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“Not at all,” she said, and wanted to ask if there was anything she could do for the older woman before she left.
“My grandson says that you’re over there alone.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t have a ring on.”
“I’m single.”
“Have you always been?” The voice was fading, but the hawkish look in Nonnie’s eyes was not.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How come?”
I beg your pardon? The words were there. For some reason, Addy didn’t say them. What she did say was, “I’m a bit of a loner.”
“Pssshh. No one’s really a loner,” Nonnie said. “Who was he?”
Was dementia a problem here, as well? Mark hadn’t intimated as much. But sometimes the family was the last to admit. “Who was who?”
“The man who hurt you so much you’d rather live alone?”
“There was no man.” Anyone else she’d have told to jump in the lake. In polite terms, of course. “I date. I’ve just never met anyone worth giving up my solitude for.”
Arms crossed, Addy stood there, taking on the bird of a woman.
“You ain’t gay, then.”
“No.” She laughed.
“Didn’t think so, but these days, you can never be sure. There’s lipsticks and dykes and—”
“Mrs....!” Addy broke off when she realized she didn’t know Mark’s last name. Or even if his and his grandmother’s last names were the same.
But she was fairly certain the woman was being purposely outrageous.
“Call me Nonnie,” the woman filled in without pause. “Everyone does. And don’t mind me, dear. I said what I thought when I was young enough to know better. No hope of stopping me now.”
“I don’t mind,” Addy said, perplexed as she realized that she spoke the truth. She should mind.
“Mark minds. But he worries too much, that boy of mine. My fault, not his. I was so certain I could handle raising him all by myself, but my body had other plans for me. Been the other way around longer than it should’ve been.”
“I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he doesn’t seem to mind having you around.” What did she know? Really.
“Nah, Mark don’t mind ’bout that. Like I said, he’s a good boy. Always taking care of everybody. That’s why I had to get him out of Bierly. That town was going to eat up my boy’s whole life and he’d never have known any different. Folks’re nice there, but they used my Mark. Always asking him to do the jobs no one else wanted to do ’cause they knew he would. And he was too nice to call ’em on it.”
Not sure what that meant, but completely sure she had no business having this conversation, Addy heard herself ask, “What did he do there?”
“Worked his ass off,” Nonnie said, and then, with a grin said, “Sorry, dear, I meant ‘butt.’”
“Doing what?” It’s no business of yours, woman. You’re here under false pretenses for one semester—fingers crossed—and then it’s back to Colorado and private practice for you.
“Anything anyone needed, during his time off. On the
clock he was in management at the gasification plant. Pretty much everyone in Bierly either works at the plant or has someone in the house that does.”
“Is that one of those places that turns coal into natural gas?” There was one in North Dakota that thought itself one of America’s best-kept secrets. Addy knew of it only because the Colorado-based daughter of one of their line workers missed too much school the year her father was killed and had been facing twenty-four hours in juvenile detention for truancy.
