She forgot to breathe and it had nothing to do with the poor condition of her heart.
“Hi,” she whispered.
He stepped inside then and walked quickly up to the side of her bed. The nurse who had been sitting in the chair stood up and started walking toward the door. Jake sat down in the chair the woman vacated and reached out a hand so he could entwine his fingers with Cat’s as they lay on top of the quilt.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said then, and the satisfaction in his voice eased the fear inside her chest.
“When are they going to let me go to Minneapolis?”
“Your surgeon is coming here. All you need to worry about is getting yourself ready for surgery.”
She frowned and tried to sit up. “But my insurance company has it set up in Minneapolis.”
“Your surgeon has talked to them. It’s all taken care of. All you need to do is keep breathing, as deep as you can to get the air in your lungs.”
She found herself breathing in rhythm with him again. It was as though he carried her along with his strength.
“I need to tell Lara,” she whispered after a few minutes. “I need to be the one to tell her that you are her father.”
Jake nodded. “I’ll ask my brother to bring her in for a few minutes. The wedding isn’t until this afternoon.”
“Oh, the wedding.” Cat sighed. “I had forgotten.”
She touched the edge of his shirt. “I hope you have another one to wear to the wedding. This one needs a good pressing.”
“I’m not going to the wedding,” Jake said calmly. “I’m going to stay with you. Wade’s going to ask Charley Nelson to be his best man in my place.”
“Oh, you can’t do that,” she said. “He’s your brother. I’ll be fine by myself for a few hours.”
Suddenly she noticed the white bandage on his wrist. “What happened?”
“I gave blood for your surgery,” he answered. “And don’t worry. Wade understands.”
Cat nodded. She didn’t have the strength to argue. Everything felt so light, as though it wasn’t important, anyway. She didn’t understand how the surgery could be done here, but she was going to float on the knowledge. She needed to save what presence of mind she had now for her talk with Lara.
She wondered if someone had drawn the curtains again. The light in the room seemed to be fading away. Even though she had her eyes closed, she sensed the light was leaving. From somewhere, she remembered the stories she’d heard of people seeing a white light as they were dying. She seemed to catch a glimpse of something like that, but it was far away.
She moved her fingers in Jake’s hand and felt him press against them in return. She wondered if she should have told Jake that she loved him. He’d never said the words to her, but suddenly it seemed important that he know.
The darkness overcame her, though, and she slipped into a sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
Jake willed himself not to panic. Cat had slipped into a peaceful sleep and he was able to feel the rhythm of her breathing from the pulse in the hand of hers he still held. Unfortunately, he should be working while she rested. He figured he’d have to go out on the streets of Miles City pretty soon and beg strangers to come in and give blood.
Just then he heard a hesitant footstep in the doorway and looked up.
“Mrs. Hargrove.” He tried to keep his voice down so Cat wouldn’t stir. “It sure is good to see you.”
She might count as a friend. He’d always been nice to her, but now he needed to be charming.
The older woman stepped into the room with her gray hair clipped back with bobby pins and her metal cane in one hand. The other hand held a large shopping bag and she carried it over to the bed.
“Looking good today,” he said with a thumbs-up gesture.
She looked startled by that. “Oh.”
Then she nodded. “You’ve probably been up half the night.”
He didn’t know what to say to that so he kept quiet.
“Mary, out front, called and said you were looking for blood donors,” Mrs. Hargrove said. “They never take mine anymore, but I put the word out before I left Dry Creek.”
At first, Jake’s heart leaped in triumph. Then he realized something. Those people had no reason to come. The ones who weren’t clearing their fields to get them ready for plowing would be pressing their shirts for the wedding this afternoon. Anyone would rather go eat cake than drag themselves into Miles City and give blood. He’d never made himself popular in that town, either. “Tell them I’ll pay every man, woman and child fifty dollars if they come here and give blood.”
That should get him some action.
“You can’t do that!” Mrs. Hargrove looked at him, truly aghast for the first time since he’d seen her today.
He might not be part of the community in Dry Creek, but Jake figured people there were pretty much like people everywhere.
He continued, “Make it a hundred for the first twenty people to come and show me their bandage. No cheating, though. I’ll set up a system with the lab technician to check on everyone. I don’t know what age a person needs to be to give blood, but teenagers are probably okay.”
He would give away season tickets to the local football games if that’s what it took.
“People need to be over one hundred and ten pounds,” Mrs. Hargrove said, her lips pinched together as though she didn’t know what to do about him.
“Good, that will get the athletes,” Jake said. “All that exercise should build good blood.”
“But nobody pays for blood,” she protested.
“I do,” he said. “Today, I do.”
Mrs. Hargrove looked at him for a minute or two, but she didn’t say anything more. She might look a little disappointed in him, but he reasoned he was doing what he had to do. He couldn’t afford to trust in some fairy tale that had people rushing around to do kind things for each other. Too much was at stake here. He’d buy his community of friends and worry about sentiment later.
There didn’t seem much more to say and, finally, the woman reached in the bag she’d set on the bed and drew out a plant that stood about a foot tall. It wasn’t much of a plant as far as Jake could see. Just a spindly green stalk growing up in a plain brown pot, the kind they gave away at the grocery stores.
“Your mom said Cat was interested in her lilac bushes, so I dug up a shoot from one of my bushes to give to her. Thought she might like it.”
For some reason, Jake was able to look at that poor plant more easily than he could face Mrs. Hargrove, so he focused on it. “Hard to believe that thing blooms out with lilacs.”
“God’s creation is often that way.”
Jake was grateful Mrs. Hargrove didn’t have her flannel graph board with her. If she did, she’d compare him to a seed that fell on the side of the road and never grew. He’d heard the other kids talking about all the cut-out pictures she pressed onto the cloth in her Sunday-school class.
When she opened her mouth, he braced himself.
“Cat might want to plant some flowers of her own when this is all done,” she said, instead of any of the words he thought she’d say. “I sit in my garden some days when I pray.”
“She loves lilacs,” Jake agreed, anxious to get off the subject of prayer and God. That was as bad as the flannel graph.
Mrs. Hargrove walked with the plant over to the windowsill. She set the plant down and placed an envelope beside it. “I brought a get-well card for her, too. It has a rose on it. They’re my favorite and I figure anyone who likes lilacs is going to enjoy a rose.”
“Why don’t you open it up so she can see it from her bed,” Jake suggested. Now that the danger of her talking to him about God had passed, he was gratefu
l that she’d come.
The room was plain and didn’t have any pictures, he suddenly noticed. It had an old television hanging in the corner, but that didn’t add much to the decor. Maybe he should get someone to bring in a big poster with some flowers on it.
Mrs. Hargrove opened the envelope and slipped the card out. She carefully set it on the windowsill so Cat would see the pink rose on the front if she turned her head in bed.
“I brought a card for you, too.” The woman walked back and pulled another card out of her bag. “I figure it’s been too long since I sent you one.”
Now, this was a surprise, he thought to himself as he took the card.
“Very nice,” he said as he saw the landscape on the front. It looked like the Big Sheep Mountains in the back of the ranch. Then he opened it and saw the words she had scrawled. Her handwriting was a little harder to read than he remembered, but he knew the words even if half the letters were missing.
“Psalm 121, verses 1 and 2,” he said, as he had a hundred times before.
“I didn’t write out the words on this one,” she apologized. “I have arthritis in my fingers these days.”
“That’s okay.” He was ready for her. “‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.’”
“You memorized it!”
Jake thought she couldn’t have been more surprised if he had said it in Swahili.
“I didn’t have much to do when I was in that home. It doesn’t mean anything. I like to memorize.” He didn’t want her to think the Bible verses had been important to him, although he suspected they had been. All eleven of them.
She kept looking at him with that expectant expression on her face until he felt he had to say something more.
“God and I have never seen eye to eye,” he finally explained. “I’m more the kind of guy who figures I better get it done on my own. So I kind of leave Him alone and He leaves me alone. But I…” He stopped. Maybe he needed to just admit it. “I wish it were true that He cared. Even if I don’t believe, I wish I could.”
Mrs. Hargrove studied him hard for a moment, and then she began to smile. “You’ll see. You just haven’t needed Him enough to throw yourself at His feet yet. You can trust Him to help you believe.”
There was no answer to that so he shrugged.
Regardless of how he felt about God, Jake did care about Mrs. Hargrove. When she was ready to leave, he walked her down to the parking lot, holding her elbow securely in his hand. “It’s bad enough that my mother is having trouble walking, we don’t need another person hobbling around for the wedding this afternoon.”
“If you need someone to sit with Lara, just let me know,” she said as they stood by her car.
“Oh, I hadn’t thought,” he muttered half to himself. “If all goes according to the schedule, they’ll be doing Cat’s surgery while the wedding is happening. I guess I never thought about where Lara would be. What do you think? She’s only four.”
Mrs. Hargrove nodded slowly. “That’s right, but she’ll grow up whether or not her mother makes it through this surgery. And I can’t help but think she wouldn’t want to remember that she’d been sent to a wedding instead of being as close as she could be to her mother.”
Jake nodded. That made sense.
“I’ll come and sit with her,” Mrs. Hargrove offered as she opened the door on her car. “That way you can be with Cat before they take her into surgery and after she gets out. I’ll bring some books for us, and Lara and I can sit quietly in one of the waiting rooms.”
“She likes fairy tales.” Jake held the door while Mrs. Hargrove slid into the driver’s seat.
They said goodbye and he closed the door, turning to walk back to the hospital. He stopped at his pickup and got his hat that he’d left on the seat last night. Midway to the building, he stopped and looked at his watch. His money should have been wired to the places it needed to be and the airplane should have left Minneapolis by now. He should feel some satisfaction in a plan well executed, but he didn’t. All he wanted was for Cat to live. He hurried back to her.
Cat lay in the hospital bed and she could feel her heart was stronger. Maybe it was because the doctor had just been in and said Jake had arranged everything for her surgery this afternoon. The man had a funny look on his face when he mentioned Jake, but she did not ask him why. She wondered instead how she could be falling in love more deeply when her heart might be winding down.
Maybe there was just clarity at the end, she thought as she rubbed her hand along the seams in the quilt that still covered her. As she’d struggled awake the last time, she’d started to wonder who had made the covering that lay on top of her. She had felt the age of the fabric and wondered if the quilt was older than Gracie. It had not been made by machine, she could tell that much by looking at the tiny stitches that so evenly connected the blocks of denim material.
Jake suddenly appeared in the doorway again and, at first, it seemed as though her imagination had conjured him up. He had his Stetson on his head now. His hands were cold when they touched her.
“Mrs. Hargrove left you a tiny lilac bush,” he said as he pointed to the potted plant over on the windowsill. “And a card with a rose on it.”
She watched his mouth move as he spoke to her. She was not making sense of all the words, but she loved to watch his mouth form the words.
“That’s nice,” she managed to say and closed her eyes. She would just rest a minute or two, she told herself. Then she remembered.
“Don’t forget Lara,” she said, her voice not as strong as it should be.
“I won’t,” Jake promised as he settled her hand under his again. “I talked to Wade and he’s making arrangements to get her here. He said she needs to see you. She’s worried.”
Cat nodded. “She’s such a sweet little girl.”
“She’s beautiful,” Jake agreed softly, and she felt him smooth the hair back again and kiss her on the forehead.
“Wake me when she gets here,” Cat whispered.
“I promise.” Jake held her hand as she drifted into sleep.
She almost thought she felt someone kiss the back of her hand, but she couldn’t force herself awake to find out. Nothing mattered, though. Not when Jake was guarding her.
Chapter Fourteen
Despite the dark clouds on the horizon, Jake knew it was close to noon by the way the sun still shone through the window. The surgeon should be landing in Billings in ten minutes. Everything was going according to plan, Jake assured himself. He had it under control.
Then he looked at Cat’s pale face. She was sleeping and the doctor said that was good.
Nurses were rolling carts down the hall, delivering lunch trays, and one of them came into the room. She left a tray for Cat on the table at the foot of the bed. Then she looked at him and put down another tray. “Here you go, Mr. Goose.”
“Huh?” He glanced up.
He wondered if he had missed some cartoon. He was having a hard time keeping track of all the people who had been in the room so far today, but he thought he’d remember if someone had turned the television on.
“That’s what the staff decided to call you,” the nurse explained. “You know how a goose will hang back with its mate if one of them is injured?”
He smiled even though his heart wasn’t in it. “So they feed me for that?”
She nodded solemnly. “We respect geese here.”
Jake looked down at where his hand was intertwined with Cat’s. “There’s nothing special about me. I’ve made lots of mistakes.”
“But you’re still here. That counts for something.”
As the nurse was leaving, Wade came in holding a terra-cotta pot with a stake driven i
nto its dirt.
“For Cat’s garden,” he said as he held it up. “A tomato plant. It’s just starting. Amy got it from her aunt.”
“Cat likes tomatoes,” Jake said as he waved his hand at the windowsill. A half dozen other pots were already sitting there. The rumor that Cat wanted a garden had spread through Dry Creek almost faster than news that she needed blood for her surgery.
Wade held his arm up then and showed his bandage. “Amy will be up in a minute, she’s giving blood now. And Mrs. Hargrove is bringing Lara in soon.”
People had started showing up about an hour ago. Linda Enger from the Dry Creek Café was the first one, claiming she’d come as soon as she heard. She wore a hairnet and a white chef’s apron wrapped around her waist, so Jake believed her. He hadn’t seen her since he’d been sent to the home ten years ago, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She came up and gave him a hug and left a pepper plant for Cat.
Two teenage boys, twins from the look of things, stood in the doorway next. They just flashed their wrists so he could see their bandages and then they left, shaking their heads, declining the fifty-dollar bills he’d pulled out of his wallet.
Then Elmer Maynard had shown up with another lilac bush, this one so tall Jake asked him to set it on the floor beneath the windowsill. The older man explained he couldn’t give blood, but that he was making a donation to the Red Cross in Cat’s name.
Then came Charley Nelson and his daughter-in-law Doris June Nelson, who was also Mrs. Hargrove’s daughter.
They didn’t want the fifty-dollar bills he’d waved around, either, and he wondered if he was offering too little. Maybe people expected him to pay later.
“I could write a check,” he offered hesitantly to Doris June.
He remembered her and she’d always been pleasant to him. She was Mrs. Hargrove’s daughter.
“Absolutely not,” she told him firmly. Then she hugged him and welcomed him home.
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