A Mother in the Making

Carmen discreetly slid the toe of her running shoe beneath a curled-up edge of orangey-brown carpet to take a look. She loved the whole process of renovating an old house, even though she and Cormack did mostly kitchens and bathrooms. She could just imagine this room with fresh paint, comfortable furnishings, syrup-colored floorboards….

“Yeah, I took a look and it seems to be in great condition,” Jack Davey said, following her downward gaze to the floor.

She hadn’t been discreet enough, apparently. Felt a little shamefaced as she admitted, “I love checking out the possibilities. Cormack says I act as if every house we work on is the one I’m going to raise my kids in.”

“Yeah? How many do you have?” He found the coffee jar and filters, went back into the kitchen to fill the glass pot.

“Oh, kids? None. Theoretical kids, he means.” She wasn’t convinced she wanted kids of her own, actually, after she and Cormack had pretty much raised the younger three O’Brien siblings these past ten years and more. Not that her client needed to know any of that.

But maybe he’d caught something in her tone. He gave her a sideways glance and said, “Right,” and the subject was closed.

He made the coffee and they drank it and munched on a Danish pastry each as they toured the sprawling house. It definitely needed work. The basement was cluttered with junk, and the dust lay thick. The washing machine down there looked like a model from the sixties. They both poked around, finding traces of damp along the north wall.

“I might have to get some new drainage in place outside.” Jack bent and ran his fingers across the puckered, powdery whitewash down near floor level.

Carmen took a closer look, also, and for a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder, propping their hands on their knees as they examined the problem. “The place might just need airing out. Or you might be right and it could need more major treatment.”

She was enjoying this. It reminded her of the way she and Cormack worked together, very practical and relaxed with each other. A heck of a lot easier than standing in Jack Davey’s kitchen feeling him sob in her arms.

Hmm. Too relaxed, maybe.

Suddenly she felt a little self-conscious, as if she’d been standing too close. He smelled good, and that wasn’t the kind of thing you should notice about a client a half hour after you first met him.

“But look at the windows,” Jack said, moving away. He’d stopped favoring his injured left side now that it was hurting less, and he walked with more athletic grace than she would have expected from a lawman. He was springy on his feet, and energetic, which Carmen liked because she was energetic, too. “They’re a good size. When they’re clean they’ll let in a lot of light, and I’ll clear out the junk, paint the floor.”

They went back up the rickety basement stairs. The fireplace in the living room had been closed off and replaced with an ugly gas heater, the floors needed sanding and varnishing, and you could spend three months painting the place inside and out and not have it done, but the ceilings were high and there was some great original detail. Marble and Flemish tile around the fireplace, real plaster cornices and moldings, stained and beveled glass panels beside the front door, hand carving on the hardwood newel post at the foot of the stairs.

“Want to see outside before we go upstairs?” Jack said.

“Is there much land?”

“About three-fourths of an acre. Like the house, it’s a mess.”

They went through a side door and around into the rear yard, where dew still lay on the untidy grass. Walking next to Jack, Carmen couldn’t help taking sideways looks a couple of times. To see if he was still okay. To see what that strong, hard body really looked like, because having a man fall into her arms two minutes after she met him meant that so far she had a more vivid impression about the way he felt and smelled and sounded than about the way he looked.

Both times she found him looking back at her. A little wary, a little curious at the same time. As if he needed to check out what she really looked like, too, because he only knew about how she felt and smelled. The first time this happened, they both looked away fast. The second time, out beyond the shadow of the house, the looks held for half a second too long.

He cleared his throat. “So this is the yard.” It came out a little too breezy and cheerful.

“Oh, right, great,” she answered, as if she hadn’t recognized that this was a yard until he said it.

When she looked closer, she saw that it was more than a yard, it was a garden. An overgrown and half-forgotten garden, but a garden all the same. She saw rosebushes that had gone unpruned for years and a stand of fruit trees that was almost an orchard. Winter-deadened weeds, creepers and sumac camouflaged an area of stone paving with a hand-chiseled birdbath at the center of it.

“It’ll take work,” Jack said, as if warning her.

“Yeah, I noticed,” she drawled. “Are you a gardener?”

“Never have been, but when I look at this and think about the possibilities, I want to learn.”

The property backed onto what was almost a cliff. Facing south, it rose forty or fifty feet, made of chunky, solid rock that was covered in a tangle of growth. In the April sun, the fresh lime-green of new leaves had begun to appear.

“This is natural, this rock face?” Carmen asked.

“That’s right.”

“And is that a train track up on top?”

“It’s not used anymore. I climbed all the way up here one day. There are pockets of good soil in lots of places.”

He paced in front of the rock face, his keenness for the project translating into energetic movement and an animated face. His eyes weren’t red-rimmed anymore, and he’d begun to forget their awkward start with each other. So had Carmen. Her relief was like the April sun. Getting stronger. Warming her.

“It wouldn’t be too hard to clear out this jungle and turn it into a rock garden, with creepers and flowers,” he went on. “The main yard is through that hedge, to the side of the house. There are a couple of real nice trees you can see. That huge pine and the sycamore. The property goes through to this other road, here.” He pointed.

A side road led to a development of new houses on a hillside, big pseudomansions made of cheap materials with no style. In Carmen’s mind, even in its current dilapidated state, there was no contest between Jack’s old place and those new ones. She’d take the old house every time.

“It’s great,” she said. “I love it. One of those times I wish C & C Renovations did the whole package, not just kitchens and bathrooms.” She leaned a hand on the cool rock, closed her eyes and turned her face to the early-spring sun to absorb its rising warmth, but then she sensed how closely Jack Davey was watching her and opened her eyes to return the look.

Different from their last looks at each other. Curious, this time.

“Can I ask the obvious question now?” he said. He leaned against the rock and she thought the patch of sun would probably do his aching body some good, as well as his traumatized soul.

“Which question is that?” she asked.

“The one I’m having trouble putting into words without sounding…oh, crass, I guess.”

Okay. She knew.

“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a renovation business like this?”

“That’s the one. Sorry.”

“Yeah. Don’t go all macho and chauvinistic on me, okay?” she blurted out.

“I’m trying not to. But it is a little unusual. Does everyone hit you with it?”

“Or they hit my brother with it. They wonder if I’m going to pull my weight. But then we point out that we work on a contract basis, not by the hour, so if my dainty hand is too feeble to lift a hammer, it costs us, not the client.”

“Which doesn’t tell me why you went into it in the first place.”

“Family reasons, mostly.” He wouldn’t want the details. She found herself giving too many of them, anyhow. For some reason, he seemed easy to talk to. “We needed a business where Cormack could use his building skills and I could train with him while we worked. We didn’t have a lot of capital to invest. There was no money for more education. We had to be able to get off the ground fast. It was tough at first. We had small jobs, with a lot of gaps between them. But then we started getting good references from the work we’d done, and now we sometimes have to turn clients away.”

Although she’d summarized extensively, she wished she’d been briefer. He wasn’t the only one spilling too much information and too much emotion this morning.

“And you like hammering?” He seemed to be mentally contrasting this unlikely personality trait with the traits in other women he’d known, and he wasn’t getting a match.

Curvy girl bits. Hammering. Dangly earrings. Toolbox with pry bar.

She liked hammering?