“I’ve adored Sam for forty years,” he told me. “You know, I met her right here at the hospital.” Shep then told me a story that sent shivers racing up and down my back and neck.
“One night, this was about forty years ago, Jennifer, I was out of town when I learned that my father had been in a car crash. I got to the hospital the next morning—only to find a woman I’d never met before sitting beside my critically injured father. The woman was holding his hand. I didn’t know what to say.
“Fortunately, Sam spoke first. She explained that she had been visiting a friend the previous night. Your grandfather was out of town. She was passing my father’s room when a nurse came out. The nurse mistook Sam for my sister, Adele. She gripped her by the wrist and brought her to my father’s bedside, saying, ‘Your father is asking for you.’
“My dad was semiconscious or worse. He never realized that Sam was a stranger, and she never set him straight. Sam stayed the entire night with my father—just because he needed someone.”
As Shep finished his story, I heard someone call my name, and it startled me some.
I turned and saw a doctor standing in the entrance to the waiting room. It was Max Weisberg, blond and clean-shaven, wearing green scrubs and holding a chart in front of him. Max is a few years older than I am, but I’ve known him since we were kids on the lake.
His expression was distressingly grave as he walked toward me and extended his hand. “Jennifer, I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “You can go in and see your grandmother now.”
Eleven
ON THE WAYto Sam’s room, Max Weisberg answered most of my pressing questions, but then he told me to go inside with her. I still had the freshly cut flowers in my arms as I walked up close to Sam’s bed and bent down low so that maybe she could smell them.
“Hi, it’s Jennifer. I’m here to pester you again. I’m going to keep coming until youtellme not to,” I began.
“Everybodyin town is asking about you. They want you to get well immediately, if not sooner. We really miss you, Sam. I’m speaking for the whole town, by the way.… But more than anybody else, I miss you.”
I found a nice place for the flowers on the windowsill near the bed. “I got your letters,” I said. “How could I miss them?” I reached over and touched Sam’s cheek, then kissed it.
“Thank you—for sharing the letters with me. I promise I won’t read them in one gulp, though I want to.”
I stared at Sam’s face. I thought I knew everything about her, but obviously I didn’t. She was still so pretty—real down-to-earth beauty. My eyes started to tear again, and I felt a pain in the center of my chest. I couldn’t speak for a moment. I loved her so much. She and Danny were my best friends, the only ones I ever really let inside. And now this had to happen.
“Let me tellyoua story,” I finally said. “This goes back to when I was four or five. We would drive over to the lake from Madison half a dozen times every summer. Those times at the lakewerethe summer for me.
“Do you remember, Sam? When we used to leave, every single visit, you would stand on the porch and call out, ‘Bye, I love you guys.’
“And I would lean out the car window and call back, ‘Bye, Grandma, I love you, too! Bye, Grandma, I love you!’ What you didn’t know is that I would keep repeating it all the way home—‘Bye, Grandma, I love you. Bye, I love you.’ Idolove you, Sam. Do you hear me? I love you so much. And I refuse to saybye.”
Twelve
I HATEDto leave Sam but I’d made a lunch date that I wanted to keep. I drove out of the hospital parking lot and was soon cruising down the main street in town.
Lake Geneva is like a toy village, only life-size, and I’ve seldom met anyone, except the worst cynic, who didn’t love it. The wide and busy street is lined with pretty good restaurants and nice shops selling antiques, and the shining lake glitters magnificently as a backdrop.
I stopped at the light and watched people drift in laughing clumps along the sidewalk, overlapping my memories of recent summers I’d spent doing the same with Danny.Oh, Danny, Danny, I wish you were here.
I parked in front of what used to be my great-granddad’s pharmacy and entered the cool interior. John Farley was waiting for me at a booth with red leather seats in the back of the store. He looked dashing with his thick white hair, and was wearing a striped blue and yellow rugby shirt and khakis.
He rose when he saw me. “You look like hell,” he said, beaming.
“That means a lot, coming from an expert on hell,” I said, smiling for the first time all day. While many clergy seem to have gotten life’s lessons from books, John was as in touch with reality as a good Chicago shrink. We ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate shakes from a teenage girl who had no idea I was seeing the fountain through an old sepia-colored filter, remembering Sam’s description of meeting my grandfather there.
“What kind of man was my grandfather?” I asked John after our lunch arrived.
“He was a fine lawyer, crooked golfer, good family man. He was what you would call a man’s man,” he said.
“Charles and Sam met right here,” I said. “Not ten feet from where we’re sitting.”
John must have seen something sad cross my face. He reached out and took my hands in his. “When I think about your grandfather, what jumps out at me is that he couldn’t stand to get his clothes dirty, Jennifer, but he was always out in the yard raking or moving rocks around for your grandma. Or stacking firewood or tinkering with her car.
“Meanwhile, she took care of him. Cooked what he liked to eat. Kept his spirits up. In their own way, they were devoted to each other.”
I nodded, and wondered if he was telling me the whole story. “And what about Sam? What kind of woman was she?”
