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  “I wrote it especially for…Grandma Maude,” Delphina said, “because I like her face and her blue eyes. And she likes cats and so do I.”

  “I like cats,” Abbie chimed in. “I like Tinkerbell.”

  “I like Poochie,” Kate said. “He has white paws.”

  Elbows on the table, Edie nodded. “You know, Kate, I can never remember whether it’s Poochie or Panda who has the white paws.” She looked at Delphina. “Do you know?”

  Delphina glanced uncertainly at Kate. “Poochie has white paws,” she confirmed.

  “Cats are fun to watch, aren’t they?” Edie said and all the girls nodded enthusiastically. “Once Tinkerbell climbed up my mom’s drapes. All the way up, and then he just sat at the top of the window meowing for help.”

  “He couldn’t get down?” Kate asked.

  “I’m sure he could,” Edie said. “He got up there without help.”

  Delphina chimed in then with a story about Marmalade, an ancient and obese ginger tom who, Peter recalled, never seemed to leave the couch. And then it was Natalie’s turn and the twins were clamoring to tell their funny stories. The polite restraint that had marked the beginning of the meal gave way to the usual dinner-table bedlam. Peter, watching Edie, looked away for a moment to see Sophia watching him. She held his eye for an instant, and winked. Edie would do, Sophia was signaling. It would probably take some adjustment all around, but Edie had Sophia’s seal of approval.

  “…and there’s a very famous book of poems about cats,” Edie was telling Delphina now. “It’s called Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and it was written by a man whose name is T. S. Eliot.”

  Delphina nodded happily, hardly able to contain herself. “He was born in St. Louis,” she said. “But he lived in England for a long time—”

  “Like Daddy,” Natalie provided.

  “Hey,” Edie grinned. “You girls know more about him than I do.”

  “I know one of the poems in the book,” Delphina said. “‘Mr. Mistoffelees.’ Well, I know part of it.”

  “‘Mr. Mistoffelees!’ Edie said. “Wow! That’s my favorite one of all.”

  “I can say some of it,” Delphina said.

  “I’d love to hear it,” Edie said.

  Delphina glanced over at Peter. He smiled.

  She bowed her head for a moment, then looked up. She took a deep breath and began to recite the Eliot poem.

  Peter thought his heart might burst.

  TWO WEEKS PASSED, then three. Edie was vague about future plans, but as long as she remained in Little Hills, Peter was satisfied to let things progress at their own pace. The girls seemed to be growing closer to her, their conversations frequently peppered with things Edie had said or done. One afternoon, she’d loaded them all into Maude’s car and driven them to the library for story time. Delphina had been ecstatic. “Edie is so nice,” she’d confided.

  “It’s almost frightening,” Edie whispered one night as she and Peter stood on Maude’s porch, arms entwined, trying to say good night, but unable to actually part. “I look at Delphina and feel such an incredible connectedness, I keep thinking she could actually be my daughter. The other girls are wonderful, too, but Delphina just touches my heart.”

  Peter drew her closer, kissed her mouth, her neck. “God, I love you, Edie.”

  She pulled back to look at him. “You’re kind of growing on me, too.” She caught his face in her hands. “If I’m not careful, I’m going to get very mushy and sentimental…”

  The scream came from inside the house, and then the sound of something falling. Edie fumbled in her purse for the key, turned it in the lock and threw open the front door. Maude lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “MOM.” Edie was down on the floor beside Maude, who was whimpering softly, her eyes half closed. “What happened? No, don’t talk.” She glanced up to see Jessie at the top of the stairs, her eyes wide and dark.

  “Oh my God.” Jessie came running down the stairs, crouched beside Maude. “I just got Roger off to sleep and I heard a crash. What—”

  “I tripped over the baby’s stroller,” Maude said. “Didn’t see it there.”

  “I’ll call for an ambulance,” Peter said.

  Edie held Maude’s hand. It’s my fault, she thought. If I’d listened to Viv. If I hadn’t brought Jessie here. But you did, a voice taunted. You did it. Every action has a consequence, Edie. You killed your father. You killed Jim Morrison. You hid Vivian’s asthma medicine. You’re bad, Edie. Bad, bad, bad. She shook her head to clear the clamor. “Mom. Do you hurt anywhere?”

  “I can’t comb my hair,” Maude said. “I can’t even get up.”

  “I don’t want you to get up,” Edie softly reassured her. Bad, bad, bad. “Just lie quietly. Peter’s calling an ambulance.”

  “What’s Peter doing here?”

  “We had dinner with the girls.” Every action has a consequence. You’re bad. Bad, bad, bad. “He just brought me home.”

  “That man called again.” Maude was making moves to sit up. “Fred? Red? I said you’d call when you got home.”

  “Don’t move, Mom, okay?” Upstairs she could hear Peter’s voice. “Twentee-four Monroe,” he was saying. “Yes, yes. Of course. Right,” he said.

  Edie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, Maude was watching her.

  “You going to marry him?”

  “Let’s just focus on you right now, okay?”

  “You’re not too old,” Maude said. “Women your age have babies all the time.”

  “Mom, please.” Edie exhaled slowly. Her body seemed to be filling with an enormous emotional storm; huge gray banks of tears, thunderbolts of fear. Remorse, doubt, confusion, the culmination of all that had happened since her return to Little Hills. She felt it building in her chest, behind her eyes, clogging her throat. Peter was down on the floor beside Maude now. Long bony knees. His sweet face. God, she was going to cry. She smiled at Jessie, ashen and terrified. It’s going to be all right, Jessie, she silently promised. It will. Just don’t let the storm break until Maude’s taken care of.

  “I don’t know, Maude.” Peter was shaking his head. “This could mean an end to your ballroom career, you know.”

  Maude raised a hand as though to swat him. “If I were fifty years younger, I’d fall in love with you myself,” she said.

  Edie heard the distant wail of sirens. She squeezed Maude’s hand. “I think help is on the way.”

  PETER SET DOWN a cardboard cup of vending-machine coffee and a package of cheese crackers on the small table behind Edie. She nodded thanks and turned back to her mother. They’d been at the hospital all night and now he could see thin gray morning light filtering in through the blinds above Maude’s bed. She had fractured her hip and lay sedated, waiting for the orderly to wheel her off to surgery. Edie leaned close to Maude’s face and began talking to her softly. Maude’s eyes fluttered open, focused on Edie for a moment, then closed.

  “Viv’s gone to get some fresh air,” Edie told her. “She’ll be back in a minute.”

  Peter yawned, unfurled himself from the molded-plastic chair and came over to stand beside Edie. Her hand still in Maude’s, she shot him a sideways glance. In silence, they watched the rise and fall of Maude’s breathing. Behind them, in the lighted corridor, he heard the purposeful slap of rubber soles on polished floors, the ambient hospital noise of equipment and voices and bleeps and bells. He inclined his head toward Edie and her hair brushed his face like a caress.

  “Bearing up?” he whispered.

  “I’m fine.” She rubbed her eyes, glanced at her watch. “It’s late…or early, or whatever. Don’t you have to be in school, or something?”

  “I’ll make some phone calls in a bit.”

  “Don’t…I mean, I appreciate you being here, but I’m fine.”

  “Edie, I’m here because I want to be here.” He stopped himself from asking whether she wanted him there.
He wanted to believe she did. All through the night as they’d waited for Maude to be wheeled back and forth for various tests and exams, he’d held fast to the belief that his presence was a comfort. At one point, a resident had walked into the crowded waiting room and asked for Maude Robinson’s family members and Edie’s hand had closed around his own. She was holding it still as the resident explained that Maude had broken her hip and would require surgery. “At your mother’s age…” the resident had said, and Edie’s hand had gone very still.

  Edie leaned to kiss Maude’s forehead. “Anything to get attention, huh, Mom?”

  “Oh good, they haven’t taken her yet,” Vivian said from the doorway. “The damn elevator was stuck on the fourth floor. What is it about hospital elevators? Do they stick more often than other elevators, or does it just seem that way? How’s she doing?”

  “Out for the count, I think.” Peter moved aside to let Vivian stand next to Edie. Chilled and drained by the long night and lack of sleep, he imagined collapsing under a weight of blankets, Edie beside him with her arms wrapped around him as they drifted off to sleep.

  An orderly arrived with a gurney and a couple of nurses, and Peter walked out into the corridor to allow Maude’s daughters a moment alone with their mother. He leaned against the wall and yawned again. When he raised his hand to his face, he felt the stubble of beard across his palm. Maude was wheeled from the room, the orderly pausing briefly for Vivian and then Edie to kiss their mother. Then the gurney disappeared into an elevator.

  “Well…” Vivian sighed. “I guess now we just wait.”

  Edie, her lower lip caught between her teeth, seemed fixated on her feet.

  Peter watched Edie shrug, then shake her head. And then she looked up at Vivian and both women embraced. Peter had the impression that it was Vivian comforting her sister and not the other way around. The realization surprised him, somehow. He would have guessed that Vivian would be the one to fall apart. A moment later, Vivian had produced a tissue; Edie took it, blew her nose, swiped the back of her hand across her eyes and appeared to mentally shake herself.

  “Peter,” she said. “You look exhausted. Go home, really. I’ll be fine. Viv’s here and I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.”

  He looked at her, trying to read into her face more than she might be saying. He saw only weariness and, he sensed, an enormous determination not to break down. “Edie…” He caught her shoulders and pulled her close. Her body confirmed his suspicion. She felt rigid, almost brittle in his arms.

  “I’ll be in the cafeteria,” Viv said after a moment. “See you both later.”

  He waited until Vivian had disappeared down the corridor, then took Edie by the hand and led her to a patients’ lounge. He removed a couple of magazines from one of the two armchairs. Edie sank into the chair, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. A moment later, she stood up again.

  “I’m too exhausted to even sleep.”

  “Then don’t try.” He sat down in the chair she’d vacated, held out his arms. “Come here.”

  She hesitated before perching tentatively on his knee. “Peter, don’t say anything until I’ve finished, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t think I can do this…the whole commitment thing. I think I got kind of intoxicated by it all, the romance…whatever. But what just happened with my mom seems like a sign, a warning sign. I’m truly not given to the metaphysical, but it’s inescapable. If I hadn’t brought Jessie home, my mother wouldn’t be in surgery right now.”

  “If you hadn’t brought Jessie home,” Peter said, “she might have been beaten to death by her boyfriend and your mother might have tripped and fallen down the stairs, anyway.”

  Edie drew a long shuddering breath. “You can’t possibly understand, Peter. I’ve lived with this my whole life. I killed my dad, I killed my rabbit—”

  “But you didn’t kill your father or the rabbit.” Peter felt an edge of exasperation. “We talked about this, Edie. You’ve just heard Maude say it so many times that you’ve incorporated it into your own beliefs about yourself.”

  Edie got up off his lap and began pacing the room. “I understand what you’re saying. I do. But I understand it up here.” She tapped her forehead. “And then something like this happens…something that’s directly or indirectly because of something I did, and…I honestly don’t think I can deal with it.” She sat down on his lap again, took his face between her hands and kissed him. “I love you, Peter,” she said against his mouth. “But I’m going to take the Asia job. I honestly believe it would be better for all of us.”

  He watched her face for a moment. “You’ve been up all night, Edie,” he said. “You’re under a great deal of stress. I’ll respect whatever decision you make, but get a decent night’s sleep before you make it and then let’s talk.”

  She shook her head, smiling as though he’d just proposed something kind but unrealistic. “I’ve made up my mind. I was happy with my life before I came back to Little Hills and I can return to it and be just as happy. I want to give the girls my copy of the Old Possum book. I need to go by the high school to clear up some loose ends with Beth. I’ll drop it by your office.”

  And then she was gone. Peter leaned his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. Did Maude have any idea at all, he wondered, of the harm her careless words had created? He suspected not. He wondered if years from now, Natalie or Delphina, or one of the twins, would hold as true some false notion of themselves created by something he’d said or done. Too numb and exhausted to think anymore, he decided to go home and follow his own advice to Edie.

  EDIE STOOD in the middle of the hospital cafeteria looking for Viv and blinking in the harsh fluorescent light. Her eyes felt gritty, her head floating free somehow. She kept waiting for the storm to break. It hadn’t happened, as she was sure it would, when Peter drew her down on his lap, and it hadn’t happened when she’d left him sitting in the patients’ lounge. A ridge of high pressure, she imagined the weather guy on Maude’s TV proclaiming, is holding back a strong storm system. Once the high pressure breaks down, the forecast calls for heavy rains and gale force winds.

  The cafeteria had a build-it-yourself taco bar, a soup and salad bar, and an American grill—five kinds of burgers, and plain or chili-cheese fries. The mingled aromas were making her feel slightly sick. Maybe she should forget about finding Viv and go curl up somewhere and sleep. Maybe sleep would miraculously fix everything and she’d realize that Peter was right; she had merely incorporated the things Maude had always told her into the image she had of herself. But then Delphina would break her leg on the roller skates her new stepmother had bought for her, or one of the twins would choke on a piece of candy she’d supplied. Or Peter, without the blinders of new love, would see her for who she really was and be sorry he ever met her.

  Aloneness might be lonely at times, but it had its advantages. You weren’t responsible for causing anyone else’s unhappiness. She’d been fine until she came back home and got caught up in everyone’s lives. Maybe she would just leave now, take a cab to the airport. She’d call Maude and tell her…what? You have Viv, Mom. Just don’t let her talk you into selling the house if that’s not what you want. I’ll send you money… She’d call Viv too. Stop envying me. My life is not at all the way you imagine it. And stop filling the void in your own life with…stuff.

  “I’m waiting for an omelet,” Vivian came up beside her. “You’re not having anything?”

  “Not hungry.” Edie stuck a thick white mug under the spout of a coffee urn, paid for the coffee and carried it to over to a table by the window. The view outside was of a multilevel parking lot. She wondered groggily whether it was still breakfast time, or had the day slipped away into lunch?

  “You should eat something,” Vivian had followed her. “How about a muffin?”

  Edie shrugged. She didn’t care. “Fine, thanks.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t care, Vi
v…bran,” she said, when Viv still waited.

  “What if they don’t have br—okay.” She’d read Edie’s face. “Whatever they have.” Vivian walked toward the food line.

  Edie sat with her head in her hands. Days seemed to have passed since she’d climbed into the ambulance with Maude. They wouldn’t let Peter in the ambulance; only family members, the driver had said. But he had already been waiting in the emergency room when Maude was wheeled in. He’d hugged Edie and she’d leaned into his chest, aware in some distant way of his heart beating against her face. She banished the memory. If she allowed herself to dwell on such things, the storm would break right here in the hospital cafeteria. Right in front of Vivian, who was approaching the table with a laden tray.

  “Okay, this looks pretty healthy, right?” Vivian set the tray of food down on the table. “I’m not real thrilled about spinach, but it’s got all these antioxidants and God knows what else.” She took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. “I don’t think Mom ever worried about eating healthy, though, and look at her. Edie? Are you okay? Damn, I forgot your muffin.” She set her fork down. “Hold on, I’ll go—”

  “Viv, sit down. I’m fine, really.”

  “You don’t look fine. You’ve got circles under your eyes.”

  “We’ve been up all night, Viv. You don’t look so hot yourself.”

  Vivian smiled and lifted the edge of the omelet to scrape away a layer of spinach. “You’re probably right. Do I look too bad?” She leaned over to reach for her purse, but apparently changed her mind. “Oh, the hell with it. I’m not trying to impress anyone.”

  Edie eyed her sister for a moment.

  “I know, I know. Don’t even start.” Carefully, as though it required great concentration, she sliced a piece of the omelet. “Edie…I know you’re probably waiting for me to yell at you about Mom. About her falling over the baby’s stroller and everything, and I just wanted to say I’m not going to do that.” She looked at Edie. “Do you mind if we talk a little?”