The Change Up (2 page)

Locked.
Her apprehension turned into full-blown heartburn.

Before she could fully process how odd this was, considering her father knew she was coming because they had a nine o'clock meeting with a tree-cutting expert from Pittsburgh, the distinct sound of metal sliding against metal told her the bolt lock was opening and soon after so would the door.

“Rachel!” Her mother gasped as she clutched a pink terry robe around her throat. “What in the world?” She patted a few flyaway hairs at the top of her head and made a face. “I'm not even dressed. This is such a surprise!”

For a split second, Rachel thought maybe she had the wrong day or at least the wrong time and reached for her phone in the front pocket of her satchel. “Dad and I have a meeting …”

“Rachel!” There he was, dressed in a fluffy white robe with a Pittsburgh Pirates logo on the breast pocket. His slippers made an uneven shuffling sound as he walked down the wide hallway with a goofy grin on his face. “What a wonderful surprise!”

“That's just what I was saying,” Rachel's mother said.

Was she dreaming this? Maybe she was having some sort of out-of-body experience brought on by unprocessed stress. Except the cold, late-February air chilled her to the bone, and she knew that couldn't be true. “This shouldn't be a surprise,” she said to her father. “We're meeting with Wes Allen today about the trees. That's today, right?” She whipped out her phone and confirmed what she'd already known to be true, and then she looked at her father again. He seemed confused, so she elaborated. “The meeting is today at nine o'clock. The details were in my Friday update. Didn't you get my email?”

His brows scrunched together at the top of his nose. “No. I … I don't remember the last time I checked my email. I … What's the date?”

“February 21,” Jackie said softly.

“Oh,” her father said absently, frowning briefly before his face brightened. “ Wonderful! Pitchers and catchers reported on February 17.”

Rachel's shoulders slumped. He could remember a random date like that but not the meeting they had scheduled for today?

“Spring training is my favorite time of year,” he continued. “The Buccos have quite the bullpen this season. Liriano, Martinez …” Then he quieted and rubbed his fingertips over his forehead in an agitated fashion. “Liriano, Martinez …” He dropped his hand and fumbled for something in the pocket of his robe. “Where's my phone? I need to find my phone.” He turned and shuffled away, leaving Rachel standing on the porch, staring after him in disbelief.

“He's been having a rough couple days,” her mother said, and when Rachel looked at her, she saw tears.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't know you were supposed to be meeting someone.”

“I wasn't talking about the meeting, Mom. I'm talking about …” No matter what she did, she couldn't get the word
Alzheimer's
to come out of her mouth. “I'm talking about his health. Why didn't you tell me he was getting worse? This can't be normal. I saw you not even two months ago, and he was fine.”

Jackie sighed. “He wasn't fine. He just hides it well. But I agree, this is worse than usual. He has an appointment with Dr. Rictor on Monday.”

Off and on these last weeks, Rachel had thought of reaching out for more information about her father's treatment, but with her usual responsibilities in Philadelphia coupled with the scope of work to get this team up and running—and sold—she'd chosen to leave those details to her mother and sister, Helen Anne. Obviously that hadn't been the smartest thing to do.

She glanced down the empty hallway. “He needs to see someone who will be more aggressive with treatment, because this is not okay. Mom …” She leveled her mother with a serious look. “Let me take him to Philadelphia. I'll find the best neurologists.”

Jackie shook her head. “Your father likes Dr. Rictor. We trust him, and we can't keep running to Philadelphia every time he needs to see a doctor. It's …” The tears fell. “It's a lot to handle, Rachel. I'm doing the best I can.”

Crap.
“Where's Helen Anne?” After all, her sister was living in this house, too.

“She's at church with Macy.”

“No, I mean where is she while all of this is going on? Is she helping you, or is she hiding in that little bookstore of hers?”

“Of course she's helping,” Jackie said defensively. “But I don't want Macy …” Her voice broke with a small sob when she mentioned Rachel's ten-year-old niece. “The divorce has already been hard enough on her.”

Rachel's shoulders slumped under the weighty realization that things with her father were more serious than she'd wanted to admit. Worse, if she were a decent daughter, she wouldn't be passing the buck off to her sister—she would be here more often to help out.

Again, the long list of business tasks facing her scrolled through her head, and she wished she'd brought her executive assistant along because even if Rachel wanted to be more involved in her father's care, she didn't see how she could make time to be everywhere at once. The sheer magnitude of her to-do list was daunting.

“I should go check on him,” Jackie said.

Rachel hesitated at the threshold to the house. “Okay. I'll call and check on him later. I don't want to be late for my meeting.” The business side of things was where she was needed most, especially now.

She would carry on and do everything on her own—just like she'd promised her father.

• • •

Sam Sutter heard something moving in the dense patch of trees behind his house. Something big. He glanced back at his thirteen-year-old Lab mix, who was sprawled on her belly on the lawn, mauling her Sunday-morning soup bone, and figured that whatever it was, it couldn't be too ominous if Babe didn't care. But still … the heavy rumble clawed at his common sense and had him rethinking his usual walk in the woods. He didn't want any trouble.

He was just about to turn around and head back to the house when he heard faint voices. Now that was curious. Splitting a box shrub in two, Sam peered deeper into the forest that separated his property from the far edges of the old community college, but he couldn't see a dang thing other than more bark and leaves. What was going on in there?

Right about now, everyone in bucolic Arlington, Pennsylvania, was split between three places: the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, or the Pancake Palace. Well, almost everyone. He was here, like he was every Sunday since he'd walked away from a budding baseball career and bought his mother's favorite log house on the end of her favorite wooded cul-de-sac.

He glanced at the shockingly blue sky like he did every time he thought of his mother and damn near jumped a foot back from the forest's edge when a god-awful clanging sent the birds fleeing the treetops.

Finally, Babe abandoned her bone and bolted past him into the thick of things.
Dumb dog,
he thought affectionately. Every other animal was running in the opposite direction.

Sam hesitated for only a second and then followed her. “Babe!” He whistled. Her barking was sure to scare away whatever was left of the birds. He looked overhead like he expected the mass exodus to continue. But there wasn't a hint of movement anywhere. Just an eerie stillness punctuated by Babe's incessant barking. And with every step, his desire to turn around and avoid whatever was going on grew.

“Babe!” He whistled again and cut around the rock-rimmed fire pit he and his father would put to good use later tonight. There was nothing like two guys nursing a six-pack and chilling under the stars. Buying this house had been the best thing Sam had done with the money he'd made from playing baseball. But those thoughts never came without the wish that he'd done so sooner—soon enough for his mother to have sat around that fire, too.

He rushed an apologetic glance skyward before he hurdled over the thick trunk of a fallen tree on his sprint toward an agitated Babe. It sounded like she had something cornered. Normally, he would've guessed a squirrel or a possum, because it was a little too early in the year for it to be a fawn, but he remembered those voices. Babe normally wasn't weird with people.

He cleared another patch of trees, and sure enough, Babe had something cornered: two people and a bright-red pickup truck towing a dozer on a trailer.

“Hey!” he yelled to his dog, and this time, he clapped. “Get over here!”

Babe looked at him, looked back at the pair who Sam was sizing up, and trotted remorsefully back to his side, where she sat.

One of the people beside the truck was a woman. And not just any woman. “Rachel Reed,” he said, darn-near accusatory, recognizing her immediately despite the five or so years that had passed since the last time he'd seen her. She wore tailored, tan dress pants and a tight, white sweater, looking like a Wall Street pinup. “You're a little overdressed for a hike and awfully far from Philly, aren't you?”

A blinding smile jumped off her sun-kissed face, making her noted resemblance to Cameron Diaz even more undeniable. “Little Sammy Sutter! What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” he said, gesturing in the direction of his house beyond the trees and deciding to let the “little Sammy” quip slide while they were in the presence of a stranger. “Sam Sutter,” he said instead, emphasizing the adult version of his name and reaching a hand toward the broad man standing beside Rachel. “I don't believe we've met.”

“Wes Allen.”

“Wes is from Pittsburgh,” Rachel said. “He's helping me out with a little project.”

In the woods. On a Sunday. Sam glanced at the dozer, and the hairs on the back of his neck rose. “I thought all your projects were in Philly these days.”

“They are. Technically this is …” She hesitated. “My father's project.”

The baseball team.
Sam slipped the tips of his fingers into his blue-jean pockets and nodded slowly, adopting the devil-may-care attitude he'd perfected since walking away from a Chicago Cubs affiliate team ten years ago. But his insides twisted. And that was before he noticed the Allen Tree Cutting logo on Wes's truck.

“How's Luke?” Rachel asked.

“Married.”

A wicked little smile tipped her ruby lips. “Better him than me.”

Absolutely. Sam's older brother was working for the family landscaping business and expecting his third child with Mandy. It was a simple, happy life. The kind of life their mother had wanted for both of them. The kind of life Luke never would've had with Miss High-Achiever here, living in some sterile Philadelphia condo surrounded by smog and cement.

Rachel had never been right for Luke. Sam's thoughts flashed back to the summer before eighth grade, Luke's senior year of high school. At the Sutter family's Labor Day picnic, Luke had sat on a picnic table bench making goofy eyes at Rachel all day instead of playing Wiffle Ball with the rest of them. They'd been just as nauseating together that whole year, much to Sam's chagrin, with his brother following Rachel around like a lapdog. Until the next Labor Day, when she'd dumped Luke the night before she left for college. Rachel Reed had made it clear she was heading places, and Luke was no longer good enough to bask in her shadow.

Looking at her through the lens of twenty years, Sam found the woman to be just as beautiful and just as irritating as ever. Stomping all over his clearing, eyeing up his trees like she owned the place.

“Well, I don't want to keep you from your Sunday morning,” she said, her tone clearly dismissive. “It was nice seeing you. Tell Luke I said hello.” Again with that uppity smile.

This was the part where Sam should have politely told Rachel it was nice to see her, too, then gone on his merry way. But a warbler sounded overhead and settled a few branches above the truck.

Listen to the birds
, his mother used to say.
They know when something's up.
Of course, she'd been talking about the weather, but still … it stuck with him. Sort of took on new meaning today.

Sam glanced at that damn logo on the truck again, and he couldn't stop himself. “You're not planning on cutting down these trees are you?”

“Just a little fact-finding mission,” she said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

He found it hard to believe anyone needed a bulldozer on a fact-finding mission. “Some of these trees are more than two hundred years old.”

“Some of these trees are impeding a parking lot expansion.”

He scoffed. Damn city people and their concrete jungle obsession. “Some of these trees are on my property.” But for the life of him he couldn't remember exactly where the property line ended. He also couldn't recall a damn thing about zoning ordinances and setbacks.

The warbler squawked again.

“I know exactly where your trees start and end,” she said confidently. He didn't trust her, and that was before she tilted her head and regarded him through narrowed eyes. “You, of all people, must be excited about my father bringing professional baseball to Arlington.”

Here we go.
Sam shrugged. “I don't really follow baseball these days.”

“That's a shame. Sam used to play for the …” She looked from Wes back to Sam. “The Cubs, right?”

Sam nodded once and added, “Never made it out of the minors.” Why sugarcoat it? Chasing “the bigs” in a rusty bus, believing he was the next big thing, had caused him to miss out on a lot of things. He was still trying to make up for some of them.

Again he thought of his mother, and this time the guilt was almost too much to swallow.

“What are you doing now?” Rachel asked, surprising him, not because he expected her to keep tabs on his career, but because she'd never been the kind to care much about other people—at least that had been his experience when she'd labeled him “whiny little Sammy” who was always trying to come between her and Luke.