Finding Home

“I’ll be there Wednesday,” she told the lawyer.

“I will have the airplane tickets forwarded to you.”

“There’s no need—” she began.

“It’s per Mr. Radkin’s instructions,” the lawyer told her.

“Oh. Well, then, all right,” she agreed. “Thank you for calling.” She was still fighting the numbness as she hung up the receiver.

Brad had remained beside her for the duration of the conversation. “You’ll be where Wednesday?” he asked.

“Attending Uncle Titus’s funeral.” It felt so strange to say that. She had gotten accustomed to the idea that the man was going to live forever. The way he’d always thought he would.

She realized that Brad was frowning and shaking his head. “I can’t make it, Stacey.”

Brad and Titus had met twice, once at a family Christmas and once at their wedding. Brad had thought the man odd, a throwback to another era, but she needed his support now. He couldn’t be falling back on prior commitments. Didn’t she mean anything to him?

“What?”

“The funeral. I can’t make it,” he said. “I have a six hour surgery scheduled for Wednesday. I cleared my calendar completely to accommodate the time it needed. The patient’s already given his own blood. Everything’s been set in motion. It can’t be rescheduled.”

She knew how difficult it was coordinating everything that went into performing a surgery. But this was her uncle Titus. The last living relative in her family. She needed Brad with her.

Stacey tried to think. “Could you fly out right after the surgery?”

Brad’s immediate response was to shake his head. “I’ve got another surgery for Thursday morning.” But then he paused, thinking. He didn’t want to be the bad guy twice in her eyes in such a short duration. “Maybe I can get Harris to cover for me—”

Stacey knew that neurosurgeons didn’t “cover” for one another. Not unless something like an earthquake or hurricane was directly involved. Each had his own area of expertise, his own small kingdom.

She banked down the bitterness that had prompted her to think the last part. “That’s okay. I’ll go alone.”

Brad peered at her face, his own uncertain. “Are you sure?”

She didn’t want to argue about this, too. Especially since she knew how it would turn out. Why waste the time? “I’m sure.”

Off the hook, Brad still didn’t like the idea of her flying alone. “Maybe Jim could go with you—”

She looked at him sharply. “Jim’s busy setting up his new life. I’m perfectly capable of flying on my own.” She blew out a breath, the impact of the news hitting her all over again. “God, I can’t believe that Uncle Titus is really gone.”

Brad nodded as he absently checked his pockets for his car keys. “I thought your uncle would go on forever.” Their eyes met for a moment. “Outlive us all.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, waiting for the ache to set in, the one that always came when she lost a loved one, “me, too.”

There was an awkwardness in the air. Brad felt he should say something more. He had no idea what. “He never married, did he?”

“Not officially, at least, not that I know of,” she amended, then smiled. “He was too much into ‘free love.’ Thought that monogamy was a waste of time, although he was pretty faithful to his ‘lady of the moment’ as he used to call them. When I was little, my parents used to have him over for the holidays because they kind of felt sorry for him.” There was irony for you, she thought. Titus was always smiling. Her parents never were. “I think he enjoyed life a lot more than they did in the long run.”

“At least he got to do it for longer.” Brad glanced at his watch. “Oh, hey, look at the time. I should have already been halfway to the hospital. I need to make my rounds before I go to the office,” he told her, striding toward the threshold.

He was halfway to the front door before he stopped and turned around. Hurrying back to the kitchen, he caught her off guard.

“Did you forget something?” she asked.

In response, he took her into his arms and kissed her forehead. “I really am sorry about Titus.”

He could have knocked her over with a feather. Stacey smiled up at him. She doubted that he realized it, but that was worth far more to her than the two hundred dollars he had left on the counter.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

Brad released her. “I’ve got to rush.”

She followed him to the door. “That really meant a lot to me.”

Brad nodded as he left the house. But he really didn’t understand why Stacey had said that.

CHAPTER 9

The long flight from LAX to Titus’s small Pacific island gave Stacey the opportunity to read for more than five minutes at a clip. She’d almost forgotten how to savor and enjoy a lengthy story. Everything these days came at her in tidy, bite-size pieces. Magazine articles ended within two pages. News stories came with highlights that summarized their content quickly for the rushed. The end result was that she no longer really knew how to immerse herself in something she was reading, had no patience to wade through deep prose, no matter how beautiful. Her brain seemed to lack staying power.

The first half hour of her journey was spent trying to keep her mind from straying as she struggled to focus on the written words before her. At the end of that first half hour she realized she’d been reading the same page over and over again. It took more effort than she would have ever guessed. So was keeping a lid on the impatience drumming through her. She kept wondering about things that she had left behind. Not the usual did-I-leave-the-stove-on anxieties, but misgivings about how Brad would fare in the house without her. He’d assured her he’d be fine, but she had her doubts.

And what if Jim needed her while she was gone? Or Julie?

She took a deep breath. They were all adults, all three of them. Even Brad. They would be fine. But would she?

Stacey propped the book up on the tray before her, trying again to lose herself in the pages of the mystery she’d purchased expressly for the trip. There was a time when she would curl up on any available space and read for hours on end, losing herself in whatever story—romance, mystery, historical biography—she selected. When had there stopped being time for reading for pleasure? For reading “just because”? When had life changed for her?

She couldn’t pinpoint a moment, an earth-shattering event, that had transformed her. It had happened in tiny increments, stealthily, so she hadn’t really been aware of the change. Until it had overwhelmed her.

The same was true of her marriage, she supposed. They’d started out being partners, two crazy-in-love partners, sharing every moment, every thought with each other. Living on love and dreams and not much in the way of creature comforts, but it didn’t matter. As long as they had each other. Now they were like two strangers who met at the same bus stop every morning. There was recognition, an exchange of a sentence or two, but very little else. Certainly no feeling of communion, or even camaraderie.

She hadn’t changed, had she? Not in the way she felt about things. Not about any of the things that truly mattered to her.

But Brad had.

Brad had changed, oh so much. Her mouth curved in a sad smile. She had married James Dean and woken up one morning to find herself sleeping next to Dennis the Menace’s Mr. Wilson. Conservative, grumpy and so not a risk taker.

She missed James Dean more than she could possibly put into words.

Stacey looked down at her book. She was twenty pages further along than she had been earlier—and couldn’t remember a single word of the story that had transpired, or how the mystery’s feisty protagonist had wound up standing in a grave.

Annoyed, Stacey flipped back twenty pages, hoping to be more successful in keeping her mind from wandering this time around.

C’mon, Stace, you can do this. You can read this book. You remember what it was like to read, don’t you? To block out everything else except for the characters in your book? Strike a blow for the not-so-distant past. Do it for Uncle Titus.

She smiled to herself. Uncle Titus loved to read. It was one of the forms that his rebellion took as society conspired to take its citizens away from the printed word and place them in front of a digital display.

For Uncle Titus, she thought, amused.