Out of Touch
About
She felt it the night before: a strain in the rock under her own porch, pointed north-northwest, and holding. At six the next morning the valley let go.
Pasadena, 1971. Helen Calloway has her name on a practice door and a bungalow she paid for herself. What her hands do has never once appeared in a chart.
She reads bodies. A heart arguing with itself before the stethoscope catches up. Blood gathering wrong in a leg that hasn't swollen yet. Since the war she has written down only what a chart can hold and let other people arrive at the rest in their own time.
Now the ground has started talking, and there is nothing to be done with what it says. No patient. No order to write. Nobody to tell who wouldn't file her under crank.
Everything she can actually touch is going the other way. The old surgeon who first called her doctor, buried under a crucifix by a wife Helen never met. The yellow dog who plots his route across the rugs because the hardwood has stopped being trustworthy. The friend who once shoved her back into the saddle on a Bisbee trail, gone to Florida. The woman in Phoenix who gave her a place at a table she had no blood claim to. And on the dresser, a smooth gray river stone with a faded cross scratched into it, silent since Bisbee, still where she can see it.
Her reach keeps getting longer. The list of people inside it keeps getting shorter.
At sixty-seven, with no husband, no children, and nobody to sort the drawers, Helen asks a partner for the name of a lawyer. She knows two things: where the money should go, and where she should go.
The rest of it — the part no will can assign — is standing in a Phoenix living room in a crooked blue dress, refusing to throw dirt on her grandmother's grave.
For readers of Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Woman of Light and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams — the American West as inheritance, where what one woman carries has to find hands to go to.
Begin Out of Touch today.
Book Two of the Legacy's Child series.