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Nineteen
I EXPECTED EVERYTHINGto blow up pretty fast after the scene at the hospital.
For days, we waited for photos of Jack and Hank in the waiting room to surface online.
But they didn’t.
Every day that passed I breathed a little easier—though, even the possibility of the photos turning up meant we were more trapped on the ranch than ever—because now we really had to lie low.
Here was the problem: It was fun to be on the ranch.
In theory, I knew to be on alert. But, in practice, it really was a forced vacation.
And there’s a reason people take vacations, I guess.
They work.
Slowly, unintentionally, and fully against my will… I relaxed.
A bit.
We fell into a rhythm. Connie returned with an official diagnosis of dehydration-induced vertigo, and she made a new commitment to hydrating. Doc clucked and fussed over her, bringing blankets and fixing cups of herbal tea. Hank and Jack kept a wary truce—not wanting to upset either of their parents. And I made myself useful by cooking all the meals, watering Connie’s garden, and collecting bouquets of flowers to place around the house. It was a pleasant, sunny, rural way of life that made the real world feel like a different universe entirely. In a really good way.
Hank redeemed himself a little bit by bringing in broccoli, brussels sprouts, and squash from the garden—and washing it for me in the sink. As mean as he was to Jack, he was never mean to me—and I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had to work to hold onto that anger.
Like it maybe wasn’t natural to him.
Both of the boys, for example, went out of their way to look after Connie—checking on her in a way that felt almost competitive, like some unspoken Best Son competition.
She was definitely not neglected.
As time went by, she got better.
After a checkup in town, she got the news that the site was healing well.
She still wore her robe every day—saying she might never go back to real clothes—but she spent less and less time in her room, and less and less time napping.
The less sick she felt, the more of her personality came out. I learned, for example, that she liked to hook rag rugs out of old clothing. She was a lightning-fast reader and could finish an entire book in a day. And apparently, last summer, she’d ripped something in her knee when she’d gotten overenthusiastic listening to music while doing housework and had started doing the cancan. She now referred to it as her “cancan injury,” and it still acted up sometimes.
Connie also had four hundred pairs of reading glasses. They were everywhere. In the cupboards, between sofa pillows, in bowls on the screen porch, on the kitchen table. She kept one pair on a chain around her neck and had at least two on her head at any given time.
“This is who I am now,” she explained. “There are worse fates.”
She also had an astonishing hobby. She refurbished old dolls and gave them to the local women’s shelter. She had a whole collection of creepy ones she’d rescued from thrift shops—dolls that looked almost like Barbie had undergone extreme plastic surgery: overly made-up cat eyes, and giant, swollen lips. They were supposed to be “teenagers,” and they were marketed toward little girls, but they really looked more like mutant porn stars.
But guess what Connie did with them? She took their faces off.
She wiped the faces with acetone until they were completely blank and then started from scratch repainting them to look, this time, like normal kids. Big eyes. Sweet smiles. Freckles. She braided their hair and sewed little play clothes for them. She gave them a second chance at a new life.
How could I not love her?
Doc was utterly lovable, too, by the way.
He took to sitting at the far end of the kitchen, deejaying songs for me from the Stapleton family record collection while I made dinner, and singing along to oldies with Doc Stapleton became my favorite time of day.
Add to that: Jack Stapleton knew how to dance. You saw American Rhythm, right? Where he played a ballroom dancer? That was no body double. He learned all the dances himself. So when he’d hear Sam Cooke on the turntable, or Rosemary Clooney, or Harry Belafonte, he’d show up in the kitchen, and pull me out into a spin.
Jack insisted it was essential for the fake relationship. “That’s totally what I’d do with a real girlfriend,” he promised.
