“The cemetery.”
The shocked look he immediately gave her almost made her smile.
“No, I’m not preparing for the worst,” she told him laconically. “I just... Whenever I have a big decision to make or need to remind myself that everything will work itself out one way or another, I visit my father’s grave...”
There was only one cemetery in Marie Cove, and Wood headed the truck in that direction. He asked her about the test, if it had hurt, if she’d liked the technician. He didn’t ask if she’d gotten a sense that the technician had noticed anything.
“They said it’ll be three days, at a minimum, before we know anything. Could be as much as a week.”
He glanced her way. Nodded and signaled a turn. “Then that’s all we need to deal with at the moment. Those days.”
He was right, of course. And she was thankful he was there.
Once they reached the cemetery, she directed him to the gravel drive that led to her father’s tombstone, and then, slowly on foot, took him to the half-rotted bench that sat directly opposite it. It tilted to the side as she gingerly lowered herself, but then steadied.
“I have no idea who put this here, or for what purpose,” she said as she held the splintery bench with both hands beside her thighs. “But I’ve always thought of it as a throne with mystical powers. It’s peaceful here. And if I close my eyes, I can hear my father’s voice.”
She closed her eyes as she said the words, but, as aware of Wood as she was, didn’t completely leave the world behind as she usually did. Still, the peace was there. For a long moment she soaked it all in. The silence. The peace. Wood’s presence.
It seemed right somehow, that she be there at that time, after a procedure that would tell her the fate of her baby, in presence of both her father—and the father of her child. Seeking sustenance from both.
As parents. Nothing less. Nothing more.
She didn’t hear him move but wasn’t surprised, when she opened her eyes, to find him standing right beside her, looking toward her father’s grave.
“My dad had a way of getting to the meat of the matter,” she said softly.
“What would he be saying to you right now?”
“To let go of them things I can’t make no difference to,” she said, quoting the man she still adored. “And to remember that I’ve got what it takes to handle whatever comes.”
The last wasn’t quite a quote. But close enough.
“I know these things,” she told Wood, looking up at him. The sun was behind her, warming her neck, illuminating his face. “But sometimes I can only feel them when I come here.”
“It’s just you and him here,” he told her. “Like it used to be when he was alive—just you and him at home, during the times you were with him.”
“And now you,” she said aloud. His face changed as their eyes met, and she couldn’t look away. It wasn’t right, this intense emotional connection she seemed to be developing with a man who was only there because her baby might be sick, but the words were there, between them, bonding them, and she couldn’t take them back.
* * *
Wood spent most of his free time over the next three days out in his workshop, with Retro lying on her bed in the corner by the open door.
He’d made a grilled chicken salad for dinner Friday night and, keeping the last of Cassie’s homemade cookies for himself at home, had run a good-size portion of the salad up to Elaina, who was working a double shift at the hospital. She’d thanked him profusely.
And he’d avoided the patient floors, not wanting to think about illness. About things that went inexplicably wrong with the human body.
He hadn’t talked about that tiny little human being growing inside a woman he barely knew—not with Elaina, not with anyone—but he was thinking about it constantly. Needing to know that the baby was okay.
Not for him, but just because.
Each night he’d texted Cassie. Innocuous stuff. Sports one night. She liked basketball because it was fast-paced. Baseball bored her because it wasn’t. He liked them both, and told her so. Football, she could take or leave—but she knew all the teams and many of the best-known players from ten years before, because her dad had watched every game and so she’d shared that experience with him.
He found out she’d played tennis in high school and college. He hadn’t told her he’d quarterbacked his high school football team. Or that he’d been scouted, after his junior year, by a decent California university. That door had closed when he’d quit school, but it wasn’t like he’d been guaranteed a spot anywhere. Only that his stats had attracted some attention. His and a lot of other guys’. He’d given up a lot, but didn’t regret the choices he’d made. Maybe he’d questioned fate a time or two, but no response had been forthcoming and he’d let it go.
On Friday he was waiting until later to text, figuring, with Saturday being the third day, she’d be more on edge. Late at night was usually the hardest time when dealing with life’s challenges. He didn’t have to be up Saturday and had a topic of discussion already picked out: old television commercials, which ones she remembered. For some reason they stuck with him, but he’d done some research, too. Had a list ready on his laptop. Planned to give her a word or two and see if she could guess the product. Or remember the jingle.
Like the Clara and Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” ads from the year he was born. The original ad hadn’t run for that long, but the fame of it lived on. He sanded, preparing for a second coat of a protective mostly colorless varnish on his latest project, thinking about his plans. Feeling good about them.