When by Victoria Laurie Read Free Book Online Page A

All of the
sudden, even though I was having a total meltdown, I laughed. Then I was half-laughing and half-crying, and I couldn’t seem to settle on one over the other.
    Mrs. Duncan returned, wringing her gnarled hands. “Your mother’s not feeling so well, herself,” she said, her eyes avoiding mine. Her meaning was clear. All the laughter died
in my throat.
    The other delivery guy came back then with a small white box, and he was sifting through it with a frown on his face. “I don’t think any of these bandages are big enough.”
    Mrs. Duncan hooked one of her fingers onto the box to pull it toward her. “Oh, that won’t do!” she said. “Come along inside, Wesley. I’ve got everything we need to
patch her up, but you’ll have to move those chairs out of the way so I can get to the powder room.”
    After they’d headed inside Mrs. Duncan’s house, the guy who was helping me got up and went to the back of his truck. He took out a couple of orange cones and put them in the street
behind and in front of the truck so that anyone who drove by wouldn’t get too close. Then he came back to me and pulled out a bandanna from his back pocket. He used it to dab at my bleeding
leg. “What else hurts?” he asked me.
    Everything hurt—I jumped every time he touched my skin with the cloth. Still, I held up my elbow. I couldn’t really see it, but I knew it’d gotten scraped up, too.
    “Yikes,” he said. “When you go down, you really go down, girl.”
    I wiped at my cheeks. He seemed really nice. But after glancing up to look at him, I took note of his deathdate, and my chest tightened. Dropping my gaze I said, “I’m okay.
Thanks.”
    “Do any bones hurt?” he asked.
    I shook my head.
    “Really sorry about that, Maddie,” he said kindly. “If your bike’s wrecked, we’ll pay to have it fixed.”
    I glanced at my ride. It looked a little scratched up, but otherwise it seemed fine. “I think it’s okay.”
    The delivery guy put the bandanna in my hand. “Here,” he said. “You can probably do a better job of that than me.”
    “Thanks.” I continued to avoid his gaze.
    “You don’t remember me, do you?”
    Puzzled, I looked up again. He had a big, square head, with short-cropped gray hair and deep-set eyes. Now that he mentioned it, he did look kind of familiar. I squinted at him but
couldn’t place how I knew him.
    He stuck out his hand, and I put my good palm in his. He shook it gently and said, “Rick Kane. I came to see you about a year ago.”
    Vaguely, I remembered someone who looked a little like him coming to see me the previous September. It’d been right around the anniversary of my dad’s death, which is always a tough
time at my house—so I couldn’t quite remember the exact details—but his deathdate stood out for me now, which was why I was trying to avoid his gaze.
    “It’s okay,” he said, as if reading my mind. “It’s still the same, right? I’ve only got about five weeks left.”
    I nodded. “I’m really sorry.”
    He smiled in a way that seemed sad but still genuine. “Don’t be, kiddo. We all gotta go sometime.”
    I looked back at my lap, wishing Mrs. Duncan and the other guy would come back out.
    “You know,” he said, “you’ve really helped me.”
    I squeezed the bandanna. The heel of my palm was scraped up, too.
    “I mean, at first I was a wreck. You tell a guy he’s only got about a year left to live, and it’ll pretty much tear him up inside. But then I got over it, and I realized I had
a whole year to get ready. Most people, they have no idea when they wake up in the morning that it’ll be their last day, but I know the exact date, and because of that, I’ve been taking
care of things.”
    I lifted my chin. “Yeah?”
    He nodded and he seemed so at peace about it. “I’ve taken out extra life insurance,” he said. “To get the insurance they had to put me through a physical, and it turns
out I’ve got a few issues. I think