Abide With Me (9 page)

T
he following afternoon, Madge stood with both hands on the railing of a second-floor balcony off the master bedroom in a beachfront home in Sea Gate while Russell went back downstairs with Blair to inspect the heating and air-conditioning systems. On the beach below, sunbathers stretched out side by side and head to toe, creating a patchwork of color. Lifeguards with their noses coated white with zinc oxide perched on stands to protect the swimmers and keep rafters and surfers in their restricted areas. Scents from tropical tanning oils, citrus lotions and sunblock blended with the salt air. Overhead, seagulls cried and swooped down for prey in the water or an unguarded snack on shore while majestic osprey glided on wind currents.

Madge closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun to let a cooling sea breeze caress her features. With her lips,
she murmured a prayer, asking God to clear any obstacles that might block their purchase of this house. With her heart, she embraced the memories of her loved ones, especially Sandra, who had loved the beach almost as much as Madge did.

She blinked back tears and cupped her hand to her brow to cut the glare of the relentless sun. In the far distance near the horizon, a freighter of some sort, probably out of Philadelphia, was heading north. Closer, dozens of sailboats and catamarans danced atop the blue-gray waters of the Atlantic. A motorboat pulling a parasail hugged the shoreline just beyond the swimming limits.

Madge had not ventured deeper into the ocean than mid-thigh for forty years, and she had no desire to change her habits now. She was not tempted to leave shore. Not even for half a heartbeat. Until she glanced up at the person strapped into the harness hanging below the red-and-white-striped parasail. She tried to imagine what the view might be like from that height. If the parasail broke free and soared above one of the few clouds in the sky, would she be close enough to heaven to get a glimpse or sink straight back to earth and wind up suspended in the ocean by a life jacket?

She fingered the gold chain around her neck as one of her dangling earrings brushed her neck. “I’d sink for sure. I’d rather stick with my beach chair, thank you,” she whispered. When she heard footsteps, she turned and saw Russell approaching her with a smile, but Blair was not with him. “Everything looks good from my end. The two-car garage will give us off-street parking, and there are outside showers to help keep the sand out of the house. How about you? What do you think of the place?”

She grinned. “The view is amazing, and the house is beyond everything I’ve ever dreamed about. Where’s Blair?” she asked, reluctant to appear overanxious about buying the house.

“He had to leave for another appointment. I told him we’d take another walk-through and lock up when we left. If we decide this really is the one we want, I can call him later. I’ve got his cell-phone number.”

She left the balcony and met him inside the master bedroom. Together, they revisited the three other bedrooms, each with adjoining baths. “There’s plenty of room for the grandchildren, if Drew and Brett ever settle down and give us some. In the meantime, I hope the boys can come for a visit. If not, Michael and Jenny and the girls will come. Andrea, too.”

They went up a six-step staircase to the family room in the loft that featured yet another balcony facing the ocean. “I could set up an office here in this alcove. There’s room for a desk and my laptop,” Russell suggested.

Madge grinned. “
Our
laptop. I’ll need to keep tabs on what’s happening at home.” She led him back down the staircase, along a hallway past a laundry room, and up another mini-staircase to a great room. An island separated the kitchen from the living room, replete with cathedral ceilings, a gas fireplace, and a wall of windows that provided a breathtaking view of the ocean, as well as a wraparound balcony. In her mind’s eyes, Madge envisioned the glory of the sun peaking over the horizon at daybreak and a wide beam of moonlight stretching from the water to the sky at night.

She placed her hand over her heart. “Are you sure we can afford this?”

Russell put his arm around her shoulders. “That’s why banks created home-equity loans,” he teased. “The house in Welleswood has been paid off for a few years now. Between what we can borrow against the house and the bonuses I’ve been setting aside, we can not only afford the house, but we can also furnish it. Within reason,” he cautioned.

“Within reason,” she murmured, but her mind was already racing ahead, planning a color scheme and listing the stores and shops she would use to make her plans become reality.

He cleared his throat. “There’s only one little glitch.”

Her heart skipped a beat.

“If they accept our offer, we can’t settle until the day before Labor Day, which isn’t really a problem for me. With starting the new position, I’ve got a number of commitments that have to be met in August. In fact, I’ll probably be away the entire month.”

She smiled. “They say September at the shore is wonderful. It’s still warm outside and so is the ocean, but the vacationers are gone.”

He reached into his pocket and frowned. “I guess I left my cell phone back at Dave’s. Let’s grab a bite to eat first, then we’ll head back to the house to get my phone. I can call Blair from there.”

“I don’t think so.” She opened her purse, took out her cell phone and handed it to him. “Ask Blair to meet us at his office so we can put in our offer before we grab lunch.”

The following morning, Madge and Russell left the real estate office with a signed contract, a settlement date of just before Labor Day and an appointment scheduled for that
very afternoon at the bank back in Welleswood to arrange for the home-equity loan.

“Things are happening so fast, I’m almost dizzy. I don’t know how you can keep all those dates and figures straight. You’re amazing,” she remarked as she got into the car.

He waited until she had secured her seat belt before closing the door and getting behind the wheel. “Some of us have a head for figures. Some of us don’t,” he teased as he guided the car into traffic. “That’s why I handle all the bills, remember?”

She patted his arm. “And you do a marvelous job. You always have. I’m lucky I don’t have the worries that Andrea has had to carry every since Peter died, or to have to make a choice between supporting my husband’s dream or staying home with my children like Jenny has had to do.”

“She and Michael seem very happy,” he suggested as they reached the Garden State Parkway entrance and headed north.

“I suppose they are, but with the new baby coming in February, it will be even harder for her to work.”

“Maybe Michael will sell this new book of his. He seems pretty excited about it.”

She waved his words away. “Michael is always excited about his newest book. At this point, with six or seven manuscripts all gathering dust and enough rejection slips to wallpaper every room in our new beach house, I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten the message.”

Russell took his eyes from the roadway for a moment and glanced at her. “What message?”

She shrugged. “That he gave this writing career he wanted so badly his best, but failed. With a wife and three children to support, it’s time he faced up to his responsi
bilities. He was a great English teacher when Jenny first met him. I’m sure he wouldn’t have any trouble finding a teaching position again. Then Jenny could stay home and raise her babies, like she should.”

Russell fidgeted in his seat and readjusted his seat belt. “I guess it doesn’t matter that both Michael and Jenny seem satisfied with their arrangement?”

“I know my sister,” she snapped, surprised by the churlish tone of her own voice.

“Ouch!”

She drew in a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just frustrating. Jenny waited so long to get married and have children. It’s hard to stand by and watch her miss out on all those precious years with Katy and Hannah, and now with the new baby, too….”

He cleared his throat. “What about Michael?”

She cocked a brow.

Russell slowed down, pulled up to the tollbooth, tossed thirty-five cents into the bin and accelerated as the light turned green. “I only meant that maybe it’s not such a bad thing, Michael staying home with the girls.”

“I’m not saying it’s bad. It’s a whole lot better than having the girls in day care with strangers. It’s just…different.” She shrugged her shoulder. “I guess I’m just plain old-fashioned, and I’m a lot more worried about Andrea. She says she’s going to be fine, but—”

“You don’t believe her?”

“No, I believe her. At least, I believe she’s telling me what her doctor has said. I just feel badly for her, that’s all.”

“Be careful. I’m not sure how well she takes to sympathy,” he murmured.

“She doesn’t, and you know it, which is why I know I have to be careful. I can’t let her see how worried I am. It’s not as if all she had to worry about was getting through her treatments.”

“Trying to run a business and maneuver about on crutches won’t be easy.”

She sighed. “I’d love to strangle that Jamie Martin. Trouble is, he’s been so decent about taking responsibility for the accident, I’m more tempted to just hug him. I just wish she didn’t have to worry about keeping a roof over her head. If her business ever fails, which is not out of the realm of possibilities, she could lose everything. Then what?”

He shrugged. “She’s a fighter. She’d find a way to survive somehow.”

Madge’s heart began to race. “Which only proves my point. She shouldn’t have to find a way to survive. She shouldn’t have to carry her financial burden alone. It’s not fair. Not that she ever gives the idea of marrying again any serious thought. She’s far too busy playing superwoman.”

Russell rubbed his brow. “Let me see if I understand you. You’re upset because Jenny has chosen to support her husband’s dream and work while he writes and takes care of the children, and you’re also upset because Andrea is sick again and because she seems to like being an independent, self-supporting woman.”

Madge chewed on her lower lip and shook her head. “I’m not upset. I’m just concerned, and I feel a little guilty, I guess.”

“Guilty? Why?”

“Because you’ve always taken such good care of me. I never had to choose between supporting your career and
the children, like Jenny, and I’ve never had to worry about going to work, day after day, week after week, like Andrea. Now with the new beach house, it almost seems like I’m being greedy or—or selfish. I have so much….”

“If that’s how you feel, it’s not too late to back out of the contract. There’s a three-day grace period.”

“No. I want the beach house, but I want Jenny and Andrea to have more.”

“Maybe they do,” he whispered. “Maybe they do.”

O
n Wednesday, Andrea had a “to do” list in front of her that would have been daunting on a good day, and today ranked somewhere between awful and disaster.

And it was only ten-thirty in the morning.

While Jamie continued on his mission to get additional businesses to display the signs advertising the Shawl Ministry, Andrea sorted through the color-coded files on her desk for the third time, leaned back in her chair and ran her fingers through her hair. She glanced at the paperwork on top of the conference table that was Doris’s temporary desk and saw the purple folder she wanted. It had to be the folder she wanted. It was the only purple folder in sight.

She sighed. Unless that folder had grown legs or sprouted wings, a possibility she did not dismiss easily given the day’s
downward spiral, someone had moved the folder and left it well out of her reach. “Someone named Doris,” she whispered.

She recognized the irascible tone in her voice and steepled her hands. She had anticipated the need to make adjustments now that she had to share her office space with another person. Although Andrea and Doris’s personalities were compatible in their approach to clients, when it came to paperwork and organizational details, they could not have been more opposite. Accommodating their different styles was turning out to be much harder than Andrea had thought it would be.

Anyone who glanced at Andrea’s desk would know she was more than highly organized. She was the Queen of Order, and she could not function any other way. Colored file folders lay separated by topic in bins on the right side of her desk. Minibaskets in her desk drawers held supplies so she could almost grab what she needed without looking. Even the maze of cords connected to the computer, printer, telephone and fax machine had been tamed into submission.

She glanced at Doris’s desk and shuddered. The only way to describe the surface of the woman’s desk right now was total chaos. File folders, mail and telephone messages littered the top of her desk as though she had simply thrown everything into the air and let it all lay where it landed. Several of Andrea’s giveaway mugs were home to pens, pencils and other supplies that were all jumbled together.

There! The purple folder for the Wheatley settlement tomorrow was smack in the middle of that…that mess.

Andrea gritted her teeth. With her chemo treatment
scheduled for nine-thirty tomorrow morning, she would not have time to get back to the office and review all the paperwork before the one-o’clock settlement. She needed to go over that file now, but her crutches were in the corner across the room where Jamie had inadvertently put them.

Bracing both hands against the edge of her desk, she pulled herself up to a standing position, then realized she could not let go of the desk to push her chair back any farther and out of her way without risking losing her balance. She gripped the desk hard. “Think, Andrea!” she muttered.

Not about calling one of the office superstores to order a swivel chair on wheels or a plastic mat to put on top of the rug so she could glide from one desk to the other. She could do that easily enough later. She had the Office Genie catalogue in her desk drawer. Not about the fact that Jamie could have gotten the folder for her if he had not been on an errand. And not about the fact that the folder would have been on her desk, right where she had put it, if Doris had not moved it and then forgotten to return it.

She closed her eyes, tightened her grip and turned to carefully nudge the chair with her right knee. She opened her eyes and tried again. Nothing. Not even an inch of more space. Frustrated, she managed a little hop, but when she heard the front door open, she was caught off guard, lost her balance and plopped rather awkwardly back into her seat.

“Andrea! Are you all right? What are you doing?”

She glared at Madge, hoisted herself back into a normal sitting position and pointed to Doris’s desk. “I’m fine. I was just trying to get that folder. I need it to make sure everything is ready for settlement tomorrow.”

Madge walked over to Doris’s desk, picked up the purple folder and grinned. “This purple one?”

Andrea clenched her teeth. “Yes.”

Madge placed the folder on the desk in front of Andrea. “Where’s Doris?”

“Showing a house.”

“What about Jamie? I thought he was supposed to be here to help you.”

“He’s out distributing the signs advertising the Shawl Ministry.”

Another grin. “Good thing I stopped by, isn’t it? What else can I do?”

Madge’s smile and willing nature sweetened Andrea’s sour mood, but she had no intention of getting her sister involved in her real-estate business. “Lend me your left ankle?”

“If I could—”

“I know you would.” Andrea glanced at Doris’s desk again and sighed. “I don’t like this. Not even a little.”

“What don’t you like? Having someone else working here, being so dependent or having me catch you doing something dumb, like trying to hop your way to the other desk?”

Andrea blushed, even though it was rather comforting to have someone know her so well. “All of the above.”

Madge pulled up a chair and glanced around the room. “I know it’s hard, but things will work out with Doris. I think you’ll even get to like having someone to share all this work, too.” She grinned again. “And I’ve seen you do plenty of dumb things before, so don’t worry about today.”

“What dumb things? Other than the disaster with the sand crabs?” she countered.

Madge curled the fingers of one of her hands into half a fist, inspected her nails and frowned. “Oh, let me count the times.” She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “What about the time you dumped the entire contents of the salt shaker into the gravy Mother was making for Thanksgiving?”

Andrea stiffened her back. “That wasn’t my fault. Sandra loosened the lid on the salt shaker because she was mad Mother wouldn’t let her help, too.”

“Hmm. There was the time you sprayed hair spray on the furniture instead of polish.”

A little stiffer. “Again, not my fault. Mother said to use the can of polish she kept in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. She didn’t know you kept a can of hair spray hidden there so I couldn’t borrow it. Neither did I, so I just opened the cabinet and grabbed the first can I saw.”

“Without bothering to read the label, which turned out to be pretty dumb,” Madge teased. “Do you remember Miss Dillon?”

“Vaguely. She lived up the street with her brother, I think. As I recall, they had a lot of pets.”

“Miss Dillon had a turtle that she kept in a cage in the backyard. She had drilled a little hole in its shell, and she’d attach a leash and let it out to hunt for bugs in her garden. Remember?”

“I—I think I do remember playing with the turtle a few times.”

“You stole the turtle.”

Andrea’s pulse raced with disbelief. “I did? Are you sure I stole her turtle?”

“I remember it perfectly,” Madge countered. “It was the Fourth of July. We had all gone to the parade, like we did
every year. On the way home, we were excited about the fireworks planned for late that night, which meant we had to take a nap, of course.”

Andrea nodded. She had no specific recollection of that particular Fourth of July, but Mother’s insistence that they all take naps if they wanted to stay up for fireworks was a tradition that had lasted well into elementary school for all the girls.

“Well, you didn’t take a nap that Fourth of July. You sneaked up to Miss Dillon’s and snatched Willie.”

“The turtle’s name was Willie?”

“Yes, it was.”

Andrea rolled her eyes. “You even remember the turtle’s name?”

Madge shrugged. “I do. Don’t you? Never mind. Obviously you don’t. Anyway, you brought the turtle home and hid it under your bed and then took your nap.”

“I did?” Andrea shook her head. She had absolutely no memory of doing anything of the kind.

“You did.”

“Why? Why would I steal Miss Dillon’s turtle?”

Madge chuckled. “As I recall, after Mother found the turtle walking down the hallway after he’d done his business on her new carpet runner, you told her you’d brought Willie home because the fireworks that night were going to scare him.”

Andrea furrowed her brow and mentally flipped through her childhood memories. She remembered loving the sprays of dazzling color when each fireworks display lit the night sky, but the loud bangs had terrified her. An old, old memory finally surfaced from the fog created by many,
many years, along with the emotions she had felt as a young girl. “Oh, I remember Willie now. Miss Dillon had let me paint his name on the bottom of his shell with nail polish! And I did. I did take Willie home to protect him. I did!”

“See? I told you I’d be able to think of something dumb you did.”

Andrea drew her head back. “That wasn’t dumb. I was trying to do something kind for an animal that I loved. That wasn’t dumb,” she repeated.

Madge’s eyes twinkled. “Of course it wasn’t. The dumb part was not putting the turtle into a box or something so he couldn’t escape from underneath your bed. I tried to warn you at the time, but you ignored me, as usual.”

Andrea opened her mouth to argue, heard the whisper of a memory to back up Madge’s claims and pursed her lips. “How on earth do you remember all this…this stuff?”

“Great mind. Pure talent. Or sheer brilliance. Take your pick.”

Andrea laughed with her sister. “Honestly, how you manage all that minutiae—wait a minute! You’re back from the shore! I forgot you went to Sea Gate to look at beach houses. Did Blair show you something you liked? No, that was a dumb question. What’s not to like about any beach house in Sea Gate?”

Madge opened her purse, pulled out a fact sheet and handed it to Andrea. “As of September third, it’s ours!”

Andrea listened carefully as Madge described the four-bedroom, five-bath summer home—a home Andrea or most average folks could not afford if it was their only home. Joy for her sister, however, eclipsed a wisp of jealousy. “It’s beautiful.”

“At the price we paid, it should be,” Madge quipped, “although you wouldn’t believe some of the monstrosities we saw. They’re tearing down so many of those little cottages Mother and Daddy used to rent, you almost wouldn’t recognize it as the same town. Not that that’s a bad thing.”

She leaned closer to the desk. “The best part is we’re facing the beach and the views…” Her gaze grew distant. “Mother and Daddy would have loved this house.”

“They loved it anywhere we could all be together,” Andrea whispered.

“There’s plenty of room in this house for all of us and maybe a few grandchildren someday if I can get either one of the boys to settle down and get married,” Madge ventured, and the twinkle in her eyes sparkled even brighter. “We called Drew and Brett last night. Drew isn’t sure if he can get any time off in September, but he said he’d try. After living in Washington State for the past two years, he said he’d love to come to a drier climate. Brett’s a definite, though.”

She tucked the fact sheet back into her purse. “He said he’d fly in for a long weekend. He’s going to see if he can get a flight right into Atlantic City.”

“Is be bringing Amy?”

“They broke up.” Madge shook her head. “I liked her a lot.”

Andrea chuckled. “You liked Mindy a lot, too.”

“I’ve liked all Brett’s girlfriends. One of these days—”

“Madge? What a surprise!” Doris swept into the office with a shopping bag in one hand and her briefcase in the other. She plopped both on top of her desk. Simultaneously, the telephone rang, Jamie returned from his errands, picked
up the remaining signs and left again. Meanwhile, the fax machine started whining.

Andrea reached for the telephone, but Doris got there first. “Hooper Realty. Yes? Oh, I see. No, I suppose not. Thank you.” She hung up the telephone. “That was Dr. Newton’s office? I—I’m sorry. I didn’t get a chance to tell her…I think the receptionist thought I was you. Your appointment has been changed to one o’clock tomorrow, the last appointment of the day. She said something about the doctor having to schedule additional surgery in the morning.”

Andrea felt the blood drain from her face. No one outside of her family knew about her cancer recurrence or the regimen of treatments scheduled for the coming year. To think a simple mistake might have changed that left Andrea weak with disappointment. Though secondary, the conflict between her appointment and the Wheatley settlement now added frustration to her emotional distress.

Her pulse pounded against the wall of her chest. How much did Doris actually know and how much would she surmise? Andrea closed her eyes and prayed for the patience and strength to survive a bad day—one that was quickly heading straight toward disaster.