The Swallow's Nest. Emilie Richards
“My tutu trotted out an old Hawaiian proverb whenever things went wrong. ‘He ihona, he pi’ina, he kaolo.’ It means we go down, we go up, we walk on a level road. A level road is all I’m asking for. Graham, too.”
“He’s looking so much better. Hair’s appealing on a man, don’t you think?”
Lilia allowed herself to laugh. “We weren’t sure what color it would be after chemo, but I think it looks the way it did before he lost it, only shorter.”
Graham, dark blond hair a couple of inches now, was standing outside their sunroom door with newly arrived partygoers, receiving good wishes. Employees and clients from Encompass Construction, the design-build firm he had created from the ground up, were shoulder to shoulder with neighbors, college friends and some of Lilia’s clients, too. But in the middle of a conversation with another young man, he stopped and turned, looking straight at her, as if he knew she was talking about him. Then he smiled.
For a moment she fell back in time to the first day Graham Randolph had smiled at her. She’d been ten; he’d been eleven. She’d been barefoot, and he’d worn stiff leather loafers with heavy dark socks. Until that moment she’d written him off as sullen and self-absorbed. Then she fell in his swimming pool trying to make an impossible Frisbee catch.
Remembering that now she winked at him, and his smile widened before he turned away.
Graham, even after months of chemotherapy, after losing all his hair and almost twenty pounds, was still easy on the eye. He was handsome in a prep school way, even though he was still puffy from steroids and sported nearly invisible chemo ports in his chest and scalp. Once again his blue-gray eyes were rimmed with dark lashes shaded by darker brows. Despite his illness he was still broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, and today, as usual, he was clad in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt—the more or less official dress of the Silicon Valley.
Best of all he was alive and hers.
“Do you ever get tired of this?” Regan swept a manicured hand at the pitcher and at a platter of hot and sour wings that Lilia had photographed first. The wings weren’t quite finished, but sometimes food photographed best when it was still slick with sauce that later would darken in the oven.
Lilia set down her camera so she could slide the wings back to a foil-lined baking sheet. “As much as I’d like to forget my website this once, I don’t have the luxury. These days my online presence is the largest portion of our income.”
“Didn’t readership grow during Graham’s illness?”
The larger audience had surprised Lilia, but so many people had hung on every word she’d carefully crafted about Graham’s illness. Prayers had been said all over the world. Uplifting emails had flooded her in-box.
“It did grow, but now my readers want a celebration after a year of gloom.”
Regan was still piling up the happy endings. “The Swallow’s Nest will be even busier and more productive now that you won’t be at the hospital so much.”
The Swallow’s Nest had been named after the Tudor Revival cottage in San Jose, California, where they stood. Lilia’s aunt Alea Swallow had always called the house “my nest” and, on her death, had bequeathed it to her niece, who had taken care of her at the end of her life. Now Lilia’s website and blog were devoted to nesting, to creating a snug, beautiful home in a small space like this one, to feeding loved ones and launching fledglings.
That last, of course, was something she wouldn’t be doing, at least not for some time.
She closed the oven door, setting a timer with her voice. At that moment Carrick Donnelly, who’d circled the house to the patio, abandoned his date and came inside through the sunroom, bending over when he reached Lilia to kiss her cheek.
Carrick and Graham had been friends since childhood, and Lilia had known him almost as long as she’d known her husband. He might be Regan’s older brother, but in the sunshine there was only a faint tinge of red in his brown curls, and his eyes were a much deeper and muddier green. He was also as different from Lilia’s husband as the ocean from the shore, lankier and less patrician, but equally as pleasurable to look at.
For just a moment he rested his hands on her shoulders. “Anything you need help with?”
“No, you ought to get back to Julie.” Lilia hoped she had his date’s name right. She’d met the woman once, another associate at Carrick’s Palo Alto law firm, but keeping up with the names of his ever-changing girlfriends wasn’t easy.
“She’s already engrossed in a bitcoin discussion with somebody from Google. She’ll never realize I’m not standing beside her.”
She held out the sangria. “Would you take this outside and put it with the other pitchers and check to see if there’s enough beer and soft drinks in the ice chest? I have plenty in the fridge if there’s not.”
He reached for a dish towel and wrapped it around the bottom of the pitcher where moisture was beading. Unlike the man she’d married, who had grown up with housekeepers and maids, Carrick and Regan had grown up in a family where everybody pitched in.
He inclined his head toward the patio. “Graham looks happy.”
“I invited everybody he loves.”
His expression changed to something less pleasant. “His mother?”
“I did ask Ellen. She sent her regrets.”
“She’s capable of regret?”
This was so unlike him, a man who always struggled to be impartial, that Lilia didn’t know what to say.
He shrugged. “I’ll see about the drinks.”
Regan waited until her brother had gone. “He won’t tell you, but he called Ellen when Graham was first diagnosed. He told her she needed to make peace with her son because if she didn’t, and Graham died, she would regret it forever.”
Carrick hadn’t told Lilia, but he wouldn’t have. She’d had enough on her plate. “Carrick was a guest in their house for a lot of years. He knows Graham’s parents better than I do. I guess he was in a better position to plead with them.”
Of course Carrick hadn’t bothered to speak to Graham’s father. Like any lawyer he understood lost causes.
“Plead probably isn’t the right word,” Regan said. “I think he told her straight out.”
“Maybe the phone call worked. Ellen did visit the hospital at least once. I was there.”
“How did that go?”
Lilia could still see the scene in her mind. Illness hadn’t rested well on Graham’s shoulders. Depression was part of cancer, for reasons nobody had to explain, and too often he had shut out the people who loved him when they tried to help. That morning she had prayed his mother’s visit might turn the tide.
She tried to describe it. “When she walked in and asked Graham how he was feeling, she wrapped her fingers through a long strand of pearls and twisted them back and forth, until I was sure they were going to explode all over the floor. Maybe she wanted me to scoop up a few to help with the hospital bills.”
“Casting pearls before swine?”
Lilia hoped not. “She stayed about five minutes. Then she told me Graham needed his rest and offered to walk me to my car.”
“Did she have something she wanted to tell you?”
“I’ll never know. He needed support more than he needed rest, and she knows our phone number.”
“Well, look at all the people who are here to celebrate.”
Lilia could see the backyard, and in the other direction, all the way through their dining area to the living room. More guests had just let themselves in through the front door. From the looks of things, everybody she had invited might be coming.