A rabbit hopped toward a neighbor’s dormant vegetable garden, and Felix’s stomach bubbled and churned. Clearly, he needed an upgrade to something stronger than Pepto-Bismol.
He folded his arms behind his neck and stared up into the cloudless expanse. A hawk drifted overhead, screeching, and a flock of pigeons rose from the power lines and scattered. He blinked against the intensity of blue sky marred only by the laceration of a single vapor trail.
One week earlier, he would have denounced sky gazing as unproductive and self-indulgent. But in the last thirty-six hours, he had become a dreamer, a man who wanted his critically ill wife to come home looking like the woman he’d been preparing to collect from the airport a week ago. In seven days, someone had moved the goalposts of his life; someone had stolen the certainty that his wife would even come home.
A double yellow line divided his marriage into before and after the heart attack. And this person who now lived in jeans and Dr. Martens, who had given up hair gel and aftershave, was not someone he recognized. And neither was the nervous, frail person he had visited in hospital yesterday.
Turning his back on the Carolina sun, Felix stepped onto the wooden bridge and entered cool shade. A solitary toad croaked and water trickled down the small waterfall he had created for Ella out of indigenous river stones.
He crossed the periwinkle that threatened year-round to swallow the stepping-stone path, and headed for the clearing around the house. Years ago, Ella had told him that periwinkle was the flower of death. When Felix had suggested ripping it up, Ella had reminded him that the garden was her territory, and periwinkle was the perfect low-maintenance ground cover for the patch of woodland by the creek. The periwinkle had stayed, jostling for superiority with the equally invasive ivy that grew up and around the tree trunks. Felix hoped the ivy would win the battle.
As the sun warmed the back of his neck once more, Felix walked around the side of the house to the small patio that faced untamed forest—a protective barrier that afforded year-round privacy and solitude.
It would have been easier and cheaper to let Eudora blast mama squirrel into pieces. A week ago, he would have done exactly that. After all, he routinely decapitated copperheads without a qualm. Now he was paying Sunday rates to relocate nature’s original psychos. And yet the squirrel invasion had been a problem he could fix. Had it also become an excuse to avoid the hospital? Was there a small part of him that said enough? Katherine had been more than happy to take today’s shift, but it should have been him. Ella was petrified about tomorrow’s meeting with Dr. Beaubridge, convinced he was going to prescribe the knife. Felix was terrified he wasn’t, because if open-heart surgery wasn’t an option—then what?
Inspecting the gray mesh patio chairs, he chose one that had not been gnawed by squirrels, dragged it across the concrete, and sat. He pulled out his mobile, tapped on the phone app, and selected the third number down. As usual, Robert picked up on the first ring.
“Please tell me you’re coming in tomorrow,” he said.
“I’m afraid not. Ella’s back in the CCU.” Explanations seemed irrelevant. The upside of working with Robert was that he never expressed interest in anyone’s personal life but his own. “She’s going to be in hospital for at least another two weeks.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Which means that starting on Tuesday, I’ll have to leave the office by two forty-five each day for school pickup.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Felix. Are you kidding me?”
A nice attitude from someone who was, no doubt, fresh home from taking his family to the weekly service at the First Methodist Church of Raleigh. Robert Sharpe was partial to anything that contained the word first.