Chapter Thirteen
“I’ll say this much for the lady,” Charity mumbled as she pulled a cashmere sweater set from one of the dozens of bags in the living room, “she may have her issues, but Lordy, she’s got great taste.”
After her question the night before, well, early this morning was more accurate, Kolby’s mouth had clamped shut.
He'd taken her bag from her hand, and led her down the hallway, passing the kitchen to a set of back stairs.
The second level held three bedrooms, the guest room housing a daybed currently filled with bags of new clothing.
Kolby’s body deflated again.
“Just shove it all to the side,” she said matter-of-factly, then did it herself by lifting three bags at once and placing them down along one wall. “We’ll deal with it in the morning. Where’s the bathroom?”
Opening a door she’d thought a closet, he showed her a small, shower-stall, sink and toilet, complete with towels and washcloths.
“I’ve got my own down the hall, so we don’t have to share.” He worried a corner of his mouth between his top and bottom teeth. “Charity, really, you don’t have to stay. Let me call car service. I can manage all this. I really can. It’s not like I haven’t done it before.”
That was the saddest thing she’d ever heard and right then and there her resolve solidified into an unbreakable stubborn mass.
“Go to bed, O’Brian. You’re dead on your feet.” She made a shooing motion with her hand.
With her overnight bag in her hand, she pushed by him and into the bathroom. Once the door was closed behind her, she heard another sigh, then his feet shuffling from the room. When she opened the door and peeked out, a door down the hall closed with a snick.
One of the only good things to come from having five obnoxious brothers was she couldn’t be intimidated, and when she spoke with that hard-edged resolve her mother’s DNA had gifted her, they always listened.
Kolby had, too.
Several hours later, she woke on the surprisingly comfortable bed to the sound of the shower down the hall.
She sprang up and got ready for the day ahead of her.
It hadn’t been on her internal bingo card she’d be cleaning out a shopping hoarder’s house that morning, but plans changed and here she was.
Once showered, she found Kolby in the kitchen, his phone at his ear and a fresh pot of coffee on the counter.
He pushed a mug at her while speaking.
As soon as she’d made her morning cup of caffeine, Kolby hung up.
“The hospital?” she asked.
“My mom’s awake,” he told her, “in a great deal of pain and has no memory of anything for the past week.”
“Is that normal when she has an episode?”
“Yeah. The racing going on in her mind gets her all tripped up with timelines and memories.” He glanced down at the phone. “Look, the nurse said I could come in now and see her, even though it isn’t officially visiting hours. Would you mind if I did?”
“Go. Be with your mama.” Like the night before, she shooed him with her hand.
He cocked his head. “You...you’ll be...okay...here?”
“Yup.”
“And when I get back? Will you still be here? Or are you heading back to Heaven?”
“Of course I’ll be here. I promised you, O’Brian, I’d help and even though you weren’t exactly gracious about my offer,” she lifted her left eyebrow and pursed her lips, “it stands. I can get started on putting all this stuff into some kind of manageable return pile for you so you’re not driving hither and yon and hither again. ”
His smile took its time growing. With a shake of his head, he mumbled, “That accent,” like he had before, then drained his mug and put it in the sink. “Okay, I’m gonna go now. I’ll text you when I’m heading back, okay?”
She made a go motion with her hand again as she sipped her coffee.
Jingling his keys nervously, he left her.
Charity finished drinking, rinsed both cups, then dried and put them back in the cabinet. She turned the pot of coffee he’d left, off.
“Okay. Where to start?”
Four hours later, after organizing the bags in the guest room, making sure the proper receipts were with each bag of clothes, she took them down to the living room.
Natural nosiness had her first exploring the other upstairs bedrooms. She told herself she was looking for more bags or items, but understood it for the fib it was.
She was curious. Ridiculously curious. About Kolby’s mom, his upbringing, and the man himself.
Mom’s bedroom was the first one she came to. The bed was unmade, a three-step ladder rested against one wall, and the light fixture over the bed was a broken mass of glass pieces scattered on the top of the bedding and on the floor next to it. Charity spotted blood on the top of the sheets.
“This is where she fell,” she said out loud.
Taking the proverbial bull by the horns, she decided to clean the space of the glass debris before tackling the bags in the living room.
First, she pulled out her phone and took pictures from every angle of the mess.
She wasn’t sure Kolby had seen this yet, and in case he hadn’t, she wanted him to know where his mother had been injured.
It took her almost half an hour to vacuum all the glass fragments, after first locating the vacuum cleaner in a hall closet. She tossed the sheets and comforter in the laundry machine once she was certain she had all the tiny particles of glass cleaned from it, and then ran it.
That done, she continued exploring. Kolby’s room was next.
Did she feel any trepidation about going into his bedroom, wondering what she’d see or find?
No.
Did she have any concern she was invading his privacy?
Nope, not a drop.
Was she surprised at what she found?
Totally. And completely charmed, too.
Kolby’s childhood bedroom was a time capsule of the boy he’d been. Two walls were lined with posters of country music legends ranging from Johnny Cash to Tanya Tucker, Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings.
“He’s got such a hard-on for country.”
The bed was a queen, and she wondered if his feet had stuck out of it as a gangly teen.
In all honesty, she couldn’t see him sleeping on anything other than a king-size mattress.
The bed was made, which surprised her since she knew he’d slept in it the night before.
A utilitarian three chest dresser, nut-colored and dinged in places, housed a stack of well-worn paperbacks.
She scanned the titles. All westerns by the same author.
“Guess he’s got a favorite book genre, too.”
She pulled open the louver-doored closet. A few dress shirts that looked a bit small for him and a pile of old, much loved and worn sneakers were all the clothing she found. A dozen or so empty hangers dangled from the sagging rod. There was no curtain covering the window.
All in all, not the happiest of rooms. Her own childhood bedroom had been Barbie-pink, or Pepto-pink as her brother’s had referred to it; had a four-poster canopy bed and frilly bed linens.
A four-drawer white dresser and a highboy sat together on one side of the room, her white desk and chair across from the bed.
Her closet was always filled to bursting with clothes, mostly bought on shopping sprees with CarlieRae and Granny Quinlan when the latter wanted a shopping day.
Charity couldn’t remember ever wanting for anything growing up.
Her mother had forbidden the hanging of rockstar posters on the walls, so Charity had lined them with family photos.
Whenever she went home to visit, she still slept in the same bed, surrounded by happy childhood memories.
What did Kolby remember when he slept in this room?
“None of my business.” She shook her head.
After that, she got to work in the living room. Digging through all the bags, she discovered a batch of bills that were still in their envelops, sealed.
“Electricity, gas, credit cards. I’ll bet these are doozies.” The last one she found was from a bank addressed to both Kolby and his mom. She placed them on the coffee table in a pile and started on the rest of the bags.
The parcels in the bedroom were done, and she’d organized the online boxed items. Luckily, they were all from the same distributor and unopened, so all Kolby had to do was take them to a local shipping store and they could be returned as is.
The shopping bags were another story. Of the thirty scattered across the living room and draped across the furniture, she’d only been able to find twelve with receipts inside them. She made a mental note to ask Kolby if his mother had a habit of putting things somewhere “safe.”
Her phone chirped with an incoming call, and thinking it was Kolby telling her he was on his way, she grabbed it from the table where she’d placed it and saw Tom written across the screen.
“Hey, you,” she said, a smile in her voice.
“Hey, yourself. I took a chance you'd have a break, because I wanted to ask if I could pick you up at the airport and take you to dinner tomorrow.”
“Oh, gosh, you don’t know,” she said.
“Know what?”
She told him about the change in plans, including that her partner had a family emergency and that’s why they’d come home a day earlier.
“Where are you right now? Back in Heaven?” he asked.
“No. Actually, I’m in your neck of the woods.”
The front door opened, and Kolby walked in, a paper bag in one hand and a fountain drink balanced in the other. Charity waved as his eyebrows rose.
“You’re in Concord?” It was impossible to miss the excitement in Tom's voice.
“Yes.”
“Are you free? I could drive wherever you are and pick you up.”
“Actually,” she considered for a moment as Kolby took the bag and drink into the kitchen. “I could use a break. I’ve been working on a project for a few hours and something to eat sounds nice.”
“Great. Give me your address.”
“Hang on.”
She followed Kolby into the kitchen and asked, “What’s the physical address here?”
He told her, his brows asking a question.
“Thanks.” Charity recited it to Tom. “Give me about a half hour to get cleaned up and then I’ll meet you at that address, okay.”