Page 23 of Something Old

It’s so lovely, Mama. Good job.

The voice came softly at Madeline’s ear; her heartbeat spiked hard. “Oh,” she said aloud, exhaling in pain. “Oh.”

If it had been a long time—before last month’s episode, anyway—that she’d let herself indulge in a good long talk with Ronny, it had been eons since she’d heard Lauren so clearly. Normally, she only saw her. A blood-quickening glimpse of her darting into a store here. A juddering shock of her driving a car there. A pulse-pounding, stomach-dropping sight of her walking through a park, sitting in the library with a book . . .

Mama. Lauren had mostly called Madeline that when she was very young, like under three. She rarely used the term as she got older, and only when she was feeling really happy or silly. Mama. Madeline closed her eyes, envisioning her child—brownish eyes so like her own shining, two deep dimples showing, her smile that was just a little crooked. She could even smell the citrusy scent Lauren had so loved to wear.

Madeline sank back into the chair, nodding—late—to the compliment. Smiling but feeling so sad, she picked up the teacup again, cradling it with both hands, her head bowed. All its stories—and the rest of its family’s stories—were full of love, Madeline was sure. You didn’t drink out of cups like this enough to wear away the gold on their handles and lips unless you regularly sipped with people you cared for.

Would she ever again feel happiness that didn’t melt into sorrow or recall life’s sweetest moments without bitter undercurrents? Did she even want to?

Of course, you do. Lauren’s voice again, impatient now—brusque even. Madeline set the cup back on its saucer and smiled the tiniest bit. How typical of her daughter that tone was. Though a complete romantic in some ways, she was a hardcore pragmatist in others—and always quick to scorn anything she deemed “mushy” or “sappy.”

Boots chose that moment to stride into the room on the lookout for Madeline, apparently deciding he’d been ignored for too long. When he spotted her slumped figure in the gloom, he came over and bumped her calf with his velvet-plush head.

“Okay, okay.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand and reached down to pet her feline friend with the other. “I’ll stop. I didn’t know the two of you were in cahoots.”

Feeling older and way more decrepit than the chair she sat on, she lumbered to her feet and walked the whole store, slowly—something she could’ve done blindfolded, even if she was spun around five times first. Boots accompanied her, pausing and looking reflective whenever she did. As she paced, she faced a fact she could no longer avoid.

The shop wasn’t enough. If she was to stay remotely sane—like the ship hadn’t long sailed on that possibility!—she needed to fill her time with something other than floating around her dark premises like some grief-demented specter.

Grant’s dad’s house flashed in her mind—and she understood now why she’d volunteered so quickly to help out, though her reasoning had been unconscious at the time. She needed to forge new relationships, make some friends. Living human ones. And Grant, as messed up and isolated as she was, had seemed like a low-risk place to start. Except he wasn’t low-risk, was he? He was extreme, high-voltage risk. She’d been shocked by how intensely they connected. Was it just that pain recognized pain or something?

Still, whatever the reason, it had been a month, yet she couldn’t get him out of her head or stop feeling guilty that she’d reneged on her offer to help him just because his kindness and their undeniable chemistry—something so foreign to her these days—unsettled her.

She suspected not many people said this about him, but thank goodness for Grant Graham! She clapped her hands once. She would renege on her reneging!

With that decided, she left the tea set but picked up her now-empty coffee mug. It was time for a refill and to get busy. She’d moped around enough for one day.

The next couple of hours passed in a blur of computer work as she commenced detailing her ideas for phases one, two, and three of the job of sorting and dejunking Grant’s father’s property, along with a rough timeline they could use to keep on track. As her fingers raced to keep up with her brain, she realized that deep down, she’d been planning to reach out to Grant again all along. She’d just needed to get her courage up.

*

The sky had made good on its earlier threat and was dumping rain by the bucket. As Madeline climbed out of her van at Grant’s father’s house, it was so cold, wet, and dreary that summer seemed like a wishful delusion, and impending winter more like reality. And if she’d thought Grant’s junk-laden property looked forsaken and dismal before? Well, now it was a yawning expanse of mud and misery.

There was no sign of old Grover or his owner—whom she wouldn’t blame one bit for being a grumpy sod today if he was one. She reached for the printed sheets lying on the passenger seat, grateful she’d had the foresight to stick them into a resealable plastic sheath. Then she pulled her hood up and booked it toward the entry that Grant had used the last time she was there.

She didn’t get as far as the door, however. Emerging from behind a bank of vehicles that formed a massive wall between the house and the shop, she spotted Grant in full rain gear. He had rigged a large shelter out of tarps and appeared to be moving vehicle parts, tools, and miscellaneous other heavy metal things that lay blocking the shop’s big bay doors. The heavy rain had no doubt muffled the sound of Madeline’s vehicle, and now it obliterated the splash of her booted footsteps.

When Grant caught her movement in his peripheral vision and turned, Madeline stifled a nervous laugh. His face was a cartoon-worthy portrayal of surprise, complete with round eyes and an O-shaped mouth, which quickly morphed into a frown.

“What are you doing here?” he growled.

Madeline blinked, then rallied. His surliness, though disappointing, wasn’t a surprise. She hadn’t expected him to be all roses and sunshine. “We had a deal, remember?”

“Yeah, but it’s been a month.” He shifted uncomfortably. “Besides, I thought, you know . . . that you were out. That you ‘can’t do this’ or whatever.”

Madeline sighed heavily and crossed her arms. There was no point trying to hide her desperation. If he rejected her . . . well, she’d figure out something else. Maybe she could volunteer somewhere?

“You need the help,” she stated, “and I . . .” She what? Needed to fill her time, so she didn’t go crazy? Needed to find a purpose that would keep her from dying, if not literally, at least metaphorically?

She clenched her jaw. Just one more thing lost in an endless list of losses. Her useless, pointless pride. “And I . . . I need a friend.”

“Huh,” Grant said, staring at her with an unreadable expression, his face an alien blue-gray in the strange light of the tarp tent. “You . . . ” He broke off with a shake of his head. Then smile lines creased his eyes, though his tone remained dry. “You not only sign up for bad deals. You have terrible taste in friends.”

The giddy, weird feeling of kinship or like-meeting-like that had so unhinged Madeline that evening in Grant’s tiny, perfect home all those weeks ago flared again. She grinned but didn’t know what to say, so settled for handing him the plastic sheath of papers.

Grant moved deeper into the cover of the tarp, where a trouble light hung from a makeshift wire hook. Madeline followed and saw Grover was indeed present and accounted for—deep asleep on a dilapidated old truck seat and seemingly right at home on the exposed foam and springs, so long as his human friend was nearby.