Free Spring Fever by Mary Kay Andrews Page A

and Modern Maturity .
    Choosing Modern Maturity only because all the brain-teaser puzzles in Highlights had already been worked, she was idly scanning an article about prostate health when Mason returned, slumping into a chair once removed from her own. He sighed loudly and buried his head in his hands.
    Annajane looked at the clock. “It’s barely been fifteen minutes,” she pointed out.
    He didn’t respond.
    “She’s a perfectly healthy little girl,” Annajane added. “And Dr. Kaufman really does know what he’s doing.”
    “I know that,” Mason said, his voice muffled. “It’s just … this place.” He raised his head. His voice was strained and full of despair. “This place. You know?”
    “I do know,” Annajane said softly. She hesitated, but after a moment, she reached over and squeezed his upper arm. His hand found hers, and he patted it briefly before letting go. They both knew this room all too well.
    A little over five years ago, she’d rushed into this same emergency room and found Mason sitting in almost the same place, slumped over, despondent, waiting for news from this same doctor, Max Kaufman. Only that time, the patient had been Mason’s father, Glenn, and the news, when it did come, had been devastating.
    Funny. That day was the beginning of the end of their marriage.
    *   *   *
     
    There had been other fights. Annajane wouldn’t have called them fights, really. Quarrels, or tiffs, if anybody ever really used that word.
    They’d been married less than two years, when the little fissures in their happiness began to appear.
    Mason and Annajane were living in the caretaker’s cottage at the lake. It was only a temporary address, Mason assured her, a rent-free solution until they saved enough money for a down payment on a house of their own.
    The cottage had been abandoned for years. As children, she and Pokey had appropriated it for a playhouse, furnishing it with cast-off furniture from the big house, a wobbly kitchen table, a pair of rickety wooden chairs, and an army cot for campouts. They played at cooking with a battered saucepan, once nearly burning the place down after attempting to heat up a can of SpaghettiOs on Davis’s Boy Scout camp stove.
    And yes, she and Mason had snuck away to the caretaker’s house for stolen hours in the first few months after they’d started dating.
    At first, Annajane had been enchanted with the quaint honeymoon cottage, with its deeply pitched slate roof, leaded-glass windows looking out onto the lake, and stacked stone fireplace.
    But living there was a different matter. The kitchen’s warped wooden cabinets didn’t close, the refrigerator barely cooled, and that adorable roof had a spot that leaked—directly over their bed. It was drafty in the winter and hot in the summertime, and damp and mildew from the lake seemed to creep in year-round. Also, there were mice. There was no washer or dryer, which meant they had to either troop into town to the coin Laundromat or drag their basket of dirty clothes up to the big house, like a couple of college students.
    All that Annajane might have cheerfully accepted. She hadn’t grown up in a mansion, as Mason had. Her family’s two-bedroom brick ranch had one window air-conditioning unit—in Ruth and Leonard’s bedroom—and just one bathroom. The real problem with the cottage was its location—directly in the looming shadow of Sallie Bayless, a constant presence in their lives, who was prone to dropping over uninvited to offer Annajane unsolicited advice on everything from housekeeping: “Annajane dear, you really must use lemon oil every week on Mason’s grandmother’s walnut dresser, to keep the wood from drying out”; to cooking, “Annajane dear, we never, ever use dark meat in chicken salad”; to marriage itself, “Annajane dear, no man wants to see his wife in the morning before she’s fixed her hair and her makeup—and his breakfast.”
    Her mother-in-law never came right out