Julia Spencer-Fleming - Out Of The Deep I Cry

Renee Rouse took his hand, squeezed it in hers. She nodded. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m just…”

She nodded again, then stitched a smile on her drawn face. “Why don’t you have some of that hot chocolate, lovey.” She stood. “I’m going to tidy up in the kitchen.”

Dr. Rouse took his mug off the table and sank back in on himself, as if his reserves of indignation had been spent. Did all that relentless consideration for your spouse help or hurt? Clare had really only seen one marriage up close and personal-her parents’-but she couldn’t recall her dad apologizing over a snapped remark like Dr. Rouse’s. Of course, she also couldn’t envision her mother bringing Dad hot cocoa on a tray or working to smooth his ruffled feathers.

Clare took her drink off the coffee table with a murmur of thanks. Mrs. Rouse gave her husband another look-checking his emotional temperature-and whisked out of the room. Mug in hand, Clare read COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS in Gothic gold lettering. “Did you attend Columbia?” she asked, trying for some semblance of conversation.

Dr. Rouse gestured toward Mrs. Marshall with his mug. “Her mother sent me. Paid my way through medical school and my residency. That’s how I wound up at the clinic, you know.” He sat up straighter, speaking directly to Mrs. Marshall. “It’s not as if it was my dream to sink my life into that two-bit practice, you know. I was going to do my time and get the hell out.”

Mrs. Marshall sat stiffly, knees together, and sipped her cocoa. Clare waited for her to respond to Dr. Rouse. When she didn’t, Clare ventured, “Why did you stay on?”

“Mrs. Ketchem died right around the time my obligation was up. I had agreed to head up the clinic for as many years as she supported my medical training, you see. Seven years. But when it was time for me to go, I could see there wasn’t anyone competent willing to take on such a thankless, underpaid job. And by that time, I had become sort of-infected by Mrs. Ketchem’s passion for the clinic.”

“ And you had a life here,” Mrs. Marshall said, “ and Renee didn’t want to move away from her family…”

He shot a fierce look at Mrs. Marshall. “That’s true. But mostly, it was the clinic. You have no idea what that place meant to your mother. None at all. If I told you-” He cut himself off.

Clare thought it sounded a bit theatrical. Evidently, Mrs. Marshall did, too. “Allan,” she said, her voice gentle, “I’m sure you have insights into my mother that are different from my own. But I’m the person she left as trustee, and I can only act according to my judgment about her wishes.” She put her mug down on the coffee table. “I think our presence here is just causing you more distress right now. Why don’t we leave and give you a chance to absorb what we’ve talked about. You have my number, and if you want to speak further after you’ve… adjusted to the news, please give me a call.”

She stood, and Clare hastily followed suit. Mrs. Rouse met them at the door as they retrieved their coats from the hall closet. “Leaving so soon?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall laid her hand on the woman’s arm. “Renee, I’m sorry to have had to bring bad news. Please let me know that he’s doing okay.”

For a moment, Mrs. Rouse’s chirpy facade fell away, and she looked older, tired, scared. “He’s just so unpredictable lately,” she whispered. “Sometimes he’ll sit for hours in that old chair, not reading, not watching television. Just sitting. Then other times he’ll come home ranting and raving and ready to take on the world. I wish I knew how to help him.”

“Have you thought about taking him to a psychiatrist?” Clare said. “Maybe he’s depressed.”

“He can’t be!” Mrs. Rouse’s expression went flat. “He’s the most stable person I know.” She reattached the cheery look on her face. “He probably just needs a break. We’re going away this Friday to a medical conference in Phoenix. We’ve planned to take a few extra days afterward, to lie by the pool and order room service.”

“That sounds wonderful, dear. I’m sure it will cheer him up,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Do keep in touch, won’t you?”

The two women exchanged hugs and Clare shook Mrs. Rouse’s hand.

Outside, on the top of the steps, they paused to pull on gloves. “You ought to encourage her to get him to see a doctor,” Clare said. “Stable people suffer from depression, too. And he was acting very oddly in there, you have to admit. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to curl up and die or come out fighting.”

Mrs. Marshall clutched Clare’s arm against icy slips as they descended the steps. “Maybe,” she said.

“You sound doubtful.”

At the walk, Mrs. Marshall let go of Clare and snapped open her clutch to retrieve her keys. “We’re from another generation, dear. We don’t go popping off to get mood-altering pills whenever life hands us a setback.”

Clare rolled her eyes.

“I will check in with Renee when they get back from Phoenix.”

“Thanks.” Clare fished her keys from her parka pocket. “Let’s hope it starts.”

“Oh, I think it’s warmed up.”

“Yeah. It’s twenty degrees instead of fifteen.” Clare walked Mrs. Marshall around the snow piled against the curb to her Lincoln and held the door open as the elderly woman got behind the wheel. “What was that remark about you not knowing your mother?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall pursed her lips. “My mother, because of several tragic events over which she had no control, was the subject of all sorts of gossip over the years. I’ve already heard every variation of her supposed secrets. I don’t need to sit around and have Allan Rouse repeat old stories.” She started up her car. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

“I’ll be there.” Clare shut the Lincoln’s door and walked to her Shelby. Thankfully, it started.

On the drive back to St. Alban’s, she passed the clinic. It looked vaguely accusing to her in the hard-edged morning light. For the first time, she noticed the carving in the granite lintel over the door giving its original name: THE JONATHON KETCHEM CLINIC. She wished Mrs. Marshall hadn’t interrupted Allan Rouse. Maybe the older woman had already heard it all, but for her own peace of mind, Clare very much wanted to know what the clinic had meant to Jane Ketchem.

Clare didn’t have cause to drive into Cossayuharie much, so she was worried she’d go right by Debba Clow’s place. Narrow roads ran like cow paths around rolling hills and pastures in Cossayuharie, most of them unmarked and all of them passing clapboarded houses and dairy barns, until all at once the driver ran out of fields and was in the sharp switchbacks of the mountains.

“Don’t worry,” Debba had said over the phone. “It’s impossible to miss our house. We have purple shutters.”

Cresting a large hill, the written directions pinched between her hand and the wheel, Clare saw the Clow residence where Debba had promised it would be, straddling the road at the bottom of a narrow valley. Debba had underreported the impossibility of missing it.

It was shaped like the typical Cossayuharie farmhouse, an overlarge, under-maintained structure that had started life as an 1850s four-up-four-down and had shotgunned backward through an 1870s parlor, an 1890s kitchen, and a 1920s extra bedroom. However, the Clow farmhouse also had the less typical 1960s addition of a rotting psychedelic bus in the side yard, multiple 1970s solar panels, something that looked like a steppe-dweller’s tent, and a paint job that defied categorization. The purple shutters were the least of it. As Clare shifted into neutral and let the Shelby roll downhill-her personal gas-saving technique-she could see yellow-and-black checkerboards over the chimney bricks, door lintels encrusted with D-I-Y mosaics, and painted jungle vines flowering up the front porch posts. The porch stairs were colored like Easter eggs and embellished with stencils of what proved to be, as Clare pulled into the dooryard, farm animals. She could make out pink pigs on the lavender step, brown cows on the yellow.