Blueprints

by Barbara Delinsky

  Phone calls were fine, though. She made a few more before extracting herself from the cats, pulling on a white tank and denim shorts, and trotting barefoot down the stairs. The place smelled—cloyingly—of roses. She might have tossed them, had they not been from Theo.

  She poured herself an iced tea, pulled a stool up to the kitchen counter, and opened her laptop. It was a minute before her e-mail began loading. One day offline, and an amazing amount piled up. MacAfee had a digital assistant whose job was to monitor Gut It! Facebook posts, forward notes to whoever of the cast could best answer them, and post their replies. As host, Caroline got the most mail. For that reason, and because she liked doing it, she wrote and posted replies herself.

  Today, there were questions on refinishing butcher block, building bunk beds into a gabled alcove, and replacing an out-of-code banister, but she had barely skimmed the list when Master began weaving through her legs. She managed to haul him onto her lap—no small feat with only one arm and significant cat girth—but once there, he butted her chin with his furry gray head by way of thank you, turned a circle in search of just the right spot, and settled in.

  How to restore salvaged barn board. She started with that. Her right thumb was a problem, since the bandage holding it in the proper position for her wrist kept hitting the space bar at the wrong time. Other than the occasional twinge, though, the typing caused no pain.

  Caroline loved this part of her job. There were times when that still surprised her. Born and bred a carpenter, she had never dreamed of doing anything but working with tools. But now this—writing letters, giving advice, sharing her knowledge with people who turned around and put it to good use? Life was good.

  The doorbell rang. Easing Master to the floor, she left the kitchen. And there, at the far end of the hall on the other side of the screen, was Claire Howe.

  Caroline’s first thought was that Claire would not like what she was wearing. She rarely did. Not that the woman was a sharp dresser herself. Tall and lean, she seemed oblivious to her sloppy appearance, as in ill-fitting skirts and half-tucked blouses. And sneakers? Even Caroline knew that flats or low heels were better with a skirt.

  Not that Claire needed clothes to exert command. Her deep voice did that all on its own, and if not her voice, her eyes. They rarely blinked. The intimidation factor didn’t bother Caroline, but she spent her share of time on the set soothing others who suffered a bruising Claire stare.

  But they weren’t on the set now. This was Caroline’s turf.

  “Claire. Hi.” She smiled as she opened the screen. “This is a surprise—and before you say anything, I watched the tape. It’s amazing. Our best season yet, don’t you think?”

  Claire didn’t reply. She was eying the bandaged hand. “That looks serious.”

  Caroline turned the wrist back and forth. “Not to worry. This is by design. My doctor has a perverse sense of humor. And thank you for the birthday flowers.” She glanced toward the living room, where the arrangement from Brian and Claire positively burst from its vase. “Come.” She gestured. “You have to see these.”

  “I can certainly smell them,” Claire remarked as she followed Caroline into the living room. She glanced at the flowers, said a dismissive “Pretty,” and returned to Caroline with cautious eyes. “You look calm. Does that mean you’re okay with everything?”

  “With what?”

  “The change.”

  “What change?” When Claire’s eyes darkened in annoyance, Caroline tried to think of something she might have forgotten. The woman certainly wasn’t talking about menopause; she never got personal. Caroline could only think of one possibility. “You mean the underwriting change?” A new sponsor would be on board for the fall. But Claire’s frown said it wasn’t that. Uneasy, she said, “Spill it, Claire. It’s not like you to hesitate.”

  “It’s not like Roy to lie,” Claire shot back.

  Ooooh. Caroline wasn’t touching that one. “Please,” she invited, “what is it?”

  With a low chuff, Claire looked away, then almost angrily back. “We’re changing hosts.”

  Pause. “Excuse me?”

  “We’re making a change in who will host the show.” The words, enunciated in pairs, were barely out when she declared an irritated “I was not supposed to be the messenger here. We discussed this at length. Roy said Jamie already told you.”

  Caroline was doubly confused. “I was with Jamie yesterday. Twice. She didn’t mention any change.”

  “Well, I don’t know why not. She was the one who offered to tell you. This has been in the works for a while. We’ve been prepping her behind the scenes. She’ll be taking over as host.”

  Caroline was floored. “Excuse me?”

  “Jamie is the new host. We want a new face.”

  Caroline recoiled. “What’s wrong with mine?”

  “Nothing, Caroline,” Claire said in a pedantic way, clearly still annoyed, “except you’ve been hosting for a while. It’s time for something fresh.”

  Caroline had an awful feeling. “Define fresh.”

  “Young. Our backers feel strongly about this, and focus groups tell us that Jamie is the one they like best.”

  “At least they have good taste,” Caroline managed to say. Jamie would make a great host, but that wasn’t the issue. The word “young” was echoing, echoing, echoing. She felt blindsided, gutted just as she had been when Roy had told her she was no longer “young” enough to be his wife. “Oh boy,” she muttered. “This is Roy’s doing.” It was the only thing that made sense. He loved everything about Gut It!’s success except her role in it.

  Claire was strident. “Roy does not make the decisions here. He may know about marketing for your family business, but television is not his world. No, Roy didn’t initiate this, but he’s been on board from the start.”

  From the start? Like months and months? And Jamie knowing, too? That thought had her reeling.

  “Jamie is good, Caroline. She won’t let you down.”

  “Her ability isn’t the issue.”

  “It was Jamie’s idea to make a contest out of choosing the fall house.”

  “She’s definitely savvy about marketing gimmicks, but how does that correlate to hosting Gut It!?”

  “She’s of the generation we want. It was her idea to bring Taylor Huff on as interior designer this spring. Taylor is thirty. Focus groups liked her, too.”

  “Who all were in these focus groups?” Caroline cried. “College kids?”

  “Accept it, Caroline. It’s a fact of life, and it isn’t just television. Every entertainment platform puts a premium on youth.”

  “What about Oprah? She’s not thirty. Neither is Katie Couric or Cokie Roberts or … or Diane Sawyer.”

  “You’re no Diane Sawyer.”

  “And Gut It! is no This Old House,” Caroline shot back, because one put-down deserved another. But there was little satisfaction in it. Something inside her was withering. “I’m just gone from the show, then?”

  “Oh no,” Claire said quickly. “Lord no. We want you to stay on as master carpenter. You’ll still anchor certain segments, especially if the wedding takes place during the taping, and Jamie and Brad are in Paris.”

  “Paris.”

  “Am I speaking out of turn? I thought they were honeymooning there.”

  The woman certainly knew how to stab and twist. Caroline felt the pain but refused to show it. “They haven’t decided,” she replied, though suddenly wasn’t certain.

  “Well, whatever. When it comes to Gut It! we want you to do everything that you’ve been doing.”

  “Like smoothing things over when you offend people on set?”

  Claire stared. “Do you have a point with that?”

  “Absolutely,” Caroline said, perhaps brashly, but what did she have to lose? “I do a lot more on set than hosting, and it’s because I am who I am at the age I am that I’m able to do it.”

  “And we appreciate your efforts. But the person facin
g the camera is going to be Jamie.”

  With that bluntness, Caroline was blindsided all over again. How to process this, when it didn’t make sense? She and Jamie shared everything. Besides, hadn’t Jamie just said she didn’t have time to plan a wedding? Add hosting responsibilities to that—unless she was already factoring in hosting responsibilities?

  “There’ll be a learning curve,” Claire went on. “She understands that. But you have to agree that this will lead to big things for her career. Her name will be front and center. She’ll be a celebrity in architectural circles.”

  “I’m not arguing with any of that. But why now?” Jamie was twenty-nine. Caroline had been midforties when she took the helm.

  “Because our new sponsor feels strongly about it. Jamie was instrumental in securing this sponsor, by the way. She was in on all the meetings last winter. It’s about demographics. We want to aim for the twenty-five- to forty-year-olds.”

  “Well, that’s very PC,” Caroline said in a burst of pique, “but they’re not the ones spending the money.”

  “Increasingly, they are. Advertisers know this.”

  “They should tell that to those twenty-five- to forty-year-olds, who either have low-paying jobs or—if they were lucky enough to go to college—huge debt to repay. In the ten years our show’s been running, what was the youngest age of a homeowner?” In response to silence, she said, “Correct. Forty. Which is at the very top of that demographic. The average age of homeowners has been fifty. Our fall homeowners are nearing sixty. Do advertisers want that to change, too? Should Gut It! start focusing on redoing the one-bedroom condo that the average thirty-year-old might be able to afford?”

  Needing fresh air, Caroline left the living room and went out the door to the porch. Oh yes, the heat was brutal, but that wasn’t why she was sweating. Claire was poison. She wanted the woman out of her house. But even the porch was too close. She went halfway down the walk, where she put her hands on her hips and waited.

  Behind her, the screen slapped. Hit by a new wave of bewilderment, she turned as Claire approached. “Was it something I did? Something I said? Something I wore?” Not that she was about to change her look. Viewers loved her color. She constantly got mail on that.

  Claire said nothing.

  “Just my age,” Caroline concluded in defeat.

  After another moment’s silence, Claire waved away a fly. “So … are you okay with this now?”

  They had come full circle, but Caroline was more confused than ever. “How could I be okay with it? I totally disagree with this decision.”

  “You don’t want your daughter to move ahead?”

  “Whoa,” she cautioned with deadly calm, “I always want my daughter to move ahead. I’ve devoted my life to having my daughter move ahead. Do not ever think that I would do anything to hold my daughter back.”

  * * *

  It was true. But Caroline knew that the issue here wasn’t job advancement. It was caring. It was honesty, or the lack thereof, and the hurt it caused. It might even be betrayal, though she refused to go that far before she spoke with Jamie.

  Claire was still backing her BMW out of the driveway when Caroline went inside and, heart pounding, tried Jamie’s cell, but the call went straight to voice mail. Realizing that the plane might not have touched down in Atlanta, she waited another few minutes, then tried again. This time, after the beep, she said, “Call when you land,” and clicked off.

  Claire was gone.

  Jamie was silent.

  Caroline was too old.

  Sinking down on the steps in the front hall, feeling deficient in ways she hadn’t in years, she waited for Jamie to call back. Antsy, she wandered out to the front porch, frowning at nothing in particular until her eye fell on the flowers the Gut It! cameraman had sent. Heal well, his card read. You’re still our carpenter. She had thought the wording strange at the time, but it took on new meaning now.

  Who else knew? Claire and Brian, Roy and Jamie, the cameraman. Were e-mails making broader rounds even now? Was she the last to know? Had they purposely chosen to break the news when they knew she would be at home and out of commission?

  Striding angrily down the steps and across the lawn, she paused at the junipers growing in the shade of a curbside oak. They needed pruning. But not now. Totally aside from the heat, her wrist wouldn’t work.

  Because she’d had to have surgery on it. Because she’d been using it for so long.

  Discouraged, she went back to the steps, sat on the lowest one, and hugged her knees. A neighbor returning home slowed and waved. She waved back but was in no mood to talk. Instead, she went back inside and tried Jamie again, wondering if Jamie had forgotten to turn her phone on. She didn’t usually. Whenever Caroline was with her, she turned on the phone the instant the wheels touched down. It was habit, even compulsion perhaps.

  Unless she had deliberately not done it now because she didn’t want to be reached. Unless she had actually, horrifyingly planned to be away so that Claire would have to break the news.

  Trying not to panic, Caroline went through to the kitchen and out the back door. Even as she headed for the garage, though, her mind remained in the kitchen. Jamie wanted to renovate it. She had been increasingly insistent. Out of guilt? That would make sense if she had known about this for a while or, worse, had lobbied for it. Would she seriously have done that?

  Roy sure as hell would. Caroline had no doubt about that, as she slipped into the garage. He might not have come up with the idea, but he was probably on the phone with Claire right now, grinning that cocky grin of his as he reveled in Caroline’s demotion.

  Inhaling the familiar scent of sawdust, she ousted Roy from her mind. She didn’t want him here. This place was hers.

  Up until five years before, she had lived in the house they shared while married, and though it was a dozen years before that when he moved out and signed over the deed, that house had never felt entirely hers. This one did—both the main Victorian and this garage, which had the same facade as the original carriage house but was a totally different beast inside. Oh yes, it had a small office in the second-floor loft, but more important to Caroline was the belly below.

  The equivalent of a generous two-car garage, it was outfitted with superb lighting and the latest in ventilation systems to remove sawdust from the air. That said, there was just enough of it gathered at the feet of the worktables to bring her comfort. Add to its smell the fainter ones of glue, wood stain, even a lingering electrical smell from her new belt saw, and she was in her element. Her tools were on shelves and wall hooks, or mounted on tables, with goggles and gloves lying nearby. Mingling among them, though, and just as precious to her were the relics from her father’s workshop. Most were small hand tools. Running her hand now over a palm sander that had been revolutionary in his day, she was taken back to her roots.

  She was a carpenter. The scent of sawdust, like comfort food, was an anesthetic. She was okay, she told herself. She didn’t need to host a TV show.

  Momentarily soothed, she tried Jamie again, but when she hit voice mail, the soothing leeched away. Jamie knew. Jamie prepped. Jamie plotted.

  But knowing Caroline would be hurt?

  She thought about asking Roy and quickly vetoed the idea. All he would do was gloat.

  Theo, on the other hand, was her champion. He might have insight into what was happening and why. But running to her ex-father-in-law at the first sign of trouble just wasn’t her way.

  Unable to work because of her hand and too unsettled to sit still, she left the garage and paced the yard as she waited for Jamie’s call. But the cell in her hand remained silent, and the longer it did that, the more damning things seemed. Jamie was taking her sweet time returning her call, which was so not like Jamie that there had to be more going on.

  Plane trouble? Back inside, she checked the airline’s website. ARRIVED, it said.

  She thought of calling Dean. But he was in the air somewhere in the middle of the count
ry, and besides, his solution to life problems was either to ride on the Harley or to hunt.

  Annie would be as angry as Dean. But she was doing a huge installation at a MacAfee project an hour away. And Caroline didn’t want to involve anyone else until she talked with Jamie.

  She wanted to convince herself that being upset was petty and that she’d be fine as long as she was still part of the show. She wanted to say she didn’t care if Jamie hosted.

  But the silence grew louder with each minute that passed, so that by the time Jamie finally called, Caroline was ready to believe the worst.

  seven

  Jamie’s heart lurched when she heard Caroline’s message. It was too short and too tense, not like her mother at all. And though Jamie was in a car with her client and needed to maintain a semblance of professionalism, there was no way she wasn’t calling right back.

  Picking up, Caroline said her name, just her name.

  “What’s wrong?” Jamie asked in the lowest of voices.

  “Claire was here.”

  Jamie pressed her fingers to her forehead, as much to shield her voice from the driver as to keep herself calm. “She wasn’t supposed to do that.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “One day.”

  “That’s not what she said. She said you’ve known for a while.”

  “Not true.”

  “She said they’ve been grooming you for this.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “She said you were all in favor of it.”

  “She lied.”

  “But you did know about it both times you were here yesterday.”

  “Yes. But the time wasn’t right to discuss it.” Nor was this, what with a client sitting three feet away. Voice even lower, she said, “I can’t talk right now. Can I call later?”

  She heard what sounded like a frustrated sound, then a click, and the line went dead.

  * * *

  Caroline’s rational self understood why Jamie couldn’t talk. The emotional one did not. Thinking that if Jamie was as innocent as she claimed, she would find a way to call back, she waited anxiously on the porch. She walked through the house. She spent time with the cats.