Читать книгу Coming Home For Christmas - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

Chapter Three

Walking ahead of him, Kenzie had just managed to climb up one step on the staircase when melodic chimes announced that there was someone on the other side of the front door.

Keith looked from the door back to the woman standing just ahead of him. He was hard-pressed to say which bothered him more—going upstairs with the woman he was still trying to place, or dealing with what had to be a prospective buyer. He wanted the house emptied almost as much as he wanted it sold. He just didn’t want to be the one dealing with either firsthand.

Looking at his expression, Kenzie could almost read his mind. It occurred to her that for a relatively uncommunicative man, Keith didn’t keep his thoughts all that well hidden.

“It’s too soon for a prospective buyer to be turning up on your doorstep, and even if there was one this fast, he or she would be coming in with Mrs. Sommers. They wouldn’t be here on their own, ringing your doorbell—I’m assuming you gave her a set of keys.”

How had he forgotten that? Though he hated to admit it, even to himself, all of this had shaken him up more than he thought it would.

“Yes, I did,” he answered.

As if on cue, the doorbell rang again, sounding a little more demanding this time around, if that was actually possible.

Kenzie withdrew from the first step, facing him squarely, toe-to-toe. “I can get that for you if you’d like,” she offered.

“No, thanks. I can answer it myself,” he retorted stiffly, then glanced at her expectantly.

It took her a second, but again, she seemed to sense what he was thinking. “Why don’t I just start the tour without you?” she offered.

His grunt told her that she’d guessed right again. “That sounds good.”

Having no other recourse, Kenzie turned back around and went up the stairs. It was only after she had reached the landing and the doorbell had rung for a third time that she heard any sort of movement on the floor below. Keith was finally opening his front door.

Kenzie shook her head. She remembered a far different Keith. While not exactly gregarious, he’d been popular and friendly. What had happened to him in the past ten years to change him into this stoic, distant man she’d met today?

Putting Keith out of her mind, she scanned the small bedroom she’d entered. Amy’s room. Judging by the soft decor, the pastel accent colors and the white eyelet comforter on the four-poster double bed, the bedroom had not been touched since the girl had died.

Amy had been a very pretty, popular teenage girl, Kenzie recalled, looking at the photographs tacked onto the cork bulletin board above the small desk. The montage included some shots from her childhood, but for the most part, it depicted her high school years. There was even, Kenzie realized as she drew closer, a picture of Amy and her. Her heart ached a little as she looked at it. It had been taken at one of the baseball games they’d attended at school. She could remember standing next to Amy when someone had snapped it.

The next moment, another photograph caught her eye, and Kenzie paused to examine it. Amy had her arms around Keith, who appeared to be teasing her.

That was the Keith she remembered. A wave of nostalgia hit her. The man she’d left downstairs seemed to be light-years away from the teenager in the photograph she was looking at.

He was decidedly happier in the picture, Kenzie thought. He had laughter in his eyes. The man answering the door downstairs didn’t appear as if he actually knew how to smile.

Kenzie swiftly took account of the closet and the other items in the room. Although the bedroom had apparently been cleaned on a regular basis, nothing had been touched or moved. It had been preserved like a shrine to Amy’s memory. She guessed that had been Amy’s mother’s doing, because unless she’d read him incorrectly, Keith was definitely reluctant to come up here.

Had he been here since Amy’s death? The thought saddened her that maybe he hadn’t. Taking it a step further, she began to think that quite possibly he hadn’t even been back to the house in all this time, which meant that he and his mother had been estranged at the time of her death.

Her first impulse was to run downstairs and throw her arms around him, saying how sorry she was. Of course, since he didn’t seem to remember her, that would only spook him. She’d approach this more subtly, she decided—but she did intend to get to the bottom of this and find the answers to her questions. If nothing else, she owed it to Amy to see to it that Keith made peace with whatever demons were haunting him.

Kenzie went through the other two upstairs bedrooms as quickly as she could. After doing this job for a number of years, she’d developed an eye for what could sell and what would be passed over. Since Keith had told her he wanted to get rid of everything, she inventoried the clothes and furnishings, placing everything into two categories: what would sell and what would ultimately have to be disposed of in some other fashion.

When she was finished, Kenzie made her way downstairs quietly. She was just in time to hear the person—an older woman—who had rung the doorbell tell Keith, “I could drive you over to the funeral home if you’d like.”

Keith guided the woman in his mother’s foyer toward the door. He’d been polite, letting her elaborate on how she felt when she’d let herself into the house and found his mother unconscious on the floor, but he didn’t know how much longer he could maintain his facade. He didn’t want details. Details would only reel him in, and he wanted to remain distant.

It was time to send the woman on her way.

“No, I know where it is. Thanks, anyway, Mrs. Anderson.”

Peggy Anderson lingered in the doorway. “It’s just not going to be the same without your mother living next door to me,” she told him sadly. “Your mother had a way of lighting up everyone’s life the second she came in contact with them.”

“So I’ve heard,” Keith replied, an extremely tight, polite smile underscoring the words.

Observing him, Kenzie could see that he was holding himself in check. Keith was probably afraid that if he allowed his guard to go down, he’d fall apart.

Sympathy flooded through her.

It intensified as she drew closer.

Ushering Mrs. Anderson out of the house, Keith closed the door firmly behind the talkative woman. He stood there for a moment, looking at the closed door, his entire body a testimony to rigidly controlled grief.

Or so it seemed to Kenzie.

There were men who wanted only to be left alone when they were dealing with their darkest hour. However, she had never learned how to accommodate them, because everything within her cried out to offer a grieving person as much comfort as she could render.

And besides, this was Keith. There was no way she could stand on ceremony.

Coming up behind him, she placed her hand on his rigid shoulder, trying to convey her availability to comfort him in his grief. She said with a great deal of sincerity, “I’m so sorry.”

Keith almost jumped when he felt her hand on his shoulder. He’d forgotten all about her. How long had she been standing there? She was supposed to be upstairs, taking inventory, not down here, eavesdropping.

He swung around to look at her. “You can’t sell any of it?” Keith asked, assuming that her apology referred to the things she’d found in the upstairs bedrooms.

“What?” It took Kenzie a minute to untangle his reaction. And then she understood. They were talking about two entirely different things.

“Oh, no, I’m not apologizing about anything that has to do with your estate. I just wanted to tell you how very sorry I am about your loss.” And then Kenzie frowned, shaking her head. “The words are trite,” she was quick to admit, “but that doesn’t make the sentiment any less genuine.”

“I’m sure it is,” he said crisply, cutting the young woman off in case she had more to say on the subject.

This whole thing was much too private, and he didn’t want to talk about it. However, he could see that she felt she had to say something. He shrugged away any obligation she might have thought she had in this case.

“Everyone’s got to die sometime, right?” He needed to get out—and he actually did have somewhere else to be. “I have to leave for a while. Go on with your tour. Let me know if you think you can sell these things and what they might go for.”

“Absolutely,” she promised, then asked, “Where are you going?”

He wasn’t prepared to be questioned, so he didn’t have a lie on tap. Which was how the simple truth wound up coming out. “I’ve got to go see about making funeral arrangements.”

Now there was something she’d find oppressive if she had to face it on her own. “Are you going alone?”

Again, she’d caught him off guard. And there was that weird feeling again, as if he knew her from somewhere. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

Either way, Keith thought that was an odd question for her to be asking him. “Yes. Why do you ask?”

“I just thought you might want some company. You know, someone to talk to. This isn’t exactly a run-of-the-mill errand you’re about to undertake,” she pointed out.

He turned the tables on her by saying, “If you need to talk to me, we can meet later.”

With that, and a mumbled “See you later,” he walked out before Kenzie had a chance to say that she thought he was the one who needed to talk, not her.

Instead of going back to her work—she had yet to inventory the first floor—Kenzie went to the front window, moved aside the curtain and stood in silence as Keith walked down the driveway to his car.

Here was someone who was either oblivious to, or more likely in denial about, the extent of his own grief.

Watching him, Kenzie made up her mind.

* * *

There were too many damn questions to answer, Keith thought wearily half an hour later.

Mrs. Anderson had told him that, per his mother’s wishes, upon her death, Dorothy O’Connell wanted to be laid out at Morrison & Sons Funeral Home. He’d assumed from this information that all the paperwork had been taken care of.

He’d assumed wrong.

He supposed he could have just taken the easy way out, called the funeral director to ask about the costs and then assured the man that the check would be in the next day’s mail. To be honest, Keith still wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing here. It all seemed rather perverse and against what he’d always felt his role would be after his mother’s final breath had been taken.

This process wasn’t supposed to matter to him, but it did.

He supposed that somewhere—very deep inside—was still a sliver of the kid he had once been. The kid who had gotten along with his mother and had wanted nothing more than to take care of her and his sister. He’d wanted to be the man of the family.

He must have been all of ten or eleven years old at the time.

Before the age of reason, Keith silently added.

“I can write up a full accounting,” Abe Morrison Sr. was telling him.

The funeral director looked exactly the way Keith would have expected the man to look. Tall, thin, somber, with a touch of gray at his temples and a soft voice, as if he knew that speaking above a certain decibel level would be intruding on the next-of-kin’s grief.

But Keith was hardly listening to the man. He just wanted this part of it to be over with.

Hell, he wanted all of it to be over with.

More than anything, he wanted to be on a plane flying back to San Francisco and his life, his future, not sitting here with a stately old man, stuck in the past as he listened to him talk about a woman who was in essence a stranger to Keith and had been so for close to ten years.

Abe Morrison, however, seemed to know her very well. Why the thought irritated him so much, Keith wasn’t sure, but it did and that contributed to his feelings of intense restlessness.

The man’s whisper-soft voice was beginning to annoy him, as well.

“She was very explicit, your mother,” Abe was saying. “She didn’t want to burden you with a lot of details.” A mass of wrinkles around his eyes became prominent as the funeral director offered him what appeared to be a fond smile. “Not all our clients are as thoughtful as your mother was.”

Keith nodded dismissively. He didn’t want to be here in this place where the dead were made to look lifelike. He took out his checkbook, hoping that would signal an end to Morrison’s narrative.

Placing his checkbook on the edge of the man’s mahogany desk, his pen poised, Keith asked, “So, what do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Abe replied serenely.

Keith looked up at the man. Was this some sort of a game? If it was, the point of it was lost on him. “Nothing?” he questioned.

“Nothing,” Abe repeated, then went on to explain. “Your mother wrote out a check once she’d decided what she wanted. Always knew her own mind, that lady,” Abe commented with just a hint of an appreciative laugh. “She prepaid her funeral expenses. She just wanted you to fill in the paperwork.”

He should have known. She’d become almost flighty in that year after Amy’s death, but at bottom, she was an exceedingly proud, responsible person who always insisted on paying her own way. He supposed funeral expenses were no different for her. Making him fill out the paperwork was just her way of reminding him that she was still in charge, even though she was no longer around.

Closing the checkbook again, he slipped it into his jacket’s inside breast pocket. “So I guess if there’s nothing further you require from me, I can be on my way.”

Abe’s finely curved eyebrows drew together as his brow furrowed. He gazed at Keith as if he couldn’t comprehend what had just been said.

“Don’t you want to view the body?” he asked, seemingly convinced that Keith hadn’t really meant he wanted to leave without seeing his mother. “Our in-house cosmetic artist did an excellent job,” he added quickly. “In case you think seeing her this way might be too difficult for you, I assure you that your mother just looks like she’s sleeping.” The lanky funeral director was already on his feet, ready to lead the way into Dorothy O’Connell’s viewing room. “Come, I’ll take you to the room myself. You’ll be the first one to see her—other than my staff, of course.”

Keith wanted to tell the man there was no need to bring him to his mother’s viewing room. He wanted simply to beg off and leave. After all, he hadn’t spent any time with his mother in the last ten years of her life. Why would he want to spend any time with her now that she was dead?

But he had a very strong feeling that if he left, the funeral director would only keep after him until the man got him to change his mind—or lose his temper. He might as well spare himself the aggravation. And this way, after he got this viewing over with, he’d be done with it once and for all.

So, against his better judgment, Keith allowed himself to be led into the viewing room.

He was prepared to mumble a few token words of grief for Abe Morrison’s benefit and then leave the funeral home and this part of his past once and for all.

What Keith wasn’t prepared for was that the funeral director would leave him alone in the viewing room.

And he definitely wasn’t prepared for the impact that being alone with his mother’s body would have on him. Logically, he knew it wasn’t her. It was just the empty shell of what had once been his mother.

And yet...

She still seemed to be right there, a part of everything. A part of him.

Keith felt as if someone had stolen the breath out of his lungs, then sat on his chest, daring him to suck air back in.

He couldn’t.

For just a second, before he regained control over himself, Keith thought he was going to black out.

“Guess you got in the last word, after all, didn’t you?” he asked his mother, the question barely above a whisper.

Keith felt tears gathering in the corners of his eyes, and he damned himself for it and her for making him have to go through this.

“This doesn’t change anything, you know,” he told her gruffly. “This death thing isn’t going to soften me and make me decide you were right and I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong. You were. Wrong to act like life was one great big party, wrong to act like you were a teenager, living life to the fullest—and more.

“I know what you were trying to do,” he told the still form lying in the blue silk–lined casket. “You were trying to live Amy’s life for her after she couldn’t live it herself. But you couldn’t do that,” he pointed out, the very words he uttered scraping against the inside of his throat. “Nobody gets to live someone else’s life. Everybody’s got one chance to live, and if that’s taken away, well, then it’s gone.”

He leaned over the casket just a tad, bringing his face in closer to hers. Damn it, the funeral director was right. She did look as if she were sleeping.

He felt as if Death—and his mother—were rubbing his nose in the fact that she was gone.

“There are no do-overs, even if you thought there should be. You don’t get to decide things like that,” he informed her. And then his voice grew louder as his anger came to the fore. “Don’t you think it tore me apart, seeing you do that? Acting like Amy when Amy wasn’t there anymore? You were her mother—my mother. You were supposed to act like one, not like some teenage girl with a mission.

“And where did all that get you in the end?” he demanded heatedly. “Nowhere, dead on a slab, that’s where it got you.” Because now that he thought about it, his mother’s erratic, age-denying lifestyle must have contributed to her demise. “Now your life’s gone, too, just like Amy’s.”

The disgust abated from his voice, and it softened again just a hint. “Maybe you could have lived longer if you hadn’t lived so crazy. I don’t know, and it’s too late to find out.” He turned to leave, then stopped, another wave of recrimination hovering on his lips. “But you shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have,” he repeated, stopping short of raising his voice to the level of shouting.

He didn’t want to attract anyone to the room. Having a meltdown here in the middle of the funeral home was bad enough without it being witnessed by a bunch of strangers.

Still, Keith stood there in the room for a few more moments, doing his best to pull himself together. Searching for a way to reconcile the fact that he was never going to see his mother’s face again. This was to be the last time he’d see her, and he told himself that he shouldn’t care.

But he did.

Calling himself a fool, Keith squared his shoulders and turned to walk out of the small viewing room. He didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time to let something as useless as grief eat away at him. He had loose ends to tie up and a busy life to get back to. He wouldn’t stand around and mope over a woman who had had no regard for him whatsoever, who had shut him out when he’d tried to reach her and make her accept reality.

This, he thought, taking one last look at Dorothy O’Connell, was the final reality.

Turning, he took a long stride out of the room—and walked straight into the young woman he couldn’t quite place, who was standing just outside the room.

And who was apparently, if the expression on her face and the tears glistening in her eyes were any indication, listening to every word he’d just said to his late mother.