Drummer In the Dark by T. Davis Bunn Page A

are now, yellow leg warmers with a neon green cocktail dress and black sneakers might be high fashion.”
    Jackie started toward the curb. “Let me know if I need to do something for her.”
    Crouch called after her, “Know what Millicent told me this morning? You’re a good daughter. I said she could take that right to the bank.”
    Jackie dumped her load with the other bags and lengthened her stride back to the Camaro. Crouch’s words merely darkened the day’s already bitter cast. She backed down the drive, ignoring the doctor’s hesitant wave. The motor rumbled deep-throated taunts all the way to her mother’s nursing home. Good sister, daughter, student, fiancée—all the lies she had watched crumble, all the energy lost to pretending it didn’t matter.
    The nursing home’s front door expelled the harsh scent of industrial cleanser. The place was extremely Catholic and packed with religious ornaments and nurses in the white headdresses of the full-on devout. Jackie had come here because it was the only Medicare bed available when her mother had suffered the stroke. Now she counted it as one of the luckiest days of her life. Nobody else would have put up with her mother for this long.
    Like many of the home’s staff, the manager was Ghanaian, stoic, and quietly sympathetic. The heavyset woman rose from her desk and beamed a welcome far too genuine for this place. “Miss Jackie, what you doing here so early? I didn’t expect you before lunchtime.”
    “I’ve taken a couple of days off work. Thought I’d come over before things got busy.”
    “If I had me a day free, sure to goodness I wouldn’t be spending it here.”
    Jackie started grimly for the stairs. “How’s Mom?”
    “She’s drinking her own bile and dying just as fast as she knows how. Same as always.” Knowing dark eyes followed her departure. “Don’t you go be doing the same, mind.”
     
    A FTER JACKIE’S FATHER had dumped them, her mother had gone through a series of bad jobs and worse men, finally landing as a waitress at a HoJo’s on Route 50. The place had been so rough she would seldom let her children come in for the free meals offered to all employees’ families. And there she remained, right up to the moment Preston struck it rich and rented her a fine little place on a lake. Their mother had never acknowledged the gifts, for that would have meant also accepting that a man in her life had done something good.
    Jackie let herself into her mother’s room. The upper half of her mother’s bed had been slightly elevated. Evelyn Havilland lay there inert and pale. Eyes closed. Chest hardly moving. Face slack. Taking revenge on life and everyone she had ever known by shutting them out. Jackie carried the chair over from its station beside the opposite wall, seated herself by the bed, and waited.
    “These people do everything they can to hurt me.” The mouth scarcely moved. The eyes never opened. “You satisfied now? You should be.”
    “Hello, Mom. Would you like something to drink?” Jackie picked up the plastic cup from the bedstand and saw it was empty. “Let me get you some water.”
    Evelyn Havilland said nothing more until Jackie had fitted the plastic straw into her mouth and let her sip. “A decent daughter’d have gotten me out of here. Found me a place with people who know how to do things right. But not you. Oh no. Too much trouble, finding your own mother a decent place to breathe her last.”
    Evelyn turned her head then, just a fraction. Far enough to shoot her daughter a glimmer from shadow-filled eyes. “Probably just as well you didn’t try. You’d only have made a mess of it anyway.”
    Jackie found a fly buzzing about the room to focus her attention upon. It was a trick she had used since childhood. A dust mote in sunlight would do. A sound from beyond the room. Anything to keep from being opened and penetrated.
    “I always knew it would come to this. Lying here waiting for the end, looking at a