Life is Sweet (18 page)

“Not exactly inspiring our students to reach for the stars, though, is it?”

Olivia's lips turned down at the corners, but she didn't say anything. She tossed another pained look at Matthew, which Nicole caught.

“What?” Nicole asked.

“Nothing,” Olivia said quickly. “Only, since you've been traveling all day, maybe tomorrow going to my school will be a big hassle? You probably don't even have a speech prepared.”

“I've got a million PowerPoint presentations to pull from,” she said. “Believe me, it's no big deal. It's what I do.”

“Yeah, but Becca might have been counting on being there,” Olivia said.

Nicole chuckled. “Trust me on this. She'll be so relieved not to have to go, she'll be doing handsprings.”

Olivia considered this. “Okay . . .”

When she was out of earshot, Nicole shook her head. “Someone hit that kid with the worry stick.”

“When she's not acting like a feral beast, she tries hard to please. And she and Becca get along really well.”

“Oh right,” Nicole said. “The horse thing.”

“They like each other a lot,” he pointed out.

“Olivia likes everybody.”

Nicole yawned. “I think I'll hit the hay, too. And you're in your pajamas, so I guess it's too late for you to flee back to your own place.”

He hadn't really thought about going back. “I can leave if you'd rather.”

“No, stay. I could use a cuddle buddy tonight.” She smiled at him.

It was the kind of look that would have had him streaking for the bedroom a few months ago. Now, he smiled back, wondering how he was going to survive his life just going through the motions. Or whether he should.

While Nicole was getting ready for bed, Matthew stared at the clock. It was after ten. Would Becca be in bed already? She was an early riser. Plus, knowing her, she would be angsting over her presentation tomorrow—the one she didn't have to give. He should call and explain.

He reached for his cell phone and speed-dialed her. The number rang several times before going to a message. After the beep, he took a deep breath in anticipation of a quick explanation, when Nicole came out of the bathroom in her short robe.

His thumb jabbed End Call.

“Who were you calling?” she asked.

“Nobody,” he said. “Just checking messages.”

What was he doing?

He couldn't account for the lie. It was almost as if he felt guilty for wanting to phone Becca, when there hadn't been anything in his mind but a friendly heads-up that she wouldn't need to be at the school in the morning. So why had his first reaction been to hang up when Nicole walked in? What did he have to feel guilty about?

Maybe for not being more ecstatic at Nicole's surprise homecoming?

He considered confessing why the phone had been in his hand and going ahead and calling her again. The message would spare Becca a night of angst. Then again, she would probably receive Nicole's e-mail first thing tomorrow. If he e-mailed her, it could be construed as alerting her that Nicole was back, for personal reasons.
By the way, Nicole is home again, please back off.

Before he could make up his mind, a strange sound made him turn toward the bed. Nicole lay on her back, her arm flung over her face. The crook of her elbow hid her expression, but he knew at once why he hadn't been able to place the noise—he'd never heard it before. Nicole was crying.

 

Becca paced the waiting room of Emergency, drinking her third coffee of the night while she awaited word of Walt's condition.

She wished she could do something for Walt instead of just standing around, but she wasn't even sure where he'd been taken. The last time she'd seen him was when the paramedics had arrived and loaded him on a stretcher into their ambulance, alive but still unconscious. Not wanting to get stuck without transportation in the middle of the night, she'd followed in her own car. But when she arrived at the hospital, Walt had already been admitted and taken back. Maybe the only benefit of losing consciousness was not having to wait among the sea of the nauseous, bleeding, and cranky people of the ER.

She again approached the receptionist, a woman with a helmet of black hair who sat on the other half of a Plexiglas barrier. Becca suspected she'd been hired specifically for the spectacularly impenetrable I-don't-give-a-damn vibe she exuded. After each nervous newcomer had their inquiries met by her froggy stare and husky, drill-sergeant commands to sit and wait for their name to be called, it was clear a person had to be very desperate to bother her with a question.

But it was going on eleven now. Becca felt very desperate.

“Excuse me?”

The woman continued tapping on her computer for fifteen seconds before glancing up. “May I help you?” she asked, as if she'd never seen Becca before. As if Becca hadn't been wearing out the linoleum in front of her for the past two hours.

“Is there news about Walter Johnson?” Using his full name seemed strange. In her mind, he seemed like one of those one-name personalities, like Madonna or Cher. He was just Walt.

The woman looked up at her with an unblinking gaze. “Are you Mr. Johnson's next of kin?”

Becca wanted to weep. “I told you—I brought him in after finding him unconscious in my bed.”

The woman's dark brows raised, but maybe in this situation having any kind of intimate relationship assumed between them would be better than nothing. Becca certainly hadn't gotten far being his unofficial landlady and part-time employer. “I just want to find out how he is, or if he needs anything. Has a doctor seen him?”

“If Mr. Johnson was unconscious when he was brought in, then he most certainly has been seen by someone.”

“Then may I talk to that someone?”

“If you're not his immediate family—”

She let out a bleat of frustration. “I'm all he's got right now. If I don't check on his condition, no one will. Are patients who aren't lucky enough to have family just supposed to languish all alone in this hospital?”

Her outburst did nothing to soften the receptionist's demeanor. But she did seem to yield to the logic of Becca's argument. “Walter Johnson?” she asked, typing.

“Yes.” Finally. Maybe the computer would be able to tell her whether he was still alive or not.

“And what is your name, please?”

Becca clenched her hands. If this was just going to start another argument over whether she was authorized to see Walt . . . “Becca Hudson.”

“Hudson . . .” At first it looked as if the woman was reading off the screen, but then her head tilted and she gave Becca a closer inspection. “Rebecca Hudson? That kid on that show?”

Becca managed a tight smile. If she had to use her former celebrityhood to get through the swinging double doors to where there were people who could actually give her information, so be it. “That little kid, about a decade and a half later.”

The woman smacked the countertop. “I thought you looked familiar. I used to watch you every week. Me and my daughter.”

“It's nice of you to remember.”

The woman shook her head in wonder. “You used to be so cute.”

“Thanks.”

“Especially when the show first started. So precious! Whenever you said ‘Good night, Daddy,' I just wanted to reach into the television set and pinch those little chipmunk cheeks of yours.” She leaned forward, chuckling. “Had a real crush on that dad of yours, too. What a hunk!”

“He certainly was.”

“I saw that article in the paper a while back about your opening a bakery, and my daughter actually went and bought some cupcakes or something from you. Said they were delicious.”

“Did she?” Becca asked. “That's terrific. I'll bring you some next time I'm headed out this way.”

“Aw, bless your heart, but I've got diabetes, so one of those babies would probably kill me. But it's so sweet of you to offer.” She chuckled. “Literally.” She shook her head again. “Rebecca Hudson. What do you know.”

Smile frozen, Becca shifted, trying not to seem too impatient.

“You should've given me your name right off the bat,” the woman told her.

Really? Becca didn't want to quibble now that things were finally going her way, but that seemed a little unfair. Why should it matter that she'd been on TV? Did Mary Kate and Ashley get to saunter into any hospital room they wanted?

“You just sit tight and I'll get the doctor who saw Mr. Johnson to come talk to you,” the woman said. “It won't be long.”

When Becca turned back to the seating area, at least ten pairs of eyes were all focused on her. At first she expected resentment for using her celebrity to get her foot in through the ER doors. But for the next ten minutes, she signed autographs, fielded an inquiry about whether she had a problem with her parents stealing all the money she'd earned as a child, and told a few curious women what Jake Flannery was
really
like.

Happily, someone called her name and she gathered her purse and hurried to where a white-coated woman of about her own age stood, clipboard in hand, holding the door open with one comfort-soled shoe. In the next moment, Becca was led a few steps down a hallway painted a cheerful peach.

“I'm an intern here,” the woman said in a hurried but not brusque tone. Her name tag read
Dr. Christine Atar,
which was evidently all the introduction the busy doctor had time for. “Mr. Johnson needs to stay in ICU overnight.”

Becca let out her breath. He was alive. But Intensive Care didn't sound great. “Is he okay?”

A battalion of worry lines formed along the doctor's brow. “Well, I wouldn't say okay. We've revived him, and he's going to be given dialysis.”

“Dialysis,” Becca repeated.

The doctor cocked her head and regarded Becca more closely. “You know Mr. Johnson has ESRD.”

“No,” Becca said. “What's that?”

“Kidney disease.”

“Is it—” She almost asked the doctor if it was serious, when obviously it was. The man had passed out. He needed dialysis.

Why hadn't he told her? Did he know it himself?

“He's had too many close calls,” the doctor said, inadvertently answering the second question. “Tonight his blood pressure spiked to a dangerous level—”

Becca nodded. “I worried he was dead.”

“Well, frankly, if he doesn't undergo dialysis more regularly, that is an outcome I would expect.”

Becca tried to wrap her mind around this. “You said he's had close calls. You've seen him here before?”

“He was here”—the doctor flipped through several pages on her clipboard—“just a few weeks ago.”

Becca shrank back from the news, wanting to deny its truth. Yet at the same, puzzling things that had happened suddenly made a little more sense, like his disappearing with no notice. “Is fatigue a symptom of kidney problems?”

“Oh yes.”

Poor Walt. Being fired from his stupid gas station job for a problem that was beyond his control. She was willing to bet this was related to why he had lost his apartment, too. Why hadn't he said anything?

Maybe he thought she wouldn't have kept him on at the shop if she'd known of his condition. Or . . .

She remembered Monday afternoon, when he'd appeared at her apartment looking worried. Had he known then how sick he was and intended to tell her, maybe to ask for her help? And she had talked his ear off about how upset she still was over her mother's death. He probably thought any more bad news would send her over the edge, so he'd made up a pathetic excuse about wanting to tell her he'd fixed some wobbly chairs.

“I don't know why Mr. Johnson didn't go to his last appointment,” Dr. Atar said.

Becca could guess. “Does he owe the hospital money?”

The doctor bit her lip. “I'm guessing the answer is yes, but that's not my bailiwick. You'll have to ask about that at the accounts office.”

Becca nodded. “I will, although they might not tell me anything.”

The doctor blinked, as if this were an odd question. “I don't see why they wouldn't.”

Of course. No doubt they were less picky about who paid a patient's bills than they were about what visitors he received. “Can I see Walt?”

“You can see him briefly, but he's resting.”

Becca went to the little cubicle-like room in the ICU, where Walt looked small and fragile lying on the hospital bed. Still, even this was a much more comfortable setup than the one in the back of the shop. A tide of shame rolled through her at the thought of him sleeping on the camp bed among the flour and sugar sacks.

His arms poking out of his hospital gown seemed bony and undernourished, as opposed to the sausage-like ankles and feet protruding over the other end of the bed. She'd never noticed the swelling. Had she been paying attention at all?

And she'd thought she was being so generous. Lady Bountiful taking the unfortunate worker to Target. Now she couldn't believe how stupid she'd been, how obtuse. How blind could she be?

Chapter 14

When the alarm sounded, Becca shot out her arm and whacked at the bedside table until she made contact with the offending clock. A direct hit sent it flying to the ground. Sprawled over the side of the bed, she squinted one eye open and saw it out of her reach, still buzzing.

The two cats remained curled up together on the foot of her bed, unperturbed. They had done their usual four-in-the-morning war dance, which was when she reset her alarm clock to go off a little later, so she could get enough sleep and not be a complete mess when she gave her presentation in front of Olivia's class.

The thought of Career Day sent her tumbling out of bed. She crawled to the clock, killed the alarm, and then straggled to her feet. What a day. She still had cupcakes to ice, and then school, and after that she needed to go to the bank to transfer money to her checking account so she would have funds available to put toward Walt's outstanding hospital bill.

She brushed her teeth, then tossed on some clothes that hopefully made her look like a relatively successful businesswoman and not just a burnout who baked. She even considered panty hose for a moment, but not even for the sake of Olivia and inspiring the businessmen and women of tomorrow would she struggle into a pair of those.

Downstairs, she found the shop in the condition she'd left it in the night before. The cellophane-covered cupcakes remained bare, ready to be iced, and the frosting was in a stainless-steel bowl in the refrigerator. She took it out and put it back on the mixer to loosen it up again. Meanwhile, she very belatedly tried to think of something to tell the kids. What was she supposed to say? She wondered if she should dwell on the work itself, or if she should mention the business side. Given that she'd made her big leap into commerce with about a fifth-grade understanding of economics, she doubted she could go too far over their heads.

A figure appeared at the shop entrance, causing her first to jump and then rush to open up. She threw the lock and pulled the door wide, allowing Erin to sweep inside. After hugging her, Becca had a hard time not staring. She was so astonished and relieved to see her. Not a cinder at the bottom of a volcano, then. Thank God.

“I was driving by and saw your shop light on,” Erin said. “I'm supposed to be out getting breakfast.” Her skin was bronzed to swimsuit model perfection, and Becca could swear she detected a hint of coconut oil, blue ocean, and sun behind the usual spritz of Chanel.

“I'm so glad to see you! When did you get back?”

Erin dropped her purse on the counter. Despite the ocean breeze she'd floated in on, a chill hung in the air. “Haven't you been reading your e-mail at all? We flew in yesterday.”

“You and Bob?”

“Who did you think?”

Becca lifted her shoulders and then dropped them. “I wouldn't know. I haven't been checking my e-mail. There hasn't been time. I had the most awful night last night.”

Erin snorted.

“First there was—” Becca had been about to explain the awful night right from the beginning, but that snort stopped her. It wasn't an interested, tell-me-all-about-it sound. It was a bitter snort. It threw her off. “But it's a long story,” she said, changing direction. “What happened in Hawaii? You look great.”

“I feel great, despite everything.”

“Then you had a . . . successful trip?”

Erin folded her arms tightly. “Yes.”

The silence put Becca on edge, as it clearly was meant to. She had no idea why. It was as if Erin were trying to make her feel guilty, but what did she have to feel guilty about?

To cover her jittering nerves, she circled around the counter and went back to her stainless-steel bowl of frosting. “And Bob is okay?”

“Bob is fine. We've decided to work on our marriage. We're going into couples counseling.”

Becca swallowed back her surprise. “Great.”

Bob wasn't known for his touchy-feeliness—or for having discernible feelings at all—so she had a hard time wrapping her mind around his having agreed to see a counselor. The last time they'd been at the same dinner party, he and Becca had ended up in an argument over his theory that pet owners were infantile and selfish because all animals belonged in the wild. Dogs, cats, budgies—if something didn't have a human brain, or wasn't being raised for human consumption, according to Bob it shouldn't be domesticated. She'd called him a soulless egghead, but only after he'd accused her of multiple counts of animal abuse because she had two cats in captivity.

The idea of him in marital counseling or any kind of psychotherapy was weird and vaguely unsettling, like those YouTube videos of parrots singing opera. She couldn't believe it was something he would do under normal circumstances. “How did you convince him to agree to that?” she asked.

As soon as the question escaped her lips, she wanted to call it back. Erin's face turned a hue of red that had nothing to do with her past week of soaking up rays in the South Pacific. “Bob
wants
to save our marriage. He suggested it. He was panicked when I told him I was thinking about a divorce.”

“You told him that?”

“Well, of course.” Her eyes flashed. “Why shouldn't I?”

“It's just . . . I thought you were going there to save your marriage, not to give him notice.”

“I flew there to discover what was going on, and to see who this woman was. I guess
you
thought that was hilariously naïve of me.”

Becca shook her head. “No, I didn't.”

“Well, you obviously didn't think about enlightening me. Did you think I wouldn't find out that Nicole was the wife of the guy you've been seeing?”

Oh, for heaven's sake. “Matthew and I haven't been seeing each other. It's just that he has a little girl—”

Erin pounced on the word. “Exactly. The little girl is Nicole's daughter. And that guy, Matthew, is practically her father.” She sent her a withering look. “How could you break up a home like that?”

Becca sputtered before finally spitting out, “I haven't done anything.”

“Oh, please. The minute I started piecing it all together, Bob confirmed that Nicole had probably felt insecure because Matthew was stepping out on her, and so she started coming on to him at work. If she weren't so horrible, I could almost pity her.”

The world felt tilted upside-down.
She
was the bad guy? Just seeing Erin mad at her for any reason was hard to take, like having the Easter Bunny turn vicious. “That's insane. Nicole knows exactly what Matthew and I have been doing.”

“Of course—that's why she turned to Bob for a shoulder to cry on. She was so unhappy.”

“But we've been doing
nothing
. A shopping trip in DC. A birthday party at the stables. She's been kept apprised of all of this. God, Erin, how could you think I would be a home wrecker?”

Erin's pointy jaw worked as doubt warred with wishful thinking in her eyes. “I don't know what to think. First I find out that you didn't even tell me you knew Nicole, and then last night poor Pam said you were giving her grief because she and Cal are an item. Bob says you're a loose cannon.”

She certainly would have loved to lob a cannon at Bob. “I'm just worried Pam's going to get her heart broken over some kind of rebound fling.”

“Rebound!” Erin said. “It's been a year since you signed the divorce papers.”

“Maybe it was a mini-rebound. Cal's the person to ask about that. All I know is, on Saturday evening he was kissing me, and then hours later they evidently ran off together.”

Erin's jaw dropped, and for a moment, her moral outrage about her own situation dissolved and she became a friend who wanted the scoop. “You guys were kissing? When?”

“At the stables, after Matthew—” All at once, she wished she'd stopped with “at the stables.” Now she had to force herself to soldier on and finish with an unfortunate reminder of Erin's home-wrecker aspersions. “After Matthew and Olivia left.”

Erin shook her head mournfully, as if this were further evidence of Becca's having undermined her. “I still can't believe that you knew about Nicole and you didn't tell me.”

“I should have, I guess. At first I wasn't sure, and by the time I did know, it seemed too late. You were already flying off.”

“And yet you kept seeing Matthew, knowing that his straying was endangering my marriage.”

“I was
not
seeing him. Not romantically.” She rolled her eyes. “I don't even know how I got wrapped up in all these relationships. I
thought
I was helping some people out, but now everyone seems to be putting the worst possible spin on it. There's nothing going on with Matthew and me, and I have no idea what the status of his relationship is. As far as I know, he's going to fight like a tiger to stay with Nicole.”

“Really?” Erin asked, her eyes lighting up with hope. “You haven't been trying to bust them up?”

“
No.
In fact, I probably won't have any more to do with those people after . . .”

Damn.

Erin went on the alert. “After what?”

“Well, I promised to speak at Olivia's school Career Day,” she confessed. “But Matthew's not going to be there—at least, I don't think he is. I'm just doing this for Olivia. That's why I was down here. I needed to ice these cupcakes to take with me.”

Erin aimed a distrustful, wounded-puppy gaze at her. “Well. As I was saying, I was just driving by and I saw your light on in here and thought I would drop in. I wanted to tell you I'm back, and also that Pam and I have decided we don't want to do Not-Book-Club this month. It's been getting sort of old anyway. . . .”

I just wanted to drop in and tell you I don't want to be your friend anymore
might not have been exactly what Erin was saying, but it was all Becca heard. Her heart sank.

Erin turned to leave, but then stopped and glanced back at the cupcakes. “Are those pumpkin spice?”

She nodded numbly.

“Would they make a good breakfast?” Erin asked.

Becca dropped two in a sack and handed them over.

After Erin left, Becca slathered icing over the remaining cakes, loaded them into boxes, and hurried for the door. She would be late, but there was no help for it. It wouldn't be the first time in her life she'd gotten a tardy mark at school. Also, she still didn't know what she was going to say, which caused a different anxiety to gnaw at her. It was almost like stage nerves, and she hadn't had those in a long time.

The parking lot at the elementary school was crowded, so she had to park at the back. By the time she speed-walked to the front door where a receptionist waited, her breath was puffing. “I'm here for Career Day. Guest of Olivia Parker.”

The receptionist smiled encouragingly. “You brought goodies! Lucky class.” She pointed to the right. “That will be Ms. Andrews's class. Do you need me to walk you over there?”

As if it was the first day of school.

Actually, being talked to like a grade schooler soothed her nerves. “No, I can handle it.” Becca hurried down the corridor, transported back by the scents of pine floor cleanser and Elmer's Glue.

Each door had a narrow rectangular window along the side. When she arrived at the door with a sign that read Welcome to Ms. Andrews's Fifth Grade, she stopped, peered inside at the children sitting at their short desks, and spotted Olivia. At the same moment, Olivia glanced over and did a double-take, her eyes widening in surprise.

Becca assumed from her reaction that she'd given up on her. She took a breath, and pushed inside with her two bakery boxes propped on one hip.

It wasn't until she'd slipped into the room that she understood Olivia's alarm could have had another cause: mortification. The attention of everyone in the room swiveled from the front of the class toward the door. Becca, seeking out someone who looked like an elementary school teacher so she could apologize for being late, instead found herself staring at a woman giving a PowerPoint presentation.

She froze. The woman's gaze focused on her, her eyes narrowing to slits. Projected onto a screen was a drawing depicting some kind of underwater turbine, including a dizzying number of directional arrows to explain the mechanics to the layman. The blackboard Nicole was standing in front of had some crude illustrations of waves and arrows, and scrawled words like
buoyant actuator
and
data telemetry.
Above it all was a name printed in block letters:
Nicole Parker.

Oh crap.
What is
she
doing here?

Becca could tell from Nicole's glare that the other woman was thinking the same thing.

“I'm so sorry,” Becca mumbled.

She turned to flee, but before she could manage to scuttle out the door, another woman swooped across the room, hand outstretched, and grabbed her arm. “How wonderful—another visitor!”

Becca cringed and shot an apologetic glance to Olivia, who had sunk several inches lower in her desk chair. “I think some wires got crossed. I agreed to come as a sub, but now . . .” She nodded toward Nicole. “I can leave.”

“No, no—we wouldn't hear of it.” Ms. Andrews yanked Becca into the room and took the boxes from her. “And you've brought goodies! The more, the merrier—isn't that right, class?”

She spoke in such a bright voice, the answer was already a foregone conclusion. But even if the children had felt lukewarm about sitting through another presentation, the cupcake boxes sealed the deal.