Day by Day (14 page)

Judy entered the apartment. “I heard she’d been in the hospital,” she offered, unable to forget the day she and Penny had found the woman in her apartment and called for an ambulance.

“She lingered awhile, poor soul. The funeral was lovely, though. Her daughter was such a dear. She had a catered luncheon for all the residents right here in the social room. I think you have a daughter, too, don’t you?”

Judy tightened her hold on her bag. She did not know Mrs. Reisch all that well, and she was reluctant to discuss Candy. “Yes, but she lives in California,” she offered and followed her client into the kitchen.

Mrs. Reisch turned on the burner under the teakettle. “Pity that. California is no place for decent folks. Not with that movie crowd out there. I read all about them in the tabloids. Makes me want to cry sometimes. Welleswood is a good town and a godly town. If she’s as smart as you are, that daughter of yours will move back home.”

“Maybe she will,” Judy whispered, half-afraid Candy would show up at home, sooner rather than later.

T
he following week, Judy left the Towers for the second time on Thursday with a bent and battered gift certificate her last client, Mrs. Fowler, had given to her instead of coins she had saved up since Judy’s last visit. The gift certificate, accepted by any of the merchants on the avenue, was for twenty dollars, a tip that normally would be considered very extravagant. There was only one hitch: the certificate expired today.

Exhausted after the fitful night before and a frenzied day at work, she hurried down the avenue toward the school to pick up Brian from the after-school program. Her day, unfortunately, was far from over. After dinner and homework, she and Brian were meeting back at the school with her friends and their grandchildren to organize the books for the Book Fair.

She held tight to her purse as she crossed a side street and continued down the avenue. Still reluctant to barter
for the new locks on her doors that she needed, she thought about the gift certificate in her purse. The twenty dollars might have gone a little way or a long way toward getting those new locks, but she had no idea what they might actually cost yet. The expiration date, however, made the possibility of using the money toward new locks almost nil. If she had had the certificate sooner, she could have applied it toward her new refrigerator. Since she hadn’t, she could use the money to get something for Brian, but the shops on the avenue were fairly expensive. She would get much more for her money at one of the nearby discount stores, but the certificate was of no value outside of town.

With the way her day had gone so far, however, getting stuck with the certificate seemed about right.

When she arrived at the school, she waved to Mrs. Hemmy, the after-school teacher, as Brian came racing toward her with a paper of some kind in his hand. “Look! I got the Best Student Award today. See?”

He was so excited he almost knocked her over, and she steadied both of them while trying to read the hand-printed award. “I’m so proud of you!”

“I’m gonna get more, too. Miss Addison said so ’cause I’m doin’ better. Lots better.”

Judy held him against her. “Yes you are! We should celebrate,” she announced and had a flash of inspiration of exactly how she might use that gift certificate. She walked him outside and turned back toward the center of town. “Hungry?”

His head bobbed up and down. “Can you make hot dogs tonight?”

She laughed. “I could, but I was thinking maybe we should go out for dinner to celebrate your award. What if we went to Scoops and had ice cream?” she asked, but felt guilty for never taking Candy for an ice-cream dinner when she had been little.

He tugged on her hand and shook his head. “Grandmom, we can’t have ice cream for dinner.”

“Who said?”

“You did. That time I said I wanted ice cream for dinner, you said no. You said I had to eat my regular dinner first.”

“That was different,” she insisted. “You didn’t win an award that day, did you?”

“Nope. I never got one before today.”

“Well, then, that settles it. We’re going to Scoops and having ice cream for dinner. Then we’ll go home, get homework done, change and go back to school to sort through the books for the Book Fair.”

He skipped and hopped his way to the ice-cream store, polished off a sundae with cookie crumbles and gummi bears on top and walked all the way home with her without once complaining about being tired. She had her keys in hand when she got to the bottom of the steps on her front porch, but climbed the porch steps slowly. For a brief moment, she longed for the days not so very long ago when her life had been more settled. If today’s hectic schedule was any indication, however, things were not likely to settle down again for her for a good long time.

When she got to the top step, she paused and stiffened her back. Yes, her life was unsettled. It was also unpredictable and a little chaotic at times with Brian here, but her life now was also filled with the love of that little boy
and friends like Barbara and Ginger were becoming. She thought about Candy and the danger she could represent, but now firmly rejected the notion of changing her locks and contacting a lawyer, especially if she had to barter for what she needed.

She opened the door and followed Brian into the house. When she closed the front door, she threw the inside bolt. If Candy was on still on drugs and wanted to come here to get her son back, different locks on the doors or a judge’s order on a piece of paper would not stop her. That much Judy knew from experience.

But the school personnel could keep Candy from Brian.

And Judy would stop her. She was Brian’s grandmother and grand mother now. With friends by her side and faith as her shield, she would protect him better than anyone or anything else.

With a single glance around the basement storage room at Park Elementary School, Judy stood inside the door with her two friends and sighed. Any idea that they could organize the books in a single night quickly withered. What wishful thinking!

“There are hundreds and hundreds of books!” Ginger exclaimed as the four children darted around the room peeking into one box after another.

Barbara pushed up the sleeves on her sweatshirt. “It’s a good thing we didn’t wait until the last minute. We’re going to need more than tonight to get this job done.”

Eyes wide, Judy looked from one friend to the other. “I’m really sorry. I had no idea there would be…I don’t have a clue about how to tackle this many books. Or how
to tell Ann that we’ll need hundreds more price stickers!” She paused, then turned quickly toward the children when she spied Brian out of the corner of her eye. “No, Brian. Please don’t climb into any of the boxes.” When he climbed out with no argument, she smiled, took another look at her friends, shook her head and chuckled. “If nothing else, this should be an interesting venture I’ve pulled you both into. Hundreds of books. Four children with energy to spare. And three tired grandmothers!”

“Maybe all we need is a little adventure to perk us up and slow them down,” Ginger prompted as the children quickly organized a game of tag that had them squealing and racing around the room. She clapped her hands.

“Okay, you guys. Hold it and listen up. We’ve got lots of work to do and we need your help.”

“You’ve got a plan?” Judy asked as the children raced toward them.

Ginger giggled. “No, but I think Barbara probably does.” She nudged Barbara with her shoulder. “You’ve had to organize boxes of shipments for your shop, right? This shouldn’t be much different.”

“I guess not,” Barbara conceded. She narrowed her gaze for a moment and smiled. “Apparently, we all agree we’ll have to do this in stages. Why don’t we call it a good night if we can separate the books into fiction and nonfiction piles tonight?”

“Sounds good to me,” Judy replied.

Ginger nodded.

With one of the twins on either side of her now, and both Judy and Ginger holding on to their respective grandsons, Barbara glanced around the room. “I think it’s
probably safe to assume that most of the books will be fiction so we’ll need more room for those. Let’s see if we can make some kind of divider with the boxes so the fiction will be here, closer to the door,” she suggested.

Working hand in hand with Brian, while Ginger and Barbara did the same with their grandchildren, Judy tugged boxes into a row that separated the room, leaving a walkway in two sections to make it easier to move around.

Brian beamed as he helped Judy shove a box into place. “This is fun, Grandmom!”

“I’ll try to remember that tomorrow when my back is aching,” she teased as she stood up and eased the kink out of the small of her back.

“Can I help Vincent?” he asked as Ginger’s grandson struggled on one side of a very wide and obviously heavy box.

“Sure. Go ahead. I’ll help Melanie and Jessie,” she suggested. While he raced away, she slid in between Barbara’s two granddaughters and helped them tug another box into line.

“Will you ask us to help again, Mrs. Roberts?” Jessie grinned. “This is lots more fun than helping do dishes.”

Barbara chuckled. “I can’t believe you think loading dishes into the dishwasher is work. Back when I was your age, we filled the sink with soapy water and washed dishes by hand, one dish at a time. And then we had to rinse them and dry them with a towel before we put them away,” she added. “That was work.”

“Cool!” Melanie gushed. “You gave the dishes a bath?”

Judy nodded and suppressed a grin. “We still give dishes a bath at my house. I don’t have a dishwasher, so Brian helps me do the dishes every night after dinner.”

“That doesn’t sound so cool,” Jessie admonished before charging off to choose another box to move.

“Yes it does.” Melanie grinned. “Can I come to your house some night for dinner and give the dishes a bath?”

Barbara gave the box one final push. “Melanie! It isn’t polite to ask to be invited for dinner.”

Chuckling, Judy straightened the box into line. “It’s always polite to volunteer to do the dishes, though. We’ll have dinner at my house soon, okay?”

“Okay!” Melanie replied before following after her sister.

Barbara laughed and shook her head. “I can’t remember the last time I thought that doing dishes might be fun.”

“Or that washing dishes was the equivalent of giving the dishes a bath.”

“Speaking of baths, I know four children who will definitely need a good bath tonight,” Ginger noted as she joined them. “Not to mention their grandmothers,” she teased as she wiped a smudge from Barbara’s cheek. “Now that we’ve got the books lined up, what’s next?” she asked Barbara.

Barbara let out a deep breath and surveyed the room. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m beat already. The children, on the other hand—”

“They each have more energy than we have. Combined,” Judy noted as Vincent and Brian each started chasing one of the girls.

“Which means we are very smart grandmothers if we can harness all that energy,” Barbara noted and quickly organized them all into specific tasks.

Within minutes, Judy, Ginger and Barbara were sta
tioned in three separate places within the room and the children eagerly assumed their roles as runners. Judy and Ginger inspected boxes, lifted out books and handed one to each of the children, who would run the book to Barbara, who would then direct the child to take the book either to the fiction or nonfiction section of the room. If Barbara deemed the book as inappropriate for any reason, however, she kept the book and stored it in a box marked Discards.

By eight o’clock, the boxes were all empty and the books were in stacks that were separated into fiction and nonfiction. With their faces smudged and their clothes dusty, the children had collapsed against the wall. Subdued, they still had enough energy left to whisper and giggle together.

Side by side on the opposite side of the room, all three grandmothers were smiling.

“A task well done,” Judy remarked.

Ginger chuckled. “In more ways than one. I don’t think any of us will have an argument about bedtime tonight. Poor dears. They ran themselves straight into exhaustion.”

“And their clothes straight to the washing machine,” Barbara remarked with a chuckle.

“What? You’re not going to give the clothes a bath in the sink?” Judy teased as she brushed the dirt from her own jeans.

When Ginger raised a brow, Barbara quickly explained how Melanie had compared doing dishes to giving the dishes a bath. When she finished, she toyed with the cross at the end of the chain she wore, her thoughts obviously drifting to the son she had lost so suddenly.

“Maybe we should do this more often,” Judy suggested.

“I don’t think we have much of a choice. We still have to organize the books by topic and put the price stickers on that Ann promised to make,” Ginger prompted.

“No. That’s not what I meant,” Judy countered. “I mean, look at the three of us. With all the problems we have between us, we could be feeling overwhelmed or sad or depressed or angry about how much we’ve had to give up to raise our grandchildren. Or how much we miss our own children or worry about them. Instead, we’re here with our grandchildren, having fun with them and letting them prove to us that being a grand mother doesn’t mean we can’t just be grandmothers sometimes, too. I’m worried silly about Candy, but tonight, being with Brian and having fun with him was all I could think about.”

“You’re right,” Ginger whispered. “I haven’t had a single sad or angry thought about Lily all night.”

“For the first time in months, I actually just enjoyed the girls without letting my grief at losing Steven come between us,” Barbara whispered.

“That means we definitely have to do this again. And again,” Ginger suggested.

“Like next Thursday? We still need to categorize the books,” Judy prompted. “I know we didn’t plan on including the children, but I think we should.”

Barbara nodded. “Agreed.”

“Agreed,” Judy murmured. “And when we finish organizing all the books, we’ll just have to promise to think of something else to do together.”

Ginger groaned, even as she smiled. “What? Another volunteering job?”

“Maybe,” Barbara replied. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? As long as it’s something that lets us just be grandmothers. Even if it’s only for a little while.”