“Here we are.” Mrs. Gibbons reappeared pulling Andrew’s small suitcase.
“Thank you so much,” Mitch said. He felt resistance when he tried to take the handle from her.
“Mr. Haskell, I’m not sure Mary—”
“We all owe you for looking after Andrew until I could get here. Thanks, Mrs. Gibbons.” Still holding Andrew against his chest, he turned to Dylan and tipped his head toward the Duvalls’ house. “We’ll make a pit stop, then be on our way.”
Chapter 30
He spent only a few minutes gathering up more clothing, books, and toys for Andrew’s indefinite stay with him. As he moved around the room, Andrew stayed on his heels, as though afraid Mitch would disappear. His boy appeared to be all right, but it had been a sideways morning. He had to be feeling some insecurity.
To reassure him, he knelt down and clasped Andrew to him and tried to devise a way to tell him how much he loved him, how essential he, his well-being, his happiness, were to him, but Andrew wouldn’t understand the concepts. Dylan’s concepts, he realized.
So he set Andrew away from him and whispered conspiratorially, “Hey, want to see my boo-boo?”
Andrew nodded.
“Are you sure you’re ready for it? It’s a doozy.”
Andrew nodded even more enthusiastically. Mitch raised his shirt, being careful not to lift the back of it to expose his holstered pistol.
As expected, Andrew was awed and impressed by the incision. “These are bandages, see?” Mitch said. “They’re holding my skin together. You can touch one, but be easy.” Andrew barely made contact with the closure.
“What I need,” Mitch said gravely, “is for you to help me get it healed up. Remember when you cut your finger, and I had to keep medicine and Band-Aids on it?” Andrew held up the formerly injured finger. “Right. See? It got well. Now it’s your turn to help me get my tummy well.
“And while you’re helping, it’s Froot Loops every day for breakfast. Do we have a deal?” Mitch raised his hand, and Andrew high-fived it. “Good. Now, grab that bucket of cars, and I’ll get the suitcase, and let’s go find Dylan.”
They found her in the living room, standing in front of the fireplace, looking at pictures lined up on the mantel: Angela as a baby, as an adolescent in a soccer uniform, kneeling with him at the wedding altar, and beside him at the baptismal font holding Andrew in her arms.
Andrew, distracted with retrieving all the cars that had fallen out of the overloaded plastic bucket, didn’t see Dylan’s poignant expression as she turned to Mitch and said gruffly, “What a beautiful woman. What a beautiful family.”
He walked over and looked at the pictures, although he had spent hours staring at them while steeped in sorrow and pledging revenge. “They robbed her of our family, stole her from us, ended her life. Can you understand now why I want to see them suffer and die?”
“I’ve always understood the why of it, Mitch.” She glanced over at Andrew, who was in conversation with one of the semi trucks in his collection. Coming back to him, she said, “But are you willing to pay what getting vengeance may cost you?”
He held her troubled gaze until Andrew announced that he had to pee-pee.
Mary was sitting in a chair by Hank’s bedside in the cardiac ICU when Mitch walked in. Hank was asleep. His right hand was crisscrossed with tape to hold in the IV shunt. Mary held it in her palm while, with her other hand, she was stroking his arm.
Sensing Mitch’s presence, she turned her head. “They let you in? It’s only supposed to be one visitor at a time.”
“I talked my way.”
She gave a weak smile. “I’m sure. Thank you for coming.”
“As if I wouldn’t.” He walked over, she turned up her cheek to him, and he kissed it. As he straightened up, he kept his hand on her shoulder. “It had to have been scary for you.”
“Oh, Mitch,” she sighed. “I thought he was going to die right there on the kitchen floor.”
He pressed her shoulder. “But he didn’t. Give me the skinny on his condition.”
She gave him a rundown of the standard tests. “The cardiologist suspects several arterial blockages. If he’s right, and since Hank has already had an ‘episode,’ the doctor recommends that they be corrected as soon as possible.”
“Surgery?”
“The procedures haven’t been fully explained to us yet.” She looked up and behind him. “Please turn that down. It’s so irritating.”
She’d referred to the TV mounted on the wall, where the King of Cash was sermonizing on the merits of his law firm. “You can’t escape that jerk,” Mitch said as he reached for the remote control lying on the bed tray and muted the TV.
