“Sure,” Neily agreed, trying not to pay any attention to the little thrill of excitement she felt at the thought that he wanted a minute with her.
“Can I get you something in the meantime? Tea? Coffee?” he asked.
“No, thanks. Theresa is all I need,” she answered.
“I’ll get out of the way then,” he said, reaching over the back of his grandmother’s chair to squeeze her shoulder. “That’s okay, isn’t it, Gram? If I leave you with Neily?”
Theresa’s only response was to pat his hand before her own fell limply back into her lap, all without glancing away from the windows.
Neily slipped between the wicker chairs and sat in the one he’d vacated. “We’ll be fine.”
He left then, but the heat of his big body lingered to warm the chair and Neily tried not to think about that—or like it—as she settled in.
“Hi, Theresa,” she said. “How are you doing?”
Theresa shrugged but didn’t answer, returning her gaze out the windows.
Neily checked the view, finding that the room looked down over an area of Northbridge that had been the first concentrated housing development in the late 1950s.
Finding nothing particularly noteworthy in that, she focused on Theresa instead.
“How do you like having your grandson and Mary Pat here?” Neily asked conversationally.
“They’re good to me,” Theresa answered without inflection.
“So you’re glad that they’re with you?”
“Yes.”
“What does Mary Pat do for you?” Neily inquired, still making certain that her questions sounded like a friendly chat rather than a probe into Theresa’s relationships.
The older woman shrugged. “Mary Pat does everything. She brings me my medicines when it’s time to take them. Fixes my food. Tells me when it’s cold and I should wear a sweater. Reminds me to brush my teeth or comb my hair when I forget. She’s my mother hen.” Theresa said all this in a flat tone of voice, never looking away from the windows.
“And yet you took her car keys and left her behind.”
“I had to. I had to come here. Even without Mary Pat.”
Neily heard Theresa’s belligerence threatening and so veered away from the subject. “What about your grandson? What kind of things does he do for you?”
Another shrug. “Wyatt, Marti, Ry—I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
“Marti is Wyatt’s sister?”
“Yes, and Ry is my other grandson, Wyatt’s brother.”
“They all visit you? Take care of you?”
“They worry about me. Fuss over me. Poor things—they could stay away but they don’t. They treat me like a queen. And here I am, causing them more trouble.”
“Have they said that? That you cause them trouble?”
“They never would. Whatever I want—that’s what they always say. That’s what they always do.”
“But you didn’t think they would this time? When you wanted to come to Northbridge?”
Theresa frowned. “I couldn’t tell them what I did,” she whispered.
Tears filled her eyes for a moment before she herself changed the subject this time, pointing in the direction of the houses that stretched out below them. “All of that belonged to my family, you know,” she said.
“All of what, Theresa?”
“The land where those houses are now.”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Neily said.
“Once upon a time, it was all Father’s. Then it came to me…”
“Really?” Neily wondered if there was any truth to this or if Theresa was drifting into one of her fantasies, the way she sometimes did. “I hadn’t heard that but I imagine it would have been a long time ago that you…what? Sold the land?”
Theresa didn’t answer; she merely went on staring down at the houses.
Neily tried again. “Is that what you want back—your land? Your father’s land?”
If Theresa heard her, she didn’t show it. Instead she said, “It was all ours. From here as far as you can see. Seems like so many things in life get lost.”
“Did you lose the land somehow?”
Again there was no indication that Theresa had heard her.
Instead the older woman said, “Loss…so much loss. Wyatt knows what that’s like. Marti, too.”
Neily tried yet another tack. “I’m sorry for whatever losses you’ve suffered, Theresa. Do you want to talk about them?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore,” she said, pushing herself to her feet then. “I need to rest.”
As if she were alone in the room, Theresa wandered out of it without another word.
Still, as far as Neily was concerned she’d accomplished her goal for today—to see if there had been any negatives to the arrival of Theresa’s caregiver and her grandson. There hadn’t been, so Neily followed the older woman out of the sunroom.
Mary Pat must have been watching for Theresa because the nurse joined her charge the minute Theresa reached the hall. Mary Pat tried to convince Theresa not to return to her bedroom, to go into the kitchen for tea instead. But Theresa insisted she needed to lie down, and the caregiver went along. Neily trailed them to the front of the house.
“That was quick.”
Wyatt Grayson’s voice came from the living room as Neily watched Theresa and Mary Pat climb the stairs. She turned to find him leaning negligently—and sexily—against the side of the archway, his hands slung in his pants pockets like a rodeo cowboy. It was slightly alarming that she could be struck all over again by the sight of him, but she was.
Still, she ignored the impact he kept having on her and said, “It was kind of quick, but I’ll take what I can get.”
“So maybe I can have two minutes instead of one?”
Surely he wasn’t flirting with her. But if he wasn’t, why was he smiling in such an enticing way?
Neily reminded herself that she was there on business, no matter how he smiled, and checked her watch. “I suppose I can spare two minutes before I’m due at my next home visit,” she conceded. “But if you need more—”
“Two will do,” he said. Then he got to the point—canceling the impression that he was flirting. “First I just wanted to say how much I appreciate everything that was done here—over breakfast this morning Gram was talking about broken glass and backed-up plumbing, about dust billowing out of the heating vents, about grime everywhere…Anyway, we got an even better idea of what kind of shape the place was in before yesterday and how much work had to have gone into getting it to this point, and I just had to say thanks again.”
“You’re welcome,” Neily said simply.
“I was thinking that maybe we could have a thankyou dinner for everyone who pitched in, but I don’t have any idea how to invite whoever that was.”
“If you name a day and time I can take care of it,” Neily offered. She didn’t care about herself, but she was glad that he wanted to show his gratitude to the rest of the volunteers.
“You’ll see