The Next Accident - Lisa Gardner [70]
Finally, Rainie sent Quincy to bed. In the past forty-eight hours, he’d had four hours of sleep and he was no longer close to fully functional. Then she brewed a fresh pot of coffee and sat with Kimberly at the kitchen table. The girl was a chip off the old block; she took her caffeine jet black. Rainie found skim milk in the fridge, then a bowl of sugar.
“Don’t laugh,” she told Kimberly, as she added scoop after heaping scoop to the brew. “I hate for the caffeine to be alone in my bloodstream.”
“Has my father seen you do that?”
“Couple of times.”
“How disparaging were his remarks?”
“On a scale of one to ten, I’d rate them a twelve.”
“Oh that’s not bad. My grandfather’s comments would’ve hit fifteen.”
“Your grandfather’s still alive?” Rainie was surprised. Quincy never spoke of his father. For that matter, he never mentioned his mother, though Rainie had a vague memory of him saying once that she’d died when he was young.
Kimberly was blowing clouds of steam off the top of her coffee. “He’s still alive. At least technically. Alzheimer’s. He was hospitalized when I was ten or eleven. We used to visit him several times a year, but we haven’t even done that in a while. He doesn’t recognize any of us anymore, not even Dad, and well . . . Let’s just say Grandpa isn’t that fond of strangers.”
“That’s gotta be hard. What was he like before?”
“Tough. Quiet. Funny in his own way. We used to drive up to Rhode Island to visit his farm. He had chickens and cows, horses, an apple orchard. Mandy and I loved it. Plenty of space to run around, plenty of things to get into.”
“And your mother was okay with this?” Rainie asked skeptically.
Kimberly smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. I remember one day this hot air balloon comes crashing down from the sky. Some tourist outing or something. And this little guy is yelling at the passengers to grab the branches to help brake as the balloon plows through the apple trees then plunks down in the middle of my grandfather’s field. Mom comes rushing out, all excited. ‘Oh my goodness, did you see that? Oh my goodness.’ Then Grandpa comes out of the chicken coop, stands in front of the balloon holding five embarrassed people and gives them the complete up and down, never saying a word. The guide gets nervous. He holds out this bottle, going on and on about how sorry he is and the tracking vehicle will be here any minute and oh yeah, here’s a bottle of wine for his trouble. Grandpa just looks at the guy. Finally, he says, ‘It’s God’s country.’ Then he walks back to the chicken coop. That’s Grandpa.”
“I like him.” Rainie said it sincerely.
“He was a wonderful grandfather,” Kimberly said. She added more astutely, “But I wouldn’t have cared for him as a father.”
They both returned to their coffee.
“Are you and Dad dating?” Kimberly asked after the silence had stretched on too long.
“That’s it, start with the easy questions.” Rainie sipped her coffee more earnestly.
Kimberly, however, had also inherited her father’s probing stare. “You’re pretty young,” she said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“How old?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Mandy was twenty-four when she died.”
“All the more reason not to let a silly thing like age hold you back.”
“So you are dating?”
Rainie sighed. “In the past, we have dated. What we are now . . . I don’t know. When Quincy wakes up, do me a favor and ask him.”
“How did you meet?”
“Last year. The Bakersville case.”
“Oh,” Kimberly said with feeling. “That was a bad one.”
“You could say that.”
“You’re the one who lost her job.”
“That would be me.”
Kimberly nodded with a freshly minted psych major’s knowing confidence. “I see the problem.”
“Great. Want to explain it to me?”
“Age alone wouldn’t be reason enough, but now you two are at different phases of the life cycle, which makes the gap even more extreme. You have to rebuild, which puts you back at infancy. He’s established, keeping him middle-aged. That’s a tough gulf