The M.D. Meets His Match
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“Don’t want to get used to anything new at my age, except maybe a man,” Gran had said with a wink. “You keep your money and buy a house for yourself.”
And that was that. Telling Gran she didn’t want a house of her own was out of the question. Gran wouldn’t have believed her. She had her own preconceived notions of what people did or didn’t want and there was no talking her out of them.
“Gran,” April called up the stairs, “is there anything I can get you?”
“No, I’m fine, dear,” her grandmother’s voice assured her. “Just watching my story. I’ll be down to help you as soon as it’s over.”
April shook her head as she hurried up the stairs to head off her grandmother. The woman had a patent on stubbornness. They’d waltzed around this argument every day since she’d arrived. The first day had been the most difficult, but April hadn’t fooled herself into believing that she had won the war, just tiny skirmishes here and there.
“No, you won’t,” April informed her, entering a tiny living room filled to overflowing with knickknacks that had taken more than six decades to accumulate. April seriously doubted that Gran threw out anything, convinced that the moment she would, a need for the item, no matter how obscure, would arise. “If you remember, the reason I’m here, playing solitaire with all those envelopes, is so that you can rest—and sensibly see your way clear to going to the hospital in Anchorage for—”
Lying on the sofa, Ursula Hatcher waved a small hand in the air to push away the words she knew were coming. “Stuff and nonsense,” she proclaimed. “Bunch of children playing doctor, poking at me for no good reason.” She raised her chin, tossing her gray-streaked faded red hair over her shoulder. “My heart’s fine. It’s just a little tired, but it has a right to be. It’s been working nonstop for sixty-nine years without a vacation. You’d be tired, too, if you’d worked that hard,” she insisted staunchly.
April reached over to adjust the black-and-yellow crocheted throw draped over her grandmother’s legs. “That’s just the point, Gran—” April began.
Ursula finished adjusting the throw herself, then cocked her head, listening. “Is that the doorbell downstairs?”
April pinned her with a look. Her grandmother was a great one for diversions when she didn’t like the subject under discussion. “Whoever it is down there will keep, Gran. They can’t be in any sort of a hurry if they’re living in Hades.”
“Think you know everything, don’t you, child?” Ursula began digging her knuckles in on either side of the sofa, giving a masterful performance of a person struggling to get up. “It’s a postmistress’s duty to be there when someone walks into the post office. But that’s all right, dear, you’re busy. I’ll go—”
April struggled to keep from laughing. Her grandmother was ruining her attempt at being stern with her. Very gently, she pushed the older woman back against the mound of pillows she’d personally fluffed up this morning.
“God, but you are good at dispensing guilt,” she informed her grandmother. The older woman smiled in response. “Stay put, you hear me? I’ll go down and see who it is.”
“That’s my girl.” Settling back, Ursula beamed, satisfied. She watched her oldest granddaughter cross to the stairs, affection welling up within her. April was a good girl, if somewhat misguided. “April—”
One foot on the stairs, April stopped to turn around. “Yes?”
Feeling slightly awkward, Ursula lowered her eyes and picked at the yellow-and-white daisies crocheted within the throw. “Did I ever tell you how much I appreciate your coming back to mind the store?”
April’s smile broadened. “Yes, Gran, you told me. And you know I’d do anything for you.”
“I know—” She strained to listen for the sound of movement downstairs. “So go see who it is.” She raised herself up slightly, so that her voice would follow April down the stairs. “And if you don’t know where to find something—”
“You’re right here to tell me,” April called back, finishing a statement she had heard over and over again growing up. Unlike their far frailer mother, Gran had always promised to be there for them, to show them the way no matter what. And she had. April and her siblings had come to believe that Gran was going to go on forever. Being confronted with a different kind of scenario was difficult to come to terms with. “Yes, I know.”
April looked around the small outpost as she reached the bottom of the stairs. As if she couldn’t find absolutely everything there was to find in this room within a matter of seconds, she thought. If the post office were any smaller, her claustrophobia would have kicked in.
As it was, the room that housed all the incoming and outgoing mail for Hades could be referred to as small with just cause. She could turn the whole area upside down in a matter of mere minutes if she wanted to.
Gran’s hearing was as good as ever, she thought. Someone had entered the post office while she’d been upstairs. The small bell attached to the door hardly made a sound worth listening for, but Gran was apparently still tuned in to it.
“May I help you?”
Shoving her hands into the back pockets of her faded jeans, April addressed the words to the back of a head she didn’t immediately recognize. When the man turned around, she found she didn’t recognize his face, either. She had to admit that it felt a little unusual not knowing the man. Before she’d left Hades, there hadn’t been a face she didn’t know, at least on sight.
She would have remembered this face.
With the trained eye of a professional photographer, she studied him quickly from head to toe. He looked to be several years older than she was, but at the same time, he had a face that appeared as if it would remain perpetually youthful even in old age. He had the kind of eyes, blue and intense, that would twinkle well into his nineties.
They were twinkling now as they took slow, careful measure of her. She could almost feel them passing over her body.