Page 83 of The Lonely Hearts Book Club

“We told you already,” Sloane said. “We saw Mateo drive up. He’s bringing a guest with him tonight.”

“It’s that mother of his, isn’t it?” I asked, though I wasn’t nearly as upset at the prospect as I sounded. Althea Sharpe had been gifted with a set of pipes—she and that son of hers both. Genie used to love those old French standards. Couldn’t sing worth a damn, that woman, but that had never stopped her from belting her heart out anyway. I could still hear her standing over the sink as she did the dishes, butchering half the words toLa Bohèmeand forgetting the rest.

As was always the case when I let Genie slip into my memories, I felt myself hardening into stone.

“She can come today, but I won’t have it anymore.” I thumped my cane on the floor for good effect. Once upon a time, I used to be able to command attention with my voice and my words, but those days were rapidly dwindling. I was starting to realize what Teddy Roosevelt saw in that big stick of his. “I’m getting tired of my house being turned into your personal playground. If you want to keep throwing parties, I’m charging you rent.”

I drew a deep breath and waited for the inevitable backtalk. I looked forward to it, even. Back when I’d been a teacher, none of my students would have dared to speak to me that way, all of them so worried about getting the right answers that they never let themselves enjoy the deep, satisfying process of being wrong.

Sloane was wrong all the time. Maisey, too. Mateo and Greg didn’t put forth their opinions very often, but I felt pretty sure they didn’t have one good literary theory between the two of them.

But damn it all if I didn’t like every last one of them for it, for doubling down on their errors and trying to talk circles around me, for taking enough interest totry. I hadn’t felt this good about arguing with people in decades. Not since…

“Are you going to open the door and let them in, or do I have to do everything around here?” I stalked forward and yanked on the doorknob before I went too far down that road. Standing around and dwelling on the past wasn’t doing me any favors—not the standing part, anddefinitelynot the dwelling part. “You’re welcome to join us this time, but there will be no singing until after we pick the next book club book. That’s my final word on the subject.”

I only got the door halfway open before it happened again—that sense of drowning, of sinking to the bottom of the ocean with an anchor tethered to my chest. This time, however, I wasn’t lying alone on my mattress. Instead, there were people—so many people, all of them crowding around me at once.

“I knew this was a bad idea.”

“Let’s get you somewhere comfortable, Arthur.”

“He doesn’t look too good.”

“Didn’t you warn him I’d be coming? I thought you said he was expecting me.”

“Just give the man some space to breathe. He’ll be all right in a second.”

This last one was uttered by Mateo, my favorite by far. All the other nurses that had been sent here were more like angels of death than medical practitioners, each one listing the ways and means of my inevitable departure from this world.

Do this or you’ll die a cold, miserable death.

Eat this or you’ll slip into a coma and die a cold, miserable death.

Measure your urine output or I’ll do it for you, and then we’ll both die a cold, miserable death.

Mateo didn’t do any of that. He was begrudging but efficient, more concerned with his own affairs than anything that was happening in my life. At least, that was what I’d always assumed. When I blinked and risked another glance at the man next to him, all of my good feelings fled.

“Get him out of my house,” I croaked, my voice sounding as if from twenty thousand leagues under the sea. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, you’re wrong. It’s all wrong.”

“Now, now, Arthur,” came the smooth, dulcet voice of Nigel Carthage. The years had done nothing to change the insufferably uptight look of him. Oh, he was older, of course, as we all were, but neither time nor trouble had touched him the way it touched me. His tie was too tight, his belt chosen to match the exact sheen of his shoes. “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

“You’re not my friend,” I said as Mateo thrust me down to the couch and pulled out his blood pressure cuff. As the Velcro ripped open and he unceremoniously wrapped the cuff around my arm, I added, “None of you are my friends. I regret the day I agreed to any of this.”

For some strange reason, this made my grandson laugh. “You haven’t agreed to a single thing since I’ve been here. In case you haven’t noticed, that hasn’t stopped us yet.”

I tried to turn a glare on him, but it didn’t work. Ever since I’d broken down and asked him about his mother, begged him to tell me if she’d really sent him here, if she hadn’t forgotten me in her final moments, I’d lost my power.

And distance.I’d lost my distance most of all.

***

Nigel Carthage had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a complete Shakespearean library at his feet. In addition to a trust fund and an estate in Surrey that he almost never visited, he had a family friend so high up the publishing chain that he was practically the anchor link.

“You look rough,” Nigel said as he took the chair opposite mine. Even in my hazy, half-lidded state, I could see him carefully hitch his pants, his eyes never straying around the room. He noticed it, though—I knew he did. The tumbling, dusty books and the hospital bed, the faded curtains and patterned rug that I’d never had the heart to replace.

Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

“Who are you calling rough?” I grumbled. Of course I looked rough. Ifeltrough. Unlike Nigel, life hadn’t seen fit to place me on a marble pedestal and leave me there. “And why the devil are all of you watching me like I’m about to keel over and die? If the shock of seeing my old nemesis come waltzing into my house uninvited didn’t kill me, then nothing will. I’m immortal.”