Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [88]
“What you’re seeing is a tummy ache. Thanks for noticing. I’ll fix it when I go back home. Would you mind not telling the others? We’re having a party, and no one wants to hear about bellyaches.”
Tess did not want to make the child a co-conspirator in silence. That was wrong. She would make it right later, somehow. If it was as bad as she imagined, she would tell the child, “You were the first to notice and you helped me.” Lying to a child was the worst sin, the taste of it reeked of a dead carcass. She would tell the child the truth when the time came. The child had to know that what she saw was real. Tess had to give her that.
Tess’s mind jumped ahead to the dinner with Len. She pulled the flaps of her enormous hat over her ears and walked up the dark hill to the eatery. She’d agree only to surgery, not chemo, not radiation. Sacrifice, she would not sacrifice the end of her life to a drugged and hairless stupor.
Chapter 33
Rocky had purchased a bow with a thirty-pound draw. In the five weeks since Cooper’s return, she had practiced almost daily. Now it was February, and on the few days that were both without wind and above freezing, she practiced behind Tess’s house. On all the other days, she went to the boathouse. On Isaiah’s advice, she asked the club if she could use their storage house. It was surprisingly spacious, with plenty of room down the center, between the boats. She hauled in some hay bales and set them between the rows of boats that sat stacked in neat formation. Rocky stood between the twenty-and thirty-foot rigs on one end and the piles of sea kayaks on the other. The cement floor drove the cold through her shoes after an hour. That was long enough for her. Once or twice Isaiah showed up, just to sit and watch, he said, but Rocky didn’t like it when he was there. After two arrows skittered off a hull, she said, “This is like having someone watch you practice the piano or take a bath. I shoot lots worse when you’re here.”
Isaiah wore a leather bombardier hat with flaps over his ears.
“Well, if you’re not going to bring your dog with you, I thought you would like to have some company. I won’t watch. I’ll do some old man thing like whittle, which I’ll have to learn to do eventually as I am getting older.”
Since they’d had a fight and made up, it was like someone had scrubbed layers of varnish off them and Isaiah had grown larger and softer in her life.
“You don’t need to look out for me,” she said. “I think Liz’s stalker ex-boyfriend is gone. It’s been over five weeks. He’s probably gone on to a new girlfriend and has a new set of obsessions. Give me some credit here; I know a few things about the strange entanglements of relationships.”
She set an arrow, drew back, and released. Thwack. Outer ring. Rocky sighed.
Isaiah zipped his coat. “I can see your game is off when I’m here. Either that or you’re just plain terrible all the time, and you’re trying to blame it on me.”
Rocky had her sights set on the forty-pound bow by spring. She felt her arms and back muscles firming. She had returned to swimming at the Y in Portland and her body was beginning to feel like hers again. Last night she had eaten a pile of spaghetti and meatballs.
She guided Isaiah to the big sliding metal door. “You’re right, in a way. I’m not confident enough yet to let people watch me. If I was really focused in the way that I should be, I wouldn’t even notice you sitting there,” she said.
As Rocky watched her friend walk on the gravel path to the parking lot, Isaiah turned and said, “Go get yourself a tune-up with that archery teacher. That’s what you need.”
The door squealed as she pulled it shut. No, she did not want a tune-up from Hill. She wasn’t sure if she trusted him about anything.
One of the overhead fluorescent lights flickered. The thought of spring was a bright speck of light drawing closer. As soon as she could stand it, she was going to start practicing outside again at Tess’s. She looked at the offending light and wondered if she could haul a ladder inside