The Year of Luminous Love (39 page)

Ciana gently touched Eden’s shoulder. “Same offer. If your house sells and your mother moves, you have a home with me until you have enough money to go meet him.”

Under her breath, Eden grumbled, “If I’m not too old to travel by then. And if he wants me.”

“He’ll want you,” Ciana said. “Arie and I both agree that the guy was head over heels for you. The crazy Aussie.”

A nostalgic half smile shadowed Eden’s mouth. “He’s crazy, all right. And maybe I am too. But I hope you’re both right. I hope he misses me as much as I miss him.”

Ciana lay on the ground under her truck, banging on the universal joint with a wrench and cussing. She’d pulled the pickup into the barn in order to stay warm while she worked, or tried to work. She was out of her element and she knew it. Nothing she’d downloaded from the Web was helping her deal with the truck’s leaking problem.

She felt a boot kick her foot. “That you swearing like a sailor, Miz Beauchamp?”

She scooted out from beneath the truck and glared at Jon. He sat on a bale of straw carving a small piece of wood with a pocketknife. “I didn’t know you whittled,” she said.

“I’m no artist, but I like doing it,” he said. Ever since the wedding, tensions had lessened between them. A good thing. They could talk now, banter, joke, and occasionally tease each other. She’d even taken up eating breakfast with Jon and her mother.

He slid off the bale, tucked the knife into his jeans pocket
and the lump of wood into his shirt pocket, and pulled her to her feet. “I think you’d better call in backup.”

“You?” she asked hopefully.

He threw up his hands. “I work with four-legged creatures, never anything with four wheels.”

“You have a truck.” She motioned with the heavy wrench. “How do you keep it running?”

“I hire a mechanic.”

She growled at him. “Big help you are.”

“I can help you tow it into town.”

“Not today,” she grumbled. “I’m supposed to go to MTSU and see the registrar about late registration. I went online, but all the classes I need or want are full. Thought I’d plead my case in person. Mom’s got the Lincoln, or I’d borrow it.”

Jon picked straw out of her hair. “I can take you, if you don’t mind stopping off at the county home so I can visit my dad.”

She was curious about his dad, had wondered what sort of man had fathered Jon. “Seems like a fair trade. Let me clean up a bit.”

Jon first drove to the campus. “Thought you were going to Vandy.”

She was surprised he remembered. “MTSU is closer. I can live at home and drive to the campus with Arie. Thought it would be more fun than both of us going our separate ways.” Ciana didn’t mention she couldn’t afford Vandy anymore.

In Murfreesboro, on the MTSU campus, every parking lot was filled to capacity. “Do you think all these cars have come to see the registrar?”

“Beats me. But it looks like we have to park out here and
either hike in or take one of those buses.” He pointed at a bus just leaving one of the parking lots.

Ciana groaned and hung her head. “I’m so screwed.”

Jon looked amused. “What do you want to do?”

She nibbled pensively on her lower lip. “I want to take you up on your offer to tow my truck to Ted’s Auto Shop tomorrow. After he fixes it, I’ll drive out here and camp. No need for you to waste your day. Let’s go see your dad.”

The facility where Wade Mercer was housed was a far cry from the beautifully maintained Evergreen, where Olivia had lived for three years. This place looked every bit the institutional building it was, with narrow halls, small windows that admitted little light, and paint so faded that the walls seemed colorless. Ciana wrinkled her nose over smells of stale food and people needing showers.

“I don’t like him being here either.” Jon was apologetic. “It’s where he has to be right now. I’ll take him back to Texas eventually. Unfortunately someone has to die before he can be moved up on the waiting list back home.” Jon signed in at a reception desk, told Ciana, “You can wait here. I won’t stay long.”

“No … if it’s okay, I’ll tag along.”

He hesitated. “Fair warning—my dad’s raw around the edges. Just blurts out anything he wants to say. And he’s got a lot of damage on his left side from the stroke. His face isn’t pretty.”

“I get it. My grandmother wasn’t in good shape either toward the end.” She followed Jon down a narrow hall, dodging wheelchairs and food carts.

Jon entered a room with two beds divided by a limp curtain. One bed was empty, and in the other a man lay watching an old TV hanging on the wall. “Hey, Dad,” Jon said.

Wade Mercer turned toward the voice. “Look who’s come
to call.” His body was twisted on one side, his mouth quirked in a permanent scowl. “You brought a pretty filly with you.” The eye on his stroke side stared fixedly.

“Hello,” Ciana said, smiling, ignoring the physical wreckage.

“She’s a looker, son.” Wade’s unblinking gaze pored over Ciana’s body. “Got a real nice build on her.”

Ciana flushed. Jon barked, “Be nice, old man!”

Wade said something else, but between his thick Texan accent and the stroke, Ciana couldn’t understand his garbled speech.

She squared her shoulders and held out her hand. “I’m Ciana Beauchamp. Glad to meet you.”

Wade’s expression hardened. “The hell you say. You a
Beauchamp
?” He made her name sound like a swearword.

Stung by his reception, she stepped away. “Um, yes, I’m a Beauchamp.”

“I see it now … yeah … I see it clear,” Wade muttered.

“That’s enough, Dad,” Jon growled.

“No mistakin’ them devil eyes.”

“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Jon demanded.

“Boy, I’m tellin’ you a truth for your own sake. Ain’t nothin’ good ever come out of a Beauchamp.”

“I … I don’t—” Ciana said, shocked by his words.

Jon took Ciana’s elbow. “Let’s get out of here.” He hustled her out of the room, but Wade’s raised voice chased them down the hall.

“You stay away from them Beauchamp women, son!” he yelled. “Stay far, far away. Ain’t
nothin’
good in a Beauchamp woman.”

In the truck, before he could start the engine, Ciana said, “Wait. Please. Calm down.”

Jon was shaking and furious, but he didn’t turn the key. “I’m real sorry about that. I told you he was crazy.”

Still reeling, Ciana said, “I swear I never saw him before today. Can’t imagine why my name caused him to freak out.”

Jon struck the steering wheel hard with the palm of his hand. “I don’t know either. I grew up in Texas with Mom’s people, who helped raise me while she held down two jobs. The Farleys are a whole better class of folks than my granddaddy and Wade.”

Ciana heard the affection in his voice for his mother and her kin. Ciana’s short history with Jon stretched back only to the previous summer, so she really didn’t know much about him. “How did he treat you when you were growing up?”

Jon shrugged. “He was a hard man and I was hardheaded. But Mom says he was raised by a hard man. My granddaddy died when I was about four, so I barely remember him.”

“Maybe it’s something to do with the stroke. Or his medications. Olivia could get real turned around sometimes and say things that made no sense.”

“No need to make excuses for him. It’s not the stroke. It’s him. He’s just mean as a junkyard dog.”

“Nice of you to take care of him.”

Jon shrugged. “My duty. Mom divorced him, but he’ll always be my father.”

Jon started the engine and backed the truck out of its parking space. “All I know is that I’ve got to figure out what to do with him if I’m ever going home to Texas.”

Reality hit Ciana. His presence had become such a fixture in her daily life that she’d begun to think of always having him around. Not true. He would disappear from her life the minute
he could. What did that say about Jon and Arie’s future? “Let’s go home. I need a long horseback ride.”

“Wish I could join you.”

She almost asked him to but realized she needed to step back and keep him at arm’s length for many reasons. Beauchamp rule number something-or-other: Never get so close to someone that you can’t afford to let them go.

Arie saw the truth on Dr. Austin’s face the moment he walked into the room. Her heart seized, but her voice held steady when she spoke. “So much for your poker face.”

Austin’s eyes narrowed even as he attempted a smile. “That’s why I don’t play poker. Anyone can tell the cards I hold by my expression.”

“And you’re out of aces,” she said quietly. “Or rather, I’m out of aces.”

He shuffled through sheets of paper, her lab work she guessed. “I have no good news,” he confessed.

The words she’d always feared and dreaded. Before, when a treatment failure came, Austin had given pep talks, laid out new ideas, new drug programs. Tears welled in her eyes. “I told myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said, wiping fiercely at the tears.

“Why not? I did.”

“There’s nothing else you can throw at it?”

“Over time we’ve tried everything medical science allowed. I thought we had it licked last spring. Really. The tumor had shrunk to nothing, the size of a grape seed. Then it multiplied, seed begetting seed. We can’t stop the spread. It’s in your bones now.”

“Ask not for whom the bell tolls,”
John Donne wrote.
“It tolls for thee.”
Arie knew she was dying.

They sat in silence for a while in the exam room. Arie sniffed, and Austin handed her tissues from a nearby box. “So what should I expect?” she asked.

“I can help you remain as pain-free as possible. I want to send hospice people to your home. You and your family will need their support. And it will allow you to remain at home until the end.”

Having once signed a do-not-resuscitate order, she was grateful not to spend the end of her life hooked up to machines in the hospital. “Do I have a timetable?”

“Perhaps a couple of months.”

“No need to start classes, I guess.”

“Do whatever makes you happy.”

“Well, what more can a girl ask?” She scooted off the table, glancing at her watch. “I have to run. Art classes down in Pedi.”

“You could cancel. Go home, talk to your family.”