Just Like That (28 page)
“Of course, it’s great if you come along.” He seemed sincere. “I’m just surprised that you want to.” She hadn’t thought about it. It was something Sam was going to do and she naturally wanted to go along. Should she be concerned about the wanting to be with him all the time?
“I want to,” she assured him, shoving the questions to the back of her mind for later.
Seventeen minutes later, they pulled up in front of Natalia’s house.
“Her garage is open and the car’s here,” Sam commented almost to himself as he stopped the car along the curb.
“Maybe she’s still home,” Danika suggested. “Should we wait?”
“No, we have to check it out.” Sam was frowning at the garage as if the building had insulted him. “If she’s gone, the garage door should be down. This isn’t safe.”
“Do you want me to go up to the front door and see if she’s home?” Danika asked. “She doesn’t know me. I can pretend I’m taking a survey or something.”
Sam shook his head. “Even if she is home, the garage door should be down.”
“We can mention that if we talk to her.” Danika rolled her eyes. “Should I see if she’s home?” Sam shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t know me either.”
“She doesn’t even know you?”
“Nope.”
“How exactly did you get started doing this?”
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“We picked one of the other ladies, Katherine, up in the ambulance one night with chest pains. The other three were there with her. Every minute. I overheard them talking and realized what good friends they were and that Katherine, at least, lived alone and wouldn’t be able to take care of things on her own for a while. They were debating how much help they would be able to be. The idea formed.” He shrugged. “We started by showing up at Katherine’s place with a new alarm system that we told her she had qualified for through a program for older women living alone.”
“You made this program for older women up?” Danika asked.
He nodded. “We thought about telling her she’d won it in a contest, but we wanted to do the same thing for the other women who were alone and convincing them that they had all won a contest seemed like a stretch. Instead we asked Katherine for the names of three friends who could also benefit from a system and she, of course, gave us Barb, Dorothy and Natalia’s names.”
“You guys are very clever.”
“We find a way of doing what needs done. We installed the system for her safety but made a point of choosing the code for it so we could get in any time to take care of the house. We took care of just her at first, but…” He frowned and paused. “I guess I don’t know how we found out about the card game every Thursday.”
“So Natalia’s never met you?” Danika asked, amazed by the story.
“They all met us in the ambulance, but they were pretty upset and didn’t register our faces or even ask our names. Then she met me briefly when we came to install the alarm system. But no, she doesn’t know who I am or that I come to her house.”
“I think that’s too bad,” Danika said. “She should know how sweet and generous you are.” He shook his head. “No. It’s better this way. Easier. I get to feel good about helping her, but I don’t have to feel bad about not visiting or forgetting her birthday or anything.” Danika huffed out a frustrated breath. It didn’t even occur to Sam that maybe he would like to visit or that Natalia’s birthday would…a thought came to mind and she asked him, “When is Natalia’s birthday, Sam?”
“August first,” he answered. Then he glanced at her.
She was looking at him with raised eyebrows.
“I suppose you think that it’s significant that I know when her birthday is?”
“Oh, not at all,” she replied. “I also don’t think it’s significant that she gets a bouquet of flowers from a secret admirer on her birthday. And I don’t think it’s significant that there’s a ‘free’ extravagant dessert for her at whatever restaurant she and the girls choose for the celebration.” Sam didn’t argue, or deny. He just glared at her. “Come on, let’s see what’s going on.” Danika laughed as she got out and followed him up Natalia’s driveway. She’d gotten pretty darned close with those guesses. She knew him. He was a good guy who was sweet and generous and caring.
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“Maybe she forgot something inside and is coming back out,” Sam said as he approached. “If she sees us, we’ll pretend to be appreciating her landscaping.”
“Got it,” Danika said dutifully, knowing that Sam had likely done the landscaping. She wondered if Natalia thought she’d qualified for free landscaping, too, or if the beautiful bushes, flowers and stones just naturally appeared around her house one weekend. Danika guessed the older woman was brighter than that.
“I’ll…um…go…take a look in the back kitchen window,” Sam said.
Danika smirked. Sam had no idea what he was doing. But it was sweet that he was here and hadn’t just left when he’d seen that Natalia’s car was still here.
“I don’t think she’s here,” he said a moment later.
“How can you tell?”
“I can see her answering machine on the counter. She has three messages. She would have listened to them if she was here, right?” He sounded like he had no idea one way or the other.
“Should we go in?”
“I guess.”
They had just started toward the door into the house through the garage when a car pulled into the driveway. Danika glanced at Sam and found him looking panicked. But there was no escape now. The people in the car had to have seen them and running would certainly look suspicious.
Two older women got out of the car and started toward the house.
“Oh, hell,” Sam muttered.
Another glace at his face showed him looking at the two women, easily in the their mid-seventies, as if they were terrorists come to torture government secrets out of them.
“Hello,” the one who had been driving greeted them. “Can I help you?”
“We’re um…” Sam started.
Danika took control. “We were admiring the landscaping here and wanted to ask the owner who had done it.”
Sam half choked, half coughed behind her.
She ignored him and continued. “We saw the car was here, but no one answered the front door and we were concerned.”
The other woman, who had been in the passenger seat of the car, smiled, but her eyes filled with tears.
“That’s sweet. But no, no one is home.”
“Oh, then we’ll just be going,” Sam said, grabbing Danika’s elbow and dragging her toward the driveway.
Danika dug her heels in and turned back toward the women. “I hope everything is okay.” The woman was crying, and there had to be a reason.
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“No.” The woman sniffed and dabbed her eyes with a tissue that looked to have been used for the same thing repeatedly already. “Everything is not okay.” The driver patted her friend’s arm. “We’re here to get some of our friend’s things. She’s in the hospital.”
Danika felt Sam tense beside her, but she didn’t look at him. His grip on her elbow tightened, but he made no move to walk away now.
“Oh. I’m so sorry. Is it something serious?” These woman had to be two of the four that Sam helped take care of. They obviously didn’t know who he was, but he had recognized them. She wanted to find out as much information about Natalia for him as she could without tipping them off. While she thought he should tell them who he was, he had chosen not to and she couldn’t ruin that for him.
“A stroke,” the driver, the more composed of the two said. “I’m afraid it’s quite serious.”
“They don’t know if she’ll wake up,” the passenger said.
The woman started truly crying versus just letting tears run over her cheeks and Danika had to hold herself back from reaching out to her. Instead, she turned her attention to another person who needed comforting. She slipped her arm from Sam’s grip and instead took his hand in hers, squeezing.
“It doesn’t look good,” the other woman said, putting her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “But we’re praying and hoping.”
“We will be too,” Danika said softly. Then she turned to Sam. “We should go,” she whispered.
He was watching the two women let themselves into Natalia’s house. She could feel him holding himself back from following them. He wanted to do something. She could sense that.
“Come on, Sam.”
They walked back to the car silently. Sam pulled his car keys from his pocket but didn’t protest when Danika took them from him and got in the driver’s seat.
She didn’t pull the car away from the curb right away. She turned to face him. “You okay?”
“No.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Go home, I guess.” He stared out the front windshield.
“I know what you’re going to say, but I think you should go to the hospital.”
“Why?”
“To see Natalia.”
“What difference would it make?”
Danika frowned at him, even though he wasn’t looking at her. “What do you mean?”
“Even if she wakes up, which doesn’t sound likely, she won’t know me.” He sounded and looked defeated and Danika wanted to hug him.
“Then tell her who you are,” Danika said. “Now’s a good time.” 166
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“No.” He frowned at the pavement in front of the car. “It won’t matter.” Danika sat and let her thoughts turn. Then she said, “You should tell the other women.”
“No.”
“Sam, come on. They’d love to know that you’ve been there for her. They’d love to know who you are.”
“Danika, I’m
not
doing that. What’s the point?”
“They love her. They’re hurting. It would make them feel good that someone else cares about her.”
“The point was to avoid getting involved and caring…” he mumbled.
She sighed. “Sam, you don’t have to talk to someone every day or even know their middle name to
care
about them. Sometimes that just happens. I’m guessing you got to know Natalia pretty well being her house once a week.”
He didn’t reply.
“Tell me three things you know about her that most people who spend time with her probably don’t know. Maybe something her friends don’t even know.”
He shook his head.
“Tell me, Sam.”
He sighed. “She likes tater tots. She buys like five bags at a time.” Danika smiled. “What else?”
“Her great granddaughter’s middle name is Natalia, after her.”
“How do you know that?” She assumed he knew about the tater tots because he’d checked to be sure her fridge and freezer were working.
“She had the birth announcement hanging on her fridge for a long time. Then she framed it and hung it in her bedroom.”
Danika liked that he’d been paying attention. He didn’t want Natalia to know she had a guardian angel, but he was doing a great job of it.
“One more thing,” she prompted.
“She’s allergic to poppy seeds.”
Danika chuckled. “How do you know
that?
”
He smiled. “She had antihistamines on the countertop for the first time in all the months that I’d been going to her house. Then beside her chair in the living room she had several pages printed off the Internet about allergies and she had highlighted and circled poppy seeds on every page that mentioned it.”
“You could be a detective,” Danika said. “Wow.”
He shrugged. “I was in her house once a week for over a year. You’re right, you get to know someone that way.”
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Danika let those words linger in the air for several moments. Then said, “You should go to the hospital.”
“I have to tell the guys.” He reached for his phone and hit a number on his speed dial.
Danika put the car into drive and pulled away as he called, not wanting Natalia’s friends to find them still sitting there without a good reason. Or at least, without a reason that Sam would share with them.
“Kevin, it’s me,” Sam said a moment later. “Natalia’s in the hospital.”
“I know. I just got here.”
“Where?”
“The hospital,” Kevin answered. “Are you coming?”
“Why are you at the hospital?” Sam asked.
“To see Natalia. And Katherine and Dorothy and Barb.”
“What do you mean “to see” them? And Katherine and Barb are over here at Natalia’s getting her stuff.”
“Did you talk to them?” Kevin acted genuinely surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“Did you tell them who you are?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh.” Now his friend sounded disappointed. “Why not?”
“Why would I? What would that help?”
“I just thought…forget it,” Kevin said. “Are you coming over?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Mac and Dooley are here.”
“How’d they know about it?”
Kevin took a deep breath and Sam braced himself. For what, he wasn’t sure, but he definitely got the impression that Kevin was hesitant to tell him whatever it was and that probably meant that Sam wasn’t going to like it.
“Katherine called Dooley and he called Mac, who called Dorothy to be see if she was okay, but she was already down here so he came down to be with her.” Sam processed that one long sentence slowly. “Katherine called Dooley?” he finally repeated, picking
something
to start with when he wanted an explanation on the whole blessed thing.
“Right.”
“How…why… How did she know to call him… How did she have his number?” Sam demanded.
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Kevin sighed. “There’s something you should know and I suppose this is the best time for it to come out.”
Oh, crap. “I don’t want to hear this, do I?” he asked his friend.
“Probably not,” Kevin admitted. “The thing is…the ladies have known about us for about six months now.”
“What?” Sam demanded. “Why?”
“Barb caught me at her house one day. I told her what I was doing, but I only gave myself up. Then Dooley and Mac wanted Dorothy and Katherine to know, too, so they confessed. We’ve still been going to their houses to check on them, but we don’t necessarily go just when they’re gone.”