“At least,” she added, “I thought we talked. But I guess I thought wrong.”
Doc Ed made no answer. Instead, he lightly cupped her elbow and guided her back into the room she’d vacated several minutes ago when she’d seen the technician making his rounds. Her mother had been dozing off.
Cate had waylaid the lab tech in the hallway, once again stating her impatience. She wanted to begin donating blood, the first of what she intended to be several pints. Frustration had assaulted her even before he’d opened his mouth to tell her the bad news.
Ever since she’d learned that her mother had leukemia, Cate had felt completely frustrated. There was nothing she could do to change the course of events. When her bone marrow turned out not to be a match, it had just fed her impatience, making her that much more determined to be able to help somehow. She’d immediately taken it upon herself to spearhead a search amid the San Francisco bureau personnel and their families for a donor. So far, there had been none who matched.
More frustration.
And now, this, whatever “this” was.
“Julia.” Doc Ed’s gravelly voice was as soft as Cate had ever heard it as he addressed her mother.
The pale woman in the bed stirred and then turned her head in their direction. The look on Julia Kowalski’s face told Cate that her mother was braced for more bad news. Resigned to it.
Don’t be resigned, Mama. Fight it. Fight it!
Cate found herself blinking back tears as she approached her mother’s bed and took the small, weak hand into hers.
She could almost feel time slipping through her fingers. Her soul ached.
Julia tried to force her lips into a smile as she looked at her daughter. “Yes?” The single word came out in a whisper.
“Cate just found out that her blood doesn’t match yours.” Moving over to the bed, Doc Ed took his patient’s other hand and held it for a long moment. “Julia, it’s time.”
“Time?” Cate echoed. A shaft of panic descended, spearing her. She fought to push it away without success. Her heart hammering, she looked at the man who, over the years, she’d regarded as her surrogate grandfather. “Time for what?”
“Something that you should have been told a long time ago.” His words were addressed to her, but Doc Ed was looking at the woman in the bed as he said them. “I’ll leave the two of you alone now.” Releasing Julia’s hand and placing it gently on top of the blanket, Doc Ed made his way to the door. Pausing to look at them for a moment longer, he added, “I’ll be by later to look in on you, Julia. And Dr. Conner will be by shortly.”
Cate was vaguely aware of the reference to her mother’s oncologist as she watched the door close behind him.
Sealing her in with her mother and whatever secret the woman had kept from her all this time.
Chapter 2
Juanita Graywolf was nursing a cup of the black tar she liked to call coffee when her son, Dr. Christian Graywolf, entered the small house in Arizona where he’d grown up. Hearing the soft creak of the front door, Juanita Graywolf barely stirred in her seat. Instead, she looked at the reflection in the kitchen window directly opposite her. The window faced the garden, and west. Dawn was still making up its mind as to just how large an entrance it was going to make this morning. Darkness remained with its face pressed against the pane, helping to define her son’s image in the glass.
He was such a handsome boy, she thought. He looked like his father. Tom Graywolf had turned out rotten to the core, but he had been a handsome devil, there was no denying that. Christian was twenty-nine years old now, but he was still her boy. And once, he had been her golden child.
Until she had stolen his smile from him. His smile and his soul.
Her face gave away none of her thoughts as she took another sip of coffee. Juanita smiled at the reflection instead of at her second born. “You’re up early this morning, Christian.”
It was Monday morning and she’d risen early to have a little time with him before he returned to Bedford, California, which he and his brother now called home. But Christian’s bed was empty when she’d knocked and looked into the room. And she’d known where he had gone.
“So are you,” Christian Graywolf pointed out.
She sat up straight, like a young girl, he thought. People seeing them together mistook them for siblings, not mother and son. He was proud of her for taking care of herself. Proud of her for never giving up the way so many here did. She had always been the source of strength to him. She and Uncle Henry.
“I have a flight to catch,” he reminded her.
The flight had nothing to do with where she knew her son had been. For a moment longer, Juanita held her peace, even as her mother’s heart ached.
“And I have a schoolhouse full of students to prepare for,” she said. Turning around now to face him, she nodded toward the old-fashioned stove. It was the same one that had occupied that space when she was growing up in this same house. “Coffee’s hot.”
“And hard as usual,” he joked. Taking a cup, he filled it only halfway.
At the other end of the small house, they heard Henry stirring, mumbling to himself as he obviously ran into something in the dark. The words were all in Navajo and hard for Christian to catch. He saw his mother smiling to herself as she listened.
Henry Spotted Owl, his mother’s older brother, had come to live with them years ago, to take the place of the father he hardly remembered. And to help straighten out Lukas before his older brother was forever lost to them. Henry, an ex-boxer among other things, had done such a good job with Lukas, he’d decided to stay on and offer his own brand of rough-handed counseling to some of the other troubled teenagers on the reservation. He built a gym and gave them a way to work off their anger productively. In his late sixties and fifteen years’ his mother’s senior, the man gave no sign of letting up despite the emergency bypass surgery he’d received from Lukas some years back.
Grit and determination against all odds ran in the family. Henry had pulled himself out of a self-destructive lifestyle that would have killed him before he reached forty. Lukas had become the first of their family not just to graduate high school and college, but to become a doctor. And Christian was the second.
Christian’s mouth curved slightly. He and Lukas both owed a great deal to their mother, who had refused to follow a path of self-indulgence and self-pity, the way so many other of her contemporaries had. Just to put her sons through school, she’d worked two jobs without a word of complaint, behaving as if it was the norm.
At fifty-three, Juanita Graywolf looked younger now than he remembered her looking while he was growing up. Back then, he thought of her as just his mother, who was also a schoolteacher. Now she was principal of the school where she’d once sat in the back row as a student. It was the reservation’s only school, taking children from kindergarten to twelfth grade. His mother had almost single-handedly brought up the standard of teaching there, so that now the school was held up as an example to other reservations.
She was a remarkable woman, and he had grown up thinking that all women were that strong, that determined not to allow life to best them.
His late Alma had shown him how wrong he was.
Juanita suppressed a chuckle. “It sounds like your ride is grumbling,” she said as she nodded toward the rear of the small house.
There had been just three rooms when Henry had come to live with them, a combination living room and kitchen and two small bedrooms. The first thing Henry had done was add on his own room. After that, he’d built on another room and expanded the living room, then added a porch. Henry liked to say that he left his mark wherever he went. Truer words were never spoken.
Christian