Life is Sweet (26 page)

Becca was going to say something, but she was distracted by Cal letting out a wince. “Ow!” he yelped at Pam.

Standing next to him, she had his arm in an anaconda-like squeeze. “We could have an afterschool program at Butternut Knoll.”

“We?” Cal blinked.

From the feverish look in Pam's eyes, her brain had bolted out the gate. “It would be perfect. There are always a few kids who ride after school, and you're great with the weekend classes. All you have to do is give them thirty minutes of instruction, then let them ride a little, then do a few chores. They'd pay you.”

“Yeah, but . . .” He frowned. “Thirty minutes of instruction every day?”

She gave him a light whack on the arm. “Thirty minutes is nothing. This is a good idea. It would bring money in, and it might actually save you work.”

Saving work seemed to appeal to him, at least. “It's an interesting idea. Definitely worth looking into.”

Erin brightened. “And I came up with it. Amazing! Maybe I have a bright future as a business thinker-upper. Is that a job?”

Pam circled around to Erin's table and practically lifted her up by the armpits. “No, but right now you have a bright immediate future as a cupcake saleslady.” She propelled Erin over to the counter and transferred her Strawberry Cake Shop apron to her.

Becca watched the exchange in bemused silence. Looked like she was getting a new employee.

“I'm sorry,” Pam told her. “I'm giving notice again. Cal needs me.”

“I do?” Cal asked, startled. “You mean, right now?”

“We need to get out to the stables and start planning this out.” Pam prodded him toward the door. “Also, we have to stop by Home Depot and grab some things. We could build a few more storage shelves for the kids to put their stuff.”

“Shelves?” Dawning panic showed in Cal's eyes. “Shouldn't we let the idea sit awhile? Allow it to brew a little?”

“Why wait? We could be making cash and rescuing Olivia from Zumba study hall.”

“Olivia,” Cal muttered. “That kid has a lot to answer for.”

After Pam had pushed Cal out of the shop, Becca shifted her attention to Erin, who was studying the cash register cautiously, as if it were a rare, exotic, and possibly dangerous beast. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” Erin gave one of the buttons a tentative poke. “I've just never been on this side of one of these before.”

“Now you can see how the other half lives.” Becca laughed and turned to get back to bake-work. It didn't occur to her until much, much later that Erin hadn't seemed amused at all.

Chapter 21

Becca assumed that when she brought Walt in for his appointment, the doctors would look at his medical history, take a blood sample, and then sign him up ASAP for the National Kidney Registry she'd read about on the Internet. After all, the man was obviously sick.

Instead, the appointment turned into an afternoon-long ordeal. The expected blood draw, during which the technician drained Walt with vampire-like thoroughness, was followed by X-rays and a stress test. While he was being shuttled between departments, Becca set up later appointments for a colonoscopy and vaccines, and received information on getting Walt on an insurance plan. And she waited. Sometimes she was waiting with Walt, sometimes alone. She probably had enough time to finally finish
Ulysses,
but she opted for an Angry Birds marathon on her phone. Together, she and Walt were counseled by a nutritionist on the importance of sticking with a low-salt, low-protein diet. Then another doctor read Walt the riot act about keeping up with dialysis treatments.

By the time they sat down with an actual transplant surgeon, Walt looked as exhausted as Becca felt. Dr. Laverents, an earnest, soft-spoken man about Walt's age, informed Becca that they would have to wait for test results to get on the registry, and that in the meantime she should probably see about also signing Walt up with another transplant center in a neighboring region.

Her entire life, she'd never given much thought to how transplants worked, or the ratio of how many organs were needed to those that were available. The shortage was eye-opening, and discouraging. Donors were in short supply, so there was a protocol for who received organs, with children understandably receiving priority. The thought of a child having to endure what Walt was going through depressed Becca so much that she nearly missed the point of the good doctor's talk.

The upshot, Dr. Laverents said, was that most patients who needed transplants had to wait. Sometimes a long time.

“How long?” she asked.

“Sometimes years.”

Becca had read about long waits on the Internet, but she'd also heard some cases were resolved right away. For some reason, she'd expected the medical professionals to take one look at Walt and shoot him to the top of the list. Turned out, Walt was not a special case. Or an unusual one.

Dr. Laverents went on to explain a formula to guesstimate how long the wait would be at any transplant center. The calculations included taking the number of people on a center's registered recipient waiting list and factoring in the number of transplants the center performed, minus the rate of “attrition.”

Becca repeated that last word, which heretofore she'd only associated with World History class and World War I trench warfare. “What do you mean by attrition?”

The doctor steepled his hands. “Attrition takes into account all the reasons people drop off the lists. Some receive living donor transplants, or transplants at a different center. Or they develop a condition that makes them ineligible for the operation.”

“Or they die,” Walt guessed.

From the shadow that crossed Dr. Laverents's face, Becca guessed this was the reality the kindly man had been tap-dancing around. “Some people do die waiting,” he confirmed. “We try our hardest not to let that happen.”

Becca left the meeting shaken.
Don't panic.
In the car, she assured Walt, “We'll get you on several lists. Don't worry.”

“I'm not worried. It's an ordeal, though.”

“No, it's not.” Not when she considered the alternative.

“Plus, I don't have insurance,” he said. “I did have some back in LA, but I lost it when I was laid off my last job. Then I never went through the hassle of signing up again. . . .”

She glanced back at the pile of folders she'd accumulated throughout the course of the day. “I'm going to look into that. That woman in Administration mentioned several websites I needed to go to, including the government one . . .” She'd talked to so many people, and received so much advice and literature. It was daunting.

“And they put you through all those tests at every new place, the man said,” Walt went on. “It's not pleasant.”

She gripped the steering wheel so tightly her hands were going numb. “It's another day of tests versus your life,” she pointed out, trying not to sound too irritated. She reminded herself how much she dreaded just getting her annual flu shot. The tests he'd undergone today were just the tip of the iceberg.

“Seems to me all those organs should go to those little kids and young people. Give them a chance.”

“They do. The doctor explained that they take age and physical condition into consideration.”

He was silent for a moment. “I don't want to cause you any more trouble.”

“It's no trouble,” she said, her vocal cords straining with the effort it took not to shout.

She was happy to drop him off at the town house, and Walt looked ready to get away from her, too. He climbed out of the car and shambled toward Matthew's front door. Guilt for feeling annoyed with him filled her. Poor guy had been poked and inspected all day, and then had been told he'd have to do it all over again somewhere else. And that it might all come to nothing. He could die.

The strange thing was,
she
seemed more upset by that last news than he was. Instead, he kept dwelling on the inconvenience. Was she going to have to drag him the whole way through the process? What if she wasn't successful? He might die waiting, and he was her only living relation.

If he actually was her father. What if he wasn't?

That last thought made her wince. She should have insisted on a paternity test the first time the subject had come up. Now asking for one would seem like saying that she didn't want to bother with any of this if he wasn't a blood relation. But she had been concerned about Walt before the father issue had come up, so it wasn't as if she'd just drop him if they didn't share the same genes.

She drove back downtown, brooding. Poor Walt. He seemed depressed, restless. The problem was he had nothing to do. Rattling around in Matthew's town house and watching TV all the time couldn't be fun. She needed to connect him to something he loved—something that would give him a little hope. Which would be easier if she knew him better.

At the shop, the Closed sign was on the door. Her dashboard clock read 4:25. And it was Thursday—still plenty of people out and about. Why would Erin have closed up already?

She hurried inside the shop to assure herself that the place had suffered no obvious calamity. At first glance, nothing appeared amiss. The water heater hadn't broken, there was no fire damage, and the shelves were picked clean.

She eyed the empty glass, impressed. Just that morning, those shelves had been crammed full of goodies. Erin must have sold out—on her first solo day, too. Maybe her friend had found her true calling.

She took the stairs two at a time, ready to congratulate Erin on a job fantastically done. When she reached the upstairs landing, though, the apartment was nearly dark. And quiet. Her body went clammy. The silence reminded her of the night she'd found Walt passed out on her bed.

Squinting across the long room, she spotted the outline of a slumped form on the couch. She rushed over and snapped on a floor lamp.

Jack-in-the-box fast, Erin bolted up to sitting. Becca hopped back in surprise, nearly stepping on the cats twining around her legs. She'd been ready to perform CPR, but Erin looked fine—except for her bloodshot eyes and the mascara streaming down her cheeks.

Becca's stomach clenched. In the last day or so, Erin had seemed a little better, but now she'd boomeranged back to despair. “What's wrong?”

Erin put her fist to her mouth, then brought it down and gulped in a breath. “Today I failed at everything.”

Becca sagged onto the cushion next to her, relieved that there wasn't a life-and-death crisis underway. “You scared me. I thought something horrible had happened.”

“It did,” Erin said. “I realized how useless my life is.”

Becca bit back a groan. After her day at the transplant center, she wasn't sure she was up for a poor-little-rich-girl discussion. “Your life has not been useless. That's absurd.”

“See? Even you don't take my problems seriously.”

“I'm sorry. I just spent a day in a building full of people fighting for their lives. They all would have traded anything to be twenty-nine and in good health.”

Erin clutched a throw pillow and sank back. “I knew you wouldn't understand. You don't know what it's like. You had a whole career begin and end by the time you were fifteen.”

“Thanks for the reminder.”

“I mean, that's a
good
thing. You had to change direction. You learned to navigate life's choppy waters. But how do you learn how to navigate when you've just been coasting for twenty-nine years?”

Becca started to understand the crux of the problem. Better yet, she saw that there might be something here that she could fix. “First of all, don't compare yourself to anyone else, least of all me. It's not as if I
did
anything to get a career when I was a little kid. At the time, people would pat me on the head and tell me that I was a little go-getter, and of course I believed them. But it was a lie. The truth was I happened to be in the right place at the right time. I had a look some producer thought would work. I could recite lines—but not particularly better than any number of little kids could have done.”

Erin blinked at her. “So?”

“So I was lucky, just like you were lucky to be born with a big bank account behind you. Stop beating yourself up. You aren't the only fortunate person in the world.” She couldn't believe she was consoling someone for being rich. Especially when she was about to spend her evening figuring out how to get her maybe-dad on public assistance. “Everybody reaches a point when they have to reboot.”

“But what am I going to do?” Another tear splashed across the mascara-streaked plains of Erin's cheek. “I always screw everything up.”

“Will you stop belittling yourself? You didn't screw up your marriage. Bob did. And what you're going to do is pick yourself up just like you've been doing. You can always work at the store until you hatch a better plan.”

Wrong thing to say, apparently. Sure, it wasn't the greatest job offer, but Becca didn't expect her friend to fall over in despair at the prospect, which is what happened.

“You don't know what happened today,” Erin said.

Oh God. “What happened? I thought you did great. You sold out.”

“No, I didn't.” Her voice was barely intelligible because she'd face-planted a pillow. “I gave everything away.”

A few seconds ticked by before Becca's brain processed the muffled words. “You gave everything away . . . as in, for free?”

Erin nodded, then lifted her head up a bit. Testing to see if it was safe to show her face.

“All the cupcakes?” Becca asked, numb. “Cakes, brownies . . .”

“Everything.”

Becca swallowed. Only Herculean restraint kept her from yelling. “Why would you do that?”

“I don't know.” Erin's voice keened with tension. “I mean, I
do
know why. The cash register jammed or something, and I couldn't get it to work. And I didn't know what to do. There were all these people there, waiting to buy stuff. I couldn't just send them away.”

“So you just
gave
everything away?” Was she crazy?

“Well, yeah. And to be honest, it felt great,” Erin confessed. “Like a big party. Everybody looked so happy.”

“I'll bet.” Now it was Becca's turn to collapse. She sank against the couch cushions, doing some mental accounting. Which was not her strong suit.

“They gave a lot of money to the tip jar,” Erin said.

“We don't have a tip jar.”

“I put a coffee cup out. We made sixty-three dollars. People are really generous when things are free. That's kind of nice to think about, isn't it?”

Becca grunted. Even with the tip cup, the day would be about a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar net loss. Crap. “Why didn't you call me?”

“You were at the hospital. What could you do?”

“Well, for starters, I probably could have told you
how to fix the cash register
.”

Erin winced. “Also, I just felt so stupid. I mean, even teenagers working at McDonald's could have handled the situation better. So I just . . . snapped, I guess.”

Becca began to feel as mad at herself as at Erin. What was the first thing they taught in management class at the business course she'd dropped out of?
A manager takes responsibility
. Erin had just started, and Becca had been so distracted lately she hadn't been paying attention to whether she was catching on to everything or not. She'd been assuming Erin was Pam. She never should have left her in charge of the store. Now she wanted to strangle Erin. And herself.

Erin shook her head. “I knew you would be mad.”

“No . . .” Her gravelly rasp of a voice wasn't fooling anybody.

“I'll pay for it all, of course,” Erin promised. “Whatever you think is right. I was going to just leave you a thousand dollars and run away, but I decided that would be childish.”

More childish than giving away a storeful of baked goods?

“What were you going to do after you left the cash?” Becca said.

“I don't know.” Erin shrugged. “Run away to Mexico?”

Only Erin would think that running away to Mexico was something she should do after
giving
someone money.