“They’re all fragile,” Hannah said. “It’s a never-ending stream of fragile, broken-down people you and Coach have to build back up piece by piece. It’s wonderful what you’re doing; I’m sure you’ll get your wings when you get to heaven, but your wife is a little tired of having to get in line behind all the soldiers.”
“It’s what I do,” Sam said. “That was part of our deal.”
Before Sammy was born, Sam had agreed to move back to Rose Hill from their farm out on Hollyhock Ridge if Hannah would agree that he could sell his network security business and work full-time with recovering vets.
Full-time was an understatement. He was on call 24-7.
“We’re having people over for dinner,” Hannah said. “Will you pick up something to grill?”
“I told Vince I would go to his AA meeting this evening,” Sam said. “He’s getting his six-month chip tonight.”
“Can’t Coach do it?”
“I’m the one who mentors him and occasionally I need to give him my undivided attention.”
“When do I get your undivided attention?” Hannah asked.
“Tonight in bed,” Sam said. “Provided our son doesn’t have an earache or a toothache or a bellyache or a bad dream or a monster under the bed.”
“You’s fightin’,” Sammy said. “Me no like it.”
Hannah reached out and hugged her son between them.
“Sammy sammich,” Sammy said. “Dat’s better.”
“Will you at least take Sammy to school?”
“I planned on it,” Sam said. “I’ll pick him up, too.”
“Me no like school,” Sammy said. “Me stay at Auntie Delia’s.”
“Auntie Deliah is helping Auntie Bonnie at the bakery today,” Hannah said. “Besides, Miss Suzanne is going to let you guys play with the water tables today. That reminds me, you need to put a change of clothes and shoes in his backpack.”
“Already did,” Sam said, patting the backpack. “I do listen to you, you know.”
They left, and Hannah went upstairs to clean up the mess they made of the bathroom. Sam hadn’t even bothered to drain the tub. Hannah’s hairbrush was in the toilet, which hadn’t been flushed, and her bottle of vitamins was floating in the bathwater.
“Gross,” Hannah said, as she threw away the brush.
The vitamins seemed to be dry, so she put them back up on the counter where she kept them.
She was picking up wet towels when she heard the dog door flap, and four dogs stampeded up the stairs. Bunny and Chicken were unrecognizable with their muddy fur full of burrs and grass.
“No, no, you guys!” she cried, but they jumped on her and licked her face, their muddy paws all over her clean clothes.
“Out, out, out,” she yelled.
They beat a hasty retreat back down the stairs and back out through the dog door flap.
Hannah looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was sticky with syrup and lopsided from bedhead, her clothes were covered in muddy paw prints, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
“I wanna get married, I said. I wanna have kids, I said. I wanna live on a farm with lots of pets, I said. What was I thinking?”
A couple of hours later, out at the Pumpkin Ridge Organic Farm, Hannah was trying in vain to catch a wily, fast-moving border collie, who had been trying to round up the groovy free-range grass-fed cows, when her phone rang.
“Hannah, it’s your Aunt Deliah,” the voice said, but it was hard to recognize because of the crying. “Your Uncle Ian’s missing.”
Hannah threw what was left of the hot dog at the collie, explained what was happening to the farm owners, jumped in her truck, and put her foot down on the gas pedal until she was back in Rose Hill. She went to Deliah’s house first, where their friend, Kay, was commandeering volunteers over her cell phone. Church ladies were making coffee, there were already dozens of baked goods in boxes on the kitchen table, and several casseroles resting on the counter.
Deliah was sitting at the kitchen table, crying, with Hannah’s mother seated next to her.
“Hi, Mom,” Hannah said, and then bent over to hug her Aunt Delia.
“Did you even brush your hair this morning?” her mother, Alice, asked. “You could have at least shaved your legs. You look like a hippie. Honestly, Hannah Jane, I don’t understand you at all. It’s like you don’t even want to be a girl.”
“We’ll find him,” Hannah told Deliah.
“He was sound asleep in his chair,” Deliah said. “Usually nothing can wake him during his nap. I just ran out for a minute …”
“He needs to be in a home for crazy people,” Alice said. “He’s going to burn this house down with everyone in it.”
“Mom,” Hannah said to Alice. “You need to go home and wait there in case Ian shows up looking for Dad.”
“Well, I could do that, I guess,” Alice said. “I’d go out and look for him, myself, but my sciatica is so bad today, and I’ve been trying to get a migraine. You know how sick that makes me.”
“You go on,” Hannah said. “Please hurry, he might be there now.”
“I’ll go, but I can’t very well hurry. I have arthritis in my knees and my plantar fasciitis is acting up.”
Alice got up and left slowly, taking her cup of coffee and a doughnut with her.
“Thank you,” Delia said to Hannah, laughing through her tears. “God bless you, child, if you do nothing else that can be your good deed for today.”
“What’s the latest word?”
“Kay’s started the prayer chain, and everybody’s out looking,” Deliah said. “I just don’t know where he could have gone.”
She started crying again, and Hannah squeezed her shoulder.
“Don’t you worry,” she said. “We’ll have the whole town out looking for him and someone will find him.”
Hannah interrupted Kay on the phone.
“I’m going out to the farm,” she said. “Ian’s been wanting to go fishing; let’s just pray he didn’t put a boat on the pond.”
Out at the farm, she met Ed and her father leaving the house.
“We’re going to check the pond,” her father said.
“Cal’s getting a boat out on the river,” Ed said.
“I’ll get someone to go down to Turtle Creek,” Hannah said. “He can’t have walked that far but someone might have recognized him and picked him up.”
“Has anyone called Claire?” her father asked.
“I’m on it,” Hannah said.
When Hannah picked her up at the police station, the first thing she said to Claire was, “Now don’t panic, but your dad is missing.”
“Oh, Hannah, no.”
“The whole town is out looking for him,” Hannah said. “Someone will find him.”
“The river,” Claire said, as her heart raced and her mind spun through several horrid scenarios.
“Cal and the rescue team from the fire station are out on the river looking.”
“Oh, Lord help us,” Claire said. “This is my mother’s worst nightmare.”
“She feels awful,” Hannah said. “She’s at home waiting by the phone.”
“Go faster.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hannah said.
“This will kill her.”
“Please don’t worry. We’ll find him. Sam’s helping, and you know that man has serious skills.”
At the entrance to Rose Hill, traffic was backed up as cars were being stopped and people alerted to her father’s disappearance. Hannah took a right down a steep, muddy alley that wasn’t officially a roadway, but eventually ended up on Peony Street.
“I wasn’t kidding when I said the whole town is on top of this,” Hannah said. “Tommy and Ed made the flyers they’re passing out.”
Hannah took Claire home, where her mother was weeping in a chair by the phone, and Kay was putting the casseroles in the refrigerator.
“I’m so sorry,” Deliah wailed when she saw Claire. “He was sleeping …”
“It’s okay,” Claire said, as she hugged her mother. “You can’t watch him every minute.”
“Two nights ago he went outside at three a.m. because he thought there was a bear in the back yard,” Deliah told Hannah. “Luckily, the dog started barking and Claire got up to see what was wrong.”
“We took the guns out of the house earlier this summer,” Claire said, “so he had taken a butcher knife with him.”
“There’s only so much you can do,” Hannah said. “You can’t lock him up.”
“You’re doing your best,” Kay said. “Everyone knows that.”
Deliah snuffled and nodded, and Claire took a clean dish towel and wiped her face.
“You stay by the phone,” Claire said. “Hanna and I are going to go look for him.”
“I can’t think where he went,” Deliah said. “Maybe the pond on Hannah’s farm …”
“My dad’s down there now,” Hannah said. “Don’t worry, Aunt Deliah, we’ll find him.”
Hannah followed Claire outside.
“Where to?” she asked.
“I don’t have a clue,” Claire said.
“It’s a small town,” Hannah said. “Someone will have seen him.”
They started by going from business to business downtown, asking, but everyone had already heard about it and no one had seen him. As they went, Claire felt a rising panic in her body.
“The Catholic church,” she said. “He was talking the other day about how Father Stephen and he were going to play chess someday soon, just like they used to.”
They ran up the hill to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, but the secretary informed them that Father Stephen and Sister Mary Margrethe were out looking for him. They searched the church, anyway, Claire hoping to find him fast asleep in a patch of sunlight somewhere, like a lazy tabby cat.
As they left the church, Claire asked, “Where to now?”
“Let’s think like your dad,” Hannah said. “Where would he go?”
“Rose and Thorn, Service Station, Laurel Mountain Diner, Catholic Church, Frog Pond, Turtle Creek …”
“Check, check, and check,” Hannah said. “We’ve checked all those places.”
“Maybe he went to the guard shack at Eldridge,” Claire said. “He knows those guys.”
Just then the town’s only police car zoomed up Peony Street and made a left down Lily Avenue, below the Community Center.
Hannah and Claire took off running.
The dust kicked up by the squad car left a trail all the way around the back of the building to the old bus barn.
“Of course,” Claire said.
Claire’s father had driven a school bus after he retired from the police force.
When Claire and Hannah got there, Sam and Scott were standing outside the squad car. Scott was talking on his cell phone, and Sam stood with his arms crossed, sporting his usual hundred-yard stare.
Sam Campbell was Hannah’s husband, Sammy’s father, and had been, at one point many years ago, the love of Claire’s life. No one besides Sam and she knew about that except Scott, whom Claire had confided in soon after she returned to Rose Hill. Claire’s cousin Hannah was dearer to her heart than just about anyone in the world, and when she married Sam, Claire had buried those feelings. It didn’t mean they stayed buried; she still occasionally kicked dirt over them.
As Claire and Hannah approached them, Scott was telling someone Ian had been found.
“He’s with me now, Deliah,” he said. “We’re bringing him straight home. He thought he was late driving the bus, and then when he got here there were no buses, and he was confused. He sat down on the loading dock to wait for the morning buses to return, and fell asleep. Sam thought of it, came to have a look, and found him.”
Claire opened the door to the back seat of the squad car. Her father was sitting next to Sammy, each sharing half of what looked like a banana ice pop.
“Me finded him,” Sammy said. “Uncle Ian’s was lost and me and Daddy finded him.”
Claire looked at her father, who was avoiding eye contact.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
There was no point in asking why, because dementia has its own reasons why.
“This is a good thing,” her father said, gesturing to the ice pop. “It’s an icy, candy, melty thing; what’s it called?”
“Nanner pop,” Sammy said. “They’s called icy pops and you gets them at the grocery in the cold part, but don’t climb in there or they gets mad at you. Auntie Deliah can gets them for you; me ask her to.”
“We’ll both ask her,” Ian said. “I’ve never eaten anything that tasted this good in all my life.”
Ian said this about everything he ate, as it seemed to him to be true, so this was a pretty normal statement for him.
“How’re you doing, Dad?” Claire asked him.
“I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” he said. “A man can’t take a walk in his own town whenever he feels like it, I guess.”
“Not without letting his wife know.”
“Me, too,” Sammy said. “Me never gets to do nothing.”
“Come on, Blues Clues,” Hannah said to Sammy. “Let’s take Daddy home and go for a swim. You should come over later, Claire Bear, and go for a dip with us. There will be plenty of beer, and you look like you need a few.”
“Me likes beer,” Sammy said.
“Root beer,” Hannah said. “Always remember to say the ‘root’ part, Sammy, or mama will have to convince the nice judge she deserves to keep you.”
“I’ll be over later,” Claire said. “Right after I install twenty locks, four video cameras, and one big alarm system.”
After Sonny Delvecchio finished installing the alarm system, Claire wrote him a check.
“I’ll order those cameras for you,” he said before he left. “Be here in a few days.”
“Thanks, Sonny,” Claire said. “Tell Kay I said thank you, too.”
“Our pleasure,” Sonny said. “Just let us know what we can do and we’ll come running.”
Claire’s father was snoring in his recliner. Deliah was reading the owner’s manual for the security system.
“I think I’ve got it,” she said. “Once you open a door or window, you have 30 seconds to enter the code or the alarm goes off. Sonny also set it up to call the fire station if it detects smoke or carbon monoxide.”
“Do you care if I go out to Hannah’s?” Claire asked her. “I can stay home if you want me to.”
“Of course not, honey,” Deliah said. “Just remember to use your code when you come in.”
“What happens when we can’t handle him anymore; when he doesn’t know us?”
“I can’t think about that,” Deliah said. “I just don’t know.”
Her mother’s face had grown more haggard just in the few months since Claire had been home. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and Claire could sometimes hear her crying at night.
‘I can’t bear it,’ she thought. ‘I need to do something, but what?’
“Hannah suggested we tie a bell to him, like a cat,” she said, and was rewarded with a smile.
“Not a bad idea.”
Out at Hannah’s farm, Claire shucked her shirt and waded into Frog Pond, wearing tennis shoes, cut-off jean shorts, and a black sports bra. She hopped up on one of the large tractor tire inner tubes that were tethered to the dock and arranged her body so that her bottom was down in the water and her legs and arms were draped over the sides.
She leaned back and looked at the sky, just starting to darken over the mountains to the east. A crescent moon shared the sky with the setting sun. The air was warm, the sky clear, and the water cool.
“This is the life,” she said.
“Two days out of the year,” her cousin Maggie said. “It was eighty-five today, might get up to ninety tomorrow.”
“That’s the record,” Hannah said.
Her two cousins were already in their tubes, which were lashed to a
fourth tube, in which the beer cooler was secured.
“Where are Sam and Sammy?” Claire asked.
“Bath, books, and bedtime,” Hannah said. “His turn.”
“Let’s set sail,” Claire said, as she untied her tube and pushed off from the dock.
“There be dragons,” Hannah said.
“Shouldn’t that be sea serpents?” Claire asked.
They drifted out to the middle of the pond.
“I wonder what normal people are doing right now?” Maggie asked.
“Normal’s overrated,” Hannah said. “I’d rather be odd.”
“Odd people have more fun,” Claire said. “Because they care less what everyone else thinks.”
“A funny thing happened today,” Maggie said. “Floyd said someone notified the health department that they got deathly ill from eating in my coffee bar yesterday.”
“What did they eat?” Hannah asked.
“The caller said it was chicken soup, but we haven’t had chicken soup for over a week.”
“Who’s Floyd?” Claire asked.
“Pine County health inspector,” Maggie said.
“That is weird,” Hannah said.
“The woman said she got deathly ill, had to go to the emergency room with food poisoning, and she wanted there to be a report made against the bookstore,” Maggie said. “Floyd checked at the emergency rooms of the closest hospitals but there were no food poisonings reported at any of them in the past twenty-four hours.”
“It’s Jillian,” Claire said.
She told them what Sophie had told her and what had happened with the attorney and her car.
“So, you’re rich, now, huh?” Hannah said. “Sammy wants his own Moonshine Slershy machine. Sam wants enough exercise equipment to serve the entire veteran population of the tristate area. I only want a tiny stately yacht for my pond. How about you, Maggie?”
“I want a new heating and air conditioning system for my building,” she said. “The one I have is almost twenty years old; probably won’t make it through this winter.”
“It’s not my money,” Claire said. “I’m just the head of a sort of committee that takes care of Eugene and his money. There’s me, Walter, the attorney, Gigi’s broker, and her CPA. I’m going to try to get Dr. Schweitzer on board, too.”
Sunflower Street Page 7
