Chapter 21
Doreen walked over to Milford. “Hello. How are you doing?”
He looked at her glumly. “I think it was a mistake to bring you into the case of my bloody garden patch.”
“Was it? Why is that?” she asked.
“Because I don’t want you poking around into Rose’s life.”
She nodded. “Meaning that her life was a little less than spotless and that will become evident when it’s put under a microscope?”
He stared at her. “You could say that.”
“Rose has been gone a short time,” Doreen said, “and I wouldn’t do anything to besmirch her reputation.”
“Not anything you could do that Rose hadn’t already done herself.”
Doreen just listened to details about this woman that she hadn’t really expected to hear.
“She was still a good woman,” Milford stated.
“I didn’t say she wasn’t,” Doreen noted gently. “And whether she lived a life that a lot of other people wouldn’t agree with is not ours to judge.”
He looked at her, tears collecting in his eyes. “I really miss her,” he whispered.
“I know you do,” she said, “and I’m so sorry. Loss, no matter who it is and how it comes about, is very hard, and, in your case, I’m sure you didn’t want to be left behind.”
“No, I sure didn’t,” he admitted, rubbing his shoulder.
“You came into town for groceries?” she asked.
“Yeah, I don’t come in much,” he muttered. “It’s just not a place I want to be.”
“But you need food.”
“I don’t even need food,” he argued. “I’ve got lots, but that darn cat of mine.”
She chuckled. “That darn cat that you love?”
“I ain’t telling it that though. That’ll just make it more arrogant, and it already thinks it owns the place as it is,” he muttered.
She smiled. “So, you came to get cat food. I thought he hunted.”
“Probably hunts a little too much. He’s very good at it, you know?”
“Yeah, I got that impression when I was there. My animals were pretty uncertain about him.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. The dog looked as if he was ready to go on the jump.”
“Maybe,” she conceded, “but I can’t have him going around picking fights either.”
He laughed. “Cats are a law unto themselves.”
“They think they are anyway,” she agreed, with a smile. “You want me to come in and do some grocery shopping with you?”
He looked at her. “Whatever for?”
She shrugged. “In case you’re lonely.”
He shook his head. “I’ll never tell anybody I’m lonely. That just makes me sound as if I’m some weak, old, pathetic geezer.”
“No, it makes you sound as if you’re human.”
That stopped him in his tracks, just as he’d been about to step away. “Good Lord, I really hadn’t considered that.”
“Of course not,” she said, with a laugh. “It’s always about trying to maintain the status quo, isn’t it?”
“For some people there is nothing else, and, in my life, you know, I loved her dearly, but she was definitely somebody who didn’t always play the same as everybody else.”
“Did she break up relationships?”
“Sometimes, yes. Definitely some people in town were probably happy to see the breast cancer take her,” he noted, “and I surely wouldn’t want to be talking to them.”
“Of course not,” she agreed. “You loved her, and love is never wrong.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “It seems as if, for so many of us, it’s never quite right either.”
She nodded, not sure what else to say. “I’m sorry it’s been so tough dealing with losing her.”
“It’s more than just losing her. It’s thinking of all those years we spent together, and, at the end of the day, it’s still just you, all by yourself,” he muttered. “Nobody even remembers her, and, if they do, it’s not fondly.”
“What they remember has nothing to do with it,” she stated pointedly. “It’s all about how you remember her because you’re the one who loved her. Did she have family?”
He shrugged. “Everybody had family at one point in time, but we never had much of any contact with hers.”
“Interesting,” Doreen said, “because a lot of people turn to family when they get sick.”
“No, she turned to me, and honestly, I was grateful because she could have turned to so many other people.”
“Even then though?” she asked. “She was up there all alone with you for a very long time, wasn’t she?”
He nodded. “And I didn’t force it either,” he declared. “No matter what some of these people might say.”
“I’m not too bothered about what they might say,” she acknowledged. “I’m more concerned about you.”
He snorted. “Don’t know why,” he muttered. “All of our days have come and gone. We’re just in the waiting room now, waiting for that final trip home.”
“Did Rose have any regrets at the end of her life?”
Milford sighed. “She did. She had a lot of them. She didn’t say much about a lot of what she saw as she looked backward. I kept telling her not to look back but to look forward, but she got very melancholy there for a while.”
“Of course,” Doreen agreed, “and I’m sure that’s not unusual. When we get to that final boarding gate, I think a lot of people look back on life and have regrets.”
He nodded. “She was a good woman.”
“Glad to hear that,” she replied. “And I have no intention of ever saying anything against that,” she added. “But other people are also entitled to have their opinion, though it doesn’t matter.”
“Exactly,” he declared, with a firm nod. “You’re better off going home and not gossiping about my wife either.”
“Not gossiping,” she clarified. “I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“What’s going on about what?”
Doreen hesitated, and then decided to just say it. “One of the men that Rose may have had an affair with some fifty years ago, a Bartlet Jones, has been missing for a very long time,” she explained. ‘And I’m pretty sure his family would very much like to have some closure.”
He just looked at her and shook his head. “Ain’t got nothing to do with me and ain’t got nothing to do with her. Any man Rose had an affair with a long time ago, who was an adult, could make his own decisions.”
“Absolutely,” Doreen agreed. “It’s certainly got nothing to do with that. I’m not worried about that in any way right now, but Bartlet’s been missing for fifty years.”
“Fifty years?” he asked, his eyebrows shooting up in astonishment.
She nodded. “Yeah, fifty years.”
“Good God,” he muttered. “She was seventy-seven when she died one year ago,” he noted. “So that would have made her twenty-eight back then.” He paused, then winced. “Honestly, she was quite the going concern back then too.”
Doreen laughed. “That’s okay. She was entitled to live her life as she wanted to.”
“Oh, she lived it all right,” he said, with half a smile.
“When did she marry you?”
“She didn’t marry me until, oh, I don’t know, a dozen years or so ago, maybe not even that much. I never could keep the dates in my head,” he muttered.
“And why so late?”
“She said that marriage wasn’t for her.” He snorted. “I wanted it to be a legal thing. I wanted her to be mine. I was a little desperate for that, but she wasn’t willing to give it to me until the end, until she had passed a certain point in life. And then she was all about getting married,” he shared, shrugging.
“She came to me one day, and that was it. She wanted to get married. She was pretty hot about it too. I never really understood, but I wouldn’t say no. I just ended up marrying her right away. We came down to the registry, got a license, and got married,” he said, with a smile. “We had just the clerks in the office as the witnesses.” He looked back at Doreen’s car, as if suddenly realizing she didn’t have the animals with her. “How come you don’t travel with the animals?”
“I do whenever I can. And I need to get back to them,” she added, with a smile.
“That’s for sure. Go,” he urged. “And, if you want to come back out to visit me in Joe Rich and take another look at that garden plot, feel free.”
“I might have to,” she declared, staring at him. “It is human blood.”
The color faded from his skin, and he winced. “ Great . I should have just waited until I died and left you a note. The last thing I want is people poking around up there.”
“I don’t know about people poking around,” she admitted, “as I have no idea what the police will do about it right now.”
“Not a whole lot,” he muttered, “and, if you’re thinking anything different, you have more faith in law enforcement than I do. I did contact them long ago, but they sure weren’t too bothered.”
“Of course not,” she said, with a smile. “And maybe that’s just life.”
He nodded, then headed into the grocery store.