As always, thanks for your infinite patience!
A few feet behind her, Brennan heard the increasingly frantic screech-screech of hangers being pushed along a metal pole and her weary eyes automatically drifted upwards to the low popcorn ceiling. A question was coming soon, that much she knew.
What remained to be seen was just how desperate it would be.
"Bones, do you know what happened to Pops' suit?"
Wrapping the last of the photographs on Hank's bedside table in tissue paper, the anthropologist placed the parcel in a small cardboard box before facing her husband. Just as she expected, a flustered Booth was poking none-too-gently into the closet of his grandfather's nursing home apartment, his subtly glowing cheeks and crinkled brow most definitely not paeans to zen-like serenity.
The pressure keeps building, she thought in passing, studying both the manhandled closet and the harried agent from where she stood. She wondered whether the thin, brittle band of control currently keeping Booth's emotions in check was meant to hold much longer.
"I'm not certain I know what suit you're referring to; I haven't been through his closet in a while."
"The suit" Booth insisted, the obscure reference still unfortunately obvious only to him. "The nice dark one I bought him when we got married; I cleaned it and put it in his closet after we got back from our honeymoon. I need it for the funeral home."
His face fell, along with a piece of Brennan's heart. "I want him to be buried in it" he added quietly, suddenly looking less like the full-grown, able, co-head of household he was and more like a little kid who'd just found out there was no Santa Claus.
Shaking her head, Brennan once again looked over the battered clothing clinging onto spindly wire hangers by a thread or already laying at the bottom of the closet.
"I don't believe he ever had an occasion to wear it after our ceremony. You're certain it's not in there?"
"I've been through his stuff about fifty times now. If it's here and I missed it, I deserve to be fired from the FBI. It's not on this rack, Bones-a blind man would have found it by now."
The snippy reply easily merited an equally testy answer. But rather than give in to that base-if totally justified-impulse, Brennan bit her lower lip, tamping down the almost automatic eye roll that had come to her face. Although a missing article of clothing wasn't even close to being the national emergency her husband was making it out to be, the scientist understood that with all the stress he was under, it probably seemed that way to him.
Loss of control inevitably leads to tunnel vision, she reminded herself, recalling her own struggles to remain objective during the Ghost Killer case; the inability to keep the relative importance of things in perspective.
"Booth, you're becoming unduly upset. Please try to stay calm-we'll find it. I'll ask one of his attendants. They always did an excellent job looking after Hank's things. One of them might know where it's at."
Stepping into the hallway, Brennan hailed the first person she saw: a diminutive, nearly ageless Filipino woman wearing cheerful pink and lavender scrubs who also happened to have been one of the institution's few employees on rare good terms with her feisty grandfather-in-law. It helped to have a sense of humor and a limitless quantity of patience working with the elderly, and luckily for Hank and a cantankerous conga line of other perennial malcontents at the home, Asunción Cruz had those qualities in spades.
"Asunción, my husband is looking for an article of clothing that belonged to his grandfather. It was a black suit, fairly new. Booth remembers hanging it in Hank's closet a few years ago after he had it dry-cleaned; it might still be in a clear plastic bag. Do you recall seeing it?"
The woman shook her head slowly with the kind of amused expression that said if she didn't know where the item was, she at the very least had a good idea of where it might have gone.
"That Mr. Hank-wouldn't surprised me if one of the other residents borrowed it for something; he was always lending things to people. Jackets, decks of cards, his Reader's Digest, even shoes," she added with a chuckle. "He'd get all mad about them asking, but he'd always give in. Here, let me help you look. He might have put it somewhere different after he got it back."
The women began going through the two sets of drawers in the room while Booth continued his patently fruitless search of the closet. The agent was in the middle of pulling out every article of clothing from the dark cubicle when a slender, elegant woman with a stylish silver bob, fragile and beautiful as a porcelain doll, made her way into the room with a walker. Without a doubt, the visitor must have been a real head-turner back in the day.
"Heard you were both here; so sorry about Hank" she announced, sounding sad but composed.
Booth was familiar with the look as well as the tone; together, they told the story of the built-in resignation experienced by many who live in nursing homes. How many times had Pops told him about good friends down the hall who had passed away in the middle of the night or simply never made it back from a routine visit to the hospital? It wasn't good to get too attached in these places; everyone there knew that. But the overriding need human beings have to connect and feel wanted made the elderly bravely forge ahead and create new friendships anyway, even knowing that these relationships would in all likelihood be brief, like those ephemeral flowers that only last one day.
"If you don't like your current friends, all you have to do is wait for the ambulance to haul them away," Pops often joked about the 'benefits' of getting old. Reading the obituary section of the newspaper on a daily basis, he could often be heard making disparaging remarks about the formerly-known deceased to anyone who'd listen.
His grandson guessed that the gallows humor was a smoke-and-mirrors kind of thing, an unorthodox form of self-preservation. With his world shrinking at a dizzying rate, caustic jokes were Pops' last remaining weapon against what must have been a growing sense of isolation.
No one at the home seemed to hold it against him, especially not the other residents. They could all pretty much relate.
"Thank you, Mrs. Kelly," Booth replied politely. "It was fast at the end" he added, as if that somehow made everything better.
In some ways it did, he supposed. But it also didn't.
"Please, Seeley; I keep telling you to call me Margaret. How long have we known each other, young man? That's good about Hank; it's terrible when it just goes on and on. I want to go that way too, if the good Lord will let me."
Their guest noticed the boxes on the stripped-down bed.
"I see you're taking his things. If you don't mind, if you find a picture of Hank and me all dressed up could I have it? One of the nurses on his floor took it last year at the Christmas party and gave it to him as a present. He looked so handsome..."
Mrs. Kelly's blue-gray, nearly opalescent eyes were starting to water, but she quickly brushed off the unsettled mood with a wave of her hand.
"We used to crochet together," she added with a wistful smile.
Brennan looked at Booth curiously, but her unspoken request for clarification on the subject of Hank's unexpected hobby was pointedly ignored by her stone-faced husband. In fact, he seemed to be doing everything in his power to avoid her gaze.
"Sure. Mrs. Ke...Margaret, did Pops ever mention lending a suit to anyone here at the nursing home?" Booth asked.
"A suit...a suit. I'm sorry; my memory, like the rest of me, is falling apart." The increasingly tired woman closed her eyes, seemingly making a concerted effort to wade through what must have been an ocean of murky memories. "Wait, I think that matter of fact, he did lend it out. To John, the railway man who lived next door. Do you remember? With the oxygen?"
Booth and Brennan nodded simultaneously. Who didn't remember John Deeley? Boisterous, wheezy, crude but unerringly funny-and also one of the many friends of Pops' they had met over the years who were no longer on this earthly plane.
"God rest his soul," Mrs. Kelly added piously. "His granddaughter got married last year. He told Hank his family was going to buy him a suit, and Hank said not to bother-that it was a waste of money and that he could borrow his."
She looked at Booth and grinned.
"He was proud as a peacock about that suit you gave him; said it was one of the nicest things he ever owned."
Funny, Booth thought, because at the time he bought it Pops had done nothing but complain to high heaven about all the fittings and what he considered to be the outfit's ridiculously high price, even though Booth had happily footed the bill.
"You were such a good grandson, young man; always looking after Hank. He was very proud of you and the grandkids, and of Temperance here."
Brennan, seeing the sudden ache that was pressing down on Booth's sagging shoulders, quickly took over for him.
"Those are very kind words, Margaret; they mean a lot to Booth and me. You mentioned that Hank lent the suit to Mr. Deeley; do you happen to know if he ever got it back?"
"Oh, honey; with John's alzheimer's, I can't imagine he even remembered going to that wedding two days after it happened, let alone that he wore something that wasn't his. I went to his wake-good Lord, it wasn't a black one by any chance, was it?"