The Daddy Makeover

The man she had met five years ago when she first moved here would have grinned and teased her about her bubbleheaded moment. But the solemn stranger he had become since the death of his wife and baby girl only nodded. “I can come back later. Not a problem.”

Guilt was a miserable companion on a rainy night. “No. Come in. You’re here, you might as well get started, at least in the empty apartment. Without Anna here, I don’t feel right about taking you into Abigail’s apartment to see what to do there, since it’s her territory now. But I have a key to the second floor. I just need to run up and get it.”

“Better change into something dry while you’re up there. Wouldn’t do for you to catch pneumonia.”

His solemn concern absurdly made her want to cry. She hadn’t had anybody to fuss over her since Abigail’s death.

“I’ll hurry,” she assured him, and dripped her way up the stairs, leaving him behind with Conan.

She returned five minutes later in dry jeans, a sweatshirt and toweled-dry hair. She hurried down the stairs to the second-floor landing, where Will must have climbed with Conan. The two of them sat on the top step and the dog had his chin on Will’s knee.

“Sorry to leave you waiting.” She pulled out a key and fitted it in the keyhole.

Will rose. “Not a problem. Conan’s been telling me about his day.”

“He’s quite the uncanny conversationalist, isn’t he?”

He managed half a smile and followed her into the apartment.

The rooms here, their furnishings blanketed in dust covers, had a vaguely forlorn feeling to them. Unlike the rest of the house, the air was stale and close. Whenever she came in here, Sage thought the apartment seemed to be waiting for something, silly as that seemed.

Abigail had rented the second floor only twice in the five years Sage had lived at Brambleberry House. Each time had been on a temporary basis, the apartment becoming a transitional home for Abigail’s strays for just a few months at a time.

The place should be lived in. It was comfortable and roomy, with three bedrooms, a huge living room and a fairly good-sized kitchen.

The plumbing was in terrible shape and the vinyl tiles in the kitchen and bathroom was peeling and outdated, in definite need of replacement. The appliances and cabinets in the kitchen were ancient, too, and the whole place could use new paint and some repairs to the crumbling lathe and plaster walls.

Despite the battle scars, the apartment had big windows all around that let light throughout the rooms and the living room enjoyed a particularly breathtaking view of the sea. Not as nice as the one from her third-floor apartment, but lovely still.

She wandered to the window now and realized she had a perfect view of Eben and Chloe Spencer’s place, the lights still beating back the darkness.

“Hey Sage, can you come hold the end of the tape measure?”

She jerked out of her reverie and followed his voice to the bathroom. For the next few minutes she assisted while Will studied, measured, measured again and finally jotted figures on his clipboard.

They were in the kitchen when through the open doorway she saw Conan suddenly lift his head from his morose study of the peeling wallpaper. A moment later, she heard the squeak of the front door and reminded herself to add WD-40 to her shopping list.

Conan scrambled up, nosed open the door and galloped for the stairs. A moment later he was back, with Anna not far behind him.

“Hey, Will. I saw your van out front. I didn’t realize you were coming tonight.”

Sage fought down her guilt. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here. Anna had no business arranging all this without talking to her.

“I meant to call you but the day slipped away from me,” she said. “I bumped into Will this morning on the way to work and he told me he was coming out tonight to give us a bid on the work we apparently want him to do.”

Anna didn’t miss her tight tone. Sage thought she saw color creep over her dusky cheekbones. “I figured there was no harm having him come out to take a look. Information is always a good thing. We need to know what our initial capital outlay might be to renovate the apartment so we can accurately determine whether it’s cost-effective to rent it out.”

Sage really hated that prim, businessy tone. Did any personality at all lurk under Anna’s stiff facade? It had to. She knew it must. Abigail had cared about her, had respected her enough to sell her the gift shop and to leave her half of Brambleberry House.

Sage had seen little sign of it, though. She figured Anna probably fell asleep at night dreaming of her portfolio allocation.

She didn’t want to battle this out tonight. She was too darn tired after wrestling thirteen energetic kids all day.

Instead, she reached into her pocket for the dog treat she had grabbed upstairs when she had changed her clothes. She palmed it and held it casually at thigh level.

Conan was a sucker for the bacon treats. Just as she intended, the dog instantly left Anna’s side and sidled over to her. Anna tried to hide her quick flicker of hurt but she wasn’t quite quick enough.

“Dirty trick,” Will murmured from behind her.

Having a witness to her sneakiness made her feel petty and small. She wasn’t fit company for anyone tonight. She let out a breath and resolved to try harder to be kind.

“I think we’re done up here,” Will said. “Should I take a look at the first floor now?”

Anna nodded and led the way down the stairs. Sage thought about escaping to her apartment and indulging in that warm bath that had been calling her name all evening, but she knew it would be cowardly, especially after Will had witnessed her subversive bribery of Conan.

She followed them down the stairs to Abigail’s apartment. With some trepidation, Sage stood in the doorway. She hadn’t been here since Anna moved her things in two weeks ago. She couldn’t help expecting to see Abigail bustle out of the kitchen with her tea tray and a plateful of Pepperidge Farm Raspberry Milanos.

All three of them—four, counting Conan—paused inside the living room. Shared grief for the woman they had all loved twisted around them like thorny vines.

Anna was the first to break the charged moment as she briskly moved into the room. “Sorry about the mess. If I’d had warning, I might have had time to straighten up a little.”

Sage couldn’t see much mess, just a newspaper spread out on the coffee table and a blanket jumbled in a heap on the couch, but she figured those few items slightly out of place probably affected Anna as much as if a hurricane had blown through.

“What I would like to do is knock down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room to make the kitchen bigger. And then I was wondering about the feasibility of taking out the wall between the two smaller bedrooms to make that a big master.”

Abigail’s presence was so strong here. While Will and Anna were busy in the kitchen, Sage stood in the middle of the living room and closed her eyes, her throat tight. She could still smell her here, that soft scent of freesia.

Abigail wouldn’t have wanted her to wallow in this wrenching grief, she knew, but she couldn’t seem to fight it back.

For one odd second, the scent of freesia seemed stronger and she could swear she felt a soft, papery hand on her cheek.

To distract herself from the weird sensation, she glanced around the rooms and through the open doorway to one of the bedrooms and suddenly caught sight of Abigail’s vast doll collection.

Collecting dolls had always seemed too ordinary a hobby for Abigail, given her friend’s other eccentricities, but Abigail had loved each piece in the room.

She moved to the doorway and flipped on the light switch, enjoying as always that first burst of amazement at the floor-to-ceiling display cases crammed full of thousands of dolls. There was her favorite, a mischievous-looking senior citizen wearing a tie-dyed shirt and a peace medallion. Golden Flower Child. She was certain the artist had handcrafted it specifically for Abigail.

“You should take some of them up to your apartment.”

Sage quickly dropped her hand from the doll’s familiar smile to find Anna watching her.

“They’re part of the contents of the house, which she left jointly to both of us,” Anna went on. “Half of them are yours.”

She glanced at the aging hippie doll with longing, then shook her head. “They belong together. I’m not sure we should split up the collection.”

After a long pause, Anna’s expression turned serious. “Why don’t you take them all upstairs with you, then?”

She had a feeling the offer had not been an easy one for Anna to make. It touched her somewhere deep inside. The lump in her throat swelled and she felt even more guilty for the dog-treat trick.