To get around the fence that bordered the two properties, I tromped out to the road, down to the Deerings’ mailbox, and up the long, narrow, winding driveway that would have been a challenge to maneuver in anything larger than a VW bug. The plastic bag of books got heavier and heavier, digging deep into the insides of my fingers. “Onward and upward,” I muttered, and hoped that Adam’s recovery wouldn’t last until next winter.
Half a century later, their two-story log-sided house came into view. I heaved a sigh of relief, climbed the steps to the wide front porch, and knocked on the door.
From inside, I heard a male voice call out, “Come on in.”
I pushed open the wood-slab door and poked my head inside. “Hi, I’m Minnie Hamilton. Your wife asked me to bring you some books.”
The front door opened straight into the living room. Plaid blankets were draped over the back of the couch and over armchairs, the large hanging light fixture was a clever driftwood sculpture, and botanical prints hung on the walls. Instead of the braided oval area rug I’d expected to see on the wooden floor, there was a faded Oriental carpet. It wasn’t too Up Northy and it wasn’t too Transplanted City Folk. It was just right.
There was a fortyish man sitting in a recliner with his feet up. His dark hair had just a touch of gray, and from what I could tell of what showed above the blanket, he looked to be tallish and in the could-use-some-exercise category. “Hi,” he said, waving. “I’m Adam. Sorry for not getting up, but—”
“But Irene, your cardiologist, your general practitioner, and the entire nursing staff at Munson Hospital will scold you if you do.” I smiled at him. “How are you doing?”
“Bored,” he said. “There’s only so much ESPN even I can watch.”
“ESPN?” I gave him a puzzled look. “That’s a new cooking network, right? Extra Special Potato Noodle.”
He laughed. “I can see why you and Irene have hit it off. She’s not what you might call a sports fan, either. Actually she’s mostly a city girl, though she’s taking to life up here like a duck to water.”
A woman after my own heart. I emptied the books onto the table next to Adam’s chair and made a mental note to look into the purchase of a wheeled book carrier. “Irene said you like to read,” I said, “but that you haven’t had much spare time for years. I brought a wide selection today, but if you let me know what you like and what you don’t, I can do better next time.”
Adam reached for the books, then winced. “Piece of advice,” he said, grimacing with pain, “avoid emergency heart surgery at all costs. The recovery time is brutal.”
“Can I get you anything?” I stood there, helpless, watching as he took fast, shallow breaths. “Water, or . . . anything?”
He laid his head back against the chair. “Do you have time to give me some quick book summaries? I’ll choose one, and then you can hand it to me so I don’t rip open my staples.”
I blinked away the vision of a doctor using the latest Swingline product to tidy up a surgical incision and glanced at my watch. “If it means luring you away from a twenty-three-year-old football game played by two teams you don’t care about much, then sure.”
The top book on the stack was The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I’d done no more than cite the title when Adam started smiling. “How did you manage to bring the one book I’ve read in the last fifteen years? My boss, down in Chicago, loved it so much that he bought me a copy and wouldn’t let up until I’d read it.”
I tried to remember if Irene had said what Adam did for a living, but I came up dry. “What kind of business are you in?”
“Numbers,” he said, shifting a little in his chair. “I’m an accountant. And yes, you’d think I could manage to sit at a computer while recovering from heart surgery, but they don’t want me working for at least two months.”
I thought about how that much enforced inactivity would mess with my head and reached into the pile of books for Atlas Shrugged. “Eight weeks should give you enough time to read this.”
He looked at the heft of the book. Laughed, then winced and sighed. “Forty-one years old,” he said, “and I’m a mess. I can’t work for two months, and I’ve been self-employed since we moved north, so that means no income for probably three months. I have medical bills up the wazoo thanks to our crappy health insurance, and my wife is working two jobs to make ends meet.”
My heart ached for him, but there wasn’t anything I could say that would help, so I just sat.
He sighed again, then put on a fake smile. “But I’ll get better, right? And at least I found out about this congenital heart condition I didn’t know I had.”
“Alive is almost always better than dead,” I agreed.
His mouth twisted. “Yeah. I could have ended up like Henry.”
I blinked. “You mean Henry Gill?”
Adam blinked back. “You knew him?”
“He was a regular. I first knew him at the library, but when the bookmobile started up, he decided it was easier to let the books come to him instead of him going to the books.”
Adam’s smile was faint. “Sounds like Henry. I was there . . .” His voice faded away to nothing.
I didn’t understand, and then suddenly I did. “You were there the day Henry died?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly.
“That must have been awful.”
“Yeah.”
We sat there, each thinking things that were probably similar, thoughts along the lines of sudden death, of pain and suffering and tasks left undone, of tender feelings never spoken and wonderful places never visited.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Adam shook his head, then started talking. “I met Henry early last summer. I’d gone out for a long bike ride and was in the far southeast corner of the county, you know, where the land isn’t quite as hilly but there are all those little lakes?”
I nodded, but he wasn’t paying attention to me, he was back in time, watching his memory spin out.
“There must have been some glass in the road or who knows what? I ended up with a really flat tire, so I stopped on the side of the road to fix the tube.” He gave a wry smile. “I’d checked my patch kit before I left, but I hadn’t made sure the glue was still good. Stuff was hard as a rock.”
My knowledge of bike tube repair was hazy, but even I knew that hard glue was bad. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Adam grinned. “I was sitting there, staring at the tire, feeling like an idiot. I had my cell phone, but Irene was at work and there wasn’t anyone I could call.”
This, I knew, was what often happened when people moved north. New folks would have a few friends, usually coworkers and neighbors, but it could take a long time to forge relationships that allowed you to call someone half a county away to come save you from your own stupidity.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Henry,” Adam said promptly. “He was out in that beater pickup of his. He slowed down, took a good look at me, and stopped. Asked where I lived, and when I said, he gave that grunt of his, you know?”
I certainly did.
“Anyway, he said he’d drop me off at my house, then told me to put my bike in the bed of his truck.”
I smiled, knowing what was coming.
“Took Henry fifteen minutes to get it strapped down the way he wanted. I told him it wasn’t an expensive bike and not to worry about it, but he said driving with an unsecured load was dangerous.” He smiled. “Then we got into the truck and headed southeast.”
“Um . . .”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “The opposite direction from here. Henry had a guy he needed to talk to about a part for a lawn tractor and he wasn’t about to quit the errand just because I wanted to get home.”
“How long did it take you to get back?” I asked, laughing.