Turnabout's Fair Play (36 page)

“They fixed…is that what your father and grandfather died from?” She squeezed her fists tight to keep her hands from shaking. This couldn’t be happening. It just couldn’t.

“Most likely. It is a congenital problem. But theirs was undiagnosed and unmonitored. Mine was diagnosed when I was little; and once the doctors determined it had closed as much as it was going to on its own, they did the surgery.” He reached for her again, and this time she let him settle his hands on her shoulders. “Flannery—I would have told you, but it didn’t seem important. I had my appendix and tonsils out when I was a kid, too. I have as much risk of dying now from those surgeries as I have from the ASD.”

“But…doesn’t it mean you’re going to be more prone to…heart attack and other problems?”

“Sure, maybe. They don’t know. But I take care of myself—I exercise, I try to eat well, I see my doctor, I take my vitamins, I drink plenty of water, and I try to get enough rest. That’s all any of us can do to try to stay healthy, isn’t it? And frankly”—Jamie glanced at Big Daddy and then back to her—“looks like you have just as great a risk of heart problems as I do, if this runs in your family.”

“Not to mention your grandmother’s cancer,” Big Daddy chimed in.

“You’re not helping.” Flannery raised her voice slightly but didn’t look at her grandfather.

Jamie dropped his hands and jammed them into the pockets of his jeans. “This is probably a lot for you to take in right now. I promise you, if I thought it would be a problem, I would have told you straightaway.” He rocked from heel to toe. “I’m going to head home and get some work done. Call me when you’re ready to talk about this…or if you need me for any reason.” He tapped the end of the bed. “Kirby, you hang in there.”

Jamie almost bowled over his grandmother in his rush toward the door. They exchanged a few words, but Flannery’s head buzzed so loudly she couldn’t make out anything they said.

Maureen entered and placed a floral arrangement on the wide windowsill then leaned over the head of the bed and greeted Big Daddy with a kiss. They murmured to each other before Maureen stood and straightened his blanket and then looked at the machine monitoring his vitals.

“I…I’ve got to go.” Flannery stuffed her tablet into her purse and escaped the room, barely able to catch her breath.

Jamie had the same heart problem his father and grandfather had died from. Probably. Most likely. And from what she’d heard, both men had died in their thirties or early forties. Jamie was already—how old? She didn’t know. But from the few silver hairs here and there, he had to be midthirties at least. How long until he—

No! She swerved from the vehemence of her mental protest. She couldn’t entertain thoughts like that. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.

But then, wasn’t she just in a state of denial if she didn’t?

Needing to scream but lost in the corridors of the huge medical center, Flannery struggled to breathe.

Minutes later, she made it out to the parking garage. Instead of waiting for the elevator, she took the stairs up to the sixth level, needing the physical outlet for her anger and confusion.

She needed something to get this off her mind. Work. Yes. She’d go to the office and bury herself in the work she’d yet to catch up on from being away from the office the first week of June.

She headed south from the hospital…but didn’t end up in Brentwood. She pulled the car up behind the white SUV in the carport at Caylor’s house. Putting the car in P
ARK
, she turned it off—but couldn’t move.

Caylor stepped out onto the balcony above the carport from her upstairs bedroom-office loft space and waved. Moments later, the redhead came out from the kitchen. She opened Flannery’s car door.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Unable to control herself any longer, Flannery hugged the steering wheel and pressed her forehead against it. “Jamie…his heart…I can’t …”

Somehow, Flannery ended up inside Caylor’s house on the sofa in the family room area of the newly renovated, open-concept house.

Caylor slapped a cold, wet cloth on Flannery’s forehead and dropped a tissue box in her lap. She didn’t say anything, just kicked off her flip-flops and curled up on the other end of the sofa, facing Flannery.

Flannery covered her face with the damp washcloth, crying into it with all the energy she had. She hated being this way—she hated for anyone to see her being this way. But it was only Caylor. And Caylor had seen her
much
worse than this. And if she didn’t get it all out at once, she’d explode.

And if that happened, Jack would do his I-told-you-so dance of victory.

“Are you crying or laughing?” Caylor asked.

Flannery scrubbed at her face, then wiped under her eyes to eliminate the smeared mascara she knew would be there.

“Missed a spot on your left cheek.”

“Thanks.” She made judicious use of the tissues to clear out her now-stopped-up nose.

“You ready to talk now?” Caylor handed her a soda.

“Yeah.” Flannery popped the can open and took a few gulps, relishing the burn of the carbonation as it went down.

“Sometime today?” Caylor reached around behind her and pulled out a small wastebasket, which she swept the wadded tissues into from the coffee table. She set the basket down near Flannery’s feet.

Flannery launched into the recounting of everything she’d been through in the last twenty-four hours—giving Caylor the look of death when Caylor exclaimed and clapped at hearing that Jamie’d kissed her.

Caylor’s joy disappeared, though, with the details about Big Daddy’s heart “event,” and returned at the news that he was doing much better—enough to admit his part in the matchmaking scheme.

“And then Big Daddy asked me if this scared me when it came to me and Jamie.”

“What did he mean?” Caylor ran her fingers along the braided piping at the top of the cushion she leaned against.

“That’s what I asked. And then Jamie came into the room.” She launched into what Jamie had told her about his heart problem and surgery.

“And you don’t believe him?”

“I believe him. I’m just not sure if I trust him.”

Caylor’s head jerked in a confused gesture. “What do you mean? You don’t trust that he’s telling you the truth about his risk factors in the future?”

“No.” Flannery flung her arms toward the ceiling in frustration. “I don’t trust…I don’t trust …”

“You don’t trust him not to die and hurt you.”

And there it was. Bald and out in the open. Flannery dropped sideways onto the center couch cushion and drew her legs up into the fetal position. “I don’t trust him not to die and leave me alone and in pain.”

“Flan?” Caylor poked the top of her head with her bare foot.

Flannery sat up, brushing at her hair with both hands as if she could wipe away Caylor’s foot cooties. “What?”

“Do you still drive the interstate to work every day?”

“Four days a week. Five if I just can’t work from home one day.”

“Do you realize how much risk you’re putting your life at by doing that?” Caylor reached sideways to set her soda can on the glass-top coffee table. “I’ve never heard of this condition Jamie said he has—had—whatever. But if what he tells you is true, you may have a greater chance of dying young in a terrible, burning, exploding car crash and leaving him alone and in pain than he does of dying from heart problems.” Caylor tapped her chin. “Or you could just be maimed—scarred all over from the burns. Or lose a limb or two. Maybe go blind. Be paralyzed, and then he’d have to decide if he loves you enough to sacrifice his life to take care of you for the rest of yours….”

Flannery grabbed a throw pillow, buried her face in it, and yelled as loudly as she could to drown out what sounded like Caylor brainstorming a new—and morbidly melodramatic—novel.

“What? You don’t like my version of the way things could turn out?”

Flannery threw the pillow at her best friend. Caylor batted it back to her.

“Look, it’s not like he’s asked you to marry him. You’ve really only been getting to know him for, what, a little less than two months?”

“Not quite—barely over a month. But in the last couple of days, we’ve been e-mailing back and forth like crazy—four, five times a day sometimes; so it seems a lot longer than that. How could he not have found a way to tell me in one of those e-mails?”

“Give it some time. Give him some time. Do some research on his condition. If that doesn’t help, get him to set up an appointment with his doctor and take you with him so you can grill his doctor about his condition. But just do me a favor.”

Flannery crossed her arms over the pillow. “What?”

“Don’t give up on him the way you’ve given up on every other guy you’ve dated. This is different—you’re different.”

“Different? You mean I’ve changed because of him?”

“We all change when we fall in love. We can’t help it. The important question is have you changed for the better. And from where I’m standing, the answer is yes.”

“You’re not standing, you’re sitting.”

Caylor picked up another pillow and popped Flannery with it. “You know what I mean. So will you?”

“Will I what?” Exhaustion—physical and emotional—clouded Flannery’s brain. She fell over onto her side again, putting the pillow under her head.

“Will you promise not to give up on Jamie?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“She totally freaked out when I told her about the heart surgery.”

“You should have expected that.” Don’s voice crackled on the other end of the connection.

Jamie adjusted his earpiece phone and then returned to weeding. “Expected her to freak out over nothing?”

“Jamie, even you know it’s not nothing. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t take care of yourself the way you do.”

He rocked back on his haunches, considering his stepfather’s words. “But the food choices and the exercise and the regular doctor visits—that’s how I was raised. It’s just part of who I am.”

“And she needs a chance to get used to that idea, to learn that about you, for it to become part of who you are together. Son, you’ve only been seeing this girl for…a minute, in the grand scheme of things. Don’t be in such a rush.”

Jamie attacked a weed with the trowel. “But what if…?” He couldn’t put it into words.

“What if…what? What if you wait and something happens to one of you? That’s a chance you have to take. That’s a chance we all take. Human life is frail. That’s something we all have to accept.”

Jamie pulled a few dried-up leaves off the nearest tomato vine. Another week or two and many of these would be ripe and ready to pick. “What if I promise her forever and can only give her a few years?”

“What if she gets pneumonia and dies? What if she’s in a car accident that leaves her brain damaged? What if Jesus comes back next week?” Don sighed. “You can what-if yourself to death if you’re not careful. How confident are you in your feelings toward her? Have you prayed about your relationship and its future?”

“Every day. I’m more sure that I’m supposed to be with her than I am about anything else, even nursing school, and I just sent my registration and initial tuition check in for that.”

“Then you have to show her that confidence. That’s the conclusion I reached when I couldn’t get your mother to agree to marry me. She was picking up on my own self-doubts, my own issues of inadequacy, and my feeling that she deserved better than me. Because as long as I felt like she could do better than me, I was making her feel the same way.”

Jamie sat down in the dirt between the tomatoes and squash plants in Cookie’s backyard. Sweat dripped from every surface of his skin under the brutal July sun. But the dirt and sweat didn’t matter. “How did you know you were in love with my mom?”

“I knew it from the first moment I laid eyes on her. Except, of course, as soon as I saw her, I reverted back to feeling like nothing more than a small-town hairdresser trying to convince everyone in Salt Lake that I could make something of myself and my grand business ideas, even though I already owned seven salons. I convinced myself she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me—I’m ten years older, I was a closet science-fiction geek, and I’d never had a real relationship with a woman in forty-three years of life. She was thirty-three and, even though grieving, a vibrant, outgoing, beautiful woman. I still think she deserves better than me.”

“I don’t. You’re just who Mom needed…and me, too. I just wish I’d realized it a lot of years ago.” Jamie wiped his face with his shirttail. His face itched so badly under his beard….

His beard! He pushed himself up to his feet.

“I know. But now we’ve got the entire future.”

“Yep. And I know just how to kick that future off to a better start.” Brushing the dirt off his jeans, Jamie jogged around to his car in the front of the house. “I’ll talk to you again soon, Dad. And hopefully, I’ll have some good news.”

Chapter 25