It's Never too Late - By Tara Taylor Quinn Page 0,25
alone. She’d put him in an impossible position with this move of hers. He couldn’t not work. His scholarship-allotted living expenses would not cover Nonnie’s disposable undergarments. Or the heat therapy bands that eased her pain. They wouldn’t pay for her vitamin supplement drinks or, God forbid, any emergency that might arise.
Closing her bedroom door—because she insisted on maintaining her individual privacy as a condition of continuing to live with him—Mark showered, pulled on a fresh pair of jeans and a sleeveless undershirt and helped himself to a beer from the refrigerator. As he sat at the kitchen table, nursing his beer, he looked through the small window over the sink into the equally small backyard, and wondered how the boys back home were doing. Pretty much every member of his crew had texted him at least once in the week and a half he’d been gone.
He missed them.
Missed knowing everyone in town and everyone in town knowing him. He missed the acre of land that greeted him when he looked out his back window at home.
There was movement out there. Slight, but there, just the same. Giving his eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness outside, Mark watched the far corner of his neighbor’s patio.
And was rewarded by the sight of her. Sitting in the dark all alone.
Was she reliving the horror from the night before? What had happened to trigger her nightmare? Especially after so many years?
Figuring he should probably just leave her be, he turned away from the window.
She was new to town, too. Didn’t know anyone, either. Was she over there missing the town she’d come from? The people? The familiar?
Was she dreading the homework that awaited her, too?
He opened the refrigerator. Grabbed a second beer.
And headed outside.
* * *
“WANT A BEER?”
Addy stared up at the tall figure standing next to her in the darkness, knowing that she shouldn’t be glad he was there. He was wearing a white undershirt—like the macho, working-class hunks depicted in the old beer and cigarette commercials. “No, thanks,” she said. If he’d offered her a glass of wine she might not have been able to refuse.
She’d heard him come in. Had been imagining him with Nonnie, asking about her day. Thinking about the things that his grandmother wasn’t telling him.
He had a right to know.
And telling him wasn’t Addy’s place.
Nonnie was allowed to have her secrets.
“How was your day?” He took a sip from his beer, still holding the other in his hand.
“Good.” Mention the nightmare, she implored him. I’ll assure you that it was an aberration. I’ll be calm. Unaffected. I’ll make it seem like a nonentity and we will never have need to speak of it again.
“Nonnie said she’d called out to you. Invited you in.”
“I visited with her a bit.”
“How was she?”
“Tired, but she seemed fine.”
“I dropped by for a late lunch,” he said. She already knew that. She’d heard him come home. “She seemed tired to me, too. Hopefully she’s still just recovering from the trip out here.”
His expression, or what she could make of it in the shadows, appeared pinched. Worried.
“Is her disease progressive?”
“Not so much as it comes and goes. At times it completely incapacitates her and then she goes into a form of remission and can get along fairly well.”
“Can she walk at all?”
“Not anymore. Her bones are too brittle and the arthritis in her knees makes walking too dangerous.”
Mark hopped the low wall that separated their patios and returned with a chair that matched hers. He set it down a foot away from her and opened his second beer.
She focused on the fountain. Searching for equilibrium in an unrecognizable world. “She told me that people dropped in on her all the time back home.”
His gaze swung sharply toward her. “She’s homesick?”
“She didn’t say that.”
“Oh.” He turned back toward the fountain and was silent.
“Other than when I’m in class, I’m here, Mark. Pretty well all day and all night, too. I’d be happy to sit with her, look in on her. Anything you need.”
It was the right thing to do. For the Grans of the world. The women who took on other people’s children and loved them as their own.
And for the children of the world who were the sole caretakers of their elderly loved ones.
“I appreciate the offer,” he said. Addy had thought about the older woman on and off all afternoon. Nonnie was an example of the type of woman Addy longed to be. Independent. Strong. Capable. No matter what