Chapter 16
Hank’s dream came back that night, but changed.
It still started kind. But the kitchen it started in this time was his own kitchen in Cobbler Cove, and the woman standing at the stove with the morning sun on her face was Sunny.
She was laughing at something he’d said, and the kettle was climbing toward its whistle behind her, and the light through the wavy old window glass lay across the floor she’d brought back from the dead.
Then the light went wrong.
The kitchen stretched and elongated into a courtroom, and she was sitting across from him at the accuser’s table. Her mouth shaped words, but the voice that came out of her came from all around him.
You ruined my life. You ruined me.
He reached for her, and she didn’t dissolve into smoke between his fingers the way Lorraine always did. She did something worse.
She picked up her coat off the chair, calm as a Tuesday, and walked out of the courtroom. She never looked back, and the courtroom door, that looked exactly like his front door, closed quietly behind her with a soft thud.
Hank woke with his heart slamming against his ribs. He lay still in the darkness of not quite morning and waited for the worst of it to pass and his heart adrenaline to drain away.
It didn’t pass. The dream sat down on his chest and stayed with him.
It dawned on him that nightmares about the past could be woken up from and dismissed because they’d already happened. This dream wasn’t leaving him because it was a forecast of awful things to come.
Shaken to the depths of his being, he got up and dressed in the dark. He let himself out into the first gray stirrings of morning, the way he had many times before.
The street was the same. Mabel Brown’s lilacs had gone brown and papery along her fence.
The lake at the end of the street lay flat as sheet metal, and the mountains beyond had their heads in the clouds.
It was already warm out and muggy. Gonna be a blistering hot one today. Maybe some thunderstorms later on.
While he walked he worked the problem, the way he had been ever since Sunny told him how much money she was going to come into soon.
When she’d come to Cobbler Cove, she’d needed a place to stay, a job, and something to remind her of who she was before Winston Perry destroyed her life.
Natalie Crawford had taken care of the place to stay, and he’d had a desk overflowing with work to be done.
He’d needed her help, and she’d needed the job.
Same deal with the house. With or without the upcoming photo shoot, it needed renovation. And she had the expertise to do it right. He’d needed her help, and he was pretty sure she’d needed the project too.
But now, all of her needs were gone. All of them at once, paid off in full by her dead husband. She didn’t need Hank’s job. She didn’t need his house. She could buy her own house anywhere she wanted to live and never once worry about what the groceries were costing again.
Which left only one question. The question that had been standing on his chest ever since the dream. If Perry’s money took away every single thing she’d ever needed him for, what was left between them?
He knew what he was worth as a husband. He’d had it explained to him in seven succinct words in that courthouse hallway.
He’d done his best to hold Lorraine together for ten years, provided for her, managed life around her, doctored her, taken her to rehab, and been there to pick her up when she came out.
And she had rotted in his care.
There was only one conclusion he could draw from that.
The people he loved were better off the moment he stopped trying to care for them and they stopped needing him.
Madison was the lone exception to that, but she was still a minor and not yet capable of taking care of herself.
Some days he suspected the only reason he hadn’t ruined her yet was the four Carter children teaching her how to laugh.
He walked down to the lake and stood there with his hands in his pockets, staring at the gray water as the sky gradually lightened around him.
Somewhere in there, the thing got decided, not in a single moment of decision but as a slow, creeping understanding of what he had to do.
He would not be one more wall standing between Sunny Carter and the life she deserved. She’d spent ten years trapped in the life Winston Perry created for himself. She’d been accessory to him. A beautiful, expensive possession like one of his fancy cars or expensive paintings.
She should not spend one more minute of her life trapped in a life another man wanted with her. If the only honest gift he had left to give her was an open door and the freedom to leave, then he would, by God, give it to her.
And, he would do it in a way that she never had to ask for it.
He’d watched surgeons amputate a man’s leg to save the man’s life. He told himself this was that as he walked home in the brightening morning, his decision settling into him like frost reaching into the ground.
A fancy black Suburban passed him on the Shoemacher driveway Thursday morning, headed out as Hank headed in.
He recognized the driver as Lincoln Sutter, the attorney who’d helped him and Reno get custody of Madison.
Lincoln lifted two fingers off the wheel in a traditional rancher’s salute. Hank returned the gesture.
So Lucas had made the call. That was something.
The day nurse met him at the door with her report.
Worse nights. Less appetite. Oxygen turned up another notch.
She added, in the tone of a woman reporting a miracle or a stroke, she wasn’t sure which, “And he’s been writing, Two days now.
Won’t let me see any of it. Hides it under the blanket as if I’m going to snatch it away from him. ”
Lucas was propped up in the hospital bed with a lap desk across his knees.
A stack of envelopes stood on the bed to Lucas’s left, and to his right stood an open box of stationery paper.
When Hank approached, the old man fumbled to turn the page he was currently writing on face-down.
There was ink on his fingers. That detail struck Hank incongruously.
A man with days or weeks left to live had ink all over his hands like a schoolboy.
Hank didn’t ask what he was writing. That was Lucas’s business and none of his.
He ran a quick physical exam instead. The crackle in the lungs had climbed higher in both lungs.
The old man lost his breath now between sentences, and his sentences had gotten shorter to fit inside his available air to speak.
“Lawyer came,” Lucas said while Hank coiled the stethoscope.
“Did what you told me. My will’s updated and signed.
Appointed an executor. Wrote down all the information the lawyer said folks would need after I go.
Passwords for my computer. Bank account and credit card numbers, monthly bills, where all the important legal documents are. ”
“That’s good,” Hank replied. “I hope it’s a weight off your shoulders. I know your family will appreciate it.”
Lucas laid his hand on the face-down page. “Doing the rest of it now. Turns out . . .” a breath “. . . I have more letters to write than I figured on.”
Lucas looked out the wall of windows at his empty pastures. Hank did the same, noting that the fences needed paint and the hay stood uncut. Down the valley the town shimmered in a summer haze.
“Funny thing,” Lucas said reflectively. “I built all this for my family. Worked like a dog to make money. Bought the land. Built this place up. Paid for braces and colleges and weddings I wasn’t welcome at.”
He had to take a half-dozen rasping breaths before he could resume.
“Told myself a man’s love is what he provides.
And by golly, I provided. The checks always cleared, Doc.
Every one. And what do I have to show for it?
” The oxygen machine chugged quietly as he took several long pulls from his oxygen cannula.
“Eight bedrooms upstairs. Not one of them slept in for years.”
The words bothered Hank like a splinter buried in his finger, tiny but painful, impossible to ignore.
“Are they coming?” Lucas asked. “My kids?”
“Bonnie’s calling them. You’ll know when I know.”
Lucas’s expression passed through hope to disappointment, hardened for a moment, then collapsed into resignation.
Hank reckoned dying alone was a bitter price to pay for not keeping up good relations with one’s children.
Thing was, most people figured that out too late, when there wasn’t enough time left to repair broken relationships.
He’d seen it before, and it saddened him every time.
When folks approached death, they tended to have only one regret: the things they hadn’t said to the people they loved.
He was glad Lucas was writing those letters. It might be the man’s only chance to say all the things he regretted not saying sooner.
Hank sat with Lucas a little longer, then packed up and drove back to town with the windows open and the splinter Lucas’s words had planted still working at him.
There was a lesson sitting in that house, laid out plain as an x-ray, about a man who’d mistaken providing for loving and was going to die alone between the two.
Hank, in the grip of a diagnosis he’d carried for ten years, did with it what he always did with new evidence against an old certainty. He decided Lucas had it backward.
The old man thought providing for his family had failed to earn his kid’s love because providing wasn’t love. But Hank had learned that healing people, holding them together and holding them up was the love. Splint it, brace it, carry it, pay for it, sit with it. It was who he was and what he did.
But, when there was nothing left for him to heal or support, the people he loved realized they didn’t need him any longer. He was just somebody standing in front of them with his arms out. In the way.