by Katie Cross
“I don’t know anymore!” I said. “I would have said no a few weeks ago, but now…”
She held up her hands. “It’s a miracle!”
“Sure, some priorities or ideas might need to be shifted around. Eventually. Maybe. But right now, I need a few ideas. The things I’ve tried for self-care haven’t been that effective.”
“Sleep,” Lexie said. “Or a treat. I know, I know. That sounds bad. But I don’t think food has to be the enemy here, right? I mean, if I’m going to a really expensive dinner with Bradley, and it’s fun and new, that’s self-care.”
“True.”
“Or looking at the pictures in cookbooks,” I said. “That really does it for me sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Yep.” She shook her head. “I know. I’m kind of pathetic. But I love it.”
“I never would have considered that self-care.”
Lexie squinted. “I guess it’s all in how you look at it. To me, self-care is something that fills me—not literally, although there is that—and is me time. Shuffling through cookbooks does that. For Rachelle, it’s running. Megan? Who knows? Probably saving small children or standing on top of a mountain or raising goats or something. For Mira? I’m going to guess Pepsi.”
This opened up a new dimension I’d never considered. Self-care had always seemed like tasks. Things that you set aside to do, like scrapbooking or jogging, that took you away from routines. Looking at food pictures in cookbooks? Odd.
But maybe she was onto something.
“Huh,” I said.
“Does Jim have anything to do with it?” She wiggled her eyebrows.
I sighed in exasperation. “What did Mira tell you?”
“Enough to know you should marry him!”
“Jim is my neighbor and just happened to be at the movie. Once she saw him, Mira invited him along, for the record, not me. And that was the first time we’d been in each other’s presence for more than ten minutes, so marriage is off the table.”
“Seems suspicious that he was at a rom-com alone.”
My nose wrinkled. “Think he’s a weirdo or something?”
“Dunno. Just never seen a guy go to a rom-com by himself without explaining it.”
“Agreed.”
Lexie sobered. “Listen, Bitsy, I know that something is going on with you. You don’t have to tell me what it is, but know I’m here if you ever need anything. Self-care included.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, as I hadn’t expected anything so compassionate or observant. I worked hard to be in the background, to keep the attention on the other women instead of on myself, but maybe I didn’t actually blend in.
For a moment, the truth almost barreled out of my mouth.
I’m not perfect. I’m a fraud. My façade of control was nothing but a front for a woman who had almost no control at all.
“Thanks, Lex,” I said with a smile. “I appreciate that.”
“So,” Lexie drawled. “What are the goals you’re setting for next week?”
I glanced at my phone and thought of the calorie counting app. My business structure could use a little remodeling and some new client leads. My garage a good sweeping. My pantry an overhaul and my closet a rearranging and in-depth dusting.
“My goal? I want to find one thing that fills me.”
Lexie grinned. “Good idea, Bits. May I suggest Cosmic Brownies? An eternal fave.”
“You clean, right?”
Jim greeted me with all the warmth of a popsicle the next morning. He stood on my porch, bright-eyed, a shirt tucked into the belt of his jeans. Had he been up for hours? It was only 6:05.
I blinked, still coming out of my half-awake stupor, and fought off a yawn. A stir of cool air ruffled my hair, clearing my sleepy thoughts. I glanced down at my walking shoes and workout pants. He’d caught me just before my walk.
“I run a maid business, yes.”
“Need a job?”
“Doing what?”
“Cleaning.”
“I figured that much. What do you want me to clean?”
“My attic.”
I’d tackled many attics in the past. Normally they were more organizational, although I had a feeling that wouldn’t be a big problem with Jim.
“Your attic? You just moved in.”
“I put everything I didn’t want to deal with up there.”
“And now you want to deal with it? Like a month later?”
He stiffened. “Let’s just say I’ve been dared, all right?”
If he wanted to give me money, I’d take it. “Sure.” I stepped back, fighting off another yawn. “Come on in. The girls are still asleep. We can talk about it in here.”
He obeyed without complaint.
I waved him into the kitchen behind me as I fought off another yawn. A mug of green tea waited on the counter. He followed, lingering in the doorway.
“Want some green tea?” I asked.
“I like stronger stuff.”
‘“What do you need done?”
“There’s a lot of crap up there. I want someone to throw away anything I don’t need.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Can’t you do that?”
He shrugged. “I think I need all of it.”
“What if you do?”
“I don’t.”
Something firm in his voice caught my attention, but I brushed it off. “Okay. But—”
“Look, you seem like an intelligent person, and I’m willing to pay you double what you normally charge to do what you do best without asking questions. Pretty easy.”
Clean with abandon and get paid?
Heck. Yes.
“What if I throw away something you wanted to keep?” I asked with a sip of tea.
His lips tightened. “There’s nothing up there I need to keep.”
His lack of the word want stuck out in my head, but I let that slide. He was right. If he was willing to pay for a service that I was more than happy to give, who was I to question him? Besides, the opportunity to get another glimpse of his life was too tempting to pass up. Who was Jim outside his crappy old couch and pristine garage and yard and love of rom-coms?
“Okay.”
“Good.” He nodded once. “Need it emptied and scrubbed by Friday.”
“Okay.”
I glanced at the calendar on the wall. The temptation to clean his house right then was strong, but I’d already planned another house while the girls were with their father. Not to mention a self-care massage at 3:00.
“Tomorrow evening? The girls will be at a friend’s birthday party.”
“Works. Thanks.”
He turned to head back to the door. I almost called out after him, but having no idea what I would say, I stopped. While he didn’t seem severe, his stern edge gave me pause. There was a rugged attractiveness in his wrinkled forehead and set jaw—not to mention his trim body. He left with a quiet snick of the door closing.
By the time I gathered my thoughts, my tea had grown cold.
Jim’s house felt like a study in minimalism and masculinity.
Not only was it bland and done entirely in brown, it was all strangely clean. Nothing decorated the kitchen counters except an unopened pack of straight razors and a microwave. Aside from scuffed wooden floors and a well-loved recliner, everything seemed … clean.
Quite clean.
Cleaner than my own house, for certain.
“Do you really need my help?” I asked.
“Yep.”
He started up a set of wooden stairs on the right, recently swept. I followed. A television played in the background. CSPAN, if the dull drone meant anything.
Interesting, but not surprising.
A hallway cut across the upper floor, leading to what was probably his room. I couldn’t tell. All five doors were closed. He stopped halfway down the hall, reached for a dangling cord, and tugged. A ladder slid out from the ceiling. Jim jerked a thumb up.
“Up there.”
&
nbsp; I stopped, peering into the murky shadows. A single bulb was visible from where I stood.
“What’s up there? And is it going to eat me?”
His expression didn’t waver. “Won’t eat you.” The emphasis on the word you wasn’t lost on me. Whatever he had up there, he clearly didn’t want to face it himself. The situation seemed a bit fishy, but there was no malice in his gaze. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything. Perhaps a touch of vulnerability. Uncertainty.
A burning desire not to explain himself.
“All right.” I set my hands on my hips. “What are my orders?”
“Get rid of it.”
“You mean you want me to organize it?”
“No. Get rid of everything up there. Except for pictures. You can keep those. She’ll want them.”
My mouth almost foamed with the desire to ask him who she was, but I bit it back. “I’m just supposed to throw it all out?”
“Except the furniture. Whatever is up there, put it in the back of my truck. I’ll take it to the landfill tonight.”
“What are you hiding from?”
The question slipped out before I could stop it. He let out a long breath, a flash of something in his gaze.
“Same as you.”
With that, he turned and disappeared down his stairs without a single glance back. Although I already had a hefty list of odd experiences I’d come across while cleaning, this was one of the strangest. My curiosity propelled me up the rickety ladder. Sticky spring air poured down on me as I ascended, my curiosity greater than my fear.
Determined to get it done as quickly as possible—or perhaps just motivated to snoop a little bit—I soon stood in the attic, the lone bulb casting watery light on a plethora of…
Stuff.
Whatever the rest of his house lacked, the attic didn’t.
Boxes filled the space, already dusty in the stale air, even though Jim hadn’t been around that long. A half-open armoire occupied part of the far wall, one door broken at the top hinge, dangling free. Boxes filled with wine glasses. A silver platter inscribed with names.
Jim and Margo.
I brushed my fingertips over the words. Margo. An ex, no doubt. Was she still alive? Maybe he was a widower. That would explain his desire to get rid of everything.
Old papers filled one box, yellowing at the edges, and curled in. I shuffled through them. School report cards. Drawings. Letters from teachers dated over twenty years back, addressed to Jim and Margo about a girl named Cora.
His daughter?
The idea seemed stunning, yet inevitable. Guilt crawled up my spine. He’d hired me to get rid of this, not to stick my nose in it. But how could I know what to keep?
This was his past. Their past. These belongings weren’t just his. If he really had a daughter named Cora, she deserved a say in what was done with her mother’s belongings. Or maybe Margo deserved a say herself.
My head spun with questions as I flipped through several manila folders. Mostly benign paperwork. Receipts from fifteen years ago. Electric bills. Bank statements. I bit my bottom lip. Most of this could be burned or recycled.
Wasn’t my place to decide that.
It wasn’t until I sorted through a box filled with medals and various pins and threaded banners—meant for a military dress uniform, no doubt—that I realized the extent of what Jim was really asking me to do. He wanted me to bury his past for him.
He wanted me to do the hard thing.
With a growl, I stood up and stalked back toward the attic entrance, then stopped when I saw another box of papers. Newer. The sheets were almost white, unworn by age. I paused. Something deep in my belly knew exactly what those papers were.
Unable to help myself, I grabbed them and sorted through them under the weak light, the humid air thick in my chest. One sheet caught my attention.
Final Dissolution of Marriage
These papers had been filed in a different state, but they were familiar all the same. I’d seen this exact writing. Held these exact papers. The same disorientation washed over me, and for half a second, I had to stand there and breathe through it.
The ladder creaked as I stepped back down it, papers in hand, and slipped down the hall. Downstairs, Jim was nowhere in sight. I stopped and glanced around. The man didn’t even have a picture hanging on his wall.
“Jim!” I called. “Hello?”
The distant hum of a television still droned in the distance. I wound through the house and eventually found what had to be the garage door. I yanked it open.
Jim sat on that ridiculous, stained couch and stared blankly at a TV across the garage. He held a beer bottle in his hand, but it wasn’t open. He seemed dazed, lost in a memory. Why wasn’t he just watching in the house? His TV was on in there.
My bluster died. I glanced down at the papers, noticing the date for the first time. A year and a half ago.
With a heavy heart, I crossed the open space between us. Although the house lacked decoration, the garage didn’t. Old license plates filled the wall. Tools. Open boxes. A few cans of WD 40. Shovels. Axes. Old military equipment. Cozy, in a well-oiled man kind of way.
I sat on the couch next to him. For a long stretch of time, neither of us said anything. Then I tossed the divorce settlement onto his lap. He didn’t look at me.
“This is why you want it all gone,” I said quietly.
“She had been cheating on me for ten years,” he said. “I think I knew before she actually confessed it. No, I knew it. I just didn’t want to face it.”
“You didn’t stop it?”
“Was my fault, probably. The marriage started to fall apart after my fourth deployment, when Cora was in middle school. By the time we moved Cora to college, it was over. It’s hard to fail.”
“It is.”
He blinked. “I confronted Margo two years ago. She cried. I suggested counseling. She refused. When I retired from the Army, she finally confessed to everything. All of them. I don’t think she could tolerate the idea of living with me every day once I wasn’t deployed.”
I winced. All of them rang through the still air. He set the beer bottle aside and sank deeper into the couch, as if wanting it to swallow him.
“Daniel cheated on me with his secretary,” I said. “It started during the first trimester of my pregnancy with Lizzy and lasted until he left us when Lana was young.”
Jim looked over at me this time, but I didn’t meet his gaze. I continued.
“We didn’t even try counseling. He just … left. Didn’t even get a chance to ask about details or why or how long. Only during the divorce proceedings did I figure out that it was his secretary. I regret that I didn’t push harder for … something.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes I feel like I should have tried.”
The pressure of his gaze left my face, leaving me to breathe a little easier.
“Do you ever find yourself wondering if things would have been different if you had just done one thing differently?” he asked. “Created one different habit? Maybe I would have been enough for her if I’d just done one thing.”
His words struck me right in the chest. Yes. Of course, I thought that. Of course, I’d assumed that the inadequacy stemmed from somewhere deep inside me. That my flaws had forced Daniel out of my life, as if he hadn’t had a choice.
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “It couldn’t have been easy for Margo. All the deployments. The danger I was in. The weeks without talking. The hardest part? I can’t even hate her. Isn’t that ridiculous? All those years. All those lies. I can’t even hate her. I feel like I forced her to become that person.”
Our gaze met.
“No,” I whispered. “It’s not ridiculous.”
He nodded once, then looked away.
“You don’t really want me to clean out your attic,” I said. “That’s not my job.”
“I know.”
“Maybe part of it is Cora’s, too. She could take i
t to Margo.”
His nostrils flared. “Can’t,” he whispered.
“Can’t?”
His jaw clenched. He glanced at the divorce papers, then curled his fist around them. A paper slipped out from the bottom, landing on the couch between us. My breath caught.
Death Certificate
“Suicide,” he said. “After her current lover left, and I wouldn’t take her back.”
“Oh. Wow. Jim, I—”
He held up a hand. “She wasn’t well.”
“I’m sorry, Jim. You know that it’s not your fault, right?”
“So they say.”
“What do you say?”
His brow grew heavy, as if annoyed. One eyebrow rose, but I couldn’t tell what it really meant. He stood up, tossing the papers into a bin on the ground.
“I say that the dead can’t come back. Thanks anyway, Bitsy. Guess I needed someone to tell me to man up.”
He tossed a twenty-dollar bill on the couch, then got up and walked away. Seconds later, his truck started, then drove off. I stared at the money, left it on the couch, and quietly went home.
Chapter 10
Difficult Glory
“Mom? Is that you?”
Lizzy’s startled voice caught me in the middle of a chapter of a new romance novel I’d picked up at Mira’s insistence. Not so steamy it gets awkward, she’d said. But just enough to be interesting.
Interesting was right. My love life had never been so grand.
I shoved it between the couch cushions and straightened up. Having the girls gone with their father in the middle of the week to celebrate Jade’s birthday had been disorienting—and a little bit nice.
“Hey!” I said with a smile. “You’re back from dinner. How was it?”
She pushed into the house. “Good. I got chicken. Lana got spaghetti.”
Lana bulldozed in behind her and threw her arms around me. “Hey, Mom!”
Daniel appeared in the door, then Jade. They stood there, holding hands, illuminated by the setting sun behind them. Where Daniel was tall, lithe, and lean, Jade was shorter, barely reaching his shoulder, with bobbed hair flying around her head in wild, red tendrils. Did I imagine a hint of redness around her eyes?
Had she been crying?