Free Healer by Carol Cassella Page B

Walker didn’t live there, but she remembered talking to him about Hallum at the fund-raiser. They’d actually been talking about wine at the time, and Addison had said he’d always dreamed about getting a vineyard going on the east side someday, when he had time. Walker said he’d gone in for apples instead, “breaking the Gen X trend,” though he was older than both of them by at least a decade. She can practically feel her brain cross-linking the threads—tagging the Walker from Seattle with the Walker who owned the orchard and the Walker named on this plaque. So, who knows? she asks herself, turning once to scan the meager equipment in this room. Maybe that ancient EKG machine was bought with the check they wrote for that trip. She can’t help thinking about what they might do with that twelve thousand dollars if they still had it today.

• 8 •
    The predicted snow hovers and teases until she is almost home and then, like an enormous down pillow, the weight of such nearly weightless particles breaks and spills silently from the clouds. She punches in the number for the house and waits for Jory to answer, hangs up and hits Redial until Jory’s petulant “Hello” puts a halt to Claire’s imagined fires or falls.
    “Did you eat anything? There’s leftover hamburger in the fridge. Can you heat that up?” Jory exhales into the telephone, only enough to confirm that she is alive and whole. “I should be home in half an hour. Or so. Is the furnace working okay? You’re not cold, are you?”
    “I hate hamburger.”
    “Well, cook some eggs, then. Or mac and cheese. It’s starting to snow pretty hard, so don’t worry if it takes me a while to get back. Did Daddy call?” Claire waits for some response until she hears the double blip of lost reception.
    The driveway is nearly impassable by the time she gets home; the car slithers and skids down the last steep turn. Proof again, she thinks, that snow tires might help you go but they weren’t much good at helping you stop. Jory is eating Chunky chicken noodle soup out of the can with a huge glass of chocolate milk. Claire pulls a chair next to her; Jory seems determined not to acknowledge her.
    “Hey,” Claire says.
    After a long, chilly minute Jory clips, “Hey, yourself.”
    Claire leans forward on her crossed arms, close enough to break the seal of her daughter’s exclusive space, waiting to see if she’ll be allowed to stay. “I was gone a long time. I’m sorry.”
    There is no response to this but a slight, magnetic pull toward her mother instead of away. Claire tilts her face until her temple rests on Jory’s shoulder, awaits the yield as her daughter relaxes. “Are you still hungry?” Jory shrugs. “We could have a popcorn and movie night.” Claire starts up the stairs. “Give me a minute. I’m freezing.”
    She strips her clothes onto the bathroom floor and puts on her robe, then dumps a whole box of bath salts, Anna’s gift from the going-away party, into the skim of rising water dyeing it an iridescent blue-green. She’s been saving them, planning to share a bath with Addison as a celebration when they move back into some decent home with some decent bathtub. But the truth about life, she is deciding, exactly at this moment, in fact, is that you never know what lies around the corner. She’s just sold off a closet of clothes she’s barely worn, books she’s never read, a cellar of wine that was getting more valuable by the day. So she will soak in this tub alone and imagine Addison, perhaps soaking at this very moment in the Drake’s deep, marble-lined tub, a billion tiny bubbles fizzing in the coils of his chest hair.
    The water is still cold when she tests it. “Jory,” she calls down from the bathroom. “I’m not getting any hot water. Did you take a long shower or something?”
    Jory walks to the bottom of the stairwell and looks up, her hair tangled down the front of her robe. She looks so childlike from this vantage that