by Holley Trent
“No. Do you know who called me this morning?”
“No. Who?”
“Frank.”
“What’d he want?”
“Just wanted to let me know he was sending his report over to the judge about Kevin. He wanted to give me a heads-up about what it said.”
Tim flinched and leaned back in his seat, rubbing his eyes. “All right, let me have it.”
“Well, brace yourself, because this one’s a shocker.” She leaned forward, knitting her brows. “Kevin is actually doing fine. He puts his head down and does his work. He doesn’t talk much to anyone. He doesn’t moan and groan about the tedious stuff. He just…works.”
Stunned, Tim sat up straighter. “Really?”
She bobbed her eyebrows.
“But at home, he’s—”
“Sullen and uncooperative, when he bothers to communicate at all. Right.”
“Huh.” Tim had stopped trying to get him out of his room, figuring it was for the best if they had some space from each other. Tim hadn’t been the sunniest guy to be around in the past month since he and Valerie had their last falling-out, and he didn’t want Kevin to think that his bad mood was because of anything he’d done.
“So, how do we bridge that?” he asked. “How do we get him to be as cooperative with us as he is with Frank?”
Heidi shrugged. “We could brainstorm it with Frank and see what he’s doing that we’re not—besides making Kevin do heavy lifting. I don’t Kevin would be able to articulate what it is if we were to ask him directly.”
“Probably not.”
“I’m gonna go print paychecks like you said.” Heidi sighed as she stood and pulled her arms over her head to give her long body a stretch. “Are you going to Clay’s tonight?”
“No.” Fuck, no. Not if Leah Lawson was going to be there looking so much like her sister, whom he was through with chasing. He didn’t feel like having people in his fucking space, anyway.
“Mind if I do? Kevin probably doesn’t need you to sit at home with him at this point, but…”
“I get it. You go and have fun. Folks probably miss seeing you.”
“Yes, the darling lechers.” She strode out of his office and out into the workshop. Her office was on the other side of the big space near where the sales guys and admin crew were housed. Tim had always been nestled in his own little enclave that looked out onto the floor, where he could see everything, but obviously nothing since he’d apparently let productivity get so far down.
“It’s my own damned fault.”
He needed to do more than inspect boats when they were done—he needed to oversee the builds more closely.
He pushed back from his desk, rolled up his sleeves, and headed to the idlers standing around the half-million-dollar boat that still hadn’t had its windows installed.
If he couldn’t put his passion where he wanted it, at the very least, he could expend it doing grueling busywork. Maybe he’d even derive some satisfaction from it when the boat was done, but he wasn’t going to hold his breath.
He knew it was just a distraction.
___
Valerie’s head was in the clouds, pondering a foundation issue at Shora, when she nearly jumped out of her skin at the startling intrusion of a white paper bag dancing in front of her face.
“Jesus Christ.” She clamped her notebook under her arm, clutched her chest with the hand that held her pen, and turned to find that the hand holding out that bag belonged to Kevin Dowd.
He winced. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Frank ordered a bunch of barbecue dinners because we finished that house a week ahead of schedule and he said to bring you that one.”
“Oh.” Self-chastened for her minor outburst, she tucked the pen into her hair and accepted the bag. “Well, thank you.”
He nodded and started away, only to stop when he’d gotten a few feet.
He always did that—acted like he forgot he had something to say.
She didn’t know why the guy didn’t just talk if he wanted to tell her something. It wasn’t like she was going to make him cry. She couldn’t even make Leah cry anymore. She’d lost her big sister mojo.
“Do you…need hot sauce or anything?” he asked. “There are packets.”
“Yeah, but I can get them.”
“They’re in the back of his truck. They’re tailgating, or whatever.”
“Okay. I’m coming.”
He nodded and got moving again.
She followed him, watching him curiously as he stuffed his earbuds into his ears and kept his eyes on the ground as he moved.
She found his unconfident posture to be surprising given that his father’s gait was so self-assured, but then again, she really didn’t know much about him. Further, she tried hard not to think about Tim and Tim-related things at all, which was difficult enough to manage when she kept hearing Frank shout “Dowd!” throughout the day.
Of course she wondered what Tim was doing and missed how he always seemed to anticipate her needs. He was just there when she needed something. And while she’d tried her damnedest to not rely on anyone except herself, doing so was emotionally exhausting. She felt disconnected and cold, and that hadn’t been what she’d expected when she’d decided all those years ago that this was what she was going to do with her life.
Maybe I was wrong.
Something felt wrong, anyway.
Carine tottered over her strappy, high-heeled sandals and pushed her sunglasses up her nose. She held Valerie back until Kevin was out of earshot, and then said, “I’m not even going to ask if you’re going tonight.”
“I appreciate you not doing so.”
“Would you be so terribly upset if I didn’t play constant companion to Leah? I know she needs some supervision, but I need a little wiggle room. Clay made a play date for me.”
Stunned, Valerie pushed up an eyebrow. “Yeah? Do you know with who?”
“Nope. I’m going in totally blind. I won’t get to see who it is, and I’m just going to have to try to guess based on clues like how he smells or how heavy his touch is.”
“Are you sure about this?”
Carine shrugged. “I trust Clay.”
“All right. And I guess Leah can fend for herself. She insists that she can, so I’m going to give her a chance to do it. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
“Come on, Clay’s not going to let anything happen to her there.”
“You mean anything illegal or deadly. Something is definitely going to happen to her.”
Carine snorted and gave her hand a dismissive flick. “Just try not to think about it, and you’ll have a lot less angst in your life”
Valerie rolled her eyes. If only there were a switch in her brain that would let her stop thinking about certain things.
She set her notebook and food bag atop Frank’s tailgate and pulled forth the greasy bag containing napkins and hot sauce packets. “Thanks for the dinner, Frank,” she called out.
“Shit, someone’s gotta feed you. Have you even left this site in two weeks?”
“Of course I have.”
At least…she thought she had. She seemed to remember going to the superstore for groceries at some point, but a lot of the past month was a blur of humdrum and blah-blah. She was on autopilot mode, marking things off project management checklists, and not really needing to engage very many critical thinking skills. She hadn’t really woken up, so to speak, until that morning when Carine told her that none of the existing home models would actually fit on a particular lot owner’s space.
The tiny corner lot near the pond had an odd trapezoidal configuration and funky setbacks that cut into the footprint of all the home models. She couldn’t easily adjust the plans, and she certainly couldn’t resize the damned lot, so she was starting a new plan from scratch. Lipton would have to approve the design, obviously, but she didn’t see what choice they had. The lot was sold, the owner was required to put a developer-approved structure on the house wit
hin a year, and Valerie was the only person schooled on all the aesthetic strictures and what the actual terrain was like. The client had to use the available plans or an alternative devised by Lipton’s representative—Valerie—but that didn’t mean Valerie couldn’t give that lot-owner something amazing.
Finally, the opportunity for something amazing. Pending approval, of course.
Kevin reached past her and grabbed a soda out of the cooler she’d apparently parked herself in front of. “Oh! Shit. Sorry. Didn’t mean to drop water on your pad.” He swiped the tail of his shirt across the paper, and then froze, furrowing his brow at the sketch.
“It’s all right if there’s a little smudge,” she said. “It’s just a brainstorming sketch.”
“What’s it for?”
“That weirdly shaped plot by the pond. I have no idea what they were thinking when they parceled off that block. The two lots on either side of it are larger than most at the expense of the corner lot, which is usually one of the most sought-after spots on a tract. None of the current plans will fit, so I’ve got to come up with something that will. It’ll be the only house like that in this development.”
“When’s that one going up? Might be fun to build.”
“Depends on how long it takes to get approved. I hope to have some preliminary ideas to show to both the lot owner and Lipton by next week.”
“You plan on being here to build that house?” Frank asked Kevin, chuckling.
“Uh…” Kevin shrugged and grabbed another sandwich from one of the larger bags marked W/ COLESLAW. “I dunno. Maybe. You’d hire me on for good?”
“Ma-a-aybe,” Frank drawled coyly.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Kevin said in that non-committal way all teenagers seemed to have down to a science.
Huh. Valerie wondered what someone like Kevin could possibly get out of working as just a crew member on a construction site. But maybe it wasn’t that odd. His father built things for a living, too, but the question remained of why he wouldn’t go work for Tim. The pay would have probably been better.
“Hey, Kevin,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”
He pulled an earbud from his canal and stuffed it into his pocket. “Sure, I guess.”
Valerie’s grandmother had always had a knack for making Valerie answer questions she hadn’t even asked. She’d probably had to learn the skill to get Valerie and Leah to tell her how they felt after their mother died when they would have rather not talked at all. She was always able to disarm them and make them give up some words.
Valerie didn’t pretend to be anywhere near as good at it as Mama Kay, but the trick came in handy on occasion.
“Where’d you get your boots?” she asked.
Kevin looked down at his work-scuffed Timberlands. “Oh. Had them for a while.”
“How long’s a while.”
“Maybe a year?”
“You know, guys used to wear those back in my day, too. They used to be obsessive about keeping them clean. If they scuffed them, it was almost like it was the end of the world.”
Kevin shifted his weight and broke the seal on his soda. “I know guys like that.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Maybe…they were.”
Huh.
“I was in public school my last three years of school,” he said. “Before that, it was all uniforms and loafers.”
“Preppy stuff.”
“Yeah. I guess I wanted to do somethin’ different.”
Do something different, he’d said, not wear something different. She didn’t want to read between the lines too much, but in her experience, sometimes the changes people made to their appearance often broadcasted that there was turmoil happening in their brains, too. That had happened with Leah when she’d cut off all her hair at fourteen. She’d said it was fun, cute, and stylish, but the truth was that she was trying to distance herself from their mother’s death. Mom had her stroke in a salon as Leah had been entering her second hour under a hairdryer. It had taken Leah three years to be able to admit why she’d really done it. It had taken her five years to care about her appearance after that, and even at twenty-nine, she still couldn’t step into a salon.
“Do you still want to do something different?” Valerie asked.
Kevin shrugged. “Something folks don’t pay much attention to. Get less criticism that way.”
Ah. She was beginning to understand young Mr. Dowd.
“Hey, Val?” Carine held up her phone and pointed to an e-mail message on the screen. “One of the clients had a question about whether it was possible to swap locations of the laundry room and the powder room in the model they’re looking at. It’s the house called the Hydrangea. Do you know off the top of your head?”
Valerie cringed. “That might have been one of the units that those were interchangeable in, but I don’t want to rely on memory. Let me go look.”
“Don’t let me interrupt your meal. It could probably wait a few minutes.” Carine winced. “They’ll just call me every five minutes until I have an answer.”
“Let’s get them off your back, then. Come on.” Valerie gathered up her notebook and food bag and swiped a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea from the tray at the end of the tailgate.
“You work too much, Val,” Frank said.
“I work less now than I did six weeks ago, remember? Besides, if I worked the hours prescribed by my profession, at least half the people in it would accuse me of not working enough.”
“You work more than anyone in the field I’ve ever met, and I’ve been in construction long enough to have terrorized probably dozens of architects, designers, and project managers.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“And probably not even then. I bet you’ll be one of those restless haints whose spirit’ll rise up out of her grave to get just one more thing done before the Heavenly Father decides to slam the pearly gates closed on your stalling ass.”
“I’m not stalling. I’m producing.”
Frank took a swig of his Mountain Dew and nodded sardonically. “Uh-huh.”
“Oh, ignore him.” Carine got Valerie moving toward the office.
“I swear, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t in this gig,” Valerie said.
“Yep. It’s because you have a uterus and life-giving tits.”
Valerie’s gut churned. “God, I explained that to Tim last month.”
“How’d that go over?”
“I think he understood it on a rudimentary level, but he can’t possibly empathize. That’s probably impossible for him.”
Inside the office, Valerie dropped everything on her desk and woke up her computer. Carine did the same at her desk, flopped into her seat, then kicked off her shoes. “Ugh, not wearing those tonight.”
“I doubt anyone would care much about your choice of shoes unless they’re a foot fetishist.”
“You know, I like a lot of kinky things, but having people love on my feet just isn’t something that’ll ever float my boat.”
Boat. Ugh. Pretty much anything folks around her said could remind her of Tim. Valerie rolled her eyes and pulled up house specs.
At that very moment, Valerie’s grandmother was on a boat—a cruise boat. Valerie had talked her into taking a fourteen-day trans-Atlantic cruise that ended in Dover, England. Her flight home was thanks to Tim’s largesse. That ticket hadn’t been a drop in the bucket, and Valerie couldn’t see using it for herself. It would have been too much like admitting it was something she wanted. And she did want to travel someplace other than from one job site to the next.
And not alone, either.
She didn’t see how she could fit it all into her schedule in the next couple of years with her career being up in the air.
She sighed and homed in on the house’s downstairs configuration. “Yeah. Those two rooms are swappable. They abut at the corner of the house.”
“So both rooms have windows?”
“Yep.”
Valerie snorted. “Wow, four kids. Yeah, uh…”
House is probably loud and chaotic.
Valerie toyed idly with the band of her watch and let her gaze blear on the computer screen.
She probably chose that.
“Is she happy?” Valerie asked.
Carine furrowed her brow. “Who?”
“Uh…” Valerie flipped through the stack of files on her desk looking for the most recent pending sale. “Mrs. Paulsen.”
“With Shora, you mean?”
“No. In general. She was a lawyer, wasn’t she?” Valerie turned to face Carine. “She doesn’t work anymore. Her kids are her work?”
“She’s still a lawyer. Contracts, which is why she gave us so much hell on the purchase agreement.” Carine’s phone buzzed and she snatched it up. “Hello, Mrs. Paulsen.” Carine winked at Valerie. “Yes, I did find out. Valerie says you can swap the rooms, but also that both have windows. Regular windows, Val, or those tiny fixed windows?”
“Full-sized windows that open.” Valerie turned her focus back to the screen. “If she’d like another option, I could probably get approval to convert the three-car garage into two stalls and use the extra space to accommodate a laundry room large enough for folding tables. That would be located right beneath one of the bedrooms and the kids’ bathroom upstairs. Could probably put in a laundry chute.”
Carine relayed the information to Mrs. Paulsen.
Valerie clicked around some more. She’s still a lawyer, Carine had said. How is she balancing everything?
“Mrs. Paulsen likes that idea but wants to know what would go into the void space where the smaller laundry room would have been.”
“We could either bump out that narrow wall and add a shower so she gets a three-quarter bath instead of a powder room or she can use the little room as a mudroom or, as my grandmother used to call it, a mop closet. Someplace to get all those mops, brooms, buckets, and whatnot out of the way that isn’t the pantry or garage.”
Carine relayed Valerie’s comments.