Answering The Call, page 1
ANSWERING
THE CALL
PARRIS
AFTON BONDS
Other Books by
Parris Afton Bonds
Reluctant Rebel
THE TEXICANS
The Brigands •The Barons
The Bravados •The Betrayers
The Banshees
Blue Bayou • Blue Moon
The Calling of the Clan • The Captive
Dancing with Crazy Woman • Dancing with Wild Woman
Deep Purple • Dream Keeper • Dream Time • Dust Devil
The Flash of the Firefly • For All Time
Kingdom Come: Temptation • Kingdom Come: Trespass
Lavender Blue • Love Tide
Made For Each Other • Midsummer Midnight
Mood Indigo • No Telling
Renegade Man • Run To Me
Savage Enchantment • The Savage
Snow And Ice • Spinster’s Song
Stardust • Sweet Enchantress
Sweet Golden Sun • The Wildest Heart
Wanted Woman • Widow Woman
Windsong • When the Heart is Right
This is a work of fiction. No part of the publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Text copyright © 2023 by Parris Afton Bonds
All Rights Reserved. Printed in the United States of America
Published by Motina Books, LLC, Van Alstyne, Texas
www.MotinaBooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
Names: Afton Bonds, Parris
Title: Answering the Call
Description: First Edition. | Van Alstyne: Motina Books, 2023
Identifiers:
LCCN: 2023934415
ISBN-13: 979-8-88784-013-0 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 979-8-88784-012-3 (e-book)
Subjects: BISAC:
Fiction > Romance > Suspense
Cover and Interior Design: Diane Windsor
It’s always the friends we encounter, and not the sights,
in our life’s travels who make the difference.
For Linda Cudd, Sandy Bazinet, and Murray Pura
You have made a difference in my life’s travels.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I do not think I would deem this novel even semi-autobiographical; however, it does encapsulate a phase in this last part of my life, when, at seventy-eight and fifty novels more or less under my belt, I decided to answer the call to adventure and move to Mexico. I sold my household furniture and my car and kept only enough clothing to pack into two suitcases. A third one contained my laptop and miscellaneous financial documents. The items in my purse included the requisite passport and my COVID vaccinations card.
During this year in Querétaro, Mexico, I wrote Answering the Call. I hope my novel enlightens and entertains—that it enlightens somewhat, at least, my approach to the aging process, as well as, living in a foreign country, but even more importantly I fervently hope it entertains the reader.
CHAPTER 1
There has to be an easier way.
The words slipped unbidden and aloud over Lauren Hillard’s lips. Each morning as she showered . . . or sometimes earlier, when groping to shut off the alarm . . . the phrase audaciously intruded. Still its daily surfacing never failed to take her by surprise.
Naturally, her mind would be fixated on that day’s demands. They centered around a monotonous routine, dominated by her older daughter’s psychotherapist practice which Lauren managed: wake, go to work, return home, go to bed and read a while, go to sleep—or not, as was more often the case these days. Occasionally, lunch or an outing with friends or family interrupted the regimen.
For how long now had the words There has to be an easier way leaked in and out of her consciousness first thing in the morning? Two or three years? Something within her insisted there had to be more meaning to life.
She was aware that life was continuing around her; yet participate though she did, she in no way felt part of life. She was not clinically depressed, as her daughter Renita might label it, just apathetic.
She tried Meetup’s book clubs, Spanish classes, hiking expeditions, choral groups, and more. Nevertheless, she invariably felt as if she did not belong . . . did not belong anywhere anymore.
For over a year, she had volunteered a couple of evenings or weekends at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. In observing the magnitude of suffering and only occasional relief or remission for the patients, rather than feel fortunate for her circumstances, she felt burdened by guilt. Guilt, because she had so much—yet felt so alone, so bereft. This despite her good health at nearly seventy, her family and friends, and her relatively stable financial security.
“Relatively stable financial security” only for so long as she continued to work for Renita. Lauren’s Social Security benefits were only one bump above being a bag lady. Her funds, frugally saved over the years, were overseen by Renita’s latest partner, a financial planner who successfully managed other people’s money.
Of course, Lauren’s younger daughter Sylvie had offered recently for Lauren to live with her and her husband, to which Lauren amiably but adamantly refused. Her stomach knotted with the thought of her daughters tucking her away like a precious heirloom on a shelf.
Yet, if she wished to live off her social security benefits and abstain from dipping into her savings, her options were zero. Her condo lease would expire in two months. Either she renewed the lease now and continued working for yet another year—or give her two-month notice to vacate, resign herself to shelf life with Sylvie and her husband, and tell Renita that she would be retiring from Behavioral Health Solutions.
Naturally, Renita would go off into one of her fits. Her authoritarian approach to muddled patients was mollified by Lauren’s coddling them before and after appointments.
Renita and Lauren’s polar but complimenting personalities were probably the reason the clinic’s balance sheet stayed in the black over the years, although just barely. Nineteen years before, Lauren had quit her lucrative position as advertising manager for Pepsico International to help jumpstart her daughter’s burgeoning psychotherapist practice.
Lauren toweled off, swiftly dressed in appropriate muted colors with low heels, and for a more subdued appearance clipped up her dark, shoulder-length hair, shot full with gray. Lastly, she lightly swiped on the requisite makeup for the working woman of a certain age—mascara, a deft brushing of rouge, and a smudge of pale matte lipstick.
Nothing vivid to attract awareness to her frame, no longer sleek; nor to the faint wrinkles amassing around her eyes, the marionette lines recently evidencing at either side of her mouth, and the faltering flesh at her once firm jawline. A furtive glance in the mirror confirmed her dismal reality . . . she was gradually fading from view.
But then that was one good thing about her aging appearance—she was not terribly disappointed by its deterioration, as she had never really felt pretty anyway.
By the time her daughter arrived at Behavioral Health Solutions, promptly at fifteen minutes before eight, Lauren had already started the coffee, turned on Echo’s soothing music background, opened her computer, and was reviewing the day’s patient schedule.
Renita cast a brief smile for Lauren. “Morning, Mother.” Striding briskly toward her office, her forty-seven-year-old sturdy physique was still indicative of her college track scholarship.
She out-topped Lauren’s five feet, two inches by another good eight inches. Then, too, Lauren suspected her advancing years had robbed her of a precious inch despite her sporadic efforts at yoga, Pilates, and tennis. “Morning, babe.”
That early morning exchange was the only time they addressed one another personally within the office confines. Thereafter throughout the work hours, they addressed each other as Dr. Hillard and Lauren.
Emerging from her office, Renita shrugged into one of her starched white coats with its ID tag. She felt the white coat instilled the sense of a professional practice. Her auburn hair, cut short for efficiency, looked untidy lately. And she seemed cranky.
Lauren had to wonder if her daughter and partner Rick were having domestic problems; or maybe Renita was experiencing her excruciating migraines more often. Or just maybe she was on the verge of menopause, which could trigger psychotic behavior in even a sainted abbess.
She came up behind Lauren’s desk. “You didn’t forget Rick’s birthday party tonight at our house, did you, Mother?”
In Renita’s tone was a barely perceptible note of disparagement. While mentally counting to five before answering, Lauren watched the provider insurance info app open on her computer screen. “Of course not. I bought Rick his favorite cologne. And already gift wrapped it. Just need to sign the card.” She could feel the usual morning tension gathering taut her shoulder blades, like Velcro tugging on them.
Normally, Andi Lyons, the front-desk eighteen-year old, hotfooted it in anywhere between eight-twenty and eight twenty-nine. Instead, she called, wailing, “The alarm didn’t go off!” She would be forty-five minutes late.
The Velcro tugged even closer on Lauren’s shoulder blades. That meant double duty for her, covering the telephone and checking-in the first patient, in addition to performing her own tasks—medical billing, coding insurance claims, and collecting on past due accounts.
Still, how could she be annoyed with Andi? The pudgy lilliputian girl exuberated life in the staid office. Her chatty, carefree demeanor tended to relax any anxious patients in the waiting room. Adhering to the clinic’s office procedure manual, Andi was careful to keep her forearm tats covered and her piercings free of flashy rings in nostrils, brows, and lips. Her punk haircut with shaved sides and a pop of maroon on the top could not be concealed as easily.
Finally, the day’s last patient, along with Renita and Andi, left at a little after six o’clock. Lauren began making her rounds—turning off the computers, silencing Echo, and shutting the blinds. Just before she flicked off the lights, her cell phone rang.
It was Renita. “You remembered to fax Howard Beech’s demographics to Mercy Sanitorium, right, Mother?”
Perplexed, Lauren frowned. “No. You never told me you wanted me to.”
“Yes, I did, damn’t. Yesterday, right after he checked out.”
It seemed to Lauren her older daughter’s cursing was increasing concurrently with her growing impatience with her mother. Cell phone cradled between shoulder and ear, Lauren backtracked to her desk and flipped over her notebook’s page to the day before. “No, I made no note of that.”
A heavy sigh. “That’s because you forgot to.”
The Velcro cinched tighter. Six months ago, when suddenly rising from her office chair, she had suffered abrupt dizziness, which resulted in the chair rolling from beneath her when she went to sit back down—and in her striking her head on the filing cabinet behind. Since then, Renita and her sister Sylvie, fearing a mini-stroke, had been eagle-eyeing her for lapses of any kind.
This continued scrutiny by Lauren’s daughters annoyed her, and their seemingly offhanded quips regarding her memory worried her. Sure, occasionally she forgot an intention or thought when passing from one room to another or misplaced her eyeglasses, as she used to do before cataract surgery abolished the need for them. Besides, did not everyone experience that kind of forgetfulness? So what if these episodes may have increased. No big whoop.
Still, since the dizzy spell she had begun keeping the notebook. She could imagine nothing worse than getting Alzheimer’s.
With a flourish Rick Mosely unwrapped Lauren’s birthday gift. “Sun Song—my favorite!” He looped an arm around her shoulders and gave an affectionate squeeze.
The high-end cologne had put a dent in her monthly budget, but then she adored the amenable man. He aptly managed her portfolio with its Pepsico pension fund and other investments. More importantly, he adored Renita, acquiescing to her highhanded ways. A health nut, he was the fifth partner for Lauren’s adamantly single daughter in the last twenty-five years and the longest-lasting at eight.
On the other hand, Lauren’s younger daughter, the portly Sylvie, had taken to marriage and motherhood early on, giving birth to twin boys followed immediately by another son. Thanks to her corporate-lawyer husband, Burnett Cohen, she had never needed to work outside the home. As of last fall, all three children were away at college. With the bedrooms vacant, forty-three-year-old Sylvie was suffering the empty-nest syndrome. Which explained why she had importuned Lauren to come live with them.
After the birthday candles were blown out and the store-bought cake passed around to the five of them, the desultory conversation was mixed with intent cell phone perusal.
Lauren thought how lucky she was to have grown up before technology had taken over the world. She recalled how, when she was a kid, her parents and their friends played games that involved the children, like Black Magic and Under the Blanket. And she remembered with nostalgia how her mother had made from scratch Lauren’s favorite, Mississippi Mud Cake, as in turn Lauren had made for her own two daughters.
She had loved being a mother, having the children stepping on her feet. Later on, in the midst of her daughters’ late teenage years, she had off and on allowed her home to serve as a landing place, lasting anywhere from a few days to a few months, for their friends, who for one reason or another were temporarily homeless.
Life these days seemed weirdly plastic, disassociated from genuine personal contact. Even that tactile act of touching and hugging. Or was she just growing old and senile?
Burney, who, as opposed to Rick, was prone to be on the heavy side, swallowed another mouthful of cake, then asked. “Well, Lauren, did you give any more thought about moving into that community in Tanglewood?” His hairline was a duet of cul-de-sacs.
Lauren blinked at him. She set aside her tasteless cake. Were her tastebuds dying off or were store-bought pastries leached of richness by lack of human touch? “Which community in Tanglewood was that?”
Renita hummphed. “Several weeks ago, I told you about that old-aged home in Tanglewood, Mother.”
Sylvie glanced up from perusing her cell phone and squinted over her bifocals. “The community is inhabited by the crème de la crème, is that right, Sis?”
“Yes, but Tanglewood is less than some of the other old-people places I checked out.”
Old-people places? One could never accuse Renita of diplomacy.
“Retirement home,” Burney amended. If ever there was a role meant for the smooth-talking attorney he was, it was that of the crafty diplomat.
Was tonight’s gathering some sort of tribalism that sowed in Lauren the TV series Survivor’s seeds of distrust? “I don’t recall committing to investigating a move there, Renita.” And she could not envision being confined to living with people of her age only—“old people”, as Renita styled it. This birthday party was turning out to be about as pleasant as a gynecological exam.
Renita sighed and rose to refill her brandy snifter from the buffet’s crystal decanter. “Well, not to worry about your forgetfulness, Mother.”
Something in Lauren’s chest tightened. Now, she could imagine something worse than Alzheimer’s: the oppressive feeling of being lovingly gaslighted.
CHAPTER 2
There has to be an easier way.
As usual, the phrase tumbled from Lauren’s lips in tempo with her shower’s pelting drops, word by word. There. Has. To. Be. An. Easier. Way.
She had not heard an insistent inner voice since her childhood. Maybe she had been more open to it as a child, when her father would begin his drinking.
He came from oil money that went back through the family’s gene pool almost to 1901 when nearby Spindletop spewed its geyser. She had never lacked for anything. Her mother had ensured she attended the best schools, from modeling to music, in an effort to make her more appealing. At one point, her mother badgered her about plastic surgery. “Long, straight noses are out these days, precious. Pixie noses are in.” She had managed to outflank her mother on that idea.
Somewhere toward Lauren’s high school years, the money drained out, siphoned by her mother’s compulsive spending and her father’s obsessive drinking. His binges often precipitated one of his tyrannical rampages. At those times, Lauren’s intuition might whisper Run! or Hide! Only a single word, never a complete sentence . . . like, There has to be an easier way.
She finished showering. Early mornings were always the worst for her. May’s dawning light had yet to breach her condo’s high bath window. She craved sunlight. Sunlight to dispel night’s lingering despondency.
Often, she would wake at three or four o’clock, unable to return to sleep. In those nocturnal hours, she occasionally would ponder the merits of living to an advanced age. What was the point of living another ‘Groundhog Day” life until one’s last exhalation? One day after another the same.
As she drove to work in the pre-dawn dark, she considered taking up another hobby. Her family was occupied with its own affairs and friends, and her grandchildren were away at college. Most likely, any hobby she undertook she would eventually add to her discarded ones—macrame, butterfly watching, cycling, painting, and on and on.
She continued to dabble in music, writing sentimental lyrics that in these days and times sounded corny. And then there was stargazing. The most wasteful time of all hobbies most would declare—and among the more difficult pastime pursuits, given that the “Stars at night are big and bright, deep in the Heart of Texas” was not true of Houston’s light pollution.
