Page 64 of Threat of Danger
He told her over his dead body—an unfortunate choice of words under the circumstances. He said he was the president of the club, and if anyone was going to chat with a sasquatch, it’d be him. He gave them a weak smile before he faded out again.
The nurse came by to check on him. “You should go home,” she told the three outside the room’s window, sympathy in her eyes. “Come back tomorrow. He’ll be in much better shape by then.”
Leaving felt wrong, but they were just in the way standing there by the glass.
Derek popped his head into the room, and when Zelda looked up, he said, “I’ll run the girls home, then come back to check on you in a couple of hours. Want me to bring anything?”
She shook her head, her eyes dazed, and went back to holding Chuck’s hand, patting it, and offering words of encouragement. Jess thought she caught, “I love you, you stubborn, stubborn man.”
Almost enough to make her smile, despite the circumstances.
Derek closed the door, then put one arm over Jess’s shoulder and another over Kaylee’s. As he turned to leave, they both leaned on his solid strength and went with him.
At the elevators, Jess pulled away. “I want to pop in and see Mom. She needs to know.”
“We’ll go together,” Derek said.
Kaylee linked her arm with Jess without a word.
They all went up, just the three of them in the elevator. The mirrored panel showed them standing close to each other, a unit, clearly belonging together. Jess couldn’t take her eyes off their reflection. Having people around her like this, as if they were family, after all these years of going it alone, filled her chest with a warm sensation that spread out into the rest of her body, all the way to the tips of her toes.
As they entered Rose’s room, she looked up from the gardening magazine she was reading in bed. She frowned as her gaze bounced from one to the other. “What’s wrong?”
“Chuck had a heart attack.” Jess went to sit on the edge of the bed. “He’s out of surgery. So far so good. Zelda is with him. We’re going to head home.”
Her mother clutched her own heart and asked a dozen questions, patting the bed next to her so that Kaylee would sit there too and get a long, hard hug. By the end, they were both crying.
“If anyone can pull through something like this, it’s Chuck,” Rose said finally, her right hand gently cradling the girl’s face. “He’s a tough old bird.”
Everybody nodded.
Rose looked at Jess. “Remember when your father set the old sugar shack on fire by accident? How Chuck ran right in to pull out some new equipment we just bought on credit? That man is tough enough to walk through fire. He’s going to come through this.”
Jess moved closer and gave her mother a hug. In light of Chuck nearly losing his life, little else mattered. Past grievances suddenly seemed insignificant.
“I don’t remember the fire.” Kaylee drew her eyebrows together as if desperately trying.
Jess could almost smell the smoke. “You were too young. You were home, sleeping. I watched from my window. Mom forbade me to go outside. Chuck was like some movie hero, coming out through the smoke and fire. Seriously. If that night was a movie, that shot would have been the one on the posters.”
A small smile softened the look of worry on Kaylee’s face. But the smile didn’t last long, no matter how hard the adults tried to cheer her up.
After the visit with Rose, when Derek, Jess, and Kaylee were in his truck ready to leave, he paused with his hand on the key in the ignition, and looked over Kaylee’s head, at Jess. “What can I do to help? Want me to run the sugar shack? It’s been a while, but I remember what needs to be done.”
He made the offer as if nothing was more natural, as if he wasn’t on deadline, as if Jess had a right to his assistance and support. Except, she had no right to expect any help from him.
She said, “Thank you,” anyway. And then, “We’ll figure it out between the two of us.”
Kaylee piped up as they got on the road. “Can I come back with you when you come to check on Zelda and Abuelito later?”
When Kaylee’d been younger, she had called her grandfather Abuelito, for the Spanish word for “grandfather,”abuelo. Jess hadn’t heard the word from her since returning home.
“Me too,” she told Derek. “I’m going to send Zelda home and stay the night.”
Kaylee opened her mouth as if to protest, but Jess said, “You have school tomorrow. Chuck will have my skin when he comes home if he finds out I let you skip. You need your sleep.”
Zelda did too. She couldn’t spend the whole night in an uncomfortable plastic chair at the hospital. She needed to keep her feet elevated or they’d start hurting.
On the way home, Derek stopped by Chuck’s place so Kaylee could pick up her things and move them over to the Taylor farm. Chuck’s house was a log cabin he’d built from a kit, with his own two hands and the help of some friends, on land he’d bought from Jess’s grandfather. That cabin was his pride and joy. He was as proud of it as he was of the maple syrup he made. But still not nearly as proud as he was of Kaylee.
