It was full dark. Multicolored lights were strung all across the eaves of her parents’ house. A silly plastic light-up snowman was posed on the front steps. Annajane and her mother hated that snowman and tried to persuade Leonard how tacky it was, but her stepfather delighted in hauling it out of storage every Christmas. She could see the glow of the artificial tree through the drapes. Somehow, she felt reassured. Maybe things weren’t as bad as they seemed.

Before she could change her mind and turn around to head home, Ruth was opening the aluminum storm door, but instead of surprise or pleasure at seeing her only daughter, Annajane recognized something else in her mother’s face.

She jumped out of the car and ran to the door. “Mom? What is it? Is it Leonard? Is he okay?”

Ruth’s face was pale. “Leonard’s fine. Have you talked to Mason?”

“No,” Annajane said bitterly. “Don’t tell me he called you.”

Ruth held out her own phone. “Here. You need to call him.”

Annajane shook her head stubbornly. “Let him stew. Did he tell you what he did to me? He missed the Christmas party? Stood me up? Mama, I think maybe…”

Ruth shook the phone in her daughter’s face. “You are not listening. Honey, you need to call Mason right this minute. It’s Glenn. He’s … Just call Mason. All right?”

Her mind was a blank. Her hands were trembling. Ruth dialed and handed her the phone.

“Mason? I just got to Mama’s. She said…”

“It’s Dad,” Mason said. He sounded calm, detached even. “It’s bad. They think he’s had a heart attack. We’re at Passcoe Memorial.”

“Oh my God,” Annajane breathed. “When? How long ago?”

“We’re not sure. Mom found him on the floor of the bedroom when she got home this afternoon. They’re working on him, but … we just don’t know anything. Dr. Kaufman is in with him.”

“I’m so sorry,” Annajane said. “Mason, I am so, so sorry. I’m coming back. Right now.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ve gotta go. The nurse is coming out to talk to us.”

“Call me,” Annajane said. “Let me know what they say. I’m on the way.”

*   *   *

She found Mason alone in the waiting room at the hospital, slumped forward in one of those hard-backed green chairs. Even with the harsh fluorescent overhead lights the beige room was wreathed in shadows. He didn’t look up when she sat down and called his name.

“Where’s Sallie?” she asked, looking around the room. “And Pokey?”

“Pokey had to go home,” Mason said, his voice a monotone. “To nurse the baby. Mama’s in the room with Dad. They tried to make her leave, but she raised holy hell and threatened to sue everybody, so they finally let her stay.”

“What about Davis?”

Mason shrugged. “He went up to Boone early this morning, to go skiing. Phone reception is lousy up there.”

“Is there … any change?”

“No,” Mason said. He sat up and stared at the television. “It’s not good,” he said bleakly. “Dr. Kaufman says his brain had likely been without oxygen for at least an hour or more by the time Mama found him. The EMTs managed to get his heart started in the ambulance, but Dr. Kaufman told us, even if he does make it, he won’t be the same. You know.”

Annajane nodded mutely. “I prayed the whole way back,” she said finally. “For your daddy. I don’t think I’ve ever prayed so hard in my life.”

“Okay,” Mason said. “That’s nice. Mama will appreciate it.”

They sat like that, not talking for another hour. Finally, she could stand the silence no more. “I’m gonna get some coffee,” she said, standing and stretching. “I’ll get some for you, too.”

“No thanks,” Mason said.

She got up and walked over to the coffee station in the corner, taking her time with sugar packets and instant creamer. She was about to sit down again when Sallie Bayless appeared in the doorway.

She was still dressed in the elegant black cashmere sweater and slacks she’d been wearing hours and hours ago, when Annajane had sat through that awful luncheon. But Sallie’s usually perfectly arranged hair was a tangled mess. Her face was pale, her lipstick chewed off, her eyes red-rimmed.

“Mama?” Mason stood.

She nodded. “He’s gone. They did everything they could, but your daddy is gone, son.” She burst into tears, and threw herself into her oldest child’s arms, while Annajane stood by, mute and heartbroken.

*   *   *

The next few days and weeks after the funeral were a blur.

Glenn Bayless’s sudden death shook his family, and the company, to its core. Sallie, his widow, wept constantly and seemed unable to cope with even the simplest detail of day-to-day life. The first few nights after Glenn’s death, she declared herself afraid to stay alone in the rambling old house. It fell to Mason, the oldest son, to move into his old bedroom down the hall to keep her company.

After two weeks, Sallie’s doctor prescribed sleeping pills, and Mason came home. To the lumpy pullout sofa.

He plunged into the work of settling his father’s estate and came home exhausted and ashen-faced from endless meetings with the lawyers. If Annajane inquired, he brusquely replied that everything was “fine.”

But things were not fine. Without confiding in his son, Glenn had quietly begun acquiring expensive parcels of land for a new bottling plant in the southern part of the state, anticipating increased demand for Quixie. But the owner of the key parcel, the only acreage with the direct rail access a plant would require, had suddenly backed out of the sale. The company was stuck with the land, bought at a top-of-the-market price, with a correspondingly high interest rate.

At the same time, Quixie’s sales had taken a worrisome dip. Vitamin waters, energy drinks, and flavored bottled iced teas were eroding their share of the soft drink market.

And Annajane and Mason hadn’t had sex since before the ill-fated Quixie Christmas party. They lived in the same house and worked for the same company, their offices only feet apart, but the chasm between them seemed to widen every day. When Leonard Hudgens fell and broke his hip and died of pneumonia a month after the death of Glenn Bayless, Annajane spent two weeks in Holden Beach with her mother. By the time she got back to Passcoe, Mason had moved out of the caretaker’s cottage. And the marriage was over.

9

The nurse who’d wheeled Sophie back to the exam room beckoned. “Dr. Kaufman wanted me to tell you that he’s gonna go ahead and take out her appendix,” she said hurriedly. “They’re prepping her now. You can go back, but only for a minute.”

They found Sophie clutching a teddy bear, with an IV-drip tube connected to her arm. Nurse Molly patted the child’s hand. “She’s been such a good girl,” she told Mason. “Didn’t even cry when we stuck her for blood or put in the IV needle.”

Mason laid his cheek against Sophie’s. “Hey kiddo,” he said softly. “Dr. Max is gonna fix up your tummy now.”

Her eyelashes fluttered. “Daddy?” she said woozily. “I got a new bear.”

“I see that,” Mason said.

Annajane took Sophie’s hand. “What have you got there?”

Clenched in the palm of her hand was an empty glass vial, probably from some drug that had been injected into her IV tube. Sophie was a magpie. From the moment she’d first started to crawl, she had a habit of picking up random small items. A misplaced earring, paper clip, discarded gum wrapper, all of these were treasures to Sophie, who would carefully tuck them in a pocket or hide them under her pillow. Or more often than not lately, in her treasured pink plastic pocketbook.

“It’s a baby bottle. For my new bear,” Sophie said.

“I’ll keep it for you,” Annajane promised, carefully placing the vial on the table out of Sophie’s reach. “Does the bear have a name?”

“Mittens,” Sophie said. “I’m sooo sleepy.”

“You rest,” Mason told her. “And when you wake up, I’ll be right here.”