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“What do you mean, her usual?” Bree asked as she reached out toward her grandmother’s purse, offering to carry it for her. But before she could grasp it, her grandmother slapped her hand away. Bree caught my concerned glance, but just slightly shook her head as if it weren’t worth mentioning.
I didn’t know what to make of that.
“Just take her up to room 717, I’ll have the front desk send up a key and meet you there,” Terry said with a sigh, clearly over this whole ordeal, as he pulled out his walkie talkie and made the request.
I really wasn’t sure what to do with myself at this point. A specific feeling that I had successfully avoided for years. It wouldn’t be helpful to anyone if I tried to follow Bree and Miss Barb to the hotel room, especially given Miss Barb’s negative reaction to me earlier. But lingering here was starting to feel like too much too.
I caught Bree’s eye and mouthed, “You good?”
She simply nodded, tired acceptance in her gaze as she inclined her head to the exit as if to say, “Now’s your chance….”
I held her gaze, doing my best to project exactly what I thought of that and hoping my message was clear.
This wasn’t goodbye.
18
BREE
Iwanted Vinh to leave just as much as I wished he could stay.
But this was a family matter.
One that needed to be dealt with on multiple levels and without the distraction of Vinh Lott and his incomprehensible expressions.
Ones that seemed to hold equal parts hope and promise.
Promises that felt preemptively broken when my mind refused to separate them from the sight of him walking away.
I cast my gaze around room 717 and prepared myself to deal with the situation at hand.
Or situations, it seemed.
Between Big Daddy’s phone call and now, as I sat in a tufted armchair in the corner of this particular hotel room—a room that somehow already held a full rack of Grandmother's clothes and a bathroom vanity littered with her signature Mary Kay cosmetics—I realized that something was going on.
That something had been going on.
AJ had offered to “escort” us here, and Grandmother had accepted his offered elbow, leaving her sandwiched between us, before I could object. The only saving grace was her firm dismissal of him as soon as a Fortuna concierge appeared and handed me the entry key to the mysterious, inexplicable Room 717.
Grandmother hadn’t said a word when she shuffled into the 400-square-foot room—her room—and placed her purse on the side table before sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed.
She now bent over, clearly struggling to remove her shoes, but knowing she’d never deign to ask for help—a genetic trait?—I kneeled on the thin carpet and removed both her socks and stockings, setting them on the luggage stand so she could reach them easily in the morning. She wordlessly gestured toward her bottle of muscle-and-joint cream on the nightstand, and I took the hint, opening the bottle and working a layer of the potent-smelling lotion onto her calves, ankles, and the tops of her feet.
The only words she said before getting into bed and promptly falling asleep were a sharp dismissal when I asked if she was sure she didn’t want to see a doctor, a subject I had initially attempted to open during the elevator ride here.
I washed my hands in the bathroom before returning to the chair and watching Grandmother sleep, taking a moment to wonder what in the world I was going to do about it all before getting to work to discover what—and how bad—“it all” was.
Over the last few hours, I learned a lot in room 717. And almost wished I could unlearn it.
I’d briefly considered grabbing the shuttle home once it was apparent that Grandmother wouldn’t be stirring until morning, but I was too worried to leave her alone. It also seemed counterproductive to trade this much more pressing problem for another one.
Unless she’d changed the locks, I could have just gone back to my old room at the Big House for the night, bypassing the issue of the trailer, but my pride wouldn’t allow it.
I was afraid that, despite her insistence otherwise, I would miss something else about her health. Having had my mother later in life, Grandmother was somewhere in her seventies. Besides “Mr. Arthur,” I didn’t think she had any other medical issues. Though what I thought I knew apparently meant nothing, as she’d been living at Fortuna—not in the house only fifty yards from the trailer—without my knowledge and for who knows how long.
Which potentially gave the recent lack of power at the Big House new meaning beyond a missed bill.
The clock on the bedside table read 3:17 a.m. when I finally worked up the nerve to do an online search of the symptoms Vinh had described to me with his careful, precise words.
