Love and Treasure Read Free

I’m an ass.” She kept her gaze fixed on the seal, and Jack saw a worried look come into her eyes, familiar to him from the time she was a toddler. “If a shark comes up while he’s sleeping, does he wake up?”
    The chills began a few miles from home, and by the time they reached the pair of whitewashed posts that marked the entrance to his long gravel drive, Jack’s whole body was shaking, legs shuddering, teeth clacking together. He grasped one hand with the other to keep them from flopping around in his lap like fish on a line. The car crunched through a blue-white canyon of banked snow up the drive. As Natalie pulled all the way to the front steps of the house, Jack closed his eyes. He did not have the strength even to open his door, let alone to get out of the car. He waited, listening to the creak and slam of the trunk lid, the banging of her bags against the steps of the porch.
    “Grandpa?” Natalie said. She had opened his door and was hovering over him, a note of panic in her voice. “Are you okay?”
    “Just tired,” he said.
    “You’re sweating.”
    He could feel sweat pouring down his forehead, pooling in his armpits and between his legs.
    “I could use a nap,” he said.
    He allowed her to hoist him out of the car and help him into the house, but when she tried to follow him into his bedroom, he drew the line. He closed the door and, after a feeble attempt at the buttons of his shirt, crawled under the comforter and let the fever overtake him. He slept for twelve hours and woke at six feeling better than he had in weeks, well enough even to load and light the woodstove. Well enough to put a pot of coffee on, if not to drink it.
    Natalie came down soon after. In her flannel nightshirt, with her hair tousled, her eyes puffy with sleep, she was again the little girl with whom he had passed so many early mornings, telling stories of the sack of Troy, the Peloponnesian War, Antigone and Polynices, Odysseus andPenelope. Wildly inappropriate tales, some of them, for a small child, stories of slaughter and mayhem and betrayal. She had adored them.
    “You hungry? Want me to make you a pancake in the shape of an N?” He meant it as a joke, but the offer came out sounding unexpectedly sincere.
    She smiled. “It’s been a long time since I had one of those.”
    “Oh!” he said, mildly panicked now that she seemed to be taking him up on his foolish offer, wondering if he had the wherewithal, either in his pantry or in his constitution. “I—I’m sure I could—”
    “I’m not hungry,” she said.
    “Ah,” he said, absurdly disappointed.
    “How are you feeling, Grandpa?”
    “I’m feeling much better.” He looked at her. “Did you sleep well?”
    “Not really.”
    “Was the bed—”
    “The bed’s fine. I don’t sleep well in New York, either.” She went to the counter, poured herself a cup of coffee, splashed in a little milk from the refrigerator. When she turned back to him she was holding a slip of paper.
    “This is for you,” she said. She handed him a check, folded in two. When he opened it, he saw that she had made it out to him in the amount of five hundred dollars.
    “It’s what you gave me and Daniel. For our wedding. I’m returning it.”
    “Honey, that’s crazy. This is just five hundred bucks more you’ll have to pay inheritance tax on.” He crossed to the woodstove, opened the door, and tossed the check into the blaze.
    “So much for that part of my plan,” she said, sounding so lost that he almost regretted his action.
    “What plan is that?” he said. “Returning your gifts?”
    “Don’t you think I should? Since the marriage lasted only three months?”
    “You want to know what I think? I think that if your little shit of a husband leaves you for some dolly after you gave him twelve years of your life, you are entitled to enjoy the modest consolation of an automatic bread maker. Or a five-hundred-dollar check from your grandfather.”
    She nodded, a small,