Page 17 of A Little Too Late
“Hey, Weston—have you heard from Crew? He didn’t reply to my text. I had a nice chat with his voicemail but I don’t think he even listens to it.” Our youngest brother doesn’tevercall Dad. Or us, unless we make him.
“Nah,” Weston says. “It’s been a while. I’ve got to run.”
Of course he does. It would kill him to stay on the phone with me for more than five minutes.
“Fine. I’ll let you know if I find that diamond mine.”
“Sure thing.”
“See you later,” I say. It’s our standard signoff. But we never actually see each other later.
Damn, I’m broody. Must be time for coffee.
I walk through the back door of the lodge, because it’s closest to the offices. But instead of heading for my father’s office, I turn in the other direction and enter the employee canteen. They serve coffee and pastries every morning. I used to eat breakfast here during ski season, especially if my mother was out on a snowcat somewhere grooming the mountain.
She loved that job. She loved to watch the sun rise from the South Slope with her thermos full of tea and her big, ugly work gloves on.
That’s how my parents met—she’d been working as a groomer for another ski mountain to pay the bills while she focused on her art. But my grandfather poached her to come and work at Madigan. “He got me for just fifty cents an hour more,” she used to say. “Plus his son. I was a cheap date.”
My father had married her within the year, and I was born ten months after their wedding day.
God, I used to hear that story a lot. If you looked up happy couple in the dictionary, you might have seen a photo of my mom and dad.
And then, when I was a senior in high school, my mother was diagnosed with a brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob. It’s kind of like the human version of mad cow disease, and it took months for the neurologist to figure out what was wrong with her. Nobody even knows how she got it. “I’ve never seen another case of it in my lifetime,” the doctor had said. “It’s too rare.”
But not too rare to blow up our family. We watched in helpless agony as Mom stopped walking, and she stopped talking. Her deterioration seemed to happen at warp speed, and, at the same time, it seemed to last forever. It’s so hard to watch someone you love suffer. I’ll probably never get over it.
Her smile was the last thing to go. And it took all our smiles with it.
The canteen is quiet. There are five or six ski-patrol team members seated around a table, drinking coffee. There’s only one person ahead of me at the service counter. I take a muffin and slide it onto a paper plate. Then I wait my turn at the coffee urn.
“Excuse me,” a woman says from behind the counter. She’s got a bandanna tied across her hair and a stern expression on her face. “The canteen is only for employees. Can I see your ID?”
“You could, but it’s at least a decade out of date. I’m Reed. It’s been a while since I pulled a shift on the quad lift.”
Her frown only deepens. “Do I have to call security? I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, here.”
“Deborah,” says a soft voice from behind me. “It’s fine.”
“Oh!” she says brightly. “Is he with you, Ava?”
I swing around, and there she is. The moment I see her pretty face, I feel it like a punch to the solar plexus. Hell, that’s nothing new. Every time Ava walked into my room in Vermont, it felt like a brand-new miracle. Together, we had everything.
Until the day we didn’t.
“He’sdefinitelynot with me,” Ava says, her eyes flashing.
Oh, honey. I am sorry. I’m sorry all over again.
There’s a very awkward silence, until a woman behind her in line says, “Wow, Ava.Burn.”
Ava ignores her. She addresses the canteen worker instead. “His last nameisMadigan, so he could fire us all over that cup of coffee.”
Deborah scowls.
“I won’t, though.” I smile at the ornery woman. “Promise.”
“As long as youpromise,” Ava hisses.
