Waiting for Sparks

She shrugged. “Payment’s in full. Up front. Cash preferred.”

Naomi had warned him of Lynette’s affection for cash. No plastic card was accepted, but as he pulled out his wallet, he noted the rest of the office asserted a predilection for plastic. On the counter, plastic—not silk—daffodils leaned out of a hot pink plastic vase with seashells glued on it. The bead curtain was plastic. Plastic covered the lampshade by the cash register. He shifted his feet, heard a crackle. Plastic runner.

After opening his wallet and removing the cash, he glanced down at the registration card she slid in front of him.

“Fill it out completely—including home address. I’ll need your license plate number, too, in case you go sneaking off with my towels.” She looked out the side window. “Where’s your car?” Her eyes narrowed again.

“It’ll be towed in.” He focused on the card. Home address. There it was again. Home. By habit, he put down the address of the pyrotechnic corporation with whom he contracted. He was rarely at the condo he rented with a pilot.

She took the completed card Sparks offered her. “Doug?”

“I go by Sparks.”

A twinkle at last thawed the frosty, faded eyes.

“Bet there’s a story there.” Her tone returned to business. “The town’s got us a drought going on, so we change the towels and sheets twice a week ’stead of every day.”

He nodded. A quick survey out the window showed no on-site restaurant. “No restaurant?”

Turning away from him with the card in her hand, Lynette slid it into a pocket of a numbered canvas wall hanging. “No need for me to monopolize making money. Dew Drop Inn Café’s over there. Place for those of us over thirty and tourists who want local color.” She gestured behind him; Sparks followed. Across the street sat a cinder block building with wide glass windows and a prominent sign announcing a “Squat and Gobble Special” of eggs, biscuits, cream sausage gravy and hash browns. No lights on and a closed sign on the front door. His stomach rumbled.

Lynette peered at him. “Nothing’s open this late... Tomorrow, start of Memorial Day weekend, you can also go to the Dairy Delite at the other edge of town or Angel Wings BBQ here on Main.” She leaned her forearms on the counter. With money in hand, her tone of voice became positively chatty. “So you’re here to bail out Naomi?”

“You must be thinking of somebody else.” He dredged up a smile, wincing at the sting. Everything he owned ached. Longing for bed, he added quickly, “I’m only here to design the Fourth of July Jamboree fireworks. Technicians come from Evanston to set up the actual display. Pretty much, I’m on vacation.” Before he opened the door to leave, he remembered. “I’ll need directions to her office, though.”

“Won’t do you any good. Naomi’s had another stroke.” Lynette’s watery gray eyes scanned him. “We’re waiting for poor little Emma to save us.”

He nodded, and moments later, as he stood in the doorway of room number twenty-seven, Lynette’s departing statement lingered. Poor little Emma must be Naomi’s hapless assistant. Did this mean working for Naomi would be...difficult?

Holding the handles of his two suitcases, he surveyed the room with no relief found from a gathering sense of gloom or his aching muscles. The two full-size beds in front of him, one with a distinct hollow in the middle and both draped with red and saffron zigzag bedspreads, shouted 1970s, as did the crimson velvet paisleys raised on the gold wallpaper. He spied a rotary desk phone on the nightstand. At least there was a phone.

Walking over faded yellow shag carpet, he picked up the receiver to call the rental company. No dial tone. So that hazel-eyed angel girl had already known the secret. Hence her smile, the smile he wanted to remember and see again.

Reminiscing about the four-star hotels he’d enjoyed in Chicago, DC, Paris and Tokyo, he rotated his shoulders. Hadn’t he wanted a break from the globetrotting for a touch of hometown America?

He chose the least concave bed and plopped his suitcases on the other. The bed dropped a couple inches lower. He shrugged. “Best to look on the bright side.” Mother Egan, a fond memory from growing up at the orphanage, had had a million such sayings; every now and then one popped out of his mouth.

Sleep was his next order of business. Once he’d slept, his head would stop banging and his bones would settle back into place. After he met this unfortunate Emma, he’d explore his summer hometown.

Forty-six glorious days of vacation.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_74df6dc0-c052-52b5-9164-46a9a296a785)

EMMA PEERED INTO her grandmother’s hospital room where monitors glowed and beeped. Chet sat next to the narrow bed, his arms folded on the railing, head pillowed on them. Sweet Chet. The only person in Heaven who wasn’t afraid of her grandmother, other than Emma’s childhood friend Zoo. Emma stepped forward.

Nomi looked old. Her face, usually bright with vigor or pique, hung sallow. So many machines connected, like when Grumpa was here. So still. Had she—? Nomi moved her right leg slightly under the sheet and blanket.

Letting out the breath Emma didn’t know she’d been holding, she moved over to Chet and touched him on the arm. He jerked, then straightened.

“E?” Worry creased his wrinkles into gullies while his remaining white hair stuck up at every angle. She managed to lift her lips into a semblance of a smile as he gripped her hand. “Thank the good Lord you’re finally here.” No judgment sharpened his words, merely relief. If Nomi had said the same thing, it would have been clear that Emma had taken too long and someone else had had to shoulder her share of the burden.

Nodding toward her grandmother, Emma returned Chet’s squeeze. “How is she?”

“I’m scared, E.” He related the few details he knew: she fell, someone—nobody knew who—called the paramedics, and they brought her to Regional. She was stable. “I’ll leave you alone with her and wait outside.”

Her grandmother stirred. Picking up Nomi’s hand, Emma held it as Nomi lay unresponsive. “Tomorrow. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispered.

Nomi’s lids rose slowly. “Trr-ouble,” she whispered through dry lips. Emma reached for a plastic glass with a flexible straw. Her grandmother sipped with shallow swallows.

“Yes,” Emma whispered back, a tear sneaking out of her eye. “It’s trouble, but you’ll be fine. You always are.”

“Sparks. Sparks.” Naomi’s head jerked against the pillow.

Had there been a fire the night of the stroke? Emma’s eyebrows slammed together.

“Take care of...trouble...” Her grandmother’s attempt at speaking alarmed the monitors. Emma stroked Nomi’s arm. Her grandmother would survive trouble. A plan of action for every crisis.

At Emma’s touch, she quieted and appeared to fall asleep.

After watching her grandmother to make sure her sleep was peaceful, Emma joined Chet in the hall. They walked silently through the hospital out toward the parking lot.

As long as there were memories, Nomi and Grumpa were in them. When a fireman came to school in second grade, some kid had asked her if her smoke jumper daddy had been a hero. She wasn’t sure, so she asked her grandmother. Nomi had hesitated, her hands stilling on the fridge door. She’d just returned from her office where she served as mayor and was pulling leftovers out for dinner.

“He did what he felt he had to do,” she’d answered, then she’d told Emma to go set the table. Heroes did what they had to do. Emma had decided if you couldn’t have a father, at least you could have a hero father in heaven. The other heaven.

Emma rubbed the vertical line between her brows that matched her grandmother’s. She knew little of her father, other than he’d left to go smoke jumping and had died.

As a child, she’d been told her mother—whoever she was—had had to go away, asking Nomi and Grumpa to take care of her. Grumpa had said that, so it must be true.

Emma had learned a little more as an early teen. Evidently, her mother had been too much of a teenager herself to handle a baby. Despite the fierce love of her grandmother and the gentle care of her Grumpa, a certain emptiness in Emma had never filled, the being left part. Being left had rendered her unable to call the town home. It set a pattern in motion. Temporary relationships only.

After hugging Chet in the hospital’s parking lot, she slid into the Omni and drove to the house where she’d grown up. She pulled the car onto the double-cemented lines of the driveway. Tomorrow she’d find out her grandmother’s details—or rather, checking her watch, later today—and head back to Salt Lake.

Straightening up, with her stomach continuing to grumble as it had in the hospital, Emma resolved to explore her grandmother’s fridge.

Movement next door at Feral Beryl’s drew her glance. Naomi’s archenemy had peeked out the kitchen window above the Berlin Wall, a tall wooden fence between the two properties. More than a property divider, it divided the have-not Beryl Winsome from the have-it-all Chambers. Beryl was a singularly unpleasant woman.

Emma pulled out her suitcases and approached the bungalow. Fatigue dripped down her neck like perspiration, and her suitcases, rolling behind her, weighed a ton. Lilac bushes that were as high as her waist as a child now towered over her five foot something. They glowed in the dark, lighting both sides of the flagstones to the house. Although chokecherry bushes almost past blooming partially blocked her view, the porch swing peeked through.

Back in the day, when Grumpa could get Nomi to “stop doing and come out and just be,” the three of them would sit in silence on the porch. Grumpa and Emma would be on the swing, Nomi sitting on the floor with her head against Grumpa’s knees. Nomi would jump up for something; Grumpa would say in the voice Nomi called his “bank president” tone, “Leave it, Naomi. The child’s more important.” And Nomi would sit down again.

Her grandmother, never quiet for long, would commence talking about how important it was that Emma make good choices. Clearing his throat, Grumpa would interrupt with another story about the fierce Lady Emma, a young girl extraordinaire who fought dragons and won. When his deep voice finished the story, silence would surround them like an old afghan. Until Nomi would make a surprised sound and exclaim, “Raymond, Emma is beyond bedtime!”

“Come along, Miss Beyond Bedtime,” he would say, and carry her off to bed. They would pray, her last sight Grumpa’s silhouette in the doorway. “Remember, I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck, Lady Emma.”

Smiling now, Emma walked through the open side gate, around the corner of the house and up the back steps. Sure enough, the door was unlocked, as were most houses in Heaven. She was in before she heard a new sound: a low growl and light panting.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_431c7b6e-50d5-59c8-acec-56df5f4a6c3d)