Handyman Special

by Pamela Browning

  He looked down at her, his eyes warm and peaceful. "This is a year that's going to get happier and happier," he said confidently, reassuringly. He was a man who looked pleased with his world and all that was in it, and in that way he differed from the man Sage had met just a couple of months ago. That man had been a footloose and fancy-free bachelor, or so she'd thought. This man looked—well, he looked settled. At peace with himself. "Happier and happier," he repeated, as though to himself.

  Sage smiled back wistfully, and inside, deep inside, she was thinking, will the year get happier? Will it really?

  * * *

  The work on Kalmia Hill progressed rapidly. In addition, Sage had bought the fixer-upper on Beauregard Street. Repair work there would be minimal, and she'd be able to resell it soon. Sage and Ben, working full-time, and Jim, working part-time after school on the two houses, accomplished as much work as she, Ben and Stanley had when Stanley still worked for her.

  Stanley. Sage was preparing to paint the woodwork in the second-floor hall at Kalmia Hill during the second week in January when she spied the article about him in the paper she was spreading on the floor to catch the drips. Stanley Garth, according to the story in the weekly Willoree Times-Courier, had been charged with driving under the influence on New Year's Day. Sage tossed the newspaper on the floor in disgust. She'd never regretted firing Stanley, not once.

  As she cross-brushed one of the panels in a door, she heard a car door slam outside the house. That would be Jim, she thought, being dropped off by his ride from school. It was three-thirty, the time that he usually arrived home. She'd put him to work on the sun porch. He'd been masking the many-paned windows with tape preparatory to painting them.

  "Sage?"

  To Sage's surprise, this was Hayley's voice.

  "Hello, Hayley. What are you doing here?" She kept on painting the door. You didn't stop when you were in the middle of painting a door with semi-gloss enamel. Pauses resulted in hard-to-remove paint edges.

  Hayley ran lightly halfway up the stairs. "I came home with Jim to help him work," she said. "Is that all right?"

  Sage shouldn't have been surprised. Every time she looked at Hayley lately, she was busy texting Jim or reading his messages to her. Irma had confided to Sage that they were crazy about each other.

  "No one spends that much time texting unless it's serious," Irma said. And Adam had mentioned that Jim was the same way.

  "I'm grateful for the help," Sage told Hayley now. "The more the merrier, and I'll pay you my regular rates. Which aren't very high, but you can have all the cola you can drink."

  "I brought a pair of your old overalls," said Hayley. "May I change somewhere?"

  Sage was again reminded of what a good decision she'd made when she'd decided to bring Hayley into her family. Hayley was the perfect little sister and a perfect big sister too, for Greg and Joy.

  Sage waved her paintbrush down the hallway at the battery of doors. "Pick a door. Any door except the first one on the right, because I'm keeping my open paint cans and various other supplies in that one."

  "Wow," said Hayley as she checked out the rooms. She took stock of the elaborate light fixtures overhead and the unusual crown molding where the ceiling met the wall. "Kalmia Hill is some house. Six bedrooms on this floor. Wow."

  "Isn't it something? You should have seen this house before I started working on it. It looked tired and unloved. We've spruced it up considerably." Sage couldn't suppress the satisfaction she felt in her accomplishments.

  "I can see why you were so eager to own it," Hayley said.

  Sage smiled and kept painting. "When I first moved to Willoree with Gary all those years ago, we had thoughts of making our fortunes by buying properties and reselling them. We were going to live at Kalmia Hill when we were rich and successful." She shrugged and went on painting, suddenly bemused. "Now I do own Kalmia Hill. But I'll never live here. Funny how things work out."

  At one time the idea that she'd never live in the house she'd long admired would have made her sad. But it didn't at this point in her life. It only made her philosophical. Anyway, she was proving herself by tackling a renovation project of this importance all by herself. At one time she'd never have believed she could do it.

  "You're sure you don't mind my working here?" Hayley asked anxiously.

  "No, silly. Go ahead and change clothes."

  Hayley disappeared into one of the bedrooms and soon reappeared wearing an old pair of Sage's overalls. Jim climbed the stairs just as Hayley stepped out of the bedroom.

  "Mm," he said at the unexpected sight of Hayley in painter's overalls. He took a bite out of the cheese sandwich he held in the flat of his hand. His eyes jumped to Sage in her almost identical overalls. He swallowed the food in his mouth. "I see a definite family resemblance in you two," he said. His eyes were twinkling much the way Adam's did when Adam was making a joke. They all laughed, because by this time Jim knew the whole story about Sage's creation of a family. And in physical characteristics, the amber Sage and the brunette Hayley didn't look a bit alike.

  Jim offered Hayley the other half of the sandwich, and they sat on the top step of the staircase as they ate. They watched Sage paint.

  "How's school?" Sage asked Jim.

  "I like it so far."

  "He's in two of my classes," Hayley added.

  "That's why I like it," Jim said with a grin.

  After polishing off the last of the sandwich, Jim said coaxingly, "Sage, how about letting me work over at the Beauregard Street house today? I could check out all the window sashes and make sure that they work. Hayley could go with me." Ben had taught Jim to repair window sashes last week, and Jim was proud of his expertise.

  "No, Jim, I had something else in mind for you. I want you to mask the windows on the sun porch this afternoon. I'll be painting all of them tomorrow, but I won't be able to do it until the glass is masked."

  "Oh." Jim looked disconcerted, even a bit sulky. "It'll take us hours to mask those panes. Anyway, can't Ben do it?"

  "Ben is working at Beauregard Street this afternoon."

  "Oh." Jim picked at a fingernail and got very quiet. His lowered eyelids barely hid the sullenness in his eyes, and his earlier good humor had evaporated in a matter of seconds.

  Sage immediately went on her guard against this mercurial mood change. Jim had never actually erupted at her, but because he had flown off the handle with Adam, Sage knew he was capable of such behavior and she never quite trusted him.

  "Come on, Jim. Let's get busy on those windows, okay?" Hayley, all sweetness and light, stood up and started downstairs. She, like Sage, had noticed Jim's slide into bad humor.

  Jim got grumpily to his feet. Sage attended to her painting, but she caught the glowering sidelong glance Jim shot at her so resentfully before he followed Hayley downstairs. He obviously thought Sage should have adjusted her plans to his wishes. Well, she couldn't, that was all. Ben needed little direction, and she trusted him to do what needed doing at the Beauregard Street house. Jim still had to be supervised entirely too much to be sent off on his own. The boy was probably eager to impress Hayley, wanting her to admire his newly learned skill in repairing window sashes.

  From where Sage worked she heard Hayley and Jim, their voices floating up from the sun porch from time to time, Hayley's cheery, Jim's moody and gruff. Listening, Sage thought it was amazing how well Hayley jollied Jim along.

  Hayley knew about Jim's foray into vandalism back in Hartford. She'd discussed it with Sage last night as they loaded the dishwasher together.

  "I'm surprised he told you about that," Sage had said.

  Hayley shrugged. "I suppose he wanted to get it off his chest. I'd never have guessed Jim would do anything destructive like that. He's so polite and—well, I just can't imagine him destroying someone else's property."

  "Did he tell you why he did it?"

  "Sort of. He said he got in with a gang of older kids. One of the kids was angry at a neighbor for not
letting him ride his trail bike on the path behind his lot, so they tossed a can of paint on the guy's driveway. The older boys threatened to tell the police Jim had done it if he didn't go along with some of their other capers. Jim's glad to be out if it, he said. He likes Willoree."

  "That's good," Sage had said emphatically, and with that they had dropped the subject. Adam had confided to Sage that he approved of Jim's friendship with Hayley, who was a stabilizing influence, he said.

  By the end of the afternoon the masking of the sun-porch windows had been neatly accomplished. Sage lingered at Kalmia Hill until after dark, hoping to see Adam when he came in from work, but Adam called at five-thirty and said he'd be late. As much as she'd have liked to linger until he arrived, Sage finally left because she wanted to spend extra time with Joy this evening and hear all about her morning at preschool.

  "Joy really loves going to school, doesn't she?" commented Hayley as they rode home together from Kalmia Hill. Above them, the branches of the willow oaks were January-bare, their outlines misted by a wispy fog filtering down from the sky.

  "Oh, yes," replied Sage. "Today she ended up with finger paint in her hair. I think her fingernails are permanently stained blue, but she painted a huge picture with lots of swoops and swirls. It's really pretty." Sage had seen the picture at noon when she picked up Joy at school and drove her home.

  Light was fading rapidly now, and Sage drove slowly and carefully because of the fog. The street shone slick with the damp, and on the radio the weatherman predicted rain for tomorrow.

  At her house Sage let Hayley out in the driveway before pulling into the garage, and then she slid down from the seat of the truck and hurried toward the back door. Golden lamplight spilled out into the fog from the many windows of the old Victorian house, warming Sage and surrounding the house with a blurry halo of light. Joy ran squealing to greet her as Sage slammed the kitchen door.

  "See my painting?" said Joy proudly to Hayley, pointing to where her creation was affixed to the refrigerator with magnets.

  "That's pretty, Joy," Hayley said good-naturedly before hurrying off to practice her piano lesson. The bright, lilting strains of a Chopin étude echoed from the living room over a commotion caused by Greg and his friends Macon and Zoey. In a few minutes, Zoey yelled, "I'm going home, Gregory," and ran through the yard to her own house, which lay diagonally from Sage's. Hayley, unperturbed, kept practicing the piano throughout.

  Sage retreated to the den with Joy, where Poppy watched a "Happy Days" rerun on television and Sage played one of Joy's games with her as the family regrouped after their day apart. Ralph stomped in from work, his sturdy boots resounding on the kitchen floor; Irma conversed cheerfully with him for a while as she browned meat in a frying pan on the range. Hayley stopped playing the piano and Greg bade a scuffling good-bye to Macon before settling down with his homework in the living room, reciting his multiplication tables softly to himself. Sage heard Snowball's tail thumping on the kitchen floor. It was a typical evening, but Sage savored it. She gloried in the humdrum sounds of their lives together—it was all no less precious to her because it was so mundane.

  Afterward, Sage would remember this night, so ordinary and so typical, as her last night of total happiness before things fell apart.

  Chapter 14

  The next day, a stormy Saturday, Sage awakened around eight and soon left in her pickup truck for Kalmia Hill. She planned to paint the windows on the sun porch this morning, and if Jim was in a good mood, she'd enlist his help. Funny how he'd tensed up so yesterday when she'd refused him permission to work at the Beauregard Street house. For the first time she'd seen evidence of Jim's temper.

  Today she hoped Jim would be more amenable. She really needed help with the tedious painting of those windows. Adam had said that he was going to the Wilpacko plant early this morning in time for the Saturday overtime first-shift start-up. When Adam came back to Kalmia Hill this morning, maybe she'd take a break from her work for a quick cup of coffee with him so that he could bring her up to date on the happenings at the plant. She'd been waiting for the opportunity to discuss with him her conversation with Lyndell Sheedy. She thought Adam should know that Lyndell was pressing for Ed's retirement, although Adam might already know that from Ed.

  A cold wind knifed around the corner of the house on Kalmia Hill, slicing through Sage's raincoat as she stepped out of her truck. The wind flung stinging droplets of rain in her face, so that she winced as she ran up the curving steps to the front door.

  To her surprise the door was unlocked. The knob turned easily in her hand and she burst inside, puzzled that the door was unlocked but glad that she hadn't had to stand out in the rain and fumble with her key.

  And she was stunned, then sickened.

  Paint lay in thick, viscous puddles all over the beautiful parquet floor. The strips of wallpaper she'd torn from the upstairs walls, scattered here and there, stuck to the paint. A can of wallpaper paste was upended on the fine carved newel post, its contents spilling down the post and settling into the carvings. Weeks of her work, some of it backbreaking, all wasted. The sight of this senseless wreckage made her want to cry.

  She bit her lip, ready to do just that, when she lifted her eyes and saw Jim standing at the other end of the long foyer. He wore his stained work clothes and stared at her in surprise, and in one hand he carried an open can of white paint.

  Jim looked guilty. There was no doubt in her mind about that.

  The words were out before she thought. "Jim? How could you?"

  Jim shook his head. He didn't say anything. He edged backward, away from her. Pure anger pounded in her head, and she saw him through the red mist of it. She hated him in that awful moment for what he had done to her beautiful Kalmia Hill.

  Unable to bear looking at him, she pulled her eyes away and, trembling, picked her way through the mess, not wanting to track any of it around. Blue paint, green paint, every shade of paint she had used at Kalmia Hill—the remaining contents of the cans were tossed here and there with only one purpose in mind: destruction. The devastation of this grand old lady of a house was not simply vandalism—it was rape. She fought a spasm of nausea.

  "I... I..." stammered Jim.

  The back door slammed, a sound of normality in this monstrously ugly scene, then brisk footsteps sounded in the kitchen. Adam appeared behind Jim, and when he saw the strewn-out wreckage in the hallway he stopped short in his tracks.

  "What happened?" he asked, visibly shaken.

  "Ask Jim," Sage said.

  Adam focused unbelieving eyes on his son. "Jim?" The one word cut through the air, razor-sharp.

  Jim's chest heaved, and his free hand, the one that didn't hold the paint can, clenched spasmodically into a tight fist at his side. "I didn't do it!" he yelled.

  "Jim," said Adam, full of entreaty, "if you did this, it's better to face up to it now instead of—"

  Jim turned on his father. "I didn't do it! I didn't! You're just as bad as she is!" He leveled a shaking finger at Sage.

  "Son—"

  "Leave me alone!" Jim cried. He wheeled suddenly and ran through the kitchen and out the back door into the wind and rain.

  Adam's shoulders slumped. "I don't think he did it, Sage."

  "Who else would do this?" she said, almost in tears. "Jim has a record of vandalism." She lifted her hands and let them fall in despair. "It'll take me weeks to repair the damage. Weeks."

  "Jim had no reason to do this to you," Adam said. "No reason at all."

  "I wouldn't let him work on the Beauregard Street house yesterday, and he wanted to work there very badly. He took it hard when I insisted he stay here and mask the sun-porch windows instead."

  "No, Sage," said Adam forcefully. "I know people, and I know my son. He couldn't have done this. He wouldn't."

  Tears of anger, frustration and hurt welled up in her eyes, and when one trickled down her cheek, she reached up and wiped it away, then stared at the moisture on her finger. She wa
s heartsick over this. She didn't want to talk about it anymore. She had seen the guilty expression on Jim's face when she first walked in the door. He'd acted as though he'd been caught red-handed.

  "He'll have to leave," she said.

  "Leave?" Adam knotted his brows together as though he couldn't believe she had said this.

  "How can I trust him to live here? How do I know what he'll do next? Next time it might be the ornamental plasterwork in the living room or the irreplaceable molding in the dining room."

  "Sage, I know you're upset, but it won't happen again. I promise you that." Adam couldn't believe she was serious about wanting Jim to leave. He worked his way carefully around the pools of spilled paint until he stood before her. He tried to put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged them angrily away. Her face was wet, and he couldn't tell how much of the wetness was rain and how much was tears. He lowered his head and touched his lips to hers, hoping to comfort her. He hated that this had happened, but he was sure in his own mind and heart that Jim wasn't responsible. Someone else had done this to Sage. He didn't know who it could have been, but it had been someone else. Not Jim.

  Sage's lips went rigid beneath his, and they felt cold as marble. He might have been kissing a statue. He stopped kissing her and let his hands fall to his sides.

  "Sage?" he said, lifting a tentative hand and touching her cheek. "Can't we talk about this?"

  "There's nothing to say," she said painfully. Sage felt incapable of talking at the moment. She was numb. After the shock and the hurt of seeing what Jim had done to her house, her Kalmia Hill, the numbness had set in. And what about her relationship with Adam? After what his son had done, how could they go on the way they were?

  She was the landlady and had certain rights. One of them was the right to evict any tenant who inflicted willful damage on her property. Yet if she insisted that Jim leave, Adam would never forgive her for depriving him of his chance to be a good father at last. If she let Jim stay, she could never trust the boy again, and her relationship with Adam would be strained. Surely Adam could see these things for himself.