Completing the Pass Read online

  “We’re still in the testing stage with his neurologist, but I think this should seal the deal on that front. He should be released from the ICU tomorrow afternoon.” Suddenly, Maeve threw her arms around Carri’s shoulders. “I’m just so glad you came.”

  Carri patted her mother’s back and decided to not think what it meant that her mother had doubted their only child wouldn’t come home when her father was in critical condition in the hospital.

  It wasn’t flattering, that was for sure.

  Chapter Two

  Carri walked into her father’s hospital room the next morning carrying a vase of flowers in one hand and her cell phone in the other. She took a moment for a brief sigh of relief when she saw her father sleeping and set the vase down on the side table.

  “I know, Jess, but I can’t leave now.”

  Jess, her property manager and only employee in Utah, ground her teeth loud enough that Carri could actually hear the nauseating sound through the phone lines. “Yeah, but how long are you going to be gone? Ballpark.”

  “You’re there specifically because I need someone to manage the properties. It’s only five. Six, if you add in the one I just finished. I left the list of contractors and the punch list with you to go in, polish it, and stage it for photos. List it, rent it like you always do, and you’re good.”

  “I can’t start searching the listings for your next property without you,” Jess said. Carri winced at her friend and manager’s tone. She was gripping a very frayed rope with her nerves, but Jess’s momentary instability could cut the last thread. “Without you, I don’t know what you want. I don’t know how you’re feeling about the different markets, I don’t—”

  “Then stop.” Taking a deep breath, Carri accepted her fate . . . at least as it currently stood. “Stop looking for houses. I won’t be back for a while. Take a break on the search for new real estate. Just keep managing the properties. Keep everything floating, and we’ll . . . I don’t know. Figure something out.”

  Jess made a sputtering sound, and Carri could almost picture the comical yet horrified look her PM would be wearing. “You can’t stop. You’re on a roll!”

  “I’m not stopping, I’m pausing.” She watched as her father shifted in his sleep. “I can’t talk now, Jess. I’m at the hospital. I’ll call you later.” She hung up and shoved the phone in her bag, letting it fall to the floor.

  “Is it true?”

  Carri whirled around to find her mother standing in the doorway. Her mother had always been a beautiful, classy woman. But she looked haggard, run down, and on the verge of collapse.

  “You’re staying?”

  “Yeah, Mom. If you need some help, I can stay for a bit.” A bit was a little ambiguous, but she had flexibility. As long as Jess didn’t burst a blood vessel or something. “I can stay until you get Dad set up at home. Uh . . .” She looked back toward her father, who still appeared to be sleeping. It felt wrong talking about him in front of him the way she had to. “Can we talk in the hall?”

  “He’ll sleep for a bit more. He just went down before you got here.” Her mother hooked an arm through hers and pulled toward the cafeteria. “Let’s get pie. You could use pie. You’re not eating well, are you? All that running around you do, and for what? If you can’t eat pie, it’s pointless.”

  Carri bit back a retort. Her mother had always been controlling, to the point of obsessive. It was a main motivator in getting out of Dodge—rather, Santa Fe—as soon as she could when she’d been a teen. Why she’d paid an ungodly amount to go to an out-of-state school. Why she rarely came home for more than two or three days at a time, even though she had the flexibility to stay longer.

  Even as she thought it, she glanced back at her father’s wan complexion before they turned the corner and knew even her mother’s controlling nature wouldn’t keep her away this time.

  “You sit. I’ll get the coffees and pie.” Maeve pointed to a booth in the corner and took off for the cafeteria line, knowing Carri would follow directions.

  And she did, damn it. She always had.

  Carri settled her bag on the bench beside her and sighed. To pass the moments, she watched other people walk around. Some looked energized, maybe just in to visit someone who was being released today or had seen a miraculous turnaround. A few looked upset, on the verge of tears. Their loved ones wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. And the doctors and nurses who sprinkled between the patrons, looking half-asleep at their salads and subs and enormous cups of caffeine.

  A face passed by the cafeteria’s glass walls, and she did a double take. But the familiar face was already gone.

  Definitely not him. He had no reason to be here. She was just spinning worst-case scenarios out of an already shitty situation.

  “Here we go. Pie and salad. Balances each other out, right?” Maeve laughed lightly and settled the tray in the middle of the table. Carri took the closest cup of coffee and downed half of it without tasting it. Then the aftertaste smacked her in the face.

  “Oh, ew. What . . . What is this?”

  “This is coffee,” Maeve said patiently as she set out their items as if they were eating in a fine-dining establishment instead of a place one step up from a fast-food restaurant. “You get what you get in a hospital, sweetheart.”

  “Yeah but . . .” She shuddered and set the coffee to the side. She’d stick with vending-machine soda for her near-hourly-jolt requirements. “Okay, what’s up?” she asked, opening her salad top. The plastic pinged as she set it on the tray.

  “Just having lunch with my daughter. Am I not allowed to do that?” Maeve wouldn’t look up, though, as she started stabbing haphazardly at her slice of pie.

  Her mother went for the pie first. Very un-Maeve-like. “Mom. Please. I can’t help if you won’t tell me what’s going on. I’m here now.”

  “For now,” Maeve agreed, then looked up. “For how long? You’re being very vague about your plans.”

  “I don’t know . . . until Dad is settled, I guess?” He was being released tomorrow. Maybe another day or two, to make sure everyone was all set up and in the right places, everyone had everything, and she could be out of there. But how did you put a timeline on your father’s health? “Yesterday, you mentioned insurance and someone coming in to help. Did you call about that? Or are you going to part time? Retire?”

  Maeve’s eyes filled with tears, and she looked away before the first one fell onto the table. “Carrington . . . I can’t go down to part time. We don’t have the money for me to come home. Not yet. We’d planned for me to work full time for another five years, minimum.”

  That took Carri by surprise, but only a little. Her mother was nearly ten years younger than her father. It was natural he’d retire well before her. Plus, her mother loved her job. “So then you’ve got a home health worker coming in? You called yesterday to set that up?”

  Her mother blinked furiously and whispered something as she looked away.

  “Mom.” Pulling teeth might have been easier. “Mom, I can’t . . . just look at me, please?”

  When her mother’s teary eyes met hers, Carri felt ice slide into her belly. A premonition of bad things to come. “Mom?”

  “We should have,” she said softly. “Should have had someone. I called yesterday, while you stayed here. I called our insurance company. The long-term kind, of course. Not the life insurance. That’s just rude to think about.”

  She was rambling. But given the situation, Carri dug deep for patience to let her mother get there in her own good time.

  “They said the policy we’ve been paying for years doesn’t have an in-home health-care guarantee. And that given his likely diagnosis—early dementia—he’s not qualified yet.”

  Carri let that sink in for a moment and tried to make sense of it. Insurance of any kind that didn’t have to do with her car or her rental homes was beyond her unde
rstanding. “So . . . what does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means we paid for crap,” Maeve snapped, then seemed to gather herself. “It means that unless your father needed to be put in a facility to live, permanently, we’re on our own. It’s clear to me your father cannot be left at home alone.” Sniffing, her voice hardening, Maeve shook her head. “He got into trouble this time because we weren’t prepared. Weren’t aware of how fast this was moving, how dangerous being alone would be. Now we are. He has to be watched.”

  Agreed. “You’ll pay out of pocket? Appeal the insurance company?”

  “Appeal, yes. Maybe speak to a lawyer.” Maeve’s hand came up to toy with the locket Carri’s father had given her on their twenty-fifth anniversary. “But we can’t afford to pay out of pocket for a home health-care worker. It’s too much. I looked.”

  And her mother couldn’t retire. Not yet. Where did that leave them? Carri stabbed her lettuce and took a bite because she wanted an excuse to say nothing.

  “Carri, I’m so glad you’ll be with us.” Maeve’s hand came out to cover her daughter’s wrist as she dropped it to gather another forkful. Hope and determination now shone in her mother’s eyes through the sheen of tears. “I will keep working on the insurance company, because I’m positive home care is covered. There’s just a mix up somewhere. But until that is taken care of, you have no idea how grateful I am you will be able to stay home with your father.”

  Carri dropped her plastic fork. “Wh-what?”

  “Until we’re settled,” Maeve reminded her of her words, and Carri wanted to chew off her own foot and beat herself with it for saying something so open ended. Had eighteen years of living with Maeve the Master Manipulator taught her nothing?

  “Mom, I’m probably not the best choice here. I have no medical training.”

  “Neither do I,” her mother reminded her. “But you have love, like I do. You love him, and so you’re the best choice of all.”

  “I . . . Isn’t there another option?”

  “The other option is to put him in a home. I won’t do that.” Maeve’s fingers tightened on Carri’s wrist. “I won’t. He doesn’t belong in a home. He’s too young, and he has us. That’s unacceptable.”

  Carri agreed, so she nodded. The thought of her father, still so physically healthy, sitting alone in a rec room full of people ten to twenty years his senior and wondering why his wife and daughter had left him there to rot made her throat close up. “Unacceptable,” she choked out.

  “I’m glad you agree. While I’m at work, you can keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t try to cook or leave on his own or play with knives. You babysat when you were a teenager.”

  At that, Carri’s head snapped up to see her mother smiling a bit. That her mother could find humor in the situation made Carri smile back. “That’s awful, Mom.”

  “If I don’t make at least one or two jokes, I might crack.” Maeve looked guilty for a moment, then shook it off. “Your father would joke the same way about me if the roles were reversed. I’d expect nothing less.”

  Carri had heard loved ones dealing with someone who had dementia often dealt with burnout quickly. If a little quiet humor helped ease them through, it didn’t seem that bad.

  “I’ll stay with Daddy,” she said, then hurried to add, as Maeve’s face split in a wide grin, “but I can’t stay forever. I have a life in Utah. Houses, and a business to grow.”

  Maeve nodded silently, but Carri could already see the wheels turning.

  “Let’s get back to Dad.” Carri nearly took another sip of the coffee on autopilot, then remembered the vile aftertaste. “But first, a stop at a vending machine on the way.”

  ***

  Josh laid a hand over Herb’s bandaged one, fighting back tears. “It’s good to see you, Herb.”

  “Good to see you too, son.” The older man gave him a weak smile that had pain moving through his eyes. His face wasn’t bandaged—just the top of his head carried the stark white gauze wraps—but it was still red, with a few blisters showing. Moving it at all had to hurt. “We miss you when you can’t stop by during the season.”

  “Yeah.” Josh swallowed hard. Herb had been more like a father to him than his own who had taken off when he was a child. Josh barely remembered him, but he remembered his mother’s tears for years, and her grit and determination to raise him alone.

  It was Herb who had stepped in when he’d needed a male influence. Herb who gave him the first talk about puberty, who explained sex in a rudimentary, generic sort of way—using more euphemisms and innuendos than a preteen Josh could really follow—who talked to him about condoms and the repercussions of not using one . . .

  Who had been to all of his home games in high school, and the few college games that had been within reasonable driving distance.

  “So,” Josh said, fighting for calm. “You got yourself some sun, huh?”

  “Just a little.” Herb cracked a smile again, but his eyes started to flutter closed. “Never can remember my hat.”

  “He’d forget his head if it weren’t attached, according to my mother.”

  Josh turned in his seat to find the bane of his childhood existence standing in the doorway to Herb’s room. How had he thought she wouldn’t come home? She’d been a raging bitch to him growing up . . . but she was still her father’s daughter. “Carri.”

  “Josh.” She stepped inside, arms crossed over her chest. Her dark hair was cut close, barely sweeping the collar of her shirt. It should have looked mannish, maybe. Instead it made her look sleek and sexy. Dangerous.

  Sleek and sexy? Dangerous? Wrong words for Carrington. More like annoying, picky . . . wrong.

  “Doing some male bonding, I take it?”

  “Something like that.” Josh carefully patted Herb’s hand, noting the old man’s eyes had closed. He should have stood, given Carri his chair. Instead he settled back and had the pleasure of watching annoyance flash in her eyes. Immature, maybe, but satisfying. “How long are you swinging through this time, Carrington?”

  “None of your business, Joshua,” she said in the same taunting tone.

  “Nice to see your dad’s health warrants the time of day from you.” The second he said it, he wanted to bite his tongue. Carri’s face blanched, and he readied himself to catch her if she pitched over. Too far. “Sorry. That was bad.”

  “Yeah.” She looked at her father for a long moment. “Yeah.”

  “Look at these two.” Maeve walked in, arm in arm with Josh’s mother, Gail. The two had been inseparable since they’d met at a playgroup for twelve- to twenty-four-month olds. Carri had been on the young end and Josh on the old. But the two mothers had formed a fast relationship, having experienced their first childbirth, first round of diapers and bottles and sleepless nights. Their only children, for both moms, as it turned out, and they’d even bonded over that.

  “It’s like old times, isn’t it?” Gail beamed at Josh. He gave her a weak smile back. “You two catching up?”

  “Yeah, just picked right back up where we left off,” Carri said, not a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  Josh bit back a laugh. She had claws and knew where to sink them in . . . but she’d always had a knack for the deadpan. That definitely hadn’t changed.

  “Oh, look at these flowers!” Maeve gushed as she hustled over to the side table Josh had left his arrangement on. They were a little overdone, but when the man you consider a father is in the hospital, overdone doesn’t seem like such a sin. “They just brighten the room right up. Carri, come look at these. Josh, you shouldn’t have.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” Carri echoed, walking up beside her mother and sliding a smaller vase of flowers around to sit in front of his offering.

  Hers, he assumed.

  “How about you two go get some coffee?” Maeve said, hugging Carri from the side. Gail walked up behi
nd him and patted him on the shoulders.

  “Yes, go. Go chat about young-people things.”

  “I just got coffee with you,” Carri said through her teeth. “And I have a soda now.” She held up the bottle as evidence, as if anyone was going to call her a liar. “Thanks anyway. I’ll just—”

  “Yeah, let’s get some coffee.” Josh stood, suddenly eager to needle her a bit more. It had been a favorite pastime of his as a kid . . . Couldn’t hurt to pick the hobby back up as a distraction. “C’mon Carri, I won’t bite.”

  Both the mothers giggled. They had that effect on each other. They could be conniving, manipulative mother hens one minute and giggly school girls the next.

  “I want to stay with Dad.” Her face set in a mulish expression Josh knew all too well, Carri crossed her arms again and planted her feet. “Thank you for coming by, Gail.”

  Message received. I’m not thanking you, Josh. You can go now.

  Josh sighed and reached for her arm, intending to gently tug her with him into the hall. “I—”

  “No!”

  They all whirled around at Herb’s exclamation. The old man thrashed in the bed, waving his arms and trying to pull out his IV. “Don’t you hit her! Don’t you touch my little girl! Get away from her!”

  “Herb!” Maeve rushed at him, trying to hold him down. Gail ducked out into the hallway, assumedly to get help. Carri froze, hand covering her mouth.

  “Daddy!” she called out. “Dad, it’s okay! It’s Josh. Josh Leeman.” Coming unfrozen, she grabbed Josh, pulling him close to her, wrapping an arm around his back and placing a hand flat against his chest. “Remember?”

  The sudden burst of sensation at his body being so tight against Carri’s warred with the real and visceral fear for Herb as Maeve fought to keep him from leaping out of bed . . . and the uncomfortable knowledge that for much of his life, Josh had fought against touching her, for fear of cooties.

  Herb’s eyes were wild and he glanced around the room. As if the wind had been sucked out of him, he slumped, half on Maeve, half onto the bed. Carri brushed past Josh to help her mother angle him back into bed just as a male nurse bustled in.