Page 1 of Second Start: Family
PROLOGUE
Eighteen months ago
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Quick.”
The young man in the white lab coat with ironed-in wrinkles fanning from the breast pocket had spilled a jumble of technical and sympathetic words from the instant he’d called Hall Quick out of the hospital waiting room.
He’d talked all through their trip down corridors to a solitary room at the end, then all the way back.
Those words thundered down too fast and from too far a distance for Hall to absorb them. Like a drowning in reverse, sucking moisture out of his lungs, his veins, leaving him parched, trying to wet chapped lips.
“Mr. Quick? If you have any questions…”
Hall wished the doctor — What the hell was his name? — would stay quiet. He wished the drunk in a cubicle down the hall to the right would stop his hollering. Turn off the ringing phones, unplug the machines whirring and clicking. All of it.
So there was silence.
A silence big enough and deep enough to let a man think.
The young doctor sucked in a breath as they neared the closed door of the private room where they’d put the family after pulling them from the main Emergency Room waiting area. Hall should have known then.
The intake of oxygen fueled more doctor words. Talking and talking and talking, as he had even when he’d taken Hall to see Annie.
What used to be Annie.
“…if you’d like me to tell your children…”
“No.”
Hall’s shoulder jerked as if he’d pulled away from a touch. But the smaller man hadn’t touched him.
“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll … arrangements … I don’t know—”
“The funeral home will know. Don’t worry about that.”
“Right. Okay.” He should have remembered that from his father. His father had been sick a long time before he died. But Annie … “I’ll, uh, talk to my kids now. Thank you.”
Annie’s kids.
“Take as long as you need.” The doctor hurried away.
Hall wiped his right hand down the side of his work jeans. His hand had looked so dark and dirty when he’d rested it on Annie’s bare shoulder. There’d been no thought to cleaning up or changing clothes from planting alfalfa when he got the call.
He opened the door, then closed it carefully behind him before he faced them.
Molly and Lizzie sat close together, Lizzie slumped against her sister’s side. Molly’s hair flared out as a vivid shadow across the white wall beyond the sofa. Lizzie’s fairer hair was harder to make out amid the flowers and vines twining on the sofa back. Bobby sat on Molly’s lap, watching her face rather than the pages of a book she read to him.
Before Hall turned to Dan, his first-born’s voice came sharp and urgent.
“Where’s Mom? Can we see her?”
Dan’s voice skidded up on the last word.
His voice is changing. God, his voice is changing.
Dan had stood by himself at the window, but now he moved closer to the younger three.
Hall had thought Dan would be the only child for him and Annie. After Dan came along, Hall had taken on more duties at the ranch, but he’d still eked out time to take a class. One a semester. Not much, but progress. They’d take precautions. At least until he got his degree.
