The Wedding Tree (2 page)

hope

D
o you know what day it is, Mrs. McCauley?” Dr. Warren leaned over Gran and shined a penlight in her eyes.

Gran scowled. “Of course I do.”

I wasn't so sure. Gran had seemed to recognize me when she first opened her eyes, but then she'd closed them again, and when she reopened them a moment later, she called me by my mother's name. I'd hated to correct her, because her eyes had held such a blue sky full of happy that I didn't want to disappoint her.

Eddie had done it for me. “It's Hope, Mom. Becky is gone, remember?”

“Gone where?”

Uh-oh. Uncle Eddie and I had exchanged a glance. Fortunately, that was the moment Dr. Warren—an angular, hawk-nosed man in a heavily starched white coat—had stepped into the room. I'd relinquished my bedside seat and stood with Eddie and Ralph as the doctor had asked Gran to move her arms and legs, to turn her head, to stick out her tongue, and to perform half a dozen other motor tasks. She'd passed each test with flying colors. Dr. Warren moved the light to Gran's left eye. “So what day is it?”

“Friday,” Gran said.

The doctor moved the light to her right eye, then switched it off. “Actually, it's Sunday, Mrs. McCauley.”

“Oops!” Gran gave a sheepish grin. “Guess I had one of those lost weekends I've always heard about.”

I laughed along with everyone else, but I was worried. Gran's memory had always been encyclopedic. Facts, dates, numbers—she was more reliable than Wikipedia.

“Glad to see you still have your sense of humor,” Eddie said.

Gran squinted up at him. “Charlie?”

Eddie's face fell. “No, Mom. It's Eddie.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Eddie, dear. And . . .” She frowned at Ralph.

“Ralph,” the lanky man supplied, putting his hand on Eddie's shoulder. “Eddie's partner.”

“Yes, yes, so nice to see you. When did you two get in from Chicago?”

“We live in San Francisco, Mom. Becky and Hope lived in Chicago.”

“Oh right.” Her blue-veined hand went to her forehead. “Is Becky here?”

Eddie and I exchanged another look. “She died, Mom. Three years ago. Her car crashed, remember?”

“Oh no.” Gran's hand drifted down her mouth. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Oh, dear. I . . . I'd forgotten.”

My fingers tightened on the steel railing. In the first few weeks after Mom's death, sometimes I'd awaken and have a pain-free moment. Then the memory would hit, and my heart would squeeze like a wrung-out dishrag, and I'd feel all tight and twisted and knotted up. I hoped Gran wasn't going through that hard, searing, brand-new pain all over again.

“Loss of memory is typical of a head injury,” Dr. Warren said, adjusting his wire-rim glasses on his hooked nose. He was looking at Gran, but I'm pretty sure he was really speaking to Eddie and me. “So is emotional lability and confusion.”

Gran's gaze landed on me. The lack of recognition in her eyes alarmed me.

“I'm Hope,” I volunteered. “Your granddaughter.”

“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Hope, honey! It's so good to see you. My mind is all clouded up right now—you'll have to excuse me. How long have you been here?”

“Since early this morning.” The clock on the wall said it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, which meant I'd been there for about twelve hours. “I came as soon as I heard.”

I'd gotten the call from Gran's next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ivy, at eight thirty Saturday night. I'd been in my sublet apartment in Chicago, pulling on my pajama bottoms—the ones optimistically printed with sheep jumping over fences—and surfing the on-demand cable TV menu for a movie I could stand to watch.

Which isn't as easy as it sounds, now that I've grown bored with revenge movies. I've been bloodthirsty for nearly twelve months, and I consider it a sign of progress that I've moved beyond wishing the horrible, painful, humiliating things portrayed on the screen would happen to my ex-husband.

Still, I can't stomach romances. All those happily-ever-afters make me want to hurl. I can't stand movies about friends, either, because the woman I'd caught in
my
bed with
my
husband had been my very best friend—my high school BFF, my college roommate, the maid of honor at my wedding, who'd helped me pick out the very linens she was lying under my husband on.

So anyway, I was surfing for a quirky independent film, or maybe an action/adventure movie, while tugging on my pajama bottoms at a ridiculously early hour in the evening—which I know is a pathetic thing for a thirty-one-year-old single woman to do alone on a Saturday night, but then, I'm apparently no better at being single than I was at being married—when the phone rang. I hopped over to the bedside table, one leg in my pj's, one leg out. The area code was southern Louisiana, but I didn't recognize the number.

“Hope?” said a wavering falsetto. “It's Eunice Ivy—your grandmother's neighbor.”

A cement block of alarm hit my chest, sinking me to the edge of the bed.

“I've already talked to your uncle Eddie, and he asked me to give you a call,” she said.

Heaviness pressed on my clavicle, constricting my airflow. I immediately feared the worst. “What happened?”

“Your grandmother fell.”

My free hand covered my mouth. “Oh no.”

“Yes, I'm afraid she did. Her new neighbor on the other side—he's Griff and Peggy Armand's widowed son-in-law; he moved to Wedding Tree a few months ago with his two children. He bought the old Henry place. He's a very nice man, and—”

“My grandmother,” I interrupted. “What's happened to my grandmother?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” she said, her southern accent maddeningly slow. “Matt Lyons—that's his name, the name of the new neighbor—saw Adelaide's shed door open, which was unusual—it wasn't even the day that Mr. Pickens comes to mow her lawn, and anyway, he's very conscientious and wouldn't just leave the door ajar—so he went over to check. He knocked at the front door first—he's very polite, this Matt Lyons—but Adelaide didn't answer. So he went around back to the shed, and that's when he found her.”

My palm was so sweaty the phone started to slip. I tightened my fingers around it. “How is she?”

“Well, she fell. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

“Yes, but what . . . Was she . . .” I couldn't bring myself to think, much less actually say, the words. It was a telephone call a lot like this one that had brought me the news about my mother.
I shouldn't have answered the phone
, I thought wildly.
If I hang up, maybe it won't have happened.
I wanted to hit the “End Call” button; I wanted it so badly I could practically hear the dial tone. But I didn't. I couldn't. “What happened?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell you,” Mrs. Ivy repeated.

So tell me already. For God's sake, just tell me!
But another part of me wanted her to continue her conversational meandering, to put off the facts as long as possible.

“He found her lying on the floor of the shed,” she continued. “Apparently she hit her head and fractured some ribs.”

A flashlight beam of hope gleamed through my fear. People don't talk about fractured ribs if someone is dead—do they? “How—how is she?”

“Well, pretty bad.”

“But she's alive?”

“Yes.”

I lay back on the bed, relief melting my bones.

“The ambulance came and took her to the hospital,” Mrs. Ivy continued. “I have the key to her house, so I went in and got her insurance card, then took it to the hospital. You know how hospitals are about getting the paperwork right. They don't want to do anything unless they have the insurance information, so I found her purse—it was in the kitchen, by the—”

“Mrs. Ivy, I really appreciate all your help on this,” I broke in, “but please, just tell me . . . How bad is Gran? Can she talk?”

“Oh, no, dear. She hasn't regained consciousness yet, which has the docs pretty worried. They fear she had a stroke. They're running all kinds of tests, and Eddie is catching the first flight out. He asked me to call you so he could hurry up and make his travel arrangements. He said he'll call you as soon as he's en route to the airport.”

Gran and Uncle Eddie were the only close family I had left. My father had died when I was seven, and Mom was killed in a car crash three years ago—which was one of the reasons I think I married Kurt as quickly as I did; I wanted to feel like I belonged to someone.

“I'm coming, too. Can you . . .” I hated to ask, but I hated the idea of Gran being all alone at the hospital far more. “Can you or someone else in town stay with her at the hospital until Eddie or I get to Wedding Tree?”

“Oh, it's already arranged, dear. Your grandmother's women's circle from church and her poker club and her Yahtzee group are taking shifts until Eddie or you arrive. And I'm pet-sitting Snowball—she's right beside me, wagging her tail—so you don't have to worry about her.”

Thank God for close-knit small towns. The very thing my mom had always hated about Wedding Tree—the way everyone was always up in everyone else's business—was a blessing at a time like this.

As soon as I hung up, I flew into frantic action. I booked the first flight out, threw God-only-knew-what into a suitcase, and called my boss's voice mail to explain I wouldn't be at work on Monday—which wasn't really a problem, because I didn't really have a boss.

For that matter, I didn't really have a job. I was working as a temp at a graphic design firm, where I mostly updated websites. I used to run the ridiculously upscale art gallery Kurt and I had bought with my mother's inheritance, but we sold that—for a huge loss, I might add—as part of the divorce settlement. We also sold the extravagantly expensive home Kurt had insisted we buy—a house with a mortgage far greater than its value, thanks to the real estate market crash—and I currently would be homeless if a friend of a friend hadn't sublet me her apartment while she spent a year in New Zealand. As a result of the divorce, I had no home, no job, and next to nothing left of the considerable amount of money I'd inherited.

Money that, in hindsight, was the real reason Kurt was so keen on marrying me in the first place. He'd burned through it at a rate that would have horrified me if I'd know the full extent of it—but I hadn't, because I hadn't wanted to see it. Like an ostrich, I'd kept my head in the sand. I still try very hard not to think about that, because it makes me feel like even more of an idiot than I already do.

Anyway, I landed at the New Orleans airport around three in the morning, then rented a car and made the hour-long drive to the Wedding Tree Parish General Hospital to find Eddie and Ralph already there. The three of us had been keeping a bedside vigil,
taking turns dozing in the room's two recliner chairs and talking with a constant stream of visitors, ever since.

“What's the last thing you remember?” Dr. Warren asked Gran.

“Talking to Mother.”

Eddie pressed his lips together as if he were trying not to cry. I awkwardly patted his back. Even though he was my mother's brother and a generation older than me, there was something boyish about him that brought out my maternal instincts. Maybe it was his babyish cheeks or his teddy bear build—but most likely, it was the way he wore his tender heart on his sleeve.

He squeezed Gran's hand. “Mom, Grandmother's been dead for more than forty years.”

“Oh, I wasn't talking to her down
here
,” she said in a don't-be-silly tone. “I was talking to her up on the ceiling.”

Eddie blinked, his eyes overbright and moist. “Do you remember falling?”

“No.”

“Do you remember going to the shed? That's where your neighbor found you.”

“What on earth was I doing out in the shed?”

Eddie shrugged. “Beats me, but it looked like you'd taken a shovel off the hook on the wall.”

I saw a glimmer in Gran's eyes.
She remembers
, I thought—but instead of explaining, she turned to Dr. Warren. “When am I getting out of here?”

“That depends on where you think you're going.” His craggy face creased in a friendly smile.

“Home, of course.”

“Well, we'll talk about that later. You're here for a while, Mrs. McCauley. You sustained a serious head injury, and we need to keep an eye on you and make sure you don't have any bleeding or swelling in your brain. You've also fractured some ribs. We'll have to see how you do when we get you up and around.”

“But I'll get to go home, won't I?”

Dr. Warren patted her leg through the blanket. “We'll talk about all your options later. Are you in any pain?”

“My head feels like it's cracked open, and it hurts to breathe.”