe it would give her and Daisy a chance to really connect.
She rubbed at her neck and reminded herself how ridiculous that idea was. She and Daisy had never connected over anything in her entire life, and if it hadn’t happened in twenty-eight years, the chances weren’t great it would start now.
Hannah grinned, a sad grin, amused at her own stubborn naivete. She should have learned by now, in all her dealings with people, that relationships very seldom changed in any significant way once their basic pattern was established. And the pattern set so long ago between herself and her mother wasn’t one that included emotional intimacy. They were as different, Daisy was fond of saying, as night and day.
So why, Hannah wondered, did she go on naively hoping things would change?
She stopped and turned to face Brad. “I have to go now. I promised Mom I'd drop by and finalize the plans for the trip."
"I’ve got that meeting tonight, so I guess I won’t be seeing you until you get back, then," he said in a sulky voice.
"You know what they say about absence.” She dredged up a smile and looped her arms around his shoulders, lifting her face for a kiss, but when it came, it was more dutiful than passionate.
Yesterday’s Gold: Chapter Two
An hour later, at her mother’s house, Hannah wished fervently that she'd given in to Brad and canceled the trip.
"You invited Elvira to come with us? Mother, how could you do a thing like that without even asking me?"
She was staring at her mother, aghast. Hadn’t the day been difficult enough without this? The beginnings of a headache thrummed just behind her ears, and she had to struggle hard to control the urge to out-and-out holler at Daisy.
The only thing that really stopped her was knowing that if she raised her voice to her mother, Klaus would leap up from his pillow near the fireplace barking hysterically. He'd growl and nip at Hannah’s ankles with his sharp teeth, wrecking her panty hose, and these were the last pair she had without runs. Damn, she hated that dog.
"I don't think I really came out and invited Elvira, Hannah. I think actually it was she who suggested coming along when I mentioned the trip yesterday, and what could I say?” Daisy lifted her hands in a helpless little gesture. "She’s my best and oldest friend, after all. I've known her since you were nine. I know she’s got her funny little ways, but she promised to share the gas and motel expenses, and there’s plenty of room in the van. I really didn’t think you’d mind.”
Not mind? Hannah was enraged, but if she told Daisy how she really felt, her mother would tremble and then start to cry, and Hannah would feel like a bully.
Unlike Hannah, Daisy was a woman who cried easily and effectively, never getting redfaced and swollen and stuffy-nosed the way Hannah did on those rare occasions when she broke down. It was just one more example of the enormous gap between them.
Why was it so easy, Hannah wondered, for her to suggest what her patients should do in similar situations? Just say no, quietly and firmly, she’d advise them. Get in touch with your own feelings and stick with them. Why was it impossible for her to apply her good, strong, sensible advice to situations in her own life? Hannah’s shoulders slumped in defeat, and her anger subs
ided abruptly.
She felt as inept as she always felt around her mother. Part of it had to do with her size. At five ten, she'd inherited her father’s height and his strong bone structure. She'd towered over her tiny mother since she was twelve. The only genetic advantages she'd gotten from Daisy were her thick, wavy flaxen hair and her leaf-shaped, brownish-black eyes.
Daisy said the eyes came from a bedouin forefather, although how a bedouin ever got tangled up with Daisy's family was never explained.
Actually, when she wasn't around her mother, being tall didn’t really bother Hannah. In fact, she found her height gave her a distinct advantage at times, when she faced down some patient's bullying husband, for instance, or when she had to stand up to a doctor who wasn’t paying enough attention to a patient’s emotional needs. But around her mother, she just felt big and clumsy.
"Mom?" Hannah knew she sounded stern. “Why did you invite her without talking it over with me first?”
Daisy didn't quite meet Hannah’s eyes. She fiddled with the top buttons on her frilly blouse, her thin, fingers flitting here and there like the small birds hopping around in the poplar tree outside her kitchen window. "Elvira's almost like part of the family, and you know how she and Gordon get on one another’s nerves. It’ll be good for her to have a couple of days away from him. I thought you liked her, Hannah."
There was a defensive quaver in Daisy’s voice, and Hannah noted with alarm how much her mother seemed to have shrunk in the past months. She looked as if she was wearing a much larger woman’s clothing.
"I do like her; she’s been like an aunt to me. That isn't the point." Heaving a sigh, Hannah flopped down into a nearby chair, trying to figure out what the point really was. "I just get tired of hearing her complain about Gordon all the time. He’s a really nice guy. And she still treats me like some stupid little kid who needs to be told what to do.”
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