Uphill: Don Walker, #3

By Frederic W. Burr

"Uphill' is the final book in the Don Walker series. This story looks in on the lives of the principal characters some thirty years after the second book (Grab an Egg and Shave It). Don struggles with depression and significant health issues. His daughter Lisa, now married and raising a seven-year-old of her own, runs her own business as an interior decorator and designer.

Because of good faith efforts to assist one of Lisa's clients, both she and her husband Rob become targets of a ruthless and predatory businessman with a broad reach, who threatens Rob's livelihood and her family's future. Struggling to balance the needs of her father's care with her own busy family life, she attempts to renew relationships between her father and his wayward sister, Leslie, with uneven results.

"Uphill" is a story of life's challenges and personal struggle, when there is no guarantee of a good outcome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frederic W. Burr
• Release date: Sep 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223616429

Frederic W. Burr

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Fred enlisted in the Navy at the age of seventeen, and retired in the rank of Commander in the surface warfare community. He is a graduate of the University of Louisville and the Albany Law School of Union University. Retiring from the private practice of law in upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Kentucky after thirty-six years, he considers himself a fully recovered attorney. Fred and his wife Donna (who also writes) make their home in Kentucky.

Book preview

Copyright

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Although the author has attempted to describe some locations and landmarks with reasonable accuracy for narrative purposes, any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Note: This story looks at the characters’ lives thirty years after the second book in the series. I wanted to be able to concentrate on their stories, without having to forecast what America might be like circa 2048. Accordingly, I have set the story in the present day, and beg the reader’s indulgence.

Copyright ©2018 by Frederic W. Burr

All Rights Reserved. Except for appropriate use in critical reviews or works of scholarship, the reproduction or use of this work in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, and in any information storage and retrieval system, including electronic transmission, is forbidden without the written permission of the author.

Epigraph

In three words, I can sum up everything

I’ve learned about life:

It goes on.

Robert Frost

Other books by the Author

Mutinies

The Ring

The Return

Lens Capture

For the Love a Pete

Grab an Egg

Old Salts, New Navy

The Persian Paradox

An Uncertain Sea

Letters From Peru

Abby’s Maze

Abby’s Test

Journeys

Unaccountable

BOONE

Guardian Angel

Disguises

Unmasked

Dark Time

Calling Hours

Dead Close

One

FOR EARLY NOVEMBER, the morning air is unusually cold, almost biting. This could be late January, she thinks. Sure as hell feels like it. As she wheels the trash bin out to the curb, her breath is suspended in a cloudlike plume in front of her face. Lisa is grateful for her father’s ratty field jacket, even if it hangs on her slender frame like a blanket tossed over a coatrack. Her small hands likewise float inside his large work gloves, but they are adequate for the task. She had missed the garbage truck last week, and the bin is now full to overflowing, and heavy to maneuver. That’ll teach me! she says to herself.

Knowing her father puts everything in the trash bin, whether it has the little triangle marking or not, she thinks, I’ll bet the recycle bin is empty. Sure enough, once back inside the relative warmth of the garage, she checks the remaining bin, which is empty, and looks practically brand new. Clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth several times, she thinks, Dad, you are not helping to save the planet! She goes into the mudroom and lays his old gloves on the upper shelf, hanging up the field jacket on one of the pegs below.

Karen! Is that you? her father shouts from the den.

No Dad. It’s me, Lisa, she answers, thinking, Dad, Karen’s been dead five years. How he can forget that her ashes sit in a small urn on his living room mantle, she has no idea. She hesitates long enough to compose herself before walking into the den, where her father sits in his recliner, his cane with the four-pronged base standing slightly off to the right side of his chair. His left eye, injured many years ago while coming to Lisa’s defense during an attack by a young man wielding a baseball bat, is reddened and weeping, which it does whenever he is stressed.

When is Karen coming back? he asks.

Not today, Dad, she replies, then, almost under her breath, and not tomorrow, either.

She married me, you know, he says. Said she’d made me wait long enough. He looks down at his left hand, where his wedding band, still looking brand new, sits loosely on his ring finger. Made me wait long enough, he mumbles.

Unbidden, the wedding tableaux flashes in her mind’s eye. Karen, the head of her hospital bed raised up, wore a new flowered nightdress for the occasion, and Lisa had tied as good a bow as she could in the white satin ribbon encircling Karen’s nearly bald head. Her father stood on one side of the bed holding Karen’s right hand, with his friend John O’Connor acting as best man. Lisa, as bridesmaid was on the other side, holding Karen’s left hand, while Karen’s hospice nurse acted as the ring bearer. A local magistrate took his place at the foot of the bed. As the justice began to read from his marriage service booklet, Lisa stroked the top of Karen’s hand with her free hand.

It didn’t seem possible that her father and Karen had been together some twenty-four years by then, and Lisa loved the eight years she lived with them, after her mother had relocated to Kansas. Her father’s and Karen’s time together ended for all practical purposes when Karen was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer.

Lisa still remembers that day in the oncologist’s office, her father gripping her hand, hard, then harder still as the doctor uttered words like ‘terminal,’ and ‘inoperable,’ and ‘hospice.’ According to the oncologist, Karen’s having never been pregnant, in large part due to a savage beating by her first husband, put her at a higher risk of ovarian cancer. By the time it was diagnosed, it was too late for anything other than palliative care.

Her father had, every few years, proposed marriage to Karen, and she had deflected, saying she would give him everything but marriage, her first trip down the aisle having ended so badly. Finally, with the end near, he renewed his proposal, and she was too weak to refuse him. John stood in for Karen to slide her father’s wedding band onto his finger, while Lisa did the same for Karen’s smaller ring. She gently closed Karen’s hand into a tiny fist so the ring wouldn’t fall off of her finger. The bones in her hand felt hollow, like those of a bird. It was like trying to gently hold a small velvet bag with a few dominoes inside. Her father almost lost his will to live when Karen passed just a few weeks after the ceremony, saying over and over that he just couldn’t go on without her, that he didn’t see the point of even trying.

It was then or shortly after, she thinks, when his prostate cancer developed. By the time it was discovered years later, it had already metastasized into his hip, spine and pelvis bone structures, some lymph nodes, and was starting to attack his liver. At first, his oncologist, a perennially optimistic sort of woman named Kinsey, only gave him a year of survival at the outset, but now, longer than that. Who knows?

Lisa shakes her head to clear her thoughts, and squats down beside her father’s chair to pat his trembling hand. Yes, she did, Dad. She married you after all. Tears gather in her eyes, and she lowers her head to wipe them away without him seeing.

I’ve got four dinners for you in the freezer, and there’s a nice sandwich in the refrigerator for your lunch, she informs him, all business now, gripping his hand tighter to still the tremors, which are getting worse. I’ll be back to pick you up later this afternoon for your chemo. Okay?

Okay, honey, he replies.

She lets go of his hand, groans softly from the stiffness in her knees as she stands, thinking forty-five years old seems early to have stiff knees, and wonders if all those years of running on asphalt are to blame. She leans down and brushes off any wrinkles in the legs of her pantsuit.

Are you going to be okay, Dad?

Sure. Sure. I’ll be fine, he replies.

As she starts to leave the room, he adds, Can you hand me the clicker?

She looks around and sees the television remote on the table next to his chair, easily within reach. Rather than point it out, she picks it up and hands it to him.

There you go, she says. Want anything else before I leave?

Nope. I’ll just watch my show until lunch and see you later.

She thinks about asking what show he is going to watch but decides not to. He won’t know, and he’ll just get upset, like he does whenever he’s confused.

Later then, as she walks to the back door to put on her dress coat, the soundtrack from some old sitcom starting to play loudly in the background.

Once in the car, she mentally goes over the situation in her father’s house. Bathrooms, clean. Sheets recently changed. Laundry pretty much caught up. The cleaning service she engaged for her father comes in every five to eight days and seems to be keeping up with things. Before leaving for her client appointment, she goes over her notes from the initial phone consultation.

She will be meeting with the wife of an investment banker, one Joseph Bagatelli. The couple has just built a three million dollar mansion off of Rose Island Road in Prospect, and there is no mortgage of record against the property, so the husband must be a successful man. Her online research in preparation for the initial meeting only turned up articles from the Courier-Journal archives suggesting that he was, in addition to investment banking, a financier who put together financing conglomerates and partnerships for major developments and building projects throughout central Kentucky (and became eventually a part owner in the projects).

He was also mentioned as chairman of the board of Associates Trust, Inc., a Kentucky based banking organization headquartered in Louisville. Any photographs that might have included him were not revealing, since it was never him smiling for the camera while holding one of the gold-colored shovels turning over ceremonial clods of dirt for new projects.

While that seems like a nice file to land, she could tell from the woman’s constant mention to on-line interior decorators, and just how inexpensive they were, this project might present a challenge. But her husband Rob shared with her the most important three lessons he had learned when launching his law practice. "Don’t cut your fees, don’t cut your fees, and finally, don’t cut your fees," he told her. Of course, he added, that assumes your fees are fair and reasonable in the first place.

Her fee schedule was pretty simple: $10 per square foot for designs (unless the residence was unusually large, in which case she would discount that), and shopping list, a ten per-cent markup if she had to handle the shopping for the client, and a flat fee of $1,000 for installation, if the client wanted her to supervise it. Her local knowledge and extensive contacts with area furniture sellers and décor shops, the time she spent getting to know the client, and most of all, her references, enabled her to carve out a successful business despite her web-based competitors.

If Mrs. Bagatelli won’t agree to the fee schedule, that will be her problem. She has two and a half, maybe three, hours to meet with the client before she has to return to her father’s house to ferry him over to the Cancer Center for his weekly chemotherapy later that afternoon.

She starts her Toyota Camry and backs out of the driveway. The local NPR station comes on, it seems by default no matter how many times she has tried to change the setting. The newsreader is doing her best to make it sound as if the Republic is one step away from catastrophe, because of the current Administration. A guest on the show complains about the Republicans increasing their Senate majority, because ‘after all, Democrats won the national popular vote for Senate.’

That’s because, you moron, Lisa yells at the radio, "there is no such thing. There are only popular votes for the individual states in federal elections. It’s not ‘America,’ it’s the ‘United States of America.’ She switches the station to the classical music alternative as she heads off to her client conference. Regarding the national political parties, her father always liked to say, I used to be disgusted. Now, I try to be amused. She knows he stole that line from Elvis Costello but has never called him on it.

Despite the heavy traffic on US 42, made worse by what seems to be never ending construction on one side of the roadway or the other, she makes good time to the Bagatelli home. Although she has worked on any number of higher-end homes, she still gasps as she pulls into the drive. Not only is the structure massive in size and scope, but it is also equally as ugly, with bay windows and turret-like outcroppings scattered across the front of the residence, and way too many hip roofs. She thinks: No accounting for taste.

Lisa does her best not to react to Ms. Bagatelli, who is teetering unevenly out to meet her on impossibly high stiletto heels. With her obviously dyed black hair and super-tweezed eyebrows, tight sky blue cashmere sweater stretched over breasts that look as though someone has improbably stuffed grapefruit halves under her skin, and black yoga pants leaving nothing to the imagination, she looks every inch a woman approaching middle age trying to maintain her trophy wife status but falling short.

Lisa smiles to herself, thinking if she had kept on with the outfits she wore some thirty years ago in her teenaged years, she might have well ended up looking like this unfortunate woman.

Miss Walton, Ms. Bagatelli yells. So good of you to come.

That’s Walker, Lisa replies. Lisa Walker. Although she took her husband’s last name when they married, she kept her maiden name for business, to afford her family at least some small degree of privacy. She extends her hand, which the woman, dangerously tottering on her heels, grips tightly just in time to steady herself from falling.

Whoops! she yells, as she grabs Lisa’s hand. Sorry! I’m Judy. Judy Bagatelli. She lets go of Lisa’s hand and, gesturing towards her architectural monstrosity, says, Won’t you come in? Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. I just wouldn’t know where to begin.

Lisa nods and follows a few paces behind Mrs. Bagatelli. Once the pair reaches the front entrance, which fortunately is only two steps up from the driveway, Judy opens the oversized door and steps inside onto a towel, and slips out of her heels, instantly becoming nearly six inches shorter, and somehow plumper.

Joe doesn’t like anyone wearing shoes inside the house, she whispers.

Is your husband at home? Lisa asks, as she bends down to take off her flats.

No, She replies. "He’s at work,