Chapter Fourteen
By the time Charity returned from lunch, he’d paid all the bills and discovered his mother’s secret hiding spot.
It hadn’t been hard. He’d been putting Charity’s uneaten lunch in the refrigerator and spotted a manila envelope in one of the internal fridge drawers.
Inside it were all the missing receipts, a half dozen articles she’d downloaded and printed from the Internet on an array of weird topics, and a bunch of his baby pictures.
“Mom.” He sighed, shaking his head as he pulled each item from the packet.
An article on the disruption of the bee population in Chili, one on the dangers of a digital payment economy, and one about tracing your ancestry, were just a few of the topics she’d downloaded.
He doubted she’d ever read them, experience again telling him her mind had been racing, and she’d just seen a topic, thought it interesting, and culled it up to look at later.
Later, he knew, never came.
“Hey, you found somethin'?” Charity said when she came back downstairs after changing out of her lunch date attire.
She’d been lovely in the sundress. In the denim shorts and plain blue t-shirt she was mouthwatering.
Don’t go there. Don’t even think about going there.
“All the missing receipts and a few other things.”
Before he could shield them, she spotted the baby pictures and reached for them.
“Oh, goodness, is this you? You were adorable.” She flipped through each faded photo. Blank faced, she looked up at him and added, “What happened?”
“Har, har.”
Her quick grin made his abdominal muscles clench.
“Your mama is beautiful.”
“She was. Time and her illness have stolen some of that.”
She shot him a narrow-eyed glare that made his pulse trip. “Never say that. Or repeat it to anyone else. She’s your mama. The first woman you ever knew and loved. She’ll always be beautiful ‘til the day she’s just a memory. Don’t you forget that.”
Something shifted in his chest. For the first time since he’d come back from the hospital, he found a grin moving across his lips.
That accent. It was gonna be the death of him.
How was he supposed to keep himself in check, disregard the desire he had for this little spitfire, if she kept dropping the well-honed speech patterns she’d developed and spoke in her natural voice?
“I won’t,” he said. “Promise.” To underscore it, he crossed his index finger over his heart in an X.
She nodded, mollified. “See that you don’t. Okay, I can match these receipts to the bags.” She put the photos back on the table and grabbed the ticket papers.
“Thanks. I found a shipping store that’s open on Sundays. I’m gonna head over there, get all the boxes returned, and then go back to the hospital.”
“Wait for me,” she said. “I’ll come with as soon as I get these receipts lined up. We can visit your mama together.”
Shock shunted through him, quickly replaced by worry and — he hated to admit it – shame. “Charity, I can’t ask you to come to the hospital with me. My mom’s not pleasant after an episode. I don’t know what she’d say or do to you.”
He had a pretty good idea, but was reluctant to put the words out into the universe.
She merely waved a dismissive hand at him, something she’d done an awful lot lately.
“Don’t worry. There’s nothing she can say or do that’s going to insult or embarrass me.
Or you,” she added, that determined glare pointing his way again.
“I’ve been around people with mental health issues all my life, Kolby.
Heard and seen everything that could be seen and heard.
I know, though, that a fresh face sometimes, well, calms the waters, so to speak.
Makes people think about being on their best behavior. ”
“You don’t know my mother.”
“Stop.” She lifted both hands up, receipts in each of them.
His mouth immediately slammed shut at the command, something he’d give great thought to later.
Charity took a breath, then walked toward him. She didn’t touch him, never gave any indication she was going to, but her words caressed him as if her hands were doing the work.
“I don’t know your mother, that’s true. But I know you. And I know you love her. Unconditionally.”
She was right about that.
“And while you and I haven’t exactly had the best relationship,” she said, her voice calm.
“And we may not be besties,” she rolled her eyes, “a ridiculous term, by the by, we’re still co-workers and as such I wouldn’t hesitate to help someone I work with any way I could.
That includes visiting a sick relative in the hospital. ”
Something shifted in his chest.
“You don’t have anyone to go with and support your mama during this trying time.
I’m here, available, and for some crazy reason, willing, so.
” She nodded as if that explained it away.
“There’s one thing I know better than anyone else, Kolby, and that’s family comes first, last and always.
We may not like 'em or their behavior every day of the week, or even months on end – and yes, I’m referring to my brothers when I say that - but we always support’em and we always, forever and always, love’em.
So, suck it up. I’m comin’ with. Now let me match these to their bags and then we can get a move on. ”
She turned on her sandaled feet and marched back into the living room.
So dumbfounded by her words, he couldn’t move.
Not once in all the decades he’d been existing with his mother’s illness hanging over them had anyone, not even his own grandmother, ever offered support, be it financial, emotional, or in any other way.
He’d managed alone since he was barely a teenager when it came to dealing with his mother’s episodic lapses and slips.
He’d never reached out to anyone for help, either.
No friend, since he really didn’t have any; no relatives, since his grandmother had washed her hands of them.
He'd become an expert in dealing with doctors, social workers, and case managers before he entered high school.
He knew more about the ins and outs of insurance claims than most agents.
And he’d learned and done it all alone.
But to have this woman, who’d shown her personal disdain and dislike for him so many times over the years, be the one person to offer him support, and willingly, was simply astonishing. Mindboggling. Heart-stopping.
Kolby rubbed at the sudden movement inside his ribcage and over his heart. It took him a moment, but when he opened his mind to it, he realized what he was feeling was something that had been alien to him for years: hope.
***
Charity, while never a fan of hospitals, a feeling culled from having spent too many occasions sitting in emergency rooms due to one of her brothers’ never-ending series of childhood accidents and mishaps, walked with her head high and expectation in her spine as she and Kolby entered the elevator.
“They transferred her to the orthopedic wing early this morning,” Kolby said. “A few days here to make sure she’s stable physically, then she gets transferred to the mental health wing. They’ll be doing her physical therapy from there.”
Charity nodded. “That’s a lot of moving about in an unfamiliar environment in a short amount of time. How does she usually handle change like that?”
“When she’s properly medicated,” he sighed, “Well. This is a little different because she’s got all this coming at her and she’s not pharmacologically stable yet. I really can’t predict how she’s gonna react.”
They exited the elevator, Kolby holding a fast-food milkshake they’d stopped for along the way with the explanation, “She loves this, and I know she’ll drink it even if she won’t eat. At least it’s loaded with calories, so she’ll get something in her system.”
Vera O’Brian’s room was across from the nurse’s station and the assessing looks a few of the nursing staff gave Kolby when he announced he was there to visit his mother didn’t get by Charity. He gave no sign he noticed them.
Kolby stopped just before knocking on the closed door to his mother’s room.
“Hey.” Charity put a hand on his forearm. “Look at me.”
When he dragged his gaze down to hers, there was no mistaking the worry in his eyes.
Or the simple exhaustion. She knew in her soul he wasn’t just tired physically, but emotionally and probably spiritually as well, and she couldn’t fault him for that.
While her brothers were a collective pain in her butt, she had them to rely on should something happen to their parents and decisions needed to be made.
They had each other’s backs through anything life threw at them.
Kolby had no one, and that just broke her heart.
With a squeeze of his arm, she said, “I’m right here with you. It’ll be fine.”
His eyes ping-ponged between hers, his brows inching toward one another.
His shoulders were up around his ears again, his neck muscles corded.
The anxiety swimming off him in waves concerned her.
The Kolby O’Brian that had been the curse of her work existence and the illogical secret crush she’d told no one about was nowhere to be seen right now, replaced by a man riddled with worry about his mother.
No matter what kind of past they had, she felt he deserved a friend, especially right now, and she was all up for it.
He covered her free hand with his. “Thank you,” he said, his voice raw.
She nodded, pressed his hand again, then said, “Come on. Let’s go see your mama.”
An hour later they got back into his truck.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his tone lined with equal measures of anger and shame.
“Stop saying that.”
He shook his head, hard. “But I am. She’s never been so...” he dragged his hands through his temples and blew out a deep breath. “She’s never been so rude and mean like that, before.”