Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (43 page)

“I am not cooking dinner for you two tonight,” I said when we were back in the van.

“Thank goodness,” Flannery said. “Kidding. Just kidding.”

“We don’t gotta go home and do homework, do we?” Desmond said, as if that were tantamount to swallowing thumbtacks.

“No,” I said. “We’re going to Ms. Willa’s.”

“Good. I still haven’t gotten to check out those nurses.”

I nodded at Flannery, but that wasn’t why we were headed there. Ms. Willa had called me that morning and said that, one, “these people” were
not
working out for her and, two, she had a proposition for me. That could mean anything from hiring Flannery to take care of her (not happening) to her taking over the running of Second Chances (not happening either).

It was neither.

With Flannery and Desmond sitting right there to hear it all from the couch, she hit me with her plan.

“There’s only one of these nurses who knows what he’s doing.”

“He?” I said.

“You know I’m not racist—or sexist. He’s blacker than the ace of spades, but he takes good care of me. The rest of them.”

She blew off
the rest of them
with a loud sniff. I was still recovering from the blatant political incorrectness.

“But he can’t be here all the time,” she said to Flannery, who answered with, “Well, no doubt.”

“Here is my proposition.”

I straightened my back, thinking I was ready.

“The Sisters are still scattered hither and yon,” she said.

Desmond’s brow puckered. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout no hither and yon.”

“All over the place, genius,” Flannery said.

“So I will donate this house so they can all live here. New ones can start out at the ones you have, or whatever you want to do with that. But there’s room for at least eight here.”

“They aren’t qualified to take care of you, Ms. Willa,” I said. I was already having nightmarish flashes of Zelda telling her she better get straight, and Rochelle grunting at her across the tea table.

“If you would let me finish.”

“She hates it when you interrupt,” Flannery said.

“They are not going to take care of me,” Ms. Willa said. “My nurse is, when he’s on duty during the day. And then you and these two children can do whatever else needs to be done for me, which is a whole lot less than those doctors think, I can tell you that.”

“That’s true,” Flannery said. “I’m in.”

“You’re in school now.” I did the habitual fingers to the temples. “I love you, Ms. Willa, but I can’t be running over here—how’s that going to work in the middle of the night?”

Ms. Willa looked at Flannery. “Is she going to let me finish?”

“You just have to keep talking,” Flannery said. “She’ll listen eventually.”

“
What
?”

Ms. Willa all but said, “
Tsk-tsk
.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Explain. Please.”

“You won’t have to come running over here because I won’t be living here. The Sisters will be living here. I will be living at your house. You have four bedrooms.”

Even Flannery’s mouth fell open. I was fairly certain Desmond’s lower lip would be hitting his lap any second.

“My house,” I said.

“Not for free, obviously. You would be handsomely paid, both before my death and after. Don’t tell me you don’t need the money, because I know you do. And with two children to raise now … do you have any idea how much that’s going to cost you?”

I closed my eyes. “Um, okay, this could get complicated, legally speaking.”

“Not according to Jack Ellington. I talked to him this morning. He’s drawing up the papers.”

“He hasn’t said a word to me about it.”

“Of course not. Attorney-client privilege.”

“Since when is Chief your attorney?”

“Since I decided I can’t trust anyone else in this town but you people.” Ms. Willa gave her blue mane a nod. “Well?”

“Ms. Willa, I don’t know what to say.”

This time she barked at Desmond. “How hard is it to say yes?”

Nobody had an answer to that one. The best I could come up with in my dazed state was a promise to think about it.

That promise was easy to keep. I couldn’t think about anything else until Wednesday when I got to Chief’s office to walk over to Chamberlain Enterprises with him and Kade.

“I know about confidentiality blah blah blah,” I said before my seat even hit the chair, “but you could have given me some kind of warning about Ms. Willa.”

“Like what?” he said, eyes crinkling.

“Like ‘Hey, Classic, you’re about to be hit by a Mack truck.’”

“This is more fun.”

“It isn’t fun. I don’t know what to do. It would be perfect for the Sisters. You should have seen them this morning. It was like a funeral at communion.”

“That’s not the part you don’t know what to do with.”

“Ya think? Aside from the fact that God is doing nothing to help me make this decision—”

“Maybe God figures you should already know. That’s how it works for me when I already have all the information I need and I’m still saying, ‘help, help.’”

I stared at him, my next words sitting wasted on my lips.

“What?” he said.

I shook my head. “Aside from that, would
you
want to live in a house with two teenagers and an eighty-something year old woman who can’t keep her—”

“Are you going to be living there?”

“Of course I’m going to be living there!”

“Then that’s exactly where I want to live.”

I could only stare as the crinkles softened. That was how Kade found us when he opened Chief’s office door and said, “She’s here. You want to join us in the conference room?”

“Here?” I said, stupidly.

“I thought we should do this on our own turf,” Kade said. He looked from one of us to the other, said, “Five minutes?” and backed out.

“Chief,” I said.

“Tonight, Classic,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at dusk.”

“The kids—”

“Kade’s lined up.”

“Dress code?”

“Leathers. You’ll need them.”

As he took me by the elbow and ushered me down the hall to the conference room, I didn’t care what the powers-that-were at Chamberlain Enterprises had to say. Nothing else could surprise me.

And then it did.

I had never seen Pix Penwell before. She fit the corporate-power-suit mold, until she opened her mouth. Her soft drawl had not been replaced by the staccato executives all seemed to acquire with their stock options. But, then, Troy had been a great actor too.

“You’re obviously all busy people,” she said, “so I’ll just get right to the point.”

“Which is?”

She surprised me with a smile that didn’t appear to come from the Mr. Potato Head kit. “Your reputation precedes you, Ms. Chamberlain. All right then, as you know, your father left a considerable number of his Chamberlain Enterprises shares to Troy Irwin.”

“Yeah, I figured that out the day my father disowned me.” I bit my lip. “You know what, I’m sorry. Forgive my sarcasm. It’s the only way I can keep from spitting when anyone mentions my father.”

Pix Penwell turned the smile on Chief. “Do you have a spittoon in here? Because I’m about to mention him again.”

“She’ll control herself,” Chief said drily.

“Wait,” I said. “Did you say my father left a number of his shares to Troy? I thought he left all of them.”

She turned back to me. “I’m getting to that. What you probably
don’t
know is that your father willed those shares to Mr. Irwin with the caveat that should it ever be discovered that he mismanaged corporate funds in any intentionally illegal way, the rest of the shares would go to you.”

“I’m sorry, what shares?”

“The ones your father put in trust, which have been there for over ten years. Even with the downturn in the economy, they’re still worth a great deal.”

“Define ‘a great deal,’” Kade said, but I put up my hand.

“I won’t take the money.”

I heard Kade choke. Chief pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Pix Penwell’s face was a puzzle.

“I don’t think you understand what we’re talking about here, Ms. Chamberlain. Two million dollars worth of help for your program can make up for a lot of resentment. You could use it to—”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t use it,” I said. “I just said I wouldn’t take it. For myself.”

I looked at Chief, and at Kade, who was a virtual puddle on the other side of the table. “Can we make it so that the money goes directly to Sacrament House?”

“We can do anything you want,” Chief said.

Ms. Penwell tapped the folder in front of her with a chiseled nail. “There’s one more thing. That two million dollars is in the trust fund. There is another million in CE shares.”

“Sell them,” I said directly to Kade.

“They aren’t worth as much right now as they will be when we get the company back on its feet,” she said. “You might want to hold onto them for a while.”

Only because she seemed truly concerned did I reach over and squeeze her hand. “I’m sure you’re going to turn that ship around, Ms. Penwell,” I said. “And I hope you get going again in the direction my grandfather had in mind when he built it. But I personally don’t want anything to do with it.”

She looked at me like a girlfriend across a lunch table. “I hope the fact that your father provided this for you softens the past a little bit for you.”

“Actually it doesn’t,” I said. “That was my father’s final slap in my face. I’m sure he thought I would be at the reading of the will, which I obviously wasn’t, and that I would know that money would never come to me, because he never thought this would happen.”

“He didn’t think Mr. Irwin would do what he’s done.”

“No. He just didn’t think he would get caught.”

I left the table a millionaire with a very sad heart.

I gave Kade a half page of instructions regarding Desmond and Flannery before Chief and I left that night. Kade promptly crumpled it into a ball and said, “I know how to handle my siblings.”

When Chief and I stepped out onto the side porch, I stopped and listened to the repartee on the other side of the door.

“Should I offer the shares to Kade instead of selling them?” I asked. “He could have an influence on CE if he wanted to.”

“It’s a thought,” Chief said. “But it’s not the one I want you to have tonight.”

He took my arm and pulled me with him down the steps and across the lane. When we reached the Road King, he folded his arms across a leather chest.

“Any other thoughts you want to leave here? You can pick them up when we get back.”

“I don’t want to think about the money,” I said. “I know we can do a lot with it, and I can’t wait to see the Sisters’ faces when I tell them, but it doesn’t really change the root.”

“Go on.”

“Money can’t take the place of working their way through. It can’t erase what’s happened to Ophelia or Flannery or any of them.”

I reached for my helmet, hanging on his handlebar, but Chief stopped my hand.

“We’re not taking this with us. Keep talking.”

“It gives us a chance to help more women and provide more for the ones who are already in the family. Maybe build a recovery center for the young girls where that school never got built on San Luis.”

“Lots of good maybes.”

“But I’m afraid of it, Chief. I’ve seen it take people and twist them into something they were never meant to be.”

Chief lifted my chin. “You’re not Troy Irwin, Classic.”

“I don’t hate him anymore.”

“I know.”

I watched his eyes. “And what about you?”

“Ah.” Chief handed me the helmet. “That’s a question we can take with us.”

The Bridge of Lions lifted us over Matanzas Bay and carried us out to Anastasia Island with the watercolor sky fading to our right and the moon already making a light-path across the Atlantic on our left. By the time we left the condos and golfing clubs of St. Augustine Beach behind, I knew where we were going. Chief was right. It was a place with no room for anything but the freedom to be.

Chief pulled the Road King to the Intracoastal Waterway side of the low, flat bridge that separated the sunset from the moonlight. He took my hand and helped me off the seat behind him and together we crossed to the side that faced the ocean and her rising silver moon. We stood shoulder to shoulder, not touching.