All things considered, I had to admire how well he was holding up- but he wasn’t looking so great at the moment.
“Do you want to go back for that injection?” I asked.
He opened his eyes. “No, I can wait. Listen, I’m sorry you’ve had to pay for all of this. I have some cash in the trunk. When we get back to your house, I’ll pay you back.”
“Forget it. I would have paid for it anyway,” I said to him. “You were wounded trying to rescue my cat.”
He looked as if he might argue, but seemed to change his mind and lapsed back into silence.
I returned to thinking about what an awful day he’d had, kept trying to think of comforting things to say, but none seemed adequate.
When the harassed pharmacy clerk finally called Travis’s name, we walked up to the counter together. It was then, as we were standing at the counter, that-with his help-the memory came back to me.
I was standing to his left. The weary clerk shoved two plastic bottles of pills and a tube of ointment toward us.
“Which of the pills are for the infection?” Travis asked.
She tapped the top of one of the bottles, then started to ring up the charges.
“Can I take that on an empty stomach?” he asked.
“Directions are right on the label,” she said.
“Do I need to eat something before I take it?” he asked again.
She sighed with long-suffering, picked up the bottle and glanced at it. “Yes. Take it with meals.” She rapped it down on the counter as if it were a gavel.
She had just finished entering a second set of numbers on the cash register when he said, “If I take the pain medication, will it make me drowsy?”
“Read the label!” she snapped.
“Can I operate machinery?” he persisted.
Wondering what was wrong with him, I picked up the bottle and said, “No, Travis. You shouldn’t take these and drive.”
“How many times a day do I take them?”
“As needed for pain, but not more than two every twelve hours.”
I set the bottle down. He reached over with his left hand, and squeezed mine-quickly, quietly and as if in gratitude. Nothing flirtatious about it.
I looked into his face. Suddenly remembered his father asking similar questions twenty-some years before. Remembered the clerk growing more and more angry with Arthur’s persistent refusal to read the label. But why? Why hadn’t he just picked up the bottle and read it himself?
Something had happened just before Arthur squeezed my mother’s hand. She had picked up the bottles and read the labels aloud.
Comprehension finally dawned.
“He couldn’t read,” I said softly. Travis nodded and smiled a little.
Mistaking my meaning, the woman behind the counter first looked shocked, then turned red. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Nor I you,” Travis said.
He took the first pain pill at a water fountain before we left the building. I held my questions until we were in the car.
“Your father-” I began.
“As you guessed.”
“Arthur was illiterate?” I said, still not believing it.
“Yes,” he said.
“But he had his own business!”
“Yes. Landscaping-that was how he began, anyway. He had a wonderful sense of color and placement, loved making things grow, loved the outdoors. Even when he no longer earned most of his money that way, few things made him happier.”
“But not being able to read! I just can’t imagine how he managed to get by!”
“It wasn’t easy,” he said, closing his eyes, leaning his head back.
“I’m sorry, you probably aren’t up to talking about this right now.”
“To be honest, no, I’m not.” He yawned. “But I’ll talk more about it with you tomorrow-if you want to.” He yawned again. “You’ve got a lot to think about now, anyway,” he said drowsily.
I started the car, pulled out of the parking lot.
“Did my mother know?” I asked, unable to let this one question keep overnight.
He opened his eyes, looked over at me, then watched the road for a little while before he closed them again. I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then he said, “According to my father, yes, she did-but only after that day in the pharmacy.” He smiled sleepily. “He always spoke highly of your mother. She kept his secret.”
“But he could have explained to my father-”
He looked over at me again. “He was ashamed that he couldn’t read. Can’t you imagine what that was like for him? My dad knew that Patrick would blame him, not your mother, for that little squeeze of her hand. That’s exactly what happened-your father assumed he made a pass at your mother. He worried at first that she would tell Patrick the truth, and his secret would be exposed to a man who already disliked him. But your mother must have seen how painful that would have been to him, because she let my father decide whether Patrick would know or not know.” He smothered another yawn, closed his eyes again. “She never told Patrick. Never told anyone. My father admired her for that.” I thought he had fallen asleep, but then he murmured, “I wish I had known her.”
As I drove home I thought about Arthur Spanning-my uncle, not my uncle, perhaps my uncle again. A man who preferred having my father think of him as an unprincipled sleazeball rather than as someone who was unable to read. Did he have a learning disability-something like dyslexia? Or had he simply never learned to read? I remembered the “six years” of education on the death certificate.
I thought of my mother, keeping secrets from the rest of us, letting us think Arthur was a womanizer, letting the rift grow between our family and her sister’s husband.
But he was a womanizer, I reminded myself. A bigamist. His illiteracy had nothing to do with that. Travis was probably right; it was impossible to imagine his parents were remarried-or whatever it would be called in this case. Why would Briana ever take him back? Because she pitied a dying man? Because of Travis?
I looked over at my sleeping cousin, his bandaged hand lying palm up in his lap.
That unexpectedly strong sense of protectiveness I had been feeling toward him all day resurfaced. The idea that someone had tried to harm him while he was staying at my home made me furious. I decided that if Rachel were awake when I got back to the house, I wanted to have a talk with her about the DeMonts.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t a smart idea to bring him home. Whoever had tried to kill him knew exactly where he was staying.
How? I wondered. How did anyone find out?
No one other than a librarian in Mission Viejo knew that Travis was the storyteller, and she knew very little of his background. And even if she had revealed to the world that Travis was Cosmo the Storyteller, she didn’t know where I lived. For that matter, she couldn’t have been certain we were going up to the Valley Plaza Branch Library; for all she knew, I would just make a phone call to that library. Certainly no one knew he’d be coming back with us. Rachel and I hadn’t known it ourselves.
I thought briefly of the car that had tailed us on the freeway. But not only had Rachel lost the tail, we weren’t in the same vehicle when we headed home. Where had the tail started?
There was a Las Piernas PD patrol car sitting outside our house when I pulled into the driveway. Jack and Rachel were sitting on the front porch, talking.
“They’re here to keep an eye on things,” Rachel said, indicating the patrol car.
“I thought you two would be gone by now,” I said.
“I think I’ll stick around,” Rachel said. “If you don’t mind. At least for tonight.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ll put Travis on the foldout couch.”
“Forget it!” she said. “He’s been hurt. Give him the guest-room bed. I’ll be fine on the couch.”
“He could stay at my place,” Jack offered.