Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,68
leak in Lindsey’s tub, and while he was finishing up, Abby rooted through her desk hunting for her checkbook. She searched her purse and then, remembering the day she’d put on Nick’s jacket and found a checkbook inside, she went to the front hall closet. But the jacket wasn’t there. She pushed apart the hangers, searched the floor, poked into the far corners. Nothing. It was gone.
Abby closed the closet door, leaned her backside against it, mystified.
“All set.” The plumber came down the stairs.
Abby said, “Good, thank you,” and beckoned him into the kitchen, where she opened a new box of checks, tore one off, wrote it out and handed it to him.
She was back inside the coat closet again a few minutes later when she heard the sound of tires and thought the plumber was back, that he’d forgotten a tool. But it was Jake’s Mustang she saw when she opened the front door, and her heart lifted. He pulled to a sharp stop. She crossed the porch to greet him.
“Gramma said you were home.” He grinned at her over the hood of his car.
Abby leaned on the rail. He looked so pleased to see her here. Then she remembered the trouble he was in at school, and she frowned. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just had to see for myself that you were back. Got anything to eat?”
“I do, as a matter of fact, if it isn’t too early for a sandwich.”
He came around the front of the car. “Never too early.”
He put his arm around her and walked with her into the house. She’d forgotten how tall he was, how much of a man he’d become. Or had this happened in the past seven months and she’d failed to notice? She said he’d just missed the plumber.
“You got the tub fixed?” Jake went to the refrigerator.
“I did.” Abby leaned against the countertop. “You didn’t, by any chance, borrow Dad’s leather bomber jacket, did you?”
Closing the refrigerator door, Jake said, “He’d kill me if I took that jacket. Why?”
“It’s not in the closet, and I know I saw it there.”
“Did you get the locks changed like Charlie said?” Jake asked.
“Not yet. But you don’t think someone broke in here and took it, do you?”
“Is anything else missing?”
“Not that I’ve noticed. My laptop is there on the desk in plain sight. The TV is still here. Isn’t that what crooks take?”
Jake poked his head back into the refrigerator. “Yeah, but I’d call the cops if I were you.”
Abby shook her head. She brought down a plate from the cabinet. “I probably moved his jacket myself. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
“Everything.” He hauled out the package of chicken, the small head of lettuce, the tomato. “Look at this place! It actually smells good in here.”
“Nothing like a little spring cleaning,” Abby said. “I’m even going back to work. Did Gramma tell you? I start teaching again after Thanksgiving.”
“It’ll be good for you.”
Abby tore off a couple of lettuce leaves and handed them to him. She circled Jake’s waist and gave him a quick hug. “What about you? How are you doing? Really,” she added.
He loaded his sandwich onto the plate she handed him and took a bag of chips from the pantry. They sat at the table, and Abby was relieved when he said a solution to his school woes had been hammered out between his professor and the department head. “It’ll mean a lot of extra work,” he said, “but I don’t care.”
“You’re lucky they were so understanding.”
“They took my circumstances into consideration. I told them I wasn’t ready to come back to campus after what happened. I said you pushed me.”
“Jake, I didn’t.”
“You did, Mom.” Jake was determined; Abby could see that. He’d been waiting a long time to accuse her.
“It wasn’t doing you any good being at the ranch. If you weren’t pacing the floor, you were getting George to drive you all over.”
“Like you weren’t?”
“You were better off in school.” Abby raised her gaze to Jake’s, and her breath caught on seeing that his eyes were welled with tears.
“I wanted to be where you were, Mom,” he told her, and he was blinking, furious. “I needed to be with you. We’re all that’s left.”
She could only stare at him, at his clenched jaw and the muscles under his ears that knotted and loosened, knotted and loosened. The idiot part of her