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Chapter One
Nate Kershaw walked into his apartment and fell on his bed fully clothed. Dead tired didn’t begin to describe how he felt. He’d just returned to Whiskey River after flying a client to New Orleans and taking a couple of vacation days to have a good time with said client and his friends. Too good of a time. Since he never had more than a beer the night before he flew, he’d stayed an extra day but even partying while sober had taken it out of him. Damn, he was getting old.
When his phone rang with his mom’s ringtone he groaned and considered not answering. But his mom usually had a good reason to call him, so he picked up.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Nate, you need to go check on your grandmother.”
“Does it have to be right now?” he asked her.
“Yes. She’s not answering her phone and you know what that means.”
His grandma was ninety-two and his mother tended to panic when her mother-in-law didn’t answer her phone. Truthfully, it worried him too. Grandma had fallen last year and broken her arm. Thank God it hadn’t been her hip. But Betty Kershaw was sharp as a tack, stubbornly independent, lived in her house by herself, and was involved in numerous activities in town. She might get irritated with Nate for checking up on her, but since he was the only family member who lived in the same town, she was used to it.
On his way Nate tried calling, but he couldn’t get an answer either. So he was pretty concerned by the time he got to her house. Getting no response when he rang her doorbell and knocked on her door, he got out his key and let himself in. He didn’t use his key often but kept it for emergencies. Which he was beginning to think this was. “Grandma,” he shouted. “Are you here?”
No reply. It didn’t take long to look through the house and out back and still see no sign of her or her dog Murphy. But her bedroom door was closed, which wasn’t like her. He knocked and opened it. Grandma sat on the bed, sobbing into her pillow, with Murphy beside her looking distressed.
The sight destroyed him. He’d never, not once in his thirty-one years, seen his grandma cry. Not even when she broke her arm. She was the toughest woman he knew. Life hadn’t always been easy for her, but she never complained. She just sucked it up and soldiered on. And lived her life to the fullest, determined to enjoy every day.
“My God, Grandma,” he said rushing in. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did something terrible happen?”
She raised her head from the pillow and looked at him with tear-drenched eyes. She also looked every one of her ninety-two years. “Nate? What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t answer your phone so Mom and I got worried. What’s wrong?”
“I got some news from the doctor. You know, from the checkup I had day before yesterday?”
He remembered. He usually went with her but since the flight to New Orleans was already booked and Travis Sullivan, the other pilot at the Devil’s Rock Airport, had another client, he couldn’t get out of it. Grandma didn’t want to cancel, so her helper/driver had taken her. But Grandma wouldn’t let Louise go in to see the doctor with her. She’d only let family go in with her, which meant Nate, unless one of his parents or siblings happened to be in town. “What did the doctor say?”
She reached for a tissue and dried her eyes, giving Murphy a pat after she did. “I’m not dying,” she said with some asperity. “At least, not yet. But the doctor said I have AFib.”
AFib? “You have atrial fibrillation? That’s—” He started to say not good or even bad, but luckily stopped himself. “Did she say it was serious?” he asked instead. He’d seen the TV commercials. AFib could lead to a stroke. At Grandma’s age that could be really bad.
“She put me on a whatchamacallit—some kind of thinner.”
“A blood thinner?”
“That’s it. She said that would help.”
“Damn it, I knew I should have gone with you.”
“Why? Do you think I didn’t know what she was talking about?”
“No, but people do get confused. It helps to have someone else there. And you’re obviously worried or you wouldn’t have been crying.”
“I’m not worried. I’m ninety-two. I could die any day now, even if I didn’t have this AFib thing.”
“You’re not going to die, Grandma.”
“Hopefully not anytime soon. But I will someday and that brings me to why I was crying.”
“If it wasn’t over the diagnosis then what was it?”
“You, Nathaniel James Kershaw.”
Okay, it was serious when she called him by his full name. “Me? Why were you crying about me? I’m fine.”
