Good Intentions

By Aya Walksfar

Bev Ransom, a college student, has a secret she's afraid to share with her family. She returns home when her father unexpectedly dies. She gets a job as a mechanic's assistant. Her friendship with her boss Rene Lawson, an older woman, helps Bev through the devastation of losing the one parent who understood her.
Then on a day like any other, she goes into work and by the end of the day Rene is dead. Bev is devastated.
During Rene's funeral, strange people show up. Curious, Bev begins to dig into Rene's past; however, the deeper she digs the more mysteries she unravels. But the threads of Rene's past are entangled in Bev's. Every secret revealed hastens Bev toward a twenty-year-old secret that shatters her world.
No one is who they claimed to be. Who can Bev trust?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aya Walksfar
• Release date: Jun 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990460220

Aya Walksfar

Born on the wrong side of life,I learned to make myself invisible, to be so quiet that no one noticed me in the shadows. My illiterate grandfather, and nearly illiterate grandmother valued books and education; consequently, they coaxed a Carnegie Librarian to teach me to read and write by age six.When I was nine years old, my grandfather was murdered; the killer never apprehended. Writing allowed me to deal with my anger and grief by changing the ending of that particular reality: I wrote murder stories.I published my first poem and my first journalistic articles around the age of fourteen. It was a time of countrywide unrest and riots.After that, I never stopped writing--poems, articles, short stories, novels.Good Intentions (first edition), a literary novel, received the Alice B. Reader Award for Excellence in 2002.Sketch of a Murder and Street Harvest have made Amazon's Top 100 Bestseller's Lists several times.

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GOOD INTENTIONS

By Aya Walksfar

Smashwords Edition

* * * * *

Published by Wild Haven Press

Copyright 2014 by Aya Walksfar

* * * * *

This book is a work of fiction. With the exception of recognized historical figures, the characters in this novel are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2014 by Aya Walksfar

2nd Edition

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use this author’s material work other than for reviews, prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [e-mail]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Cover Art: Deva Walksfar

Editing: Ellie Mack

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN:

Dedication

It never ceases to amaze me how many people are required in order to create a book. For these people I am eternally grateful. Though many helped me during the writing of this novel, any mistakes in these pages are mine alone. For the worthiness of this book, however, there are several people who suffered through the birth of this book that I would like to specifically thank.

Without these people this dream would not have come to fruition.

First and foremost, I thank my wife, Deva Walksfar. Her steadfast love, encouragement and belief in me were the pillars upon which I built my house of dreams.

Many thanks, and much love, to my elder sister, Lois Dodson, who unwaveringly believed in my talent, and was always there in whatever capacity I needed.

I am eternally grateful to Grandma and Mom for instilling in me the courage and persistence to follow my dreams, and for believing that in my fledgling talent. Though they have both Crossed Over, they are always with me.

Much thanks for the encouragement, and feedback, from my second edition Beta Reader, Joyce Hertzoff.

To my editor, Ellie Mack, you rock! No one could ask for a better editor, and I thank you for your patience and the sharing of your expertise.

And last, but never least, I thank all of my readers of the first edition. You let me know that Good Intentions was not only entertaining but thought provoking. Thank you for reading it, and for passing it around to your friends. (I am talking to you, and those like you, Amanda at Tesoro!)

Table of Contents

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

About the Author

Contact

CHAPTER 1

BEV RANSOM

Of all the ways to die! Such an ordinary death. No blazing gun in a barroom brawl; no fast car losing the hairpin curve. Surely Rene couldn’t die such a mundane death.

Rene’s short-cropped, bleached blonde hair looked like bits of wheat straw against the crisp whiteness of the pillow. I could make out the faint scar at her hairline from that long ago time she’d been thrown from a moving car. She’d told me a story about it the first time we went partying together.

Standing by Rene’s hospital bed, I recalled how much her story was like the story my friend Patsy related the night she called me and asked me to come over to her house at eleven-thirty. Her parents were gone for the weekend to visit her brother, Paul, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Patsy had been thrilled with the prospect of freedom. When you’re a junior in high school it’s a big deal to have the house to yourself. She’d been crying when she called.

By the time I’d gotten back home at one-fifteen, Dad was in bed, sound asleep. Dad knew I’d do the right thing. Mom was waiting up, of course. At least she didn’t do the martyr thing: look weepy and wring her hands. I didn’t tell her anything, except I’d been over at Patsy’s. She already knew since I’d told her and Dad where I was going as I snatched my keys and left in the middle of the wolf documentary.

Like Patsy, Rene’s story had involved one beer too many. For Rene that one beer had taken her to that place where you don’t care what you say, nor to whom you say it. For Patsy it had dulled the alarm bells every woman seems to be born with- -the bells that warn us of danger, the ones men like to laughingly call women’s intuition. Rene’s beers had been drunk at Danny O’Malley’s Bar and Grill. Patsy’s had been drunk in her boyfriend’s car on Lookout Point.

Rene had been waylaid by two men when she stumbled out from the bar, and walked through the shadowed parking lot.

Patsy had been waylaid, in a different manner, by her boyfriend.

Both women were fighters. Both lost their fights.

Patsy had been shoved out on the sidewalk in front of her house. Bleeding, but with no visible, physical wounds. Her boyfriend squealed his tires leaving.

Rene had been shoved out of the back seat of the stranger’s car and left lying in a roadside ditch.

I never asked either one of them why they’d been attacked. I knew from my own narrow escape as a freshman in high school that reason had nothing to do with it.

I scrubbed my face with both hands, trying to scrub away the angry memories. Undirected anger already threatened to break loose from my tenuous hold. Ever since I’d come home from the University, anger simmered in my gut, forcing me to constantly battle it down from eruption point. Taking Rene’s right hand in my left one, I refocused on the here and now.

The here and now brought no comfort as I lay her hand back on the bed. With a forefinger, I lightly stroked the yielding skin of her tanned and muscled forearms. Her arms laid with unnatural stillness on the white-sheeted bed.

A washed-out paleness colored the usually tan face, and her ever-alert eyes lay hidden by the closed lids. The nearly colorless respirator tube tugged at the corner of her bloodless lips. Saliva dribbled down her slack cheek.

A husky woman of generous proportions, Rene carried her five-foot-four body with such an aura that I tended to forget the extra inches around her waist. Now, she looked somehow smaller, heavier.An IV bag dangled from a stainless steel stand at the head of her bed. A long tube fed clear fluid through a needle into the back of her limp hand. The EKG machine’s steady beep created a quiet disharmony with the serpent hiss of the respirator as it forced air into her passive lungs.

Passive! What a word to even think in the same thought as Rene. Once during a discussion about my long-term goals, I’d made the mistake of saying I figured I would just wait and see what came up.

In that no-nonsense voice she saved for excuse-ridden parts runners, Rene snapped, Let me tell you something, kid. Life is what happens to people while they’re standing around waiting to see where they want to go. She pointed the spark plug wrench at me like a teacher pointing a ruler at a kid who’s being particularly resistant. You ever watched a bunch of sheep? The damn things wander around stupidly until one of them picks a direction to go in then the dumb beasts will follow the leader no matter what! With a shake of her head, Rene turned back to finish the tune-up on the old Malibu.

A sludge as thick as molasses on a cold day filled my head and slowed my mind. Wandering over to the window, I stared out at the black of sky and gray of ground that is the never-night of a moonless city, the monotony of it broken only by the sickly, yellow puddles coagulating beneath the street lamps.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.I’d grown up on the edge of it, in suburbia.At seven-years old, Mom brought me into the city when our old Plymouth needed its six-month tune-up. Mom didn’t drive much, but Rene, our mechanic, was too busy to pick up the car. Dad’s new remodeling and construction business demanded long hours so Mom got stuck with car delivery.

After dropping off the car, we caught a bus uptown. Lunch at Woolco’s Five and Dime and then shop, shop, shop. Later we wandered on back to the Tin Can with four bags of slacks, several short-sleeve blouses and one, hateful pink dress with a cutsey bow in the back.

Closing time came with Rene still working on our car. She slid the big bay doors shut then cracked the tops on a couple of beers for her and Mom, and a soda for me. It was the first time I’d ever seen Mom drink.

I stood on tiptoe against the front fender trying to see into the engine. Rene finally noticed me and grinned. Wanna help?

I nodded, too shy to speak.

Without so much as by-your-leave to Mom, Rene grabbed me beneath the arms with her grease-stained hands and swung me up to sit on the fender. I held my breath, waiting for Mom to screech about getting dirt on my good slacks. Never happened.

Memories, was that all I was going to have? Not enough! God, not enough. I ran a hand through my shoulder length, dark brown hair and turned back to the bed. Clutching the cold steel rail, I fought back tears.

Earlier, hunched outside the ER waiting room, I phoned her from the pay phone, the receiver sticky with what I hoped was candy residue. Dully, I wondered when Mom would arrive. It seemed ages since I phoned, but my watch claimed it had only been an hour.

Mom didn’t drive after dark anymore, and a taxi would cost a fortune. Irritated, I shrugged. Who the hell cared? I wasn’t sure what had possessed me to call her. If one of my friends had been close enough to come, but...they weren’t.

I hoped she didn’t drag Jim along. How could I be civil to the man trying to usurp my dad’s place? What could Mom possibly see in that short, belly-over-the-belt man? I would bet he didn’t stand more than three or four inches taller than my own five-foot-five. Seldom wearing anything except jeans, his salt-and-pepper hair looked like the flat top favored by the military. I’m not a clothes horse, nor the hair police, but I expected a man with a successful business to be a bit more professional looking, at least, sometimes.

I shook my head, dislodging thoughts that only ticked me off more.

My mind flew back to five hours earlier when Rene and I closed up the Tin Can to go to the Down Home Café, three blocks up and two blocks over on Second Avenue. They offered decent food and stayed open until nine. Not an easy combination to find in that neighborhood.

We decided to walk. I suppose most women wouldn’t feel comfortable on the streets, at least not in that part of town. All the other respectable businesses--the hulking gray block warehouses, Mama Chin’s Grocery with the iron-barred, plate glass window that hadn’t stopped the last two break-ins, even Greg’s Gas ‘n Go--were locked up by five p.m. But we both had our mouths fixed for a dinner of steak, home fries and eggs, so we left our cars parked in the alley behind the shop.

Winos littered the abandoned doorways. With a quick jerk of my head, I pointed out the occasional drug dealer or prostitute, waiting while Rene checked the person out to see if I’d pegged this one right. It was a game.

I’d wandered through my life, up until I met Rene, only vaguely aware of the people around me.Rene brought me up short. Listen kid, if you’re going to work for me and hang out in this part of town, you better get your head out of the clouds. Best way to stay safe in this world is to stay alert. Then she’d laughed. Or have a friend watching over you.

Dinner finished, I used my pocketknife to dig grease from beneath my fingernails as we worked on a second pot of coffee. Glancing up, I noticed Rene rubbing her forehead. Getting one of your migraines? I asked.

Feels like it. Guess we’d better get moving. Maybe I can beat it home and lay down before it gets too bad.

We made it back to the Tin Can before the pain fully blossomed behind Rene’s eyes.Grabbing her head, Rene stumbled as we drew abreast of my car. With a steadying hand on her elbow, I unlocked the passenger door. I’ll drive you home.

Five miles down the road I slid to a bumpy stop on the frozen gravel shoulder. Rene scarcely got the door of my V-dub open before she heaved her supper.

Ten miles from her place in Gibsonia, she moaned, God! Feels like my head’s in a vise.

Let me drive you to the emergency room, okay?

Yeah. She bent over, squeezing her head between her hands.

A few miles from the hospital Rene started to quietly cry. Rene never cried, not even when a falling Volkswagen engine broke two fingers.

My heart thundered like I was running a marathon. I stomped the accelerator. The speedometer needle shot from eighty to over ninety, then off the scale. I fought the wheel while the front end shimmied and danced over the rutted asphalt. My gut knotted every time I hit a patch of black ice.

By the time I skidded to a stop in the ER parking lot, jumping the clutch and killing the engine, bands of pain trapped Rene in some hell where my voice couldn’t reach her. White jacketed, male nurses hustled the gleaming stretcher, with a few snowflakes still clinging to it and to Rene’s hair, through swinging doors labeled ‘No Admittance.’

The admittance woman’s doughy face was as blank as her empty eyes. In a grating, high pitched monotone she asked endless questions. Hands jammed deep in my pockets, I fought the urge to throttle her.Signing the final paper thrust at me across the counter, I wadded the copies given to me into a hip pocket as I strode down the hall in the direction she pointed.

Emergency waiting areas in big cities are never deserted. Boschman General’s was no different.A youthful Hispanic man sat on a black plastic chair in the far corner. Blood leaked off the ragged hand towel he held against his cheek. An old white woman, whose seamed face was a map of broken veins, cradled her swollen stomach with match stick arms, rocking back and forth. Her long drawn out moans were interspersed with grunts that sounded like questions.

While I waited, sirens echoed down the city streets, wailing to a stop outside the hospital doors. Frantic squeaking of gurney wheels and the slap-slap of feet hurried past the alcove where each person huddled in their own personal hell. I looked up as two stretchers rushed past bearing a grizzly cargo of the maimed and the dead. When the double doors across from me bearing ‘No Admittance’ signs hissed closed, I descended again into our own grief.

Somewhere in the halls beyond that door, Rene lay. I shoved to my feet. Like some caged animal, I paced along the wall of windows staring out into the blackness as if I could somehow out walk the demons of fear gnawing my guts.

It felt like hours before the doctor finally came to the diarrhea-beige Waiting Area. Glancing at the clipboard in his hand, he quietly called, Bev Ransom?

I met him before he shuffled halfway across the once-white, tile floor, now stained with years of blood splatters and shuffling feet. I’m Bev Ransom.

Does Ms. Lawson have any family we can contact? His full lips tugged downward in a slight frown. I don’t see anyone listed here. He scanned the sheet quickly, like maybe he’d see an entry he’d missed earlier.

My stomach tied itself into tighter knots. No, no family. Least, she’s never mentioned anyone to me. What’s happening, Doctor? She’s going to be alright, isn’t she? I stared at his midnight black face, and into unusual hazel eyes.

I remembered the first hurt bird I’d ever brought home. A pigeon mangled by a dog. As a third grader, I had believed that if I stared into its’ eyes, if I didn’t blink, it wouldn’t die. It died, but somehow the superstition mutated and lived on in me. Yet even as I recognized it for what it was, the childhood talisman let me cling to hope for a little while longer.

Dr. Lindal, according to the plastic nametag pinned to the lapel of his rust-spotted, white lab coat, dropped his eyes from mine.Pulling his gold-rimmed glasses off, he polished them with a bit of tissue he dug out of his pants pocket. The pants, like his crumpled jacket, looked as if they’d been slept in. She’s had a cerebral hemorrhage.

Refusing to meet my eyes, he kept polishing the lens of his glasses as he continued in a surprisingly soft voice for a man who must’ve stood six-feet-tall and weighed a good two-hundred-fifty pounds. The ruptured blood vessel is in the midbrain. We can’t reach it to stop the bleeding without doing a great deal more harm. Unless it seals itself off....

Finally, he glanced up. Caught my eyes. Held my gaze. He let the silence gather for a moment. You should call anyone who wants, or needs, to be here. I’m sorry.

Can I see her?

Certainly. We’ve moved her to ICU, tenth floor, Room 1021. She won’t be able to respond to you. She’s in a coma.

But she could get better, I glanced again at the nametag. I couldn’t seem to hang onto such details as someone’s name. Couldn’t she, Dr.Lindal?

Lindal didn’t look to be more than twenty-five or so, yet there was a sadness on his face of someone who had seen too much tragedy. With one long-fingered hand, he wearily rubbed at his eyes.Carefully settling his glasses on the thick bridge of his nose, he answered, If you’re a praying woman, Ms. Ransom, there’s a chapel on the second floor.

I...I’m not a church kind of person. This time it was me who couldn’t bear to keep looking at another person.My eyes skittered towards a point above Dr. Lindal’s left shoulder. There was a brown water stain on the off-white, plaster ceiling in the far corner. I think I’ll go on up now.

I have dragged home a large number of animals with various injuries, some of them fatally wounded. Even though I held those animals while they died, I was not ready. Hand grasping the cold rail of Rene’s hospital bed, I was not ready when her soul fled, when the bodily gases were expelled, and I witnessed the last, restless thrash of an unsecured arm and the muscle spasms that jerked her legs.

Frantically, I punched the nurse’s call button.

I’d been on my way home from the University the night Dad died, yet pictures of what Dad must have looked like flashed through my mind. The logical part of my mind chided me that each death, depending on the circumstances, was different. Still, the images refused to fade away.

A nurse that any football team could’ve used on their defensive line hustled me out, but not before I knew. No one had to tell me it was over.

Boschman’s was an old hospital. On the ICU floor, doors lining the pastel green hallway opened into private and semi-private rooms crowded with hissing and beeping machines. Nurses in soft-soled, white shoes squeak-squeaked hurriedly down the tiled corridor, brushing past me, the clean smell of soap the only thing they left behind. Idly, I wondered if it was because some ICU patients might be badly affected by strong perfumes.

Numbly, I wandered into the deserted waiting room. Unable yet to face reality, my mind grabbed at irrelevancies, like the repeating color scheme of greens in this room. Deep, soft green vinyl chairs with gleaming imitation cherry wood edges. End tables done in the same wood with tops of forest green marble swirled with white. A similar pattern colored the tiled floor. Even the ceramic table lamps, spilling their muted luminance, were soft green swirled with white.

Crossing the deserted room, I stared down at the pinpoints of city lights sprinkled through the darkness below. I don’t know how long I stood there before Mom’s hand settling briefly on my shoulder turned me from the night. My mind was as sluggish as a silted up creek. I stared stupidly at Mom, seeing her lips move and hearing vaguely familiar sounds, but still unable to grasp what she was saying. Squeezing my eyes shut, I pinched the bridge of my nose.

Beverly, honey, you all right? Mom’s soft hand reached out as if to stroke my cheek. I jerked away from the caress.

I’m fine. But...Rene’s...gone. I could barely force the words past my unwilling lips. If I didn’t say it, maybe it wouldn’t be true. But it was true.

Oh, sweet Jesus. Oh, dear God, Mom moaned, her brown eyes squeezed shut. She swayed.Instinctively, I reached out to catch her. When she didn’t faint, I stepped back.

I didn’t notice him until his hand on Mom’s shoulder turned her around. He drew her cap of permed, grey-streaked black hair to his white-shirted chest. Wordlessly, he patted her back as she wept.

Unable and unwilling to offer her comfort, I turned away. She had a man there; let him take care of her.

I watched their reflections in the window, fuming, until he left the room. Not daring to turn to face Mom, I asked in a low furious voice, Who the hell is he?

Jesse’s a friend, honey.

Why can’t you do anything on your own? Whirling around, I glared at her. Why do you always have to have some man to hang on? Dad’s only been gone eleven months. Eleven months, Mom! I can’t believe the way you’re acting. First Dad’s so-called best friend and business partner, Jim, at our house even before Dad was buried and now you show up here with this guy. Inside I knew the innuendos weren’t fair, not really. At least not with this guy. With Jim, well, I’d been doing a lot of wondering about that. Dad had trusted Jim. So had I. How wrong had we been?

Oh honey, I know you’re upset. I am too. I was so glad you called me. Mom dabbed at her teary eyes. At least, she wasn’t wailing and sniffling.

Then why couldn’t you show up without some man?

Why honey, Jesse and your Daddy and me done knowed Rene a long time. Long time ‘fore Rene ever had the Tin Can, we was all friends.

What do you mean, you were all friends? You and Dad never said anything about knowing Rene, except as our mechanic!

Mom wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look me in the face. Why baby, your Daddy and me both got friends whatcha never met.

Before I could order the questions clamoring in my mind, Jesse stepped back into the room.

Margaret, let me take you in to see her before we leave.

Without a word, Mom got up and let him lead her out of the room.

When Mom returned, she sat like a lump on one of the chairs. I stood staring out of the window, not knowing why I waited. Maybe I thought Mom would ask me to take her home. I should’ve known better.

It wasn’t too long before he came back in, helped Mom to her feet. Spoke to her in that low voice everyone seems to use in hospitals.

I wished they’d both just go away, but I saw by the reflection in the glass that Mom was heading my way.

She stopped a couple of feet behind me. Honey, Jesse said it’s time to go now.

I whirled away from the window. Jesse said! Jim said! Ask me if I give a damn!

Beverly! Mom’s shocked voice cut across my anger.

Gritting my teeth, I said, Look Mom, it’s time to go alright, but I don’t need no man to tell me that, okay? I brushed out past them and stormed to my car. Dirty slush stuck to my scuffed, black work boots. The light snowfall, driven by the bitter January wind, stung my face like ice pellets. Cold knifed through my jean jacket. I gunned my V-dub, fishtailing out of the emergency room parking lot.

Alone, in the darkness of my studio apartment, I faced the second longest night of my life. Only the night of Dad’s death had felt longer, colder, lonelier. I tilted my secondhand kitchen chair back on two legs. The rubber tips long gone, the chrome legs dug into the worn linoleum. Feet propped up on the window sill, I balanced a coffee cup in my lap. Every time I shifted my legs, chips of cheap, white paint flaked off, dropping to the floor to join the dusting of paint lying there.

Too tired to be awake, yet unable to still my mind long enough to fall asleep, I kept wishing I could cry and get it out. I knew better. I hadn’t been able to cry for Dad, either.

In the snow swirling outside my window, I once again saw the slick roads and night dark woods flashing past my eyes as they had on that February night. Sixty-five had been way too fast that night. Severe winter conditions made the Pennsylvania turnpike a treacherous ice slick. I had shrugged and jammed the accelerator to the floor.

It made no difference. Dad was gone by the time I got to Boschman General. Jim was in the Green Waiting Room with Mom.

Where’s Dad? I demanded as I pounded into the room.

Oh, honey.... Mom stretched her arms out as if to clutch me to her.

I dodged back, feeling suddenly claustrophobic. Where is Dad? I repeated, barely able to keep from shouting.

He’s...gone, honey.

Jim stepped forward, put his arm around Mom’s shoulders. I’m sorry, Bev, but Dan passed away about an hour ago.

Suddenly, a huge steel band around my chest began squeezing the life out of me. I struggled to pull in air enough to ask, Where is he?

Room 1053, Jim replied.

The private room had been straightened up: no machines, the sheets on the bed all nice and neat.They hadn’t covered Dad’s face or anything. His steel gray, wiry hair, unruly as always, framed his face.Under the dimmed lights of the hospital room, his normally ruddy complexion appeared ashen gray. Dad’s big-knuckled hands lay flat and still. With his eyes closed, he might have appeared asleep if he hadn’t been lying so stiffly straight.

Even as I stepped up to the bed, I knew. I knew Dad was gone. He wasn’t in that pile of used up flesh lying there. As a little girl, I could always tell when my dad was in the room. He used to laugh and say I had eyes in back of my head. I guess that’s the way it is when you are really close to someone, especially a parent. I’d never been able to feel Mom’s presence in a room.

Mom had been the PTA-perfect mother most girls, before they hit sixteen, dream about- -the costume sewing, cookie baking, at home mom. That was part of the reason I was so happy to be moving into the women’s dorm at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At nineteen, putting a hundred ninety-nine miles between me and Mom the fall after I graduated from high school held more than the usual excitement of a girl leaving home.

Like several of my classmates, who were heading off to college anywhere as long as it was large numbers of miles from their moms, I thought that escaping Mom’s third degrees disguised as parental interest and being out on my own for the first time was way cool. But for me, it went beyond that. Maybe now, being away from Dad’s closeness as much as Mom’s prying, I could discover who, and what, I really was. That quest abruptly ended when Mom called, urging me to come home as quickly as I could.

Back home, my childhood room felt like an alien land. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf Dad and I built still held James Herriot’sAll Creatures Great and Small next to Jane Goodall’sIn the Shadow of Man. The Encyclopedia of Equine Medicine squeezed on shelves crammed with murder mysteries by Agatha Christie. Shirley MacLaine’s book, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain held its place on the second shelf next to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ The Harmless People. Rocks I’d found on our various vacations, and just had to haul home, crouched willy-nilly in any spot big enough to hold one.

The anatomically correct model of a Percheron stallion, I built from a kit Dad gave me on my seventeenth birthday, stood in its place of honor on the middle shelf. A gray wolf poster dominated the wall at the foot of my bed. Even my bed was the same, covered by the handmade, patchwork quilt Mom had bought me the year we went to the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, the summer I was fifteen. My very first stuffed animal, a raggedy horse, flopped on the windowsill next to a bedraggled pink rabbit with long ears that had been chewed by a puppy I’d scraped off the highway and Doctor Lil had patched up. I had spent five days spooning medicine mixed in beaten eggs down its throat every four hours before it died one night in its sleep.

Though everything appeared the same, everything was different.

Dad had been a quiet man, yet the house echoed with the silence of his absent footfalls, his jaunty whistling, his deep chuckling laughter. I guess I was trying to somehow hang onto Dad when three weeks after the funeral I pressed Mom for details about his heart condition.

Mom kept things from me from time to time, but she had never outright lied to me. She couldn’t lie about Dad’s condition either. She had known since early in Winter Quarter that Dad’s heart was so bad he could go at any time.

How could you? I shouted at her, jumping up from the kitchen table. The chair crashed to the floor. Coffee slopped over the lip of the cup, running across the beige, lace tablecloth.

Dad wanted you to finish the quarter. He figgered he’d tell you when you come home for spring break.Mom twisted the ever-present handkerchief, dabbing at her eyes.

He wouldn’t have kept something like this from me. I leaned on my hands across the table towards Mom. You must’ve talked him into it. Why? Afraid he’d want to spend more time with me than with you?

Oh, Beverly, honey, how can you say that? She pressed a trembling hand to her lips, tears trickling down cheeks mapped by the years.

How? How can I say that? I shouted, standing up straight, glaring down at her. "Because you have always been jealous of the time I’ve spent with Dad. You were always trying to get me to quit hanging out in the shop downstairs with him and come up here and hang out