A Mother in the Making

“Despite the toolbox, I am actually a girl, Jack,” she drawled. “I believe we’ve already covered that? I gotta catch up on my celebrity gossip or I grow forests of unwanted body hair overnight.”

He laughed. “No forests. He has good magazines.”

“Then I’ll come in and read.”

They waited five minutes before Dr. Seeger called him in, and he left Carmen with her pile of glitzy reading.

“Okay,” the doctor said, sounding way too eager. “Let’s see if I can cause some pain.”

Bottom line, he could.

Other than that, the news was good.

“I don’t think you’ve caused any further damage,” Dr. Seeger said. “Your blood pressure is normal and your temperature, your heart. There’s no sign of infection or swelling. It wasn’t hurting until I poked at it just now?”

“No, but if I twist…”

“Don’t twist. You’re, what, ten days out of surgery? You’re still healing. Go easy on this.”

“Do I have to lie down?”

“Not unless you want to. Have you been taking your pain medication?”

“I stopped it. Made my head too fuzzy and I hated it.”

The doctor fixed him with a thoughtful look. “It’s probably good that you’ve stopped, although I wouldn’t recommend that strategy to every patient. You’re the type who thinks he’s cured if he can’t feel actual pain. The hero type. If you pop painkillers, who knows what you’ll do to yourself and never realize.”

They negotiated Jack’s exact level of permitted activity for a couple more minutes, and Jack wondered if maybe this “hero-type” thing had some truth to it. Dr. Seeger certainly seemed able to predict a few of his recent behavior patterns with a high degree of accuracy. There was also the lingering suggestion that the “hero” label wasn’t one hundred percent complimentary.

He left the doctor’s office with mixed feelings.

“He says I can keep painting,” Jack reported when he got back to Carmen in the waiting room. He looked pleased and a little thoughtful.

“Is that good?”

“Hell, yeah!”

“What else did he say?” She put down her magazines and stood up, sensing he was eager to get out of there. The car keys in his hand provided a tiny clue. He was jiggling them impatiently, even though they belonged to his own car, not the C & C pickup that they’d arrived in, and he wasn’t even driving.

“What else?” he echoed. “Good blood pressure, no infection or swelling. And he says I should go easy on the painkillers because I’m the—” He stopped.

“The what?” she prompted.

“Nah. Nothing.”

“Go on. Worst patient he’s ever had? Rarest blood group on the planet?”

He shrugged, tucked in the corner of his mouth and spread his hands. “The hero type. For what it’s worth.”

What was it worth?

Carmen didn’t know.

She didn’t have a lot of experience with heroes.

Chapter Three

Four days of solid work later—a lot of splintered wood, a lot of paint fumes, a lot of dirt and mess, the occasional presence of Rob to help with the heavy work, not much conversation—Carmen flipped her cell phone shut and announced to Jack, “That was Cormack. He and Rob should be here with the new kitchen cabinets in about a half hour. They’ve hit a delay at the warehouse, but they’re sorting it out.”

“No problem,” Jack answered easily.

He had seemed more relaxed as each day passed. His side looked to be hurting him less, and he’d told her that Ryan was coming tonight, for the first of his more-frequent weekends here. Carmen could see Jack was happy about it, but a little wound up at the same time. He’d looked at his watch several times over the past hour.

“At least, it’s no problem for me,” he added. “Do you have somewhere you need to be?”

“No, I’ll wait. We won’t get any of the cabinets put in tonight, but they’ll take a while to unload from the truck, and we’ll want to check them for any damage or anything that’s wrong. Will it be a problem if we’re still here when Ryan arrives, though?”

He looked at his watch again. “Shouldn’t be.”

But he frowned. Carmen already had the impression that his ex’s reactions could be unpredictable.

It was late Friday afternoon and almost dark out. Chilly, too, with so many windows open to air out the smell of fresh paint. Jack had almost finished the sunroom. He’d been working with a roller at the far end, rapidly filling in the last sections with long, smooth strokes.

Carmen watched him as he returned to the work. He leaned down to the roller tray, still favoring his injured side a little. He put the roller against the wall and pushed up and down, and the muscle in his upper right arm went a little harder and rounder, below the loose band of that frayed old T-shirt, which was now splattered with paint. The color went onto the wall with a hissy, splishy kind of sound, and Jack hummed a couple of bars of a classic rock riff under his breath, sounding a little on edge after the mention of Ryan’s arrival. “Dunh, dunh, da, dunh, dunh, dunh-da.”

She recognized what he was humming. Deep Purple. “Smoke on the Water.”

He’d done a good job, her professional eye told her. Most amateur painters skimped on the prep work. They didn’t spend enough time sanding or filling in holes, didn’t tape the windows, and ended up with sloppy edges and rough spots. Jack hadn’t even opened his paint cans until yesterday evening, after she and Rob had gone for the day. He must have worked for hours last night on the ceiling, and today he’d done the main wall color, a buttery cream. There was a contrasting trim to go on later, in a pale Wedgwood-blue.

“I like it,” she told him. Then she fought a yawn, which Jack fortunately missed.

If he’d spent half last night painting, she’d spent at least as much time worrying about Kate being out late again, and listening for the sound of her coming through the front door. She’d heard her sister’s key in the lock at almost two, and then unsteady footsteps stumbling up the stairs.

“Yeah? You do?” He turned. “I wanted to prep it well enough so it didn’t need a second coat. Really wanted it done today, before—” He stopped. “Well, just done today. What do you think?”

“You’ll have to wait for brighter light, but I can’t see any patchy spots. You may have some touching up, that’s all.”

“And it’s not too yellow?”

“Not at all,” she reassured him.

“And not too, you know, girly?”

“Not to my eye.”

“Good.”

He wanted the new paint job to be finished enough to show off to Ryan, she realized, and he wanted Ryan to like it. This was no bachelor pad he was creating for himself, here. He wanted it to be a home.