was an incident on the plane—”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Flick protested. “I told them I didn’t want anything to eat, but they wouldn’t believe me.” Flick was tall for her age, and because her vocabulary was so grandiloquent—Flick’s own description of her extravagantly colorful speech—she was often mistaken for a child far older than she was.
Kristin could imagine the rest. “I’ll be glad to pay for any damages.”
“The flight attendant had some difficulty calming the woman sitting next to Felicity,” the chaperon said. “She wants her silk blouse replaced.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Kristin said.
The chaperon handed her a card. “Here’s her personal information. You might want to be gone when she exits customs,” she said with a sympathetic smile.
“Thanks. And thanks for bringing my daughter home.”
Kristin put her arm around Flick’s narrow shoulders, looked around and said, “Where’s your luggage, Flick?”
“She didn’t check any bags,” the chaperon said. “I have a flight home to catch, so I’ll leave you two to sort this out.”
Kristin frowned as she watched the chaperon hurry away, then turned to her daughter and said, “Why didn’t you bring anything with you?”
“The headmistress is packing everything up. She’s going to ship it to me,” Flick explained. “She said she didn’t trust me in the dormitory.”
Good lord! She’d wondered why Flick was still wearing her school uniform. If she wasn’t mistaken, there was a spot of blood on the collar of Flick’s white blouse, above the red V-neck wool sweater she wore with a blue red-and-green-plaid wool pleated skirt. “All right. Let’s go home.”
Flick stopped dead in her tracks and looked up at Kristin, her blue eyes brimming with tears. “I don’t want to go home, Mom. I want to go see Gramps in the hospital.”
Kristin stared at her daughter in shock. “How did you know—? How could you possibly—? Who told you Gramps is in the hospital?”
“I’m not stupid, Mom. Gramps emailed me every day—until last Wednesday. Nothing Thursday or Friday or Saturday or Sunday. I knew something was wrong. So I tried calling him. Which got me in trouble with Mrs. Fortin. But he didn’t call me back. So I knew something was wrong.
“Then I called you and asked why Gramps didn’t call me back and you said—”
“I said he wasn’t feeling well. But that doesn’t mean he’s in the hospital, Flick.”
“But he is, isn’t he?” her daughter challenged. “Because if he wasn’t, Gramps would have called me back, no matter how sick he was. What’s wrong with him, Mom? How bad is he hurt? Was he in a car accident, or what?”
Kristin felt trapped. She’d hoped to shield Flick from the truth for long enough to let her father regain more of his faculties. But that obviously wasn’t possible now. “He’s had a stroke, Flick.”
“A stroke? What’s that?”
“A blood vessel broke in his brain.”
“Is he dying?” Flick cried.
“No, but the stroke caused some of his brain not to work right. That’s why Gramps hasn’t called you back. The stroke affected his speech, so he can’t talk very well yet.”
“Yet?” Flick said, looking, as she always did, for the loophole that allowed her to escape anything she found unpleasant.
“With therapy, he should get much better. But, Flick…”
Kristin cupped her hands gently on either side of her daughter’s anxious face and said, “His right side is paralyzed. He can’t walk or write—”
“Or type,” Flick interjected, pulling free. “So he couldn’t email me back.”
“That’s right.”
“Then it’s a good thing I got myself kicked out of that ludicrous school,” Flick said, her eyes narrowed in fierce determination. “Gramps is going to need my help to get better.”
Ludicrous: Worthy of scorn as absurdly inept, false or foolish.
It was the first time Kristin had heard Flick use the word. It seemed her daughter’s vocabulary had grown in the four months since she’d seen her at Christmas. It wasn’t always an advantage having a child who was so smart. Like now, when her daughter had manipulated her world to arrive home, instead of being at school where she belonged.
Kristin put an arm around Flick and walked toward the airport garage where she’d left her car, listening attentively as her daughter talked a mile a minute about everything that had happened since she’d last seen her mother.
Kristin heard a word—superfluous—that she didn’t know and realized she was going to have to look it up when she got home. She’d spent more time practicing on the tennis courts as a child than she had studying. She’d been homeschooled and had done the least work she could to get a high school diploma.
It was only after Flick was born that she’d realized she was going to need a college degree. She’d gone to the University of Miami and received a B.A. in Communications, figuring she could use the public relations and promotional writing courses to help Harry promote his tennis academy. After 9/11 everything changed, and she decided to join the FBI.
Flick, on the other hand, had started reading at four. By the time she was seven, Kristin had resorted to parenting books to try and figure out how to manage her brilliant daughter. One night, she’d caught Flick reading her most recent parenting book under the covers. It was a toss-up who was learning to manage whom.
But despite her intelligence, Flick was still a child. Kristin had kept her daughter in the dark about her grandfather’s stroke early last week, the day after Max’s visit, in fact, in an attempt to shield Flick from the worst of it. She’d hoped her father would be well on the road to physical recovery before Flick saw him again.
Her father’s face—eye, cheek and mouth—sagged on the right side, giving him a frightening appearance, which worsened when he tried to speak. Her nine-year-old daughter might be intellectually ready to help her grandfather. But Kristin wondered how she would react when she saw him in his hospital bed.
“Please, Mom,” Flick pleaded. “Let’s go see Gramps.”
Kristin was torn. “Flick, I’m not sure—”
“Please, Mom!”
Kristin realized that if she didn’t take Flick to see her grandfather, her creative daughter would find some way to get to the hospital on her own. “He’s very sick, honey. I’m afraid seeing you will upset him.” And you.
“I won’t upset him, Mom,” the girl promised. “I just want to talk to him.”
Talk to him? He can’t talk! Kristin knew her daughter didn’t comprehend the seriousness of her grandfather’s illness.
