Chapter 13
A few days after the Harper family party, Ben was at the vet clinic, finishing up a report on a recent cat surgery.
It was nearly closing time, and he had plans to meet Landon after this for a beer and maybe a baseball game.
He was looking forward to it, at least tentatively.
He didn’t want to be the kind of guy who grew unhappier just because of his brother’s total, uncompromised happiness.
Ben finished his report and headed into the lobby to check on his secretary, Sammy.
Right before he reached her, the door opened with a jangle.
A walk-in, he assumed, but when he looked over, the older woman entering had no animal with her, nothing in a cage and nothing on a leash.
The older woman was very small, no taller than four feet eight or nine, maybe, and she shook as she walked with a cane.
Her hair was almost translucent, but her eyes were a lively and penetrating blue that made Ben think she’d once been a gorgeous beauty.
“Evening,” Ben said, coming over to the woman to help her into a chair. Why didn’t she have a wheelchair? Why was she here by herself? “Can I help you with something?”
But it was clear that the woman had exhausted herself, maybe with her walk from wherever she’d come from.
As soon as he helped her to a chair along the wall, she began to shake and gasp for breath.
She dropped her cane and pressed both hands over her chest. “Please,” she breathed. “Please, I need help.”
Ben turned toward Sammy, but already she was on the phone, calling an ambulance. Ben sat beside the woman, thinking it best that he keep her “with it.” This meant conversation. This meant reminding her that she was still in the world.
“You’re going to be all right,” he said tenderly.
“It’s a warm day out there. It can exhaust anyone.
” Was this what he’d want to hear if he was this old, if he was this unwell?
He thought of Wren, upstairs in her bedroom, listening to Ivy lecture her.
He reached over and poured a glass of water from the cooler beside him, which he offered to the woman.
He tried to help her drink it, holding it and helping her ease her head back, but it was no use. She was shaking too hard.
Three minutes later, the ambulance arrived.
Four EMT workers hurried in and helped the woman onto a stretcher that they then carried back to the ambulance.
In no time, the woman was gone, leaving Ben and his secretary alone in the clinic.
Sammy was petrified. “What do you think was happening to her?” she asked Ben.
Ben could list a number of possibilities, but it was impossible to know. “I wonder why she came in,” he said.
“Maybe she thought you were a doctor?” Sammy suggested.
“Maybe.” But Ben couldn’t imagine that she’d been so confused as to come into a veterinary clinic instead of a real doctor’s office. It smelled of dog food and cat hair in here.
Later, at their favorite bar, Ben explained what had happened with the older woman.
“That’s scary,” Landon said, his eyes widening. “You didn’t recognize her?”
“I mean, maybe I met her before,” Ben said. “But she’s quite old now. Maybe eighty-five or ninety?”
Landon scratched his beard. “It scares me to think that maybe she has children who can’t find her. They don’t know what happened.”
Ben wondered if he’d done the wrong thing in not following the ambulance. His stomach roiled with guilt.
“Why don’t we go to the hospital now and see if she’s all right?” Landon suggested.
“I don’t think they can tell us anything,” Ben reminded him. “And she must have had identification on her. I’m sure they could contact her children?”
“If she has children,” Landon said.
Ben groaned. This added another complication. What if the older woman was alone in a hospital bed with no one to come see her? What if he, Ben, had been the last person to ever speak with her before she’d died?
“I feel sick,” Ben murmured.
Ben had opted to be a veterinarian rather than a human doctor for many reasons.
For one, he was tremendously caring and empathetic toward animals, and he always had been.
But number two, sometimes his empathy went too far.
If he knew about a sick person, or an accident, or some kind of emotionally heartbreaking incident that had befallen another person, he was often so heartbroken that he didn’t know what to do or say.
When the bartender came over to clear their beers and get them a fresh round, Landon asked him about the older woman. “She’s quite small,” Landon said, describing her the way Ben already had. “Maybe four nine?”
“And she shakes quite a bit,” Ben said, feeling foolish. “She came into the vet clinic today and had a medical emergency. Just want to make sure she’s okay.”
“And that she has people,” Landon said.
The bartender furrowed his brow, then snapped his fingers. “I don’t know, but my wife always knows everything that happens around here,” he said. “She’s best friends with the secretary at the hospital.”
Landon clapped the bar. “Small towns, man,” he said.
Ben was anxious, watching as the bartender headed into the little back area of the bar to call his wife for info. He was gone no more than three minutes before he returned with the name.
“Nelly Winston,” he said. “The name rings a bell, but I don’t think I’ve seen her in years.”
Landon nodded. “Yeah. I think I remember her from the Christmas Festival and stuff.”
“She always made those little frosted cookies?” The bartender narrowed his eyes, as though he were peering back through time.
“The very one.” Landon laughed. “How is she?”
“She’s stable,” the bartender said. “My wife couldn’t give me much more info, though.”
“Good to know she’s stable,” Ben said, his voice much smaller than his brother’s.
“We wouldn’t have been able to sleep tonight,” Landon affirmed. “Thanks, man.”
Later, after Ben said goodbye to his brother and went home, he looked up Nelly Winston’s address and discovered that she lived three blocks from his place.
A shiver ran through him. Since he’d moved back to Bluebell Cove, he’d probably walked past her house sixty times, at the very least. All that time, he imagined, she’d been locked inside, too weak to leave her place.
What had made her leave today? Why had she come to the clinic? It boggled his mind.
The following evening, Ben left work and walked directly to Nelly Winston’s place.
It was a small red-brick house with a wraparound porch and a willow tree.
To his surprise, the windows were all lit up in the front room.
Before he could think twice about what he was doing, he walked up to the front door and rang the bell. He was still wearing his vet uniform.
There was the sound of whispering, followed by the clunk-clunk of heavy footsteps. Those footsteps definitely didn’t belong to Nelly Winston. The door opened to reveal a man of maybe fifty, wearing a blue button-down shirt, his feet bare on the foyer rug.
“Hello?” The man didn’t look pleased to see a stranger.
“Hi,” Ben said. “Sorry to bother you. But yesterday, Nelly Winston collapsed at my clinic, and I wanted to make sure she’s all right.”
The man’s face softened, if only a little. He beckoned for Ben to enter, so Ben did.
“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I came up from Connecticut late last night and haven’t slept much. I’m in a bad state.”
“I can’t imagine,” Ben said. “How is your…mother?”
The man nodded. “Yes, my mother. She’s doing okay.
It isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
Apparently, her carer quit last week, and we kids weren’t notified.
My mother never wanted a carer in the first place, so I imagine she wanted to keep it from us as long as possible. You can see how well that went.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” Ben said, shaking his head. He didn’t want to say how scary it had been to see Nelly like that. He didn’t want to worry her son even more.
“She looks at me so guiltily,” her son said, his voice cracking a little. “It reminds me of being, well, young, when she’d discovered I snuck a cookie or something.” He tried to laugh.
Ben didn’t want to say that his own parents were dead, that he remembered when they’d been failing, how hard that had been for him and his brother. Most children—if they were lucky—necessarily had to outlive their parents. It was a tragedy, but it was a fact of life.
It was then that Ben noticed the photograph, hanging on the wall. It was of Nelly during happier days, maybe five or so years ago. In it, she was sitting on the porch swing out front, smiling at the camera. There was a cute puppy on her lap. A Frenchie.
Ben’s heart dropped into his stomach. He realized, now, why Nelly had come into the veterinarian clinic. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her to go to the humane society or use the internet. Maybe she’d known where the vet clinic was and decided to come in to ask around.
Poor Pierre, he thought. Pierre the dog lived here, with an ailing older woman. He probably never went for walks. He was probably cooped up here, with a woman too sick to love him the way he needed to be loved. Then again, it was clear that this older woman needed as much love as she could get.
Nelly’s son followed his gaze to the photograph. Ben knew he needed to tell him about Pierre. He imagined calling Wren and explaining that she needed to give Pierre up. He imagined the heartbreak playing out across her face.
“The dog,” Ben said finally. “Someone brought him into the clinic recently with a wound and a broken paw. That must be why she came in.”
The son shook his head sadly. “We told her not to get a dog,” he said. “But she was always so stubborn. She never wanted to listen to us.”
Why would a mother listen to her children? Ben thought meekly. She’d spent her life telling them how to live and protecting them. It wasn’t easy to have that flipped on its head.
“Is he safe?” the son asked, shrugging.
“Yes, he is,” Ben said.
“I’m sure she’ll want to see him when she’s better,” the son said. “Pudding is about the only thing that makes her happy these days.”
“Pudding?” Ben laughed.
“Pudding, yep. That’s what she calls him,” the son said.
“My friend calls him Pierre,” Ben said.
The son laughed at that. “He got a cultural upgrade, I guess. I don’t know. I was never that into dogs. I didn’t know Mom was till she got Pudding. Pierre. Whatever.”
Ben tried to laugh. He wrote down his phone number and handed it to her son, whose name, he told Ben, was Scott.
Ben shook his head and left shortly after that, trying to tell himself that he liked Scott well enough.
He thought he was cold, sure. But anyone would be cold when they thought they were losing someone they loved.
Back at home, Ben called Landon to explain what had happened with Nelly, Scott, and the dog named Pudding.
“It sounds like she can’t take care of him anymore,” Landon said gently.
“Yeah. True.”
“But I don’t know if Wren’s fit to take care of a dog for long,” Landon said. “Celia always says she’ll be on her way soon. She’ll jump back on the road, and we’ll see her again in a few years.”
Ben’s stomach churned. “I guess that’s true. But we’ll find Pierre or Pudding or whatever a good home. Maybe it’ll be here, with me. Who knows?”
“You can’t get too lonely over there on me,” Landon said. “Let me set you up with someone. There are plenty of beautiful and single women in and around Bluebell Cove.”
“Hah. Good one,” Ben said.
“I’m not joking,” Landon said.
But Ben was already searching in his mind for a way to get off the phone.