Pupcakes

by Annie England Noblin

  “Sure.”

  Rita came around the desk and squatted down in front of Teddy, allowing him to smell her first and then scratching him under his chin. “I better let you get to it,” she said, giving Teddy one final scratch. “You’ve just got about ten minutes before the doors lock.”

  Brydie pulled Teddy away from his adoring fan, much to his displeasure, and continued down the hallway to Pauline’s room. Engrossed in an episode of Diagnosis Murder, she didn’t notice them when they walked in.

  “Hello?” Brydie asked, knocking quietly on the door frame. “Can we come inside?”

  Pauline grabbed at the remote, but it slid from her hands and broke open onto the tile floor, spilling its batteries. “Well, fiddlesticks,” she mumbled, making an unsuccessful attempt to sit up from the bed.

  “I’ll get it,” Brydie offered, letting go of Teddy’s leash and reaching down underneath the bed to retrieve the remote.

  When she reappeared seconds later, Pauline was staring at her, glassy-eyed. It occurred to Brydie after a few awful moments of silence that the look on the older woman’s face was one of confusion. She was trying to place Brydie . . . as if . . . as if she didn’t know who she was.

  Pauline was afraid.

  Just as Brydie was about to speak, about to offer to get a nurse, Pauline’s eyes cleared and she smiled. “Brydie, dear. I’d quite forgotten you were coming tonight.”

  Brydie felt a wave of relief wash over her. “I’m sorry I’m so late,” she said. “Dinner ran longer than I thought it would.”

  “It always does,” Pauline said. “What have you got there?”

  Brydie held out the Tupperware dishes she’d brought with her. “You’ve got pumpkin pie, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and a good-sized helping of shepherd’s pie.”

  “Sounds delightful.” Pauline patted the bed for Brydie to lift Teddy up next to her. She stroked his ear.

  “I’m sorry there’s no turkey,” Brydie said. “There was a mishap.”

  “Are you the mishap?” Pauline asked, glancing down at the dog nestled in her lap. “You smell like you might be.”

  “It wasn’t really his fault,” Brydie said. “Sasha knocked it down off the counter.”

  “Sasha?”

  “Nathan, um, Dr. Reid’s dog.”

  “Dr. Reid was there?”

  Brydie nodded. “He was.”

  “Well, now,” Pauline said. “That’s certainly more interesting than the turkey.”

  Brydie tried to smile. She didn’t have the heart to tell Pauline that she’d gone and messed it up. She’d messed it up every time, it seemed, and now he was done being patient. He was done waiting for her to make her move, to figure it out. “When his dog and Teddy get together, disaster usually ensues.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “Me, too.”

  From behind them, an orderly tapped on the door. “It’s really past time for visitors, Mrs. Neumann.”

  Pauline waved him away. “She’s just leaving, Thomas.”

  Thomas made no move to leave. He just continued standing at the door, looking at Brydie as if she were keeping him from making the rest of his rounds.

  “You’d better go on,” Pauline whispered to her. “Thomas is a stickler for the rules. That’s why he works nights here. Nobody else could keep Bob and Phyllis from sneaking to the therapy pool after midnight.”

  Brydie stifled a giggle. “Well, I wouldn’t want to keep him from his duties,” she said.

  “His duty is to be a killjoy,” Pauline replied, just loud enough for Thomas to hear.

  Still, Thomas didn’t move. He reminded Brydie of one of the guards people saw at Buckingham Palace—expressionless and yet at the same time very serious indeed. She couldn’t imagine that the nighttime antics of the elderly would get so crazy that they’d need such an enforcer, but perhaps Bob and Phyllis weren’t the only offenders.

  Brydie moved Teddy from Pauline’s bed and down to the floor. “Where should I put this food?” she asked.

  Pauline pointed to a mini fridge at the back of the room that Brydie had never noticed before. “Throw it in there. I’ll have it for lunch tomorrow instead of having them bring me something from the cafeteria.”

  “Don’t you go down there to eat anymore?”

  “Heavens no,” Pauline said. “I haven’t been down there since the Halloween party.” She pointed to her small frame, covered in thick blankets. “Nothing about me works well enough to get out of this bed anymore, it seems.”

  “They’re bringing your food to your room?” Brydie asked, her brow furrowed.

  “They are.”

  “How about on Sunday, I bring you lunch. From anywhere you want. Where would you like me to go?”

  “Oh,” Pauline said, clapping her hands together. “How delightful. Anywhere?”

  “Anywhere!”

  “Gus’s,” Pauline replied. “But you’ll have to make sure you get enough for Teddy. It’s his favorite, too.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” Brydie replied. “But if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll get.”

  Pauline opened her mouth to respond, but closed it when there was a not-so-subtle cough from Thomas in the doorway, and she rolled her eyes instead. “Listen, before you go, there is one more thing I want to talk to you about,” she said, waving away Thomas’s exasperated sigh.

  “Sure,” Brydie said. “What is it?”

  “I want to apologize for the way I acted after Thor’s birthday party,” she said. “I know I was unkind to you, and I shouldn’t have been.”

  “No, I should be the one apologizing,” Brydie said. “I should have called first instead of just going downstairs.”

  “You did the right thing,” Pauline continued. “You were charged with taking care of my house, and that’s exactly what you did.”

  “I got everything cleaned up,” Brydie said. “There wasn’t any major damage.”

  “I haven’t been down in that basement in a long time,” Pauline replied. “It got too hard for me to go up and down the stairs.”

  “Did you go down there often?” Brydie desperately wanted to ask her about the photos and the trunk, but she was afraid of upsetting her. If Pauline had gotten so angry simply knowing Brydie was down there, she didn’t want to know what she might say about the photo album.

  “I used to,” Pauline said. “I kept many memories down there. Memories I couldn’t bear to look at every day, but memories I was afraid I might forget.”

  “I have some memories I really wish I could forget,” Brydie mumbled.

  Pauline reached out and took Brydie’s hand. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t ever wish to forget anything.”

  “Sometimes I think that if I forgot about certain things, I’d be a better person . . . an easier person to get along with,” Brydie confessed.

  Pauline shook her head, adamant, and said, “The minute you begin to forget what you’ve experienced is the minute you cease to become the person you were and begin to become someone else. Someone unrecognizable in the mirror in the morning.”

  “Would that be bad?”

  “It wouldn’t be you.”

  “And those memories in your basement . . .” Brydie said carefully, slowly. “You don’t wish to forget them? Even though you can’t bear to have them upstairs where you live your life?”

  Pauline let out a sigh. A sigh so loud that Thomas hurried over to where they were and said to Brydie, “I think it’s time for you to go now.”

  “I’m fine, Thomas,” Pauline objected. “I’m fine.”

  “You need to rest,” he said, glaring over at Brydie. “I’ve been telling you that for half an hour.”

  “It’s okay,” Brydie said, freeing herself from Pauline’s grasp. “Thomas is right. It’s getting late.”

  As Brydie made her way with Teddy toward the thick double doors for exiting to the parking lot, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored windows re
flecting off the streetlights. The woman staring back at her looked worn down. She looked pinched and pained. She looked, she realized, just exactly as her mother had looked in the bedroom earlier that evening. It was no wonder Pauline scarcely recognized her, although she knew with a sinking realization that Pauline’s health was failing right before her very eyes. It seemed odd that the vibrant old woman she’d met that first day could be the sickly creature she’d seen the past couple of weeks.

  She wondered what it was that Nathan saw in her, what he saw that made him like her, made him want to be with her. It had been so long since she’d seen herself as desirable. If, in fact, she ever had. Sometimes Allan would tell her she was beautiful, but that had been long ago, when they were first married. Brydie sometimes felt like he said it out of obligation—because he thought it was something a husband should say. He’d never looked at her the way he’d been looking at Cassandra in the photograph her mother texted her.

  But Nathan looks at me that way.

  When Brydie thought about it, really thought about it, she couldn’t imagine being Pauline’s age and married to Allan. She couldn’t imagine languishing in a nursing home, alone, only to realize that she’d spent her entire life with a man who didn’t really love her. And even worse, that she hadn’t really loved herself. Maybe that’s what her mother had meant when she said she’d taken her anger out on Brydie. She’d been unhappy in her marriage and unhappy with herself. Brydie wished she and her mother had talked about it before now—about all of it, even the parts Brydie didn’t want to admit to, like her father’s drinking. Maybe if they’d had a better relationship, they both would have been happier.

  Brydie stared back at her reflection, hard. At her feet, Teddy nudged her to keep moving. Instead she bent down and picked him up, awkwardly clutching him to her, breathing in his musty scent. She brought his face to eye level with hers, and when she did, Teddy unfurled his tongue and licked her.

  “Come on,” she said, putting him back down on the sidewalk. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got one more stop to make tonight.”

  CHAPTER 30

  ALL OF THE LIGHTS WERE OFF AT NATHAN’S HOUSE BY THE time Brydie pulled into his driveway. She sat there for a few minutes, debating whether to knock on the door. She knew he probably had to be at work early the next day, and maybe he’d changed his mind about her coming over.

  Brydie shook her head. No. He’d asked her over. She got out of the car and carried a snoring Teddy to the door and rang the bell.

  Nathan answered, wearing a white shirt and fleece pajama bottoms with moose all over them.

  “Nice pants,” she said, grinning at him. She placed Teddy down on the floor and he melted into it, as if he hadn’t even noticed he’d been moved from the back of the car.

  “I thought you’d decided against coming over,” he said. His voice was thick, husky from something. What was it? Sleep?

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I can go,” Brydie said. She went to turn around, but Nathan took her hand.

  “I want you to stay,” he said. “Please.”

  He led her toward the stairs, not saying another word. The top floor in his house was almost completely dark, with the exception of a warm, yellow light coming from a room at the opposite end of the stairwell. Once inside the room, it became apparent to Brydie that this was Nathan’s bedroom, and she felt herself blush at the intimacy of simply being there.

  In the middle of the room was one of the largest beds that Brydie had ever seen. A thick white comforter and plush pillows covered it. There was a dark wooden desk in one corner, and a pair of discarded scrubs were slung over the chair in front of the desk. Magazines and books covered the top of the desk completely. The floor was almost as dark as the desk, but a gray rug covered much of it. It was a room that was meant to be comfortable. Lived in. Slept in.

  “I spend a lot of my time in sterile places,” Nathan said, as if reading her thoughts. “I never wanted my home to reflect that. Especially not the place where I close my eyes at night and open them in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry that I woke you up,” Brydie said because she didn’t know what else to say.

  Nathan kissed her, and it was harder this time, with more force than he’d had when he was in the kitchen with her earlier that evening. “I couldn’t sleep now if I tried.”

  Brydie pulled at him, an urgency that she hadn’t known existed until now surging through her, and Nathan put his hand onto the small of her back to stay her, leading her over to the big bed.

  She sat down, staring up at him as he took off his shirt. He lowered himself down on top of her and began to kiss her again, and this time she had trouble catching her breath in between the meeting of their lips. She allowed him to pull off her own shirt and then her jeans, her hands finding their way to the mass of curls on his head.

  As Nathan’s mouth made its way down from her lips to her collarbone to her breasts, Brydie felt herself opening up, blooming right there in his bedroom underneath him. It was a confidence she’d never known existed. A small, satisfied smile escaped her lips, and she closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again, Nathan was watching her. Their eyes locked, and she managed to whisper, “Please.”

  Without breaking her gaze, he slid himself inside of her. Now Brydie sucked in her breath, air filling her lungs. Thoughts of everything else fled from her mind. She didn’t think about Allan or Cassandra or the last year of her life spent in turbulence and virtual homelessness. She didn’t think about the loss of her bakery or the fight she’d had with her mother or the withering old woman at the nursing home. There was nothing else but this moment, the here and now with Nathan Reid, and the exquisite moment that the two of them became one.

  BRYDIE AWOKE THE next morning to the smell of coffee and bacon frying. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, for a moment forgetting where she was. As she stretched out, one of her feet hit a hard lump at the foot of the bed, and she realized that both Teddy and Sasha were there, fast asleep. She reached down and gave both dogs’ ears a scratch before swinging her legs over the side of the bed and groping around the dimly lit room for her pants.

  It was raining outside, a fine mist that seemed to coat everything, even inside the house, and Brydie shivered slightly when her bare feet left the carpet and hit the wooden floor in Nathan’s bedroom. Downstairs the light was much better, and she followed the scent of coffee into the kitchen.

  She watched him from the entryway for a second, her nervousness about seeing him in the daylight getting the better of her. She hadn’t meant to spend the night, not really, although Brydie had to admit it was a happy accident. They’d stayed up for a while afterward, talking. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but once during the night she’d woken up to find the bathroom and considered leaving. She hadn’t wanted to make the morning awkward.

  But she’d returned to the bed and watched him sleeping, the way his lips parted slightly as he breathed. The rhythmic motion of his chest moving up and down, up and down, up and down. She thought she might just slide into bed for a few more minutes to be next to him, and when she had, he’d reached over and grabbed her hand, whispering, “Don’t go.”

  Before she could protest, she was fast asleep next to him. She hadn’t woken up again until just a few minutes ago, slightly dazed and alone in the big bed.

  “Oh, good morning,” Nathan said when he saw her, making her jump. “I was wondering when you might wake up.”

  “What time is it?” Brydie asked, shaking her head to clear her thoughts. She still felt fuzzy from everything that happened the day . . . and night . . . before.

  “Almost nine A.M.”

  Brydie accepted the cup of coffee he offered her and said, “But I thought you had to be at the hospital hours ago.”

  “I called in,” he replied.

  “You did?”

  “First time, ever.”

  Brydie cocked her head to one side. �
�Oh?”

  “I thought we might spend the day together,” Nathan said. “I mean, if you didn’t have any other plans.”

  Brydie was taken aback by this. She hadn’t really expected to be asked to stay, especially after he’d told her he had to be at work before dawn. Truthfully, she’d expected a note and a promise for a phone call. “I don’t,” she said.

  “You don’t have to work tonight?”

  Brydie shook her head. “I don’t have to be back at work until Monday night.”

  “Great,” Nathan replied, rubbing his hands together. “I have somewhere I want to take you.”

  “Where?”

  “Nope.” Nathan moved back over to the stove, flipping the bacon. “It’s a surprise.”

  “Can I go home and shower after I eat? Change?” Brydie asked, feeling giddy. “I don’t want to go anywhere in the same clothes I wore all day yesterday. I smell like turkey.”

  Nathan grinned. “Pick you up in an hour?”

  “Sure,” Brydie said. “But what’ll I do with Teddy? He’s still upstairs asleep with Sasha.”

  “Leave him here.” Nathan waved her off. “Sasha got up early with me this morning, and we went for a jog. She got back up into bed with the two of you an hour ago, and neither you nor Teddy even rolled over. I’m sure he’ll still be up there asleep when you get back.”

  “Okay,” Brydie replied. “If he does get up, he’ll want eggs for breakfast.”

  Nathan raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t judge me,” Brydie replied. “It’s our routine.”

  “Will his highness want coffee or tea to drink?”

  “Water will be just fine,” Brydie said. “But if you have it, he’d probably prefer Earl Grey.”

  BY THE TIME Brydie was dressed and ready to go, the rain had begun to pour. She wondered for a moment if they should cancel their plans. It was silly, she knew, but driving in the rain made her nervous and Memphis drivers could be . . . well, eccentric. It wasn’t particularly cold outside, in the mid-forties, but she’d heard that there was snow and ice in northern Arkansas and Missouri.