LITMIR.BIZ

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as they had been the day he died.

      Barbara had a simple filing system. Total recall.

      When she and John had built the barn and created their apartment, they’d planned to give themselves plenty of room for books. Originally, they’d planned a big deck off the back, but after John had died she’d never gotten around to it. Or to anything else domestic for that matter. Who had the time? Or the interest when there was no one to share it with.

      She saw the room as Stephen saw it. It was squeaky clean, but all it needed was a thick layer of dust and a bunch of hanging cobwebs to turn it into Miss Havisham’s wedding feast in Dickens’s Great Expectations. And she acknowledged the truth—that she hadn’t yet built the deck because finishing a project alone that she and John had planned together seemed like a betrayal. She’d never admit to a soul that she felt that way. Her friends, her clients and even her children talked about how well she had coped with John’s loss, how she had kept growing and changing. She knew better. Emotionally, she was as empty as she had been the day John died. She told herself she was happy being alone with no one to answer to except her children and her clients.

      But sometimes in the night, when she reached for the place beside her where once she had felt John’s chest rise and fall, she hated knowing that she’d never love again.

      Her fallback position was physical and mental exhaustion. She considered herself meticulous when it came to keeping the clinic immaculate. But when half the time she fell into bed after working flat out for twelve or more hours, it really didn’t matter when the coffee table had last been dusted. She managed to keep the kitchen and bathroom clean and the papers and magazines at least in separate piles, but that was as far as it went.

      She wasn’t exactly embarrassed to have Stephen MacDonald scrub up in her bathroom, but this MacDonald guy in his vintage Triumph and polo shirt with the proper logo on it did not belong either in Emma’s rental cottage or Barbara’s apartment.

      When he came back from the bathroom, she saw he had run water over his face and hair as well as scrubbed his hands and forearms.

      She took her first good look at him. Oh, boy. Talk about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood! Grandmother, what big eyes you have. And how bright blue. She didn’t think his eyes were the result of those fake colored contacts, but you never knew.

      Further perpetuating the wolfish image was his short gray hair and what Shakespeare would have called a “lean and hungry” look. Actually, she seemed to recall Shakespeare was talking about an assassin. He stood a bit over six feet tall and had kept his stomach flat. Golf, maybe. Barbara sucked in her own stomach on a big breath, but she couldn’t hold it in for long.

      “Sorry, I made kind of a mess,” he said. “I tried to get the blood out of my khakis. Unsuccessfully.”

      “When you get back to The Hovel, put everything into the washer on cold. If there is anything I know about, it’s how to get blood out of cloth.”

      “Does it ever bother you?” He propped himself up on the wall beside the refrigerator and stuck his hands into his damp pockets.

      “Blood?” She picked up a wicked kitchen knife and sliced the sandwiches crossways, then slid two halves apiece onto plates and added pickles and potato chips. “I grew up on a farm. I was pulling piglets out of sows when I was five or six years old. Gangrene bothers me... Sorry, not the proper social chitchat over snacks. Death bothers me. Creatures in pain bother me. Damage I can’t fix bothers me. If it can live a happy life, then whatever I have to do to get the animal to that point is merely repair work. The same thing your mechanic will have to do with your radiator grille—I just do it with flesh and bone instead of metal.”

      “Did you always want to be a vet?”

      She laid out silverware and napkins and handed him a plate. “I wanted to be an Olympic three-day event rider. Jumping incredibly large and athletic horses over humongous fences at death-defying speeds.” She looked down at herself and let out a rueful sigh. “That was twenty pounds ago when I was seventeen. I was a good enough rider for local over-fences horse shows, but even if my pop had been able to afford a million-dollar jumper or the training and travel to go along with it, I wouldn’t have been good enough.”

      “Why not?”

      “Most three-day eventers at the Olympic level are certifiably insane. I have too much imagination. I could always visualize what would happen to the horse if I crashed.”

      “The horse? Not you?”

      This time she laughed. “Human doctors say ‘First, do no harm.’ We say ‘The animal always comes first.’”

      “So my eagle took precedence over my antique automobile grille?”

      “Of course it did, as you knew at the time. A lot of people would have sliced up the bird to avoid nicking their chrome. You didn’t.”

      “As dearly as I love and baby that car, it is not alive. That bird, as he told us in no uncertain terms, is. No contest.”

      “I have to keep warning you. He may not make it.”

      “I did. He will, too.”

      At the back of the kitchen was a banquette breakfast nook. He took his sandwich, slid in to one of the seats and stretched his right leg out to the side. “Be careful of my bum leg. I can be a hazard to navigation.”

      “Beer, wine, water, soda?”

      * * *

      “I WOULD KILL for a beer.” What Stephen really wanted was a handful of opioids to cut the ache in his right leg and knee. That was what he got for being macho. He’d left his cane on the front seat of the car. And he didn’t take opioids. It would have been too easy to get hooked on them in rehab. Even if reality sucked, he preferred it to living in cloud-cuckoo-land.

      “What’s with the leg?” Barbara said as she started on her sandwich.

      “Hey, you’re not kidding. I know Southerners and their pimento cheese. This is exceptional.”

      “Thank you. All my own work, as the street artists say in London. So, do we not mention the leg?”

      “Most people don’t. They avoid staring, but I can tell they’re dying to ask about it. That’s part of the reason I’m at Emma’s. Sometimes I feel as if I am one gigantic leg with tiny little arms, legs and head sewed on around the edges.”

      “I’m sorry...”

      “No! Please. I don’t mind talking about it, if you don’t start every conversation from here on out with ‘And how are you today, Stephen?’”

      She chuckled. “Promise.”

      “Okay. I was headed home from a faculty dinner. I had not touched a drop of alcohol. I was driving a small SUV that had belonged to my wife, and a guy in a gigantic diesel pickup truck T-boned me when he ran a light. He, by the way, had three DUIs pending already. They used the Jaws of Life and several miracles to get me as far as the trauma center at the Med Hospital Trauma Center. Very much the way we got our eagle disentangled from my grille. I spent the next year getting operated on, going through rehab, getting operated on some more, more rehab, lots of titanium pins in my bones, skin grafts, yada, yada, yada. In the end, I kept my bionic leg and knee, and I’m down to a cane after a wheelchair and a walker. But I still limp, more when I’m tired.”

      “And you hurt.”

      He nodded. “They say that more exercises like walking and swimming will help diminish the pain. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

      “Good luck with finding a public swimming pool this side of Jackson. Even this late in September, it’s still warm enough to take a dip in the little lake where Seth and Emma have their cabin, but not for much longer. And if you walk on our road out there—” she pointed toward the front of the clinic “—watch out for crazy drivers, and the occasional deer in your face.”

      “Boy,

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