Chapter 1
“Pops.” Brock knocked on the door, raising his voice to be heard. Everyone knew Jim Sanders was hard of hearing and sometimes he forgot to put his hearing aids on. “Get a move on, Pops. We’re going to be late.”
“I heard you… the first… three times,” wheezed the old man from inside the room. Shuffling footsteps crossed the creaking floorboards. The doorknob rattled, the lock clicked, and then it opened.
“You shouldn’t lock the door on me,” Brock said disapprovingly as the old man pulled the door open wide.
He was dressed, at least. But his belt wasn’t yet fastened and his shirt, although buttoned up the front, was buttoned up crooked.
“If I don’t lock it, you come inside,” his dad groused.
“If you have another heart attack and I have to break this door down too, I’m not putting another back up again.” Catching his father by the lapel, Brock unbuttoned the shirt before straightening it and buttoning it back up again. “Do you want eggs and toast for breakfast, or just toast?”
“Coffee,” his father replied.
“Yeah,” Brock snorted. “Nice try.”
“Bacon,” he wheezed next. “Crisp and hot… from the pan.”
Brock snorted. “If you’re gonna dream, why not go for a million bucks.” Shirt straightened, he adjusted his dad’s lapel, then patted him on both shoulders. “You had a heart attack. No coffee. No bacon.”
He left his dad’s room, heading back down the hall for the kitchen.
“No reason for… living!” Pops spat after him.
“Put your belt on,” Brock called back over his shoulders.
“I haven’t found it yet.” Throwing up both hands, Pops turned in a circle, searching the floor. Which was funny since there was nothing at all wrong with his father’s mind. He did, however, like to pretend.
Shaking his head, Brock decided to err on the side of senility. “It’s around your waist, but it’s unfastened.”
With a cough of surprise, and then of laughter, his dad hoarsely wheezed, “Well, so it is.”
Shaking his head, Brock went back to making breakfast. It was hard not to smile. He loved his dad, and for sure things had grown more interesting after Pops came to live with him.
Washing his hands at the sink, he dried them on a tea towel before draping it over his shoulders. Cracking eggs into a bowl, he whisked them at the stove. Pops got the egg whites; Brock got the rest. At six-foot-four and two-hundred-twenty pounds of lean, mean muscle, he liked to call himself a growing boy. That wasn’t quite true. He’d finished growing some twelve years ago. The trick now was, figuring out how to eat without letting his muscle turn to fat.
As he was lifting the pan off the stove, a flash of movement from the window over the sink caught his eye. He paused, eggs in one hand and spatula in the other, bending slightly to watchthe massive eighteen-wheeler truck with a moving company logo on the side as it rolled up the wet, dirt road, rolled right past the rental cabin that was his only neighbor within a three-mile radius, and came to a jerking stop in the mud right outside his driveway.
“Hey, Pops,” he called. “If you want to take part in the interviews, I think the first has just arrived!”
Quickening his step, he quickly pulled down a plate, filling it with scrambled egg whites, toast still warm from the toaster, and half a peeled orange. He put that on the table just as his father came shuffling his slow, careful steps down the hall. “Where’s the coffee?”
“Orange juice is in the fridge,” Brock replied, his attention shifting to the dining room window where he could now see a woman cautiously climbing down out of the passenger side of the big rig cab. She was a brunette, slender and small in blue jeans, white t-shirt, and the thinnest blue windbreaker he’d ever seen anyone try to wear in this neck of the woods. Especially in winter. She looked to be arguing with the big rig’s driver.
Scratch that. She looked to be pleading with the man, and whatever they were discussing, he could tell from here that it wasn’t going her way. Her eyes were big as she looked from the man to the house. Brock was glad he wasn’t visible through his mom’s old Chintz curtains. He wasn’t the gossiping type, and he didn’t usually spy on others, but this was right outside his house and, he had to admit, the way the woman bit her lip before climbing up onto the runners to move her seat to reach into the back of the truck cab made him intensely curious. When she pulled out a small toddler, in a white and pink coat, pink fuzzy boots, and a fuzzy ball dangling off the top of her knit cap, he realized the problem.
“Looks like the first interviewee has a baby and no sitter.”
“Looks like she just moved here,” Pops wheezed back.
“Looks like,” Brock agreed. “Well, unfortunately, that’s a point against her, don’t you think? We don’t need to live with a baby, one; two, if she’s looking after her kid, she’d not be looking after you; and three…” Brock shook his head. “I don’t know what she’s got in that thing, but I doubt if we could get even half that load in this house.”
“Oh, I don’t know...” His father’s hoarse voice trailed off, growing fainter as Brock studied the woman. Her toddler on her hip, she was trying to tiptoe through the mud until she reached the stepping stones that were his walkway to the porch. She was awfully pretty, and way too young. Maybe not for motherhood, but certainly to have the kind of experience he was hoping to get in whomever he hired to be his father’s live-in care provider.
Up until now, he’d never seen a need to hire anyone to help take care of his elderly father. He’d pretty much been the one taking care of Pops for all his life. The man had been sixty-two when Brock was born—a change-of-life baby, they’d called him. His mother had thought herself barren, right up until she turned fifty-one and suddenly he’d shown up. They also called him a miracle, since the chances of her birthing a healthy baby without disabilities had been slim at her age. She’d passed from a stroke almost twenty years ago.
Brock was thirty-five now and Pops was ninety-seven, with one bad fall, one heart attack, and a triple bypass already under his belt. Just as soon as he hired someone to move in with them, his days of going to work without worrying about his old man alone at home were over.
