Free Winners by Danielle Steel

how hard for her.
    “You don’t have to,” Ben reassured her. “I’ll stick around for a while.” His girlfriend Kazuko had come to the funeral parlor, and Ben was going to be one of the pallbearers the next day. Kazuko was a nurse he had met at UCSF, and they had lived together for years. She had come to Squaw Valley from San Francisco with him, and the living arrangement they had seemed to work. He was two years younger than Jessie, and at forty-one, he still didn’t feel ready to get married. Jessie and Kazuko had talked about it several times, and Kazuko had given up hope that he ever would. She was forty-six years old, totally devoted to him and didn’t seem to care if they got married now. She said she felt too old to have kids, and had given up the opportunity, to be with him. She worked at the hospital in radiology, had dozens of hobbies, and spoke fluent Japanese, although she’d been born in the States. She and Ben had gone to Japan several times, and he had learned Japanese too. They were avid skiers, which was what had brought them there in the first place, and Ben loved their life in Squaw Valley. Ben had grown up in L.A. and said he never missed it. Mountain life suited him far more than it did Jessie, who still missed city life occasionally, and the cultural life it offered, after her years in Boston and Palo Alto, near San Francisco, and growing up in New York before that, but she had come to Lake Tahoe for Tim and never looked back.
    When Jessie got to the hospital to check on Lily, she was sleeping, and Bill was roaming the halls, worried. Jessie examined her and was satisfied that it was a minor but ordinary complication of the surgery, and she and Ben agreed, but she felt better for having seen her.
    “How are your kids doing?” Bill asked her before she left. He had been surprised that she’d come in, but Lily was a major case, and although she trusted Ben implicitly, she wouldn’t have been comfortable if she hadn’t seen her herself. She didn’t say it to Bill, but he understood and was impressed. If the news she had given him weren’t so bad, he might have liked her better than he did. As it was, he resented what she’d said about Lily never walking again.
    “My kids are okay, I guess,” Jessie answered his question. “As okay as they can be right now. It doesn’t seem real to any of us yet,” and as she said it, she realized that that was how he felt about Lily’s accident. It took time to absorb the reality of change into one’s life, especially changes as major as the ones that had just happened to all of them.
    “Thank you for coming in.” He knew the funeral was the next day, and her showing up at the hospital to check Lily’s fever was a sign of her meticulous diligence.
    She reassured him again about Lily, and then left, and went home. The children were painfully quiet, and the house was eerily silent since the accident. It was hard to imagine laughter there again. The older children were distraught. Jimmy was already sound asleep in his mother’s bed, and Adam was playing video games on the TV, with a glazed look. They all felt as though they were underwater, moving in slow motion.
    Tim’s mother was alive in Chicago, but had dementia, and wouldn’t understand what was going on, so she didn’t come. Jessie had lost her parents years before, fairly young, so the children had no grandparents to share their grief with them. All they had now was their mother.
    The funeral the next day was even worse. It had a horrifying unreality to it, as the priest talked about Tim and the choir sang “Ave Maria,” while Jessie and her children cried. Almost every medical practitioner, nurse, and technician in Squaw was there. Jessie recognized hundreds of faces but wouldn’t remember any of them later. The pallbearers were all fellow anesthesiologists he worked with, and Ben, and Chris had asked to be one of them too. It nearly ripped out Jessie’s heart as she watched him and