Bitterroot Lake, Alicia Beckman [good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT] 📗

breakfast nook beside her and just hanging. Although Noah wasn’t a teenager anymore.

In the kitchen, she set the tiny nest on the window sill beside the nest she’d picked up on the lawn and the pine cone from the sewing room. Grabbed her keys and strode to the carriage house.

She backed the rig out, then paused at the end of the circular driveway to watch the two men remove a badly leaning fir that might threaten a cabin if the winds turned wrong. Both men wore white hard hats bearing the company logo. Her brother held out a hand to stop her, but she was already stopped. She was a lumberman’s daughter.

Matt made one last cut and Connor used the winch and cable in the back of the truck to land the tree softly without damaging the undergrowth or the soft earth. Then Connor waved her through. She waved back and slipped the rig in gear.

The rain had stopped, but water ran down the ruts in the road. Her tires slipped in the mud, sending the rear end sideways a few inches, and she shifted into low gear. Felt the front tires start to catch, then begin to slide backward. “Don’t let me down now, car,” she urged and the wheels spun, then caught solid ground. She fed the gas slowly and the wheels took hold, gliding forward.

At the top of the road, she stayed on McCaskill Lane but pulled over to the side. First call, her mother. No answer on the house line; voice mail on the cell. Peggy must be painting. She left a message saying Connor had been out and while the damage to the lodge was more extensive than she’d thought, he was sure it could be easily repaired. Not much of an exaggeration—he had been sure, calling Matt Kolsrud the elder a log home magician. Enough time and money, the man could do anything.

Next, the phone company, where a digitized voice told her to touch one for this and two for that and sent her in an endless loop until she finally touched zero and after a long silence in which she was sure the line had gone dead, she was told to wait. A small-town phone company should not need such a cumbersome system. When a human finally came on the line, Sarah gave her mother’s name, remembering that they wouldn’t talk to Holly, and answered the perfectly pleasant service rep’s perfectly reasonable questions: the number, the address, and what could Mrs. McCaskill tell her about the damage? No service call on record, meaning Peggy had forgotten, as Sarah had begun to suspect. They’d try to get someone out Friday, but couldn’t make any promises. Monday, more likely, or possibly Tuesday. Was there anything else she needed?

Oh, yes. There was so much more she needed than a working landline. A cell signal. A sister who didn’t keep secrets. A friend who wasn’t under suspicion for murder. A time turner so she could bring Jeremy back to life, get him to the doctor sooner so they could catch his cancer before it took off like the proverbial bat out of hell. Why were men so stubborn about going to the doctor? Would it have made any difference? The oncologist had been noncommittal on that point, not wanting, she supposed, to give them one more thing to beat themselves up about. Hadn’t they always known the cancer might come back? Yes, but not for years. Decades. Not until they’d spent a good long life together, finished raising their kids, spoiled grandchildren, taken a cruise down the Danube, all those milestones you assumed you’d live to see.

Why were there bats in hell anyway?

“Thank you, no,” she told the faceless woman in the phone company office. “You’ve been a big help.”

The car windows had begun to fog, so she punched buttons on the dashboard. The vents opened and cold air smacked her in the face. She pushed more buttons, until the air began to warm and the fog to recede. Her mother refused to get a new car because the new models were more like mobile computers than cars. She’d rolled her eyes, but now she had to agree. Why was life so stinking complicated?

She cracked the window open. In the distance, she heard Matt’s chainsaw. Glanced at the time. Her kids would be in class. Don’t call. Don’t become a stalker-mom. Texting was a godsend. Abby’s first few weeks at school, she’d texted at least once every day, and the hour before bed had often been a text-fest, with pictures and sometimes a call. Then Jeremy’s diagnosis had come and they hadn’t told the kids, but when it became apparent that this time the cancer wasn’t going to go away quietly like it had before, they’d shared the news. After that, both kids called and texted daily. The phone had been the glue that held her heart together.

And now? Now she was in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere with the bars on her screen flat as the proverbial pancakes.

But she’d talked to Abby this morning, so she sent both kids a quick text saying Uncle Connor was here checking on the storm damage, but everything was under control and he sent his love. The second she hit send, on a rare upward bounce of the signal, she wished she hadn’t been so breezy. Been more caring, asking how they were doing, yadda yadda.

As if anybody, let alone a teenager or just-recently-former teenager, ever responded to mush like that.

Truth was, she didn’t know how to take care of herself in this terrible time, let alone her kids.

Just be there, her therapist would say.

Easy to say, and hard to do. Where exactly was “there”?

Her phone buzzed with a flood of texts. Including a reminder of the call with her therapist at nine thirty. It was nine fifty-three.

Oops.

Could she claim she hadn’t been able to get a line, which was half true? Pretend she’d spaced