“They’re not happy campers,” I warned Jonathan when he arrived to pick up Katie and Benjamin promptly at six o’clock.
He looked over my shoulder and watched them trudge down the stairs. “They seem okay to me.”
God, how I hated that. Whatever I told him, his opinion differed. It ... he never changed. If he told me that, I’d take him at his word. But not Jonathan. Sometimes I wondered whether he disagreed with everything I said because he could.
“You look nice, Susan.”
Months ago that smoky look in his eyes would have made me dizzy. I handed him a slip of paper with Alex’s telephone number. “Here’s where I’ll be tonight in case you need to get in touch with me.”
“They’ll be fine.” He frowned. “Where are you going?”
Like that was any of his business. “Nowhere.”
“Nowhere? What’s this telephone number for, then?”
Busted. I needed to fine-tune my lie-making skills. Fudging the truth seemed an imperative part of divorce. “Alex invited me to his house for dinner.” I looked away from his face, the face I loved so dearly a few months ago, and pasted a joyful smile, hugged my kids and wished them a great weekend.
I left for Alex’s house at seven o’clock. I took my time, enjoying the brisk air and the sounds of my new neighborhood.
Within two minutes, I stood on the sidewalk and faced his massive story-and-a-half house, a rose among weeds. It looked like he replaced the original cedar clapboard siding with matching siding. He had painted it a soft beige with Wedgwood blue-colored shutters. Double-hung windows with white grilles completed the look. It told me so much about him. He liked the old, but accepted the new, different from his neighbors, yet very much alike. I couldn’t wait to see inside and wondered if my house would ever look so visually appealing.
“May I help you?”
Distantly, his voice broke through my thoughts. He must have been watching for me. I smiled and opened the gate in the white picket fence and walked toward him where he stood on the veranda. I remembered asking him that same question the night we met. “I was just admiring your home. It’s beautiful.” Just as he stared at my house that first night, I stared at his, but for different reasons. He had been interested in knowing whether mine housed a ghost while I'd appreciated the beauty of his.
He grinned. “Would you like a tour?”
I smiled and climbed the steps. “An offer I can’t refuse.”
He leaned over and brushed his lips across my cheek. “You look great.”
Alex looked pretty good himself. He wore black dress pants and a black turtleneck in a lightweight material. He’d shaved and gotten a haircut. I liked this look, but I liked the old one, too, the one where his hair curled at the ends and his face sported an evening shadow. “You don’t look half bad yourself.”
He whisked me inside, obviously anxious for my reaction. I didn’t disappoint him.
“Wow. This is amazing.” I tried to take in everything at one time. It was impossible. There was too much to appreciate. “This is magnificent.” The curving staircase directly ahead, the gleaming hardwood floors beneath my feet, the expansive rooms on either side of me virtually took away my breath. The living room — parlor as my grand-mama would say — boasted furniture probably as old as the house.
To my right sat an even larger room. I pictured Alex sitting in one of the two black leather wingback chairs on either side of a roaring fire, smoking a pipe. The wainscoting, which I deduced by the polished luster, had been redone. The walls were painted a cranberry color. Velvet drapes held back by matching tiebacks in the same color framed the living room window and the two long windows on either side of the fireplace. The room was very masculine, but a woman could get comfortable in it.
He helped me out of my jacket and followed my finger as it went from the cornice moldings to the wide baseboards.
“You redid this all yourself?” I asked.
“Inch by painstaking inch.”
I didn’t do the math, but I guesstimated it took months to do. The man must have the patience of Job.
“Do you like it?”
“Like it? I love it. I can’t wait to finish mine now.”
We walked into the kitchen. I marveled at the marble counter tops, stainless steel side-by-side refrigerator and microwave, countertop stove, built-in oven and dishwasher. The twelve-by-twelve beige ceramic flooring surprised me. I expected oak flooring, maybe parquet, but never ceramic. An archway from the dining room led to a glassed-in semicircular wraparound veranda overlooking the back yard.
“So, what do you think?”
“Running water through copper pipes had me salivating, cabinets and countertops have me positively covetous. You have impeccable taste.” I settled on a stool at the butcher’s block while he opened a bottle of wine and poured two glasses.
Our fingers touched when I accepted the glass from his hand. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
He took a stool across from me. Tendrils of dark, curly hair fell across his forehead.
“What does?”
“Doing all the work yourself. A sense of accomplishment. The thrill of having something metamorphose before your eyes. At least it does for me. Our houses will really belong to us once we’re finished, don’t you think?” Judging by the look on his face, I said something that surprised him. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Most people can’t see past the work that needs to be done.”
I nodded. “I might be one of those people if I hadn’t needed something to occupy my time when I house searched. It started out as therapy for me, but now I find I’m really enjoying it. Maybe I’ll go into business renovating old homes. I can use my house as a model.”
“How did that list of names I gave you work out?”
“Great, thanks. According to the plumber and electrician, my old pipes are a flood waiting to happen and the wiring is an inferno waiting to ignite. They’re both going to start on Monday, and on the following Thursday, my new cabinets and countertops will be installed.” I rubbed my hands together. I couldn’t wait. Something dawned on me. “You’re handy with a scraper. Maybe your father was a carpenter and you came by working with wood and your hands honestly.”
He smiled. I loved the overlap of his front tooth. “You’re not going to let up on it, are you?”
I put on my wide-eyed innocent look. “Let up on what?”
“On me trying to locate my birth parents.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine not wanting to find them, not wanting to know. If I had a chance to get my parents back, I’d jump at it.”
He gave me a long, steady look. “How long ago did your parents die?”
“Dad died twenty-five years ago. He was a supervisor at the mill and was killed in an industrial accident.” I shuddered at the memory. “I don’t know quite how it happened or why. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near the machinery he was. And depending who you asked, the story was always different.
“My mom took his death really hard. A few years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was operated on, but there were complications.... she didn’t last very long afterward. I nursed her at home.” My eyes filled with tears. I still missed her, even after all this time. Maybe I would never stop grieving.
“How old were you at the time?”
“Nineteen.”
“That must have been hard on you.”
It was. I’d do it again, though, without question and without hesitation. “A little.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“An older brother and sister, Elizabeth and Ryan. They both live in town.”
“Are you close to them?”
“I was once, but not now.” I stared at the wine in my glass, then gulped the remainder.
He refilled my glass. “What happened?”
I shrugged. “It was over my mother’s estate. She’d willed everything to me. I didn’t know she’d cha
nged her will. I told Elizabeth and Ryan I’d split the money evenly among us, but they took me to court instead. They contested the will and accused me of coercing her into signing a new will. Can you imagine? I was nineteen years old. How would I know anything about wills? How would I know enough to do that?” I closed my eyes for a moment against that unpleasant memory. “I nursed her because I wanted to. I loved her. All along I thought it was about the money, but it wasn’t. It was about their guilt and jealousy.” I stared into his eyes and realized how easy it was to talk to him. I never told anyone this story, not even Jonathan. It wasn’t because it shamed me or that I felt guilty. Their behavior embarrassed me.
“They didn’t win?”
I shook my head. “No. After my dad died, my mother bought my sister and brother their homes and new cars. The judge said they already received their share of my mother’s estate.”
“And now you’re alone again.”
I stared at my wine, thinking how true that was. “After my mother died and what my brother and sister did to me, I thought I'd die from the hurt. I was brought up to believe my family would always stand by me, always love me no matter what. I had no one to turn to. I cried for six months, then one day I woke up and vowed I wouldn’t look back. I haven’t. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I raised my face into the air, aware of how Alex hung on my every word. “Now that I think about it, that happening helped me cope with my divorce. And I can’t believe I’m airing private matters with a stranger.”
“I’m not really a stranger, am I?”
He was right. A stranger wouldn’t know the things he knew about me. “No, you’re not.”
“Tell me about your ex-husband.”
I took my glass and cradled it between my palms. “He’s a bastard.” I smiled to soften my words. “I’m sorry. He’s not really. I just like to think he is. He’s a good man and a good father and he was a good husband, despite his faults. We all have them, don’t we?”
He propped his elbows on the block and rested his chin in the palms of his hands. “So, you’re past the divorce?”
The question called for a witty answer. I didn’t have one. “Not yet, but I will be. I hardly think about it anymore, and I try hard not to think about Jonathan at all.” I leaned over and peeked into the glass door of the oven. “Dinner smells wonderful.”
“Meat loaf, baked potatoes, peas and baby carrots from my garden last year,” he said, as though reading my mind.
My mouth watered. “I haven’t had meat loaf since ... I can’t remember when.”
“Well, you’re in for a treat tonight. My meat loaf is magnifico.” He kissed his fingertips and sent the kiss into the air.
I laughed. He had that effect on me.
“How’s your research coming along? Unearth anything interesting?”
I didn’t know Alex very well, but there was something underlying in his eyes. Intensity, maybe. It unnerved me a little, but that didn't stop me from telling him what I learned so far. He was an intent listener. Something just occurred to me. “How did these men avoid being drafted?”
“Drafted?”
Sometimes my thoughts ran ahead of me and I jumped into the middle of a discussion in my mind. “The first World War. I thought every man over eighteen was sent to fight.”
“Not every man. If there were extenuating circumstances, or if a man had health problems, he wasn’t drafted.”
I remembered reading something along those lines.
“Now that you know the history of your house, do you know why the ghost is there?”
In my mind I went over everything I learned. After a moment, I answered, “No idea. But I’m sure there’s a clue in there somewhere. I just need to find it.”