Chapter 26

I woke up Friday morning with a headache, and a slightly upset stomach. I figured it was just the stress of leaning on Bestwick; though I'd walked some out and talked the rest out, you can't put yourself through something like that without consequences. I've known a couple of people who worked in call centers and had to get out before the stress ruined their health entirely. I used to wonder what older authors meant when they talked about an experience shattering someone's nerves, but as I've dealt with stress I've figured it out. I suspect that if I'd stayed a cop I'd be in poor health these days – with shattered nerves from the stress. And police officers do suffer from stress-related diseases on a significant basis.

I mooched out to the living room and flopped onto the sofa. There was a note in the coffee table in Cecelia's spiky hand, telling me she'd gone to visit a friend in Tijeras, someone she'd worked with before we met, and would be back that evening. Darlia would spend another night with Gacela, having taken enough clothes the day before to last her. I smiled at that – the two girls are more like sisters than friends, and when one spends the night it's always as though she expects it to be a permanent arrangement. At that I could think of worse mothers for Darlia than Sara, though I'm not ready to trade in Cecelia on any new model.

I left the note on the coffee table and picked up the book. I figured I'd finish it today, and in the back of my mind I began thinking about what I might like to read next. It was soon way back in my mind, as I "saw" the events of the Balloon Fiesta and Charlie Parker's attempts to figure out who was threatening her client.

After a while my headache began to moderate a bit. I knew that getting some caffeine into me might help, but it probably wouldn't do much for my stomach, so I didn't get a Coke. But I did decide on some ginger ale, that being good for upset stomachs. We always keep a little of it around, and I found the cans – only three of 'em, I saw – in their spot in the little cabinet above the refrigerator. I put ice into a glass and poured the ginger ale over it. It was one of the painted aluminum glasses I'd gotten from Tony and Anna when they'd died back in 1989. The paint was faded now, and worn completely off where hands had been gripping the metal for years, but I love those glasses – some green, some copper, some red – for their appearance and for the fact that whatever's in them seems to be colder and crisper. That last is probably my imagination, but I don't fight it – I just enjoy it.

The ginger ale did help, though not quickly, and after a couple of hours I did feel better. I finished the book, and set it on the return pile beside Cecelia's desk, and flipped through the to-read pile. I settled on a nice thick one - The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy. I had a whole bunch of Christian novels waiting for me – romances, which I wanted to try, though I've never been much of a romance fan nor, for that matter, a fan of Christian fiction, though I am a Christian – but I'd just finished some fiction and wanted a crack at non-fiction for a bit. And the Royal Navy has come up with some memorable one-liners, such as Nelson's signal at Trafalgar that "England expects that every man will do his duty," and Beatty's remark at Jutland that "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today."

So I decided to read on that subject. In the past I've read histories of the Air Force – which my brother served in – and the Marine Corps, and probably I'll eventually read about the US Army too. But for now the Royal Navy had my attention.

Or it would. With the settling down of my innards I was getting a bit hungry. With Cecelia gone there wasn't a chance of real cooking, and I wasn't really up to going out for any. Nor was I brave enough to risk something heavy anyway. I piddled around in the kitchen, looking into cabinets, and the freezer, and the fridge, and finally decided on a bowl of yogurt with strawberries. The strawberries were frozen, so I set them out to thaw under the little heat light that Cecelia's got set up by the stove, close to the coffeemaker. She doesn't like nuking things to thaw 'em out, and I'm not a fan of what microwaves do to the taste – I thought of my ruminations on that the night before, and grinned at myself for following the same train of thought – so we use that little infrared light.

I went back into the living room and settled down with the book. It seemed that it began its story in days before there was any such thing as a single English nation...

I was finding the book interesting, which isn't always the case when scholars do the writing, when the phone rang. We've got phones scattered around the house – one in the bedroom, one in the kitchen, one in the living room, even one in Cecelia's weight shed. I got up off the sofa and checked the caller ID of the living room phone, which sits beside the monitor of Cecelia's computer. I recognized the number and grabbed the phone.

"Hello!"

"Howdy, Son." I recognized the slow strong voice of Cecelia's father. "How are things out west?"

I headed back to the sofa, and laid the open book face down on the coffee table. "The usual, Daddy – work, play, eat, sleep, kiss your daughter..."

Daddy laughed. "I know you, Son – you kiss Cissy more than you do any of the other things."

"Well, shoot, that's the most fun. How's it goin' with y'all?"

"We all fine, here. Albert had him a bout of pneumonia, but he got over it, and it was all we could do to keep Bella from bein' his full-time nurse."

"She is a nurse, Daddy. She's bound to wanna nurse her brother."

"Shoot, that girl got herself a doctorate now, she ought not do all that. She can supervise, now."

"So she finally got her Ph.D.?" Bella, Cecelia's sister, had been working on a nursing doctorate for several years now.

"She sho did! Me an' Mama went up to Birmingham to see her get it too. You know, that wasn't so bad after all."

"That's the furthest y'all have been from home, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it is. We been right aroun' Leanna for a long time, us Johnstons. Mama, though, she come from Cottonwood, the other side of Dothan."

"So that's where Cecelia got her wandering blood!" As soon as she'd graduated from college Cecelia had moved to Albuquerque – though perhaps "wandering" wasn't quite the right word, since she's lived here ever since. She's only lived in two places her whole life.

"Yeah, she take after Mama in traveling. Me, I never saw nothin' I needed that I needed to go much further than Enterprise to find it. Even Mama come there for me to meet her."

"And I bet it was love at first sight."

"Just about, Son. I saw her, and wondered about her, and made a trip down again special the nex' week, and saw her again – an' made it a point to meet her. It was love at second sight." And he laughed over the phone.

"I never had that happen to me, though I guess it was pretty quick with me an' Cecelia, meeting in September and getting married in April."

"Yeah. Me an' Mama loved each other from that firs' meetin', but we didn't get married for two years after – it took me that long to get out of my daddy's house. Twasn't easy for black folks in Alabama in them days."

"I imagine not. I know Cecelia's the youngest, and she was born just when civil rights was taking off. Daddy, I don't know exactly what y'all went through down there, and I don't want to know – not by experience, anyway."