The Sparrow Sisters (17 page)

There was nothing for them to do but go to Doyle's for a beer.

P
ATIENCE DROVE HOME.
Have I learned nothing?
she thought.
Must I spoil everything?
By the time she got to Ivy House, she was shivering so hard that she bruised her elbow on the gearshift.

Nettie was in the kitchen with a glass of wine and a bowl of fresh peas.

She looked up and after a quick assessment that involved sniffing said, “Can you take it back?”

“Take what back?” Patience said disingenuously.

“Whatever you've done.”

“Henry questioned how we take care of Matty.”

“We?” Nettie asked.

“Me, then. Henry doesn't think it's safe for me to help Matty.” Patience took Nettie's wine and drank it down. “I'm terrified that he's right so I snapped at him and left him with Ben at the Nursery.”

“Well, they won't stay there long,” Nettie said. “Ben will take Henry somewhere bright and noisy to get his mind off you.”

“Great, everyone in Doyle's can watch him get drunk and assume I've driven him to it.”

“You have, but Henry won't get drunk at Doyle's. He'll wait till he gets home. And, if you really cared what the people of
this town think, you wouldn't be you, if you know what I mean.” Nettie took her glass back and rinsed it out. “Please try to just
not
be you for a little while.”

Patience stayed in the kitchen and drank the rest of the wine, which, as it turned out, was more than enough to give her a colossal headache the next morning. She limped through the day on nothing more than Coca-Cola, cursing her petulance and her inability to be served by her own remedies. A little milk thistle could have done her a world of good. Even in her state, she turned Henry's concerns over in her mind until, when Matty showed up just before three, Patience had come to the decision that Henry was indeed right. She couldn't just go around dosing a little boy with hops flower and valerian, passiflora, vinca, and green tea when she agreed with Henry that there was something else terribly wrong with Matty. And if she was being honest, she'd known Matty was struggling since May but she couldn't feel what it was and she feared that he might need more than she could give him.

P
ATIENCE WATCHED THE
little boy as he helped Sorrel deadhead coneflowers and gather the blossoms for echinacea powder. His hands were so thin that his fingers looked like bone. The sun was very hot as it poured over the meadow, and Sorrel was sweating. Matty's neck was red at the top of his tee shirt.

“It's too hot out here for Matty,” Patience called. “I'm taking him home.”

As they drove, she tried to explain why she wouldn't be helping him anymore.

“I think it's safer all around if you and Henry and your dad make a plan,” she said.

“I thought you liked helping me?” Matty hunched against the truck door. He held a small pot of butter lettuce between his knees.

“I love helping you, I do,” Patience said. “But Henry thinks it would be better if he helped your dad keep track of your medicine. Then you won't need my help.”

“I am sad,” Matty said. “Maybe my heart is broken.”

Patience pulled the truck over, and Matty's head bumped against the seat.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I care about you and if your heart ever breaks, I'll fix it, right?”

“Does that mean I can't come to the Nursery anymore?” Matty's voice was so thready and light that Patience had to lean in to hear him.

“No, no!” she said. “You can always come to the Nursery. I wouldn't know what to do if you stopped. I need you, Matty.”

Patience dropped Matty off. She didn't walk him in because she wanted to talk to Henry first, or wanted him to talk to Rob Short first. She had been reluctant to see Matty go, and he'd let her brush her hand over his head, hot and damp with sweat. She'd resisted the urge to pull him toward her.

Patience was exhausted by her hangover, thirsty, achy, and soon to be snarly again. She would talk to Henry the next day;
everything would be so much easier if she just waited and took a breath. As she backed out, she saw Matty standing at the window watching her.

I
N THE KITCHEN
Matty drank water from the sink. He splashed some on his face; it was flushed with heat and dirt, and sand stuck to his neck. His hair lay limp against his scalp. He didn't think he'd ever been so tired. Still, he wanted to write down everything he'd learned that morning because he wasn't sure if he would ever go back to the Sparrow Sisters Nursery. He was afraid to believe Patience really meant it when she said she needed him. In fact, he wasn't sure that he wanted to go back. Matty didn't often feel angry anymore, not since his mother died. She'd taken all his anger and, it seemed, all his energy with her. Certainly she had emptied Rob of anything like happiness. Perhaps Annie Short killed herself because she couldn't fix her son. It was as stupid a reason as any. Matty knew that reason, he didn't need to be told, and when his mother left him, Matty felt guilty. Now a tiny ember of anger did set up in his chest. Matty was angry that he couldn't seem to hold onto anyone he cared about, or they couldn't hold onto him.

Matty shouldered the drawstring bag he packed each day and climbed the stairs, trailing one hand along the wall. He left a faint green smudge in a long stripe behind him. In his room he knelt beside his neatly made bed and fished under the mattress for his notebook. It was cooler in his room; he'd
lowered the shades when he left that morning. Matty was the careful son of a careless father. Patience had given him bundles of thyme to put on the windowsills, and the room was lightly scented, as shadowed and secret as a glade. Matty settled at the little table that had belonged to his mother when she was as happy as Matty would never be again. He spread out the notebook and began to transcribe from memory all the things he had been taught each day.

“Cat's claw for arthritis,” he wrote, his fingers gripping the pen so tightly they were white beneath the nails. “Alfalfa is for prosperity but will thin the blood, celandine is a liver tonic and good for escape, dandelion leaf and root will call spirits and grant wishes, foxglove will mend a broken heart.”

Matty put his pen down. He wasn't sure that he'd gotten everything right, that he'd remembered all the bits Patience told him about the plants. He dug into his bag and pulled out an entire dandelion, roots dusty with earth, a limp clump of alfalfa, several lemony-yellow celandine flowers, and four squashed foxglove spears and a handkerchief full of the leaves. He picked this up between two fingers, wary of Patience's warning. Foxglove could save your life or not, Matty thought. That made no sense. Perhaps he'd heard wrong. Nevertheless, it was part of his homemade textbook. He wrote “Eliza Howard” next to the foxglove description. He wondered how a flower could be as old as the town. He'd begun collecting the flowers as soon as Patience told him how powerful they could be, careful to stay out of sight when he tucked the overly pink blossoms into
his bag. He'd grabbed a tall stalk so quickly one day that he brought home several earwigs. Now he took the petals off of each plant and pressed them between sheets of waxed paper. Then he slipped the lumpy leaves between the pages of one of the four dictionaries he kept in his room, licking his index finger neatly as he turned each leaf. He'd gotten the dictionaries at the church tag sale, carrying them home one by one across the village green. He heard the nice ladies chuckle as he went back and forth over the next hour, but he didn't laugh with them. Each cost no more than a dollar because they were so out of date as to be nearly useless. But not to Matty: he read the dictionaries, that was true, but he also hid things in them. He liked to put the plants he learned about in alphabetical order in the pages. By now, two of the heavy books were buckling with the mass of flowers and seeds, the pages wavy and gray with soil. The clary sage, purple and feathery, he put beneath his pillow. Even though he was too tired to eat, Matty knew that he would have terrible dreams that would wake him in a breathless sweat. So he put his faith in Patience once again and hoped the faint scent coming through the pillow would be enough to save him this night. He looked at the clock by his bed. Somehow hours had gone by without his noticing. It was seven, still light. Matty decided to eat something after all. But when he got down to the kitchen, he found that all he wanted was the cookies Patience had packed for him. He poured a glass of milk and ate two of them, lavender sprigs as well, and licked the sugar off his fingers.

S
ALLY
T
ABOR WENT
into labor on that last day of July, two days after Henry's fight with Patience, the afternoon Patience made her decision about Matty and drove off still mourning her inability to “fix him.” Henry didn't know that she'd told Matty because they hadn't spoken in that time, and Henry had descended into a gray funk that extended to the office. Sally, for one, was on the verge of calling Patience to get them both back on track. “For heaven's sake,” she murmured as Henry sighed behind her at the files. She stomped to the exam room.

Sally had stayed late to organize the office. She was stacking the doctor's charts on his desk, hoping he'd get to them over the weekend because her contractions had been marching (gently at first) through her since noon. Sally wasn't due until early August, but now she knew she wouldn't be in on Monday. She needed to make sure the office ran smoothly while she was on maternity leave. Her water broke just behind Henry's chair, trickling down her legs into a pink puddle. Swearing, she grabbed a handful of paper towels from over his sink and was squatting down, wiping the floor when Henry came in with two bottles of water. He thought he'd power through some paperwork before giving in to his crippling need for Patience.

“What happened?” he asked and then noticed the streaks of blood on the towels.

“Give me your hand, Sally,” he said. “Let me see you.”

“Sorry about this,” Sally grunted as she stood, lifting her belly with one hand as she rose.

“Please,” Henry said. He took her elbow and led her to the exam table. “Just sit and I'll call your husband.”

“He's in Hingham on a job.” Warren Tabor was a contractor, and he worked the whole region. “I'll call. If he hears your voice, he'll panic.”

“We've got time,” Henry said. “You talk to him and then I'll drive you to Hayward. We'll be there in twenty-five minutes.”

“Actually, we were planning a home birth with Dr. May.”

“Willa May, the fertility expert?” Henry gaped. He knew her work and had met her once when he was in Boston, and he was surprised she was local. Dr. May was an obstetrician who spent part of the year in Granite Point but had made a name for herself in Boston. She was the only other doctor in town when she was in her house on the Heights. Women loved her because she was so capable and because Sam Parker had delivered the doctor's own baby in a mad dash when her labor moved too fast to get her to the hospital. That made her one of them no matter how much time she spent in the city.

“Home birth?” Henry couldn't imagine anything more terrifying.

“See, this is why I never told you,” Sally said and called Warren. Henry could hear his staccato, alarmed voice through the phone. Next she called Dr. May who, to Henry's horror, was in fact at Brigham and Women's in Boston. She promised to get in the car that minute. It was a summer Friday. It could be hours before Willa made it.

“Well,” Henry said. “First baby, it'll be fine.”

“It's my third,” Sally said.

“Jesus!” Henry groaned. “Anything else you haven't told me?”

“I assumed you knew, small town and all.” Sally's face twisted as a contraction took her. She was silent, and Henry thought he might just have to swear since she wouldn't.

“OK, Sally, let's think for a second,” Henry said, trying to decide how to override his nurse's birth plan and just throw her in his car and go. He pulled out a stack of lap pads and moved to put them on the table under her. Sally held up one finger. She looked distinctly nauseated. “This is way too fast,” Henry thought.

Henry went to the sink and washed his hands. He rolled up his sleeves and tucked his tie into his shirt. It had been more than two years since he'd delivered a baby. That one had been in the ER with full access to equipment and experts. He still remembered how quickly bad things could happen. If he was lucky, he could get the EMS here in time. All he needed was one look to determine how far Sally had gone.

“I should do an internal,” Henry said as he turned around, and both of them winced. “I'm sorry.”

“We should call Patience Sparrow?” Sally was out of breath, and her statement came out as a question.

“Seriously?” Henry spoke without thought and was glad Patience wasn't already there to hear him. “I mean, fine, but can I ask what she's going to do for you?”

“She was with me the last two times. She's very calming.”

“That is not the word I'd use these days,” Henry said as he
dialed Patience. When she answered, she didn't bother to ask why Henry was involved.

“On my way,” she said and hung up.

Sally was being very brave. She tried to run Henry through what she'd set up for her absence, the name and number of the temp she'd hired to begin the first week in August, the schedule for supply deliveries. But when she started to get off the table to point out the files, Sally finally made some noise.

“All right, that's it,” Henry said as he stood behind Sally's hunched form. He rubbed the heel of his hand along the base of her back.

“Oh, boy,” Sally whispered, and Henry saw a tear hit her hand on her knee. It was now clear how short time really was. He gave her a shot of Demerol in her hip and hoped he hadn't left it too late. Twice he moved to call the EMS and twice Sally asked for a minute. By the time Patience arrived, Henry knew he was in way too deep.