The Renegade (The Moorehouse Legacy #3)(44)

One of the aides bustled by with a tray of cookies and stopped when she saw him. “Hello, Alex! Our Emma’s been waiting for you all day long.”

“Hi, Marlene. Hey, how’s your grandson?”

The woman flushed and cleared her throat. “Aren’t you sweet to ask. He’s much better since he got to meet you. All he talks about now is sailing.”

“You tell him I always got a place on my crew for a good man.”

Marlene reached out her hand, touching his arm. She blinked rapidly a couple of times. “Thank you. Really…thank you.”

The gratitude made him uncomfortable and Marlene seemed to know it. She smiled and patted him before stepping back.

“Listen, you don’t really have to come to his birthday party,” she said.

“Are you nuts? And miss the cake? Besides, he’s asked me to check out a girl for him. You know, see if she’s got what it takes. Gotta have my boy’s back. It’s a guy thing.”

Marlene looked as if she was about to melt again and he was relieved when she just put her hand to her throat, nodded and left.

It wasn’t that he minded tears. He’d always felt, though, that if a woman cried in front of him, he had to fix whatever it was that had upset her. And some things, like what had happened to Marlene’s grandson, just couldn’t be made right. At least not in the ways that mattered, not in the ways that would ensure the kid grew up and lived a full life and passed gently into the grave at the age of ninety.

Frankly the gratitude was weird, as if he were doing her a favor. Like he would turn down a request from a child in a burn unit? Whose company he enjoyed?

“We’re down here,” he said to Cassandra, nodding toward a corridor that stretched out to the right.

Every twenty feet there was a door, and some of them were open. Inside, residents watched TV from loungers or lay in bed reading or sleeping. Some of them looked up and the ones who did waved. He returned the greetings.

“Yo, martini!” he called out to one gentleman.

“Hiya, gin fizz!” the guy shouted back.

Alex paused in front of his grandmother’s closed door. He made sure his shirt was tucked in smoothly. Adjusted his belt so the buckle was precisely in the middle. Ran his hands through his hair, noting that it had to be cut.

He took a deep breath. As he wrapped his fingers around the handle, he glanced at Cassandra.

She was staring at him with an odd expression on her face.

“What?” He looked down at himself. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I—you just surprise me, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“You seem very human tucking in your shirt and smoothing your hair. That’s all.”

“Human?” God, had having sex with him convinced her he was some kind of animal?

The door was torn out of his hand before he could say anything else. The aide on the other side, a young woman with a blond ponytail, jumped.

“Oh! Hello!” She went breathless as she looked up at him and blushed the color of a Christmas ribbon.

“Hi, Lizzie.”

“Hi—I mean—” She bumped into the doorjamb as she came out, her blue eyes fixated on his face. “Hi. Um, she’s asleep.”

“Okay. I’ll just hang for a minute or two and leave her a note. I shouldn’t have come this late.”

“Do you want me to help you wake her up?”

“Nah. Leave her be.” Alex motioned Cassandra inside with his arm.

“Will you be back tomorrow?” Lizzie asked, bringing her ponytail around her shoulder and petting it. “Because she likes to have her hair done for when you come. She and I have such fun when I put it up for her. She just loves that. And she loves seeing you.”

“I’ll come the day after. And thanks for taking such good care of her.”

“I like her. A lot.”

Alex waved as the door eased shut. Hero worship coupled with a tender crush was as hard for him to handle as gratitude. In his mind, both magnified his faults to an unbearable clarity.

His grandmother’s room was dim, lit only by a night light glowing in the bathroom. The furnishings were institutional, like something you’d find in a college dorm, and the air smelled a little of disinfectant, but other than that, it was a very nice place. Lots of windows. Bright yellow walls. Everything was clean.

There were family pictures on every flat space in the room: the windowsill, the bureau, the bookcase by the door, the walls. A bouquet of fresh flowers, probably brought by Joy before she returned to New York City, was on a side table.

“Hello, grandmother,” Alex murmured as he approached the bed.

Emma Moorehouse had always been beautiful, and in her gentle slumber, she was still lovely at age eighty-eight. Her wavy, white hair flowed around her, spilling onto the Frette pillowcase and her peach satin duvet. Her face was unlined and pale as cream, the result of careful tending, not plastic surgery: she’d always taken a parasol outside with her, and that classic, high-bred bone structure had withstood the passage of the decades with grace.

He carefully picked up her hand. The skin on the back of it was translucent, so thin he could practically see the bones.

“It’s Lexi, Grandmother,” he said softly, while he smoothed her fingers.

She stirred and turned toward his voice, though her eyes remained closed.