Craft (The Gibson Boys 2)

“I have banana cupcakes and lemon bars,” I tell her as the chatter increases in the room. “I have some other goodies in the car.”

“Can I have a lemon bar?”

“Let me check with the nurse and then I’ll bring you one, okay?”

After getting the okay from the staff, we start dispensing the goods. I drop off the one red velvet to Mr. Henry before working my way back to Gretchen. “Here ya go, sugar.”

“These little visits just make my week,” she beams. She takes the lemon bar and holds it in her hand. “How was your day?”

“Good. How was yours?”

“Good, good. Same old stuff in here day after day. That’s why we love seeing you.” She takes a bite of the dessert. “Tastes just like the ones I used to make.”

“I bet they’re not as good.”

She pats my hand. “Where’d you learn to bake, anyway? Your mama?”

“My grandma, actually,” I say, kneeling beside her wheelchair. “She was a lot like you. Sweet and beautiful.”

“Ah, now you’re just being polite.”

“Not true. I saw Mr. Henry checking you out when I walked in.”

She laughs, but touches her cheek as it flushes. “He asked me to play chess with him later tonight. Do you think I should?”

“Heavens yes you should! He’s handsome, Miss Gretchen.”

“He is, isn’t he?” she giggles. “What about you? Do you have a handsome man you spend your evenings with?”

“Sadly, no,” I say, thinking immediately of Lance. Wondering what it would be like to spend an evening with him, what we would do, what his habits are, I’m jostled by an elbow to the rib by Gretchen. “I dazed off.”

She sinks her dentures into the lemon bar and throws her head back. “This is delicious. Make these for whoever he is you’re thinking of and you’ll win him over.”

I study my friend. She’s one of the sweetest women I know and I look forward to seeing her every time I come here. Deciding to take a gamble, I go for it. “I made them for him,” I say.

“So there is someone.”

“Not really,” I sigh. “We’re more like friends.”

“So not the good kind?” She raises a brow. “I’m old but I’m not dead, honey.”

Laughing, I grab a chair and pull it over to her.

“Tell me about him,” she instructs, the lemon bar now gone.

“It’s long and complicated.”

“As are all the good stories.”

Looking around the room full of people on their last years of life, I wonder what choices they made they now regret. Which risks were worth it, which ones hurt badly but they’d turn around and do them again if they could.

“Were you married, Gretchen?”

“I was. For forty years. He was a good man,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “Kind of a menace when I first met him, but he panned out all right.”

“A menace? You have to explain that.”

“He was always in trouble, forever giving me grief about things. He was what my mother called a neighborhood kid, meaning the neighborhood took care of him. His mother was a wretched woman. Just awful.”

“How did you meet?” I ask, trying to imagine her when she was my age.

Rearranging the pillow behind her back, she gets situated before going on. “He was friends with my older brother. He’d tag along for meals a lot of days or Mama would leave a bottle of milk on the stoop for him to take if he didn’t stop by. One day he kissed me by the chicken coop and told me if I kissed another boy, he’d beat the tar out of them,” she laughs. “I never kissed another boy for my whole life.”

“I love that.”

“My daddy didn’t,” she laughs, thinking back. “My mother just loved him though. She kind of took him in and treated him like one of her own.”

She pauses her story to talk to the nurse. Her evening meds are delivered and it’s a process I’ve watched happen a few times. It’s so regimented and carefully executed that it amazes me they can do it correctly so fast.

When she turns back to me, she picks up where she left off. “He passed away back in ninety-four. Said his only regret was not making peace with his mother.”

A heaviness sits on my shoulders as I relate to a man I never knew.

“What is it, honey?” she asks.

“Nothing. I just have an iffy relationship with my mom too. I kind of understand where you husband was coming from.”

“Do the two of you speak?”

“Kind of.”

She takes a moment to let that sink in. “Want some unsolicited advice?”

“I’d love some,” I say, letting her take my hand in hers. “What do you have for me?”

“Don’t be a grudge holder, Mariah. I was one for years. My good friend passed away when we were in our thirties, she just had a baby, and her car went over an embankment and into a river. We had some stupid fight that I don’t even remember at this point. I was devastated for years. I still regret it. I never thought I wouldn’t get the chance to talk to her again.”