Chapter 88
Anna had made Grandma comfortable on her porch seat, blanket over her knees to keep her warm in the late afternoon, the radio playing some country tunes, when the cruiser pulled up.
Callie—her hair now a super-cool shaggy bob—and Holly tumbled out the back and ran noisily into the house, a mess of legs and arms and speed and chatter and glorious youth.
“Hey, take it easy!” Anna called after them.
“And don’t touch the cake in the kitchen.
It’s for Mom’s birthday tomorrow.” She was in awe of how Callie had kept her sunshine, even with the shock of learning about Dr. Burdett and how he nearly killed them both.
She hadn’t remembered waking up, and so it had become a story to her, something not personally experienced.
Something she’d slept through. Anna was glad about that.
She knew how living with trauma could freeze you in time. She didn’t want that for Caroline.
“Listen to you, Martha Stewart. You been baking?” Todd was out of the car and at the bottom of the steps, arms folded across his chest, smiling at her.
He wasn’t sheriff yet, but there was talk, and it was only a matter of time.
He wasn’t in any hurry. He had no plans to leave Harper’s Creek.
Steadfast. Reliable. A good man. That’s what the town really needed to keep it in prosperity.
“If Mom asks,” she answered, “then yes. But no, Jeannie made it. No one’s making a housewife out of me.”
“I guess not.” His smile softened, wistful, as he turned and headed back to the cruiser.
“Hey, Todd, wait up.” Anna came down the steps and he paused, turning back around to face her. As it did whenever she saw him these days, her stomach churned and her heart fluttered. They were good nerves, though. A positive feeling. She was allowed it.
“I was thinking,” she said, awkward. “I wondered if maybe you’d like to get a coffee with me one day. Maybe even a slice of pie? The diner, maybe.”
He looked at her for a long moment, his hazel eyes warm. “Jeez, I thought you’d never ask.” He opened the car door. “But we’re not going to a diner. I’ll pick you up tomorrow. Seven. Dinner at The Shamrock. Get some energy in us for the dancing.”
“It’s a date,” she said, her whole body tingling.
“At last.” He smiled at her, teeth bright against his honey skin she could never get bored of or be afraid of or not want to touch. “It’s a date.”
She watched until his car had vanished past the cemetery, where the guilty of Harper’s Creek were laid to rest beside the innocent, where sometimes she saw Brett Laverne at his daughter’s grave, the man who’d followed her home that night she’d thought it was the pastor with his headlights off, watching the new girl in town, keeping her away from his murderous daughter, and then came up the steps again, her tread lighter.
She sat beside Grandma and the two of them looked past the cemetery at the fields and the world beyond.
She was happy, Anna realized as she held Grandma’s hand. She loved and was loved. The past was dust on the breeze. It was time to embrace the present. It was time to live. Just one life with no more repeats. And to make it the best life she could.
Anna lit a cigarette, and she and Grandma smoked it together, passing it back and forward between them, a new secret thing they shared.
Only one cigarette, once a day, when they had the afternoons together.
It wasn’t quite the giving-up she’d promised everyone, but it was close enough for now while her hand still ached and the earth on Melissa’s and the doc’s graves still hadn’t settled.
“We’ll quit by Christmas. What do you say, Grandma?” The old woman answered by exhaling a long stream of smoke at the slowly setting sun.
“Yeah, I agree. Maybe after New Year’s, then.
” Anna took the cigarette back and had a last drag before leaning down to dispose of it in their old tin can ashtray under her chair.
A date with Todd. It made her feel things she’d thought were lost to her.
She was alive again. Different, but maybe better.
She’d emptied the can yesterday for the trash collection so at least it didn’t stink.
She crushed the embers from the stub and let it drop to the bottom.
She froze. There were five butts in the can.
Anna stared, each one crushed just as she’d done this one, all smoked down to the butt, just as she smoked them.
Each with the glisten of the new pink lip gloss she was wearing that she’d bought only yesterday on them.
Her breath caught in her chest. Four of those cigarette butts were impossible. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before straightening up and refocusing. They weren’t there. They couldn’t be. They wouldn’t be. She closed her eyes and counted to five.
When she looked down again, there was only one solitary dead cigarette at the bottom.
Of course there was only one. She almost laughed at her own imagination, but as the steel of a passing autumn cloud suffocated the withering sunshine, she shivered instead.
They had looked so real. She checked again.
Just her imagination. There was definitely only one cigarette butt in the can.
And besides, Grandma couldn’t do that thing with time anymore.
Could she? Anna sucked in a deep breath of air and tried to relax.
Next to her, Grandma began to hum.