He sighed as the chilly living room greeted him. He flipped the thermostat up to a hardy sixty-two degrees and set up shop in the living room. By the time he’d pushed the furniture to the center of the living room and put down the drop cloth, he’d warmed up a bit. But it was still probably about forty degrees in here. And he hadn’t heard the heater click on.
Scott sighed and went into the belly of the beast: the garage, where the heater lived. He switched the unit off, waited for a ten count, then flipped it back on.
He went back inside and set up the ladder. Work from the top down, always. Period. Don’t argue.
The heater still didn’t click on.
Back to the garage. The behemoth sat stone cold. Scott switched it off and counted off a full sixty seconds. Then, just to be sure, he counted off sixty more. Then he switched the heater back on.
And waited for the click that didn’t come.
Up to now, his Captain Obvious method had always worked. Not today.
He stared at the heater with his arms crossed over his chest. “Are you serious?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken to an inanimate object. But it was the first time he’d halfway hoped to get an answer.
The heater had behaved perfectly for the past few days. While he and Liv were working amicably together on the house. The correlation was hard to ignore, much as he wanted to.
“What do you want from me?” he demanded.
But of course, the heater couldn’t answer him. Neither could the house. And any other explanation was even more ridiculous. It was time to stop fooling around.
Liv had the business card from the heater rep, but he had the manufacturer’s number in the call log of his cell phone. And if Faye Tomblyn wanted to sell this house, it needed to be taken care of.
He got into his truck and headed to the corner in front of Coffman’s Hardware.
* * *
Liv and Rachel walked side by side in the gray quiet. The snow was too fresh and soft to make much noise under their feet, and Liv almost hated to break up the pure, smooth whiteness as they walked down the street. The scattered snowflakes, the mist from their breath, and the cold air brought Liv a kind of Zen feeling, at least for moments at a time. Every few steps brought back a thought of Scott, or the business, or Terri, but a deep breath was enough to shrivel the inside of her nose and shock her back to the present moment.
“Is it hard to go back to San Diego?” Liv asked suddenly, surprised by the sound of her own voice.
“It was at first,” Rachel admitted. “But it’s home now. It’s where Brian’s job is. And I always know I’ll be back here before too long. I’ll probably come up here less, once the baby’s born.”
“Maybe Mom will make a few trips to San Diego.”
“Oh, she’s planning on it.” Rachel laughed. “She’s always telling me how fast babies grow. She doesn’t want to miss it.”
Before Liv went out in the snow with Rachel, Mom had handed her an English muffin with a tomato slice on top. Another favorite of Nammy’s, from her childhood back in Minnesota, if Liv remembered right. And prepared rather capably, as Mom rounded the kitchen on just one crutch. Gray hair or no gray hair, she was definitely on the mend.
Up at the end of the street, three kids scurried in their yard, gathering up material for a snowman. Their bright hats and scarves stood out against the monochrome landscape. It reminded Liv of a Christmas card.
“You’re lucky,” she told Rachel.
“Why?”
“If it wasn’t for your delicate condition, I’d be looking for a chance to belt you with a snowball.”
Rachel’s gray eyes glimmered. “You wouldn’t dare.”
The street took an uphill slant, and Liv felt a little out of breath, working against both the incline and the fresh snow. She ought to get more exercise. She paused as they reached the next corner. “One more block, or turn back around?”
Rachel didn’t answer right away.
Liv turned and saw Rachel had stopped a few steps back, bending to rest her hands on her knees. Better turn back, she thought. She rejoined her sister, who remained stooped, catching her breath.
“Rachel! Are you okay?” She rested a hand on her sister’s shoulder.
To her relief, Rachel straightened. “That was weird.” She wrapped an arm loosely across her rounded stomach.
“What?”
She looked at Liv, her eyes wide. “I don’t think it was a contraction. But my stomach felt really tight for a second.”
“You’re kidding.” Liv looked at their footprints, leading back to Mom’s house. It seemed a lot farther than she remembered.
“I’m all right now,” Rachel said.
“We’d better get back anyway.” Liv elected not to add the words just in case.
They’d traveled most of the first block back before Rachel paused again, one hand over her stomach, the other on Liv’s arm.
“Again?” Liv didn’t know much about pregnancy, but if these were contractions, they seemed awfully close together. She reached into her jeans pocket for her cell phone to check the time—and maybe call 911—but it wasn’t there. She tried her coat pocket, too. Not there, either. She turned to Rachel. “Did you bring your phone?”
Rachel shook her head. “Nine-Mississippi, ten-Mississippi, eleven-Mississippi . . .”
She stopped counting at thirty-three-Mississippi. Liv asked, “What does that mean?”
“I’m not sure. I just figured it was a good idea to know how long they are. I know how far apart is important.”
Her mouth dry, Liv put a hand on Rachel’s arm to start her forward. They started walking again. As they rounded a bend, Liv saw the hunter-green trim of Mom’s house through the thinning snowflakes, still more than a block away. “Do you really think it’s labor?”
“I’m not sure.” This time there was a faint edge of panic in Rachel’s voice. “But I didn’t really plan on having a little snow-baby.”
“Hold that thought,” Liv said, putting her hand over Rachel’s where it still rested on her arm. “We’ll get you back to Mom’s and figure out where to go from there.”
Chapter 20
“I think he came to the house on the twelfth or the thirteenth,” Scott told the heater company operator who was trying to field his call. “His name wasn’t Butch . . . maybe Bruce?”
A keyboard clicked faintly on the other end of the line. “That would be Russ,” she said. “On the thirteenth.”
At least he’d been warm on the date.
Scott waited while they chased Russ down from whatever end of the earth he was at. Russ remembered the service call immediately. He listened to Scott’s account: from a week of perfect performance to stone-cold dead.
“Oh, and the night you came over, the heater came on when the thermostat was off,” Scott remembered to add belatedly.
“You must have the possessed model,” Russ joked, but this was one time Scott didn’t feel like laughing.
The verdict might not be far off, Scott supposed, given the erratic symptoms and the fact that the heater hadn’t acted up for the repairman. Although the unit was out of warranty, the corporate office was willing to replace the heater at half the wholesale price. That still meant several hundred dollars.
Scott couldn’t very well fold the price of the heater into the cost of the remodeling project. Before he could tell the heater rep to proceed, he’d have to call Liv’s family and run it by them. They might want to put the brakes on the tile or the paint.
Liv’s number was programmed into his cell phone. So was Faye’s landline.
He’d try Faye first.
* * *
“Do you smoke?” the urgent care doctor asked.
Rachel looked at him as if he were insane. He amended, “Or did you before you were pregnant?”
“No and no.”
“Any history of drug use?”
“No.”
Liv could only imagine how testy Rachel would be if sh
e actually were in labor. Then again, a lot of the questions the doctor was asking were pretty embarrassing.
It didn’t help that the doctor—the intern, probably—was Max Azaria. He’d graduated from Tall Pine High the year before Liv. Rachel would have been a freshman then, so she wouldn’t remember him as well. But still.
“Sorry. It’s all on the form.” Dr. Max folded his arms around the clipboard and sat down on the rolling stool alongside Rachel’s knees. He’d grown a beard somewhere in the intervening years, and while it made him look more mature, it didn’t make Liv inclined to take him more seriously. The beard didn’t seem very clinical. And she still remembered clobbering him in debate.
Liv and Mom were seated in uncomfortable metal folding chairs by the head of the bed. Rachel sat propped up at a forty-five-degree angle, her belly connected by little adhesive electrodes to a monitor that looked a lot like a lie detector machine from the movies. The nurses had hooked her up minutes after she arrived, but in the half hour they’d spent waiting for the doctor, she’d only had one contraction, and Rachel admitted it was the weakest one so far.
“The good news is, I’m pretty sure this is a false alarm,” Max said. At Rachel’s indignant look, he smiled. Liv couldn’t remember her sister looking so irritable. “You’ve probably heard of Braxton Hicks contractions?”
“In Lamaze class.” Rachel looked suddenly sheepish.
“They’re like rehearsal contractions,” the doctor went on. “It’s your body’s way of preparing for labor, and it’s perfectly normal. All women have them, but they’re not always noticeable. Certain factors can make them more pronounced, like dehydration—you mentioned you hadn’t had much to drink this morning besides coffee. By the way, I assume that was decaf?”
Rachel reddened. The doctor nodded as if in satisfaction.
“Caffeine could be a factor,” he said. “Another possible factor is sudden activity. You mentioned you were out walking when they started.”
Now it was Liv’s turn to feel shamefaced. “It’s my fault.”
Three faces—Rachel’s, Mom’s, and Max’s—all turned to stare at her. Rachel was the one who spoke. “What makes you say that? I’m the one who wanted to go for a walk.”
“I should have thought. It wasn’t a good idea.”
“Actually, walking during pregnancy is a very good idea,” Dr. Max put in. “And if you started having contractions when you weren’t being active, getting up and moving around can actually make Braxton Hicks contractions stop.”
“So, what should she be doing?” Mom asked. “Resting or moving around?”
“Before I answer that, I want to do a quick exam,” the doctor said. “It sounds like Braxton Hicks, but there are a couple of things that make Rachel a candidate for premature labor. Emotional upsets, like your grandmother passing away recently. And you might be a little underweight. Your chart shows you at 122 now. How much did you weigh before you were pregnant?”
“About 105, I think.”
Under other circumstances, Liv would have glared at her sister. But Rachel always had been a skinny, delicate thing.
The doctor frowned and peered at the chart. “And you’re five-three,” he confirmed. “If you two ladies could give us a few minutes, I’ll bring a nurse in and check Rachel over. But I still have a feeling my prescription is going to be a little caution. And maybe a few donuts.”
As Liv and her mother rose to wait in the hallway, Max turned to Liv. “By the way, how’s the furniture business?”
“Home organizing.” Liv smiled weakly. “It’s fine. Thanks.”
She stepped into the hallway with Mom, where they found another two metal chairs, just as uncomfortable as the ones in the urgent care examining room. Liv took her mother’s hand, no longer sure who was comforting whom.
“She’ll be fine.” It was Mom who spoke.
Liv didn’t argue. She certainly didn’t want to worry her mother, and Max had seemed fairly sure they weren’t dealing with anything serious. But Rachel wasn’t his sister.
Or daughter. Liv stole a look at her mother, the single crutch propped beside her on the wall almost like an afterthought. Mom had come a long way, and she sounded more confident than Liv felt. But it was in a mother’s nature to worry.
“Did you have any kind of trouble when you were pregnant with us?” Liv asked.
To her surprise, Mom chuckled. “When didn’t I? You were nearly two weeks overdue. And I had twenty-four-hour morning sickness with Rachel. She’s had a really smooth pregnancy. Maybe she was due for a bump in the road. But she’s a lot tougher than she looks.”
“I still have a hard time believing she’s married with her own house. Let alone having her own baby.”
“It takes getting used to.” Liv heard the unspoken sigh in her mother’s voice. “But you’ll never stop being my kids.”
Liv leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder, silently pretending she was a kid again for just a moment. Funny how, as Mom’s knee recovered, the urge to lean on her—literally—came right back. No wonder Rachel came back up here so often, especially with Brian’s schedule.
And Liv lived so far away. The specter of regret hovered over her again. She’d gained more independence, gained a livelihood, but she’d lost a lot in the bargain.
At the thought of her livelihood, unease crept in. She had to find a way to keep it going. But now wasn’t the time to be thinking about her own problems. Instead, she raised her head. Time to be a grown-up again.
“We should call Brian,” she said.
“We will.” Mom’s fingers squeezed hers. “First let’s see what the doctor says. We’ll be able to tell Brian more after that.”
Liv’s cell phone jangled in her pocket.
* * *
“Hello?” Liv’s voice, over Scott’s cell phone, sounded hushed and hollow.
“Hi, Liv, it’s me.” Her phone display had probably already told her that. At least she’d picked up.
“Hi, Scott. What’s up?”
He frowned. “You sound funny.”
“Sorry. I’m at the hospital—”
“The hospital?” He cut her off involuntarily.
“Everything’s okay. Rachel started having some contractions and we brought her in to check her out.”
Contractions didn’t sound okay to him. “Rachel’s having contractions and you didn’t call me?”
He felt stupid as soon as he said it. Of course they wouldn’t call him for something like that. He wasn’t family. And the problem didn’t call for a truck, a hammer, or a screwdriver.
“They’re probably rehearsal contractions.” Liv spoke patiently. “The doctor’s just double-checking to make sure it isn’t premature labor. She’s still got about six weeks before she’s due.”
Scott found himself nodding, even though he knew that didn’t work on the phone. He wasn’t sure how premature six weeks was, but it sounded too early. “Tell her to take it easy.”
“I will. Thanks.” There was a softness in Liv’s voice, and a trace of something else he’d heard once or twice in Faye’s voice. A faint shakiness.
Without thinking, he asked the forbidden question. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” That was the macho part of him talking. That part of him that wanted to be the one who could fix it.
A long silence. He waited.
“I’m fine,” she repeated. “What were you calling about?”
He’d almost forgotten. Now didn’t seem like a good time. “Nothing important.”
“What?” she persisted.
He fumbled. “The tile,” he said. “It’s the blue patterned tile in the bathroom, the red brick tile in the dining room, right?”
She sounded baffled. “Of course.” Because the other way around would clash like a nightmare. Not to mention the fact that Nammy had only bought about one-third as much of the blue patterned tile for the much smaller bathroom.
Just get off the p
hone. Instead, he asked, “Did you talk to Terri?”
“Yeah.” Her voice sounded fainter, not like Liv at all.
“How’d it go?”
“I—we’ve got a lot to figure out. Usually I can break down all the pros and cons. I’m just a little muddled lately. It’ll be okay.”
Another area where he wouldn’t be much use. But he thought of someone who probably would. Before he knew what he was doing, he said, “I know who you ought to talk to.”
He gave her Jake Wyndham’s number. And after they hung up, he dug into his wallet for his one and only credit card. He hadn’t touched plastic since the first year after he’d moved out of his parents’ house. Fortunately, it hadn’t taken that long to pay off a year’s worth of pizza and CDs, but he’d learned his lesson. Right now, though, he didn’t see another choice.
It had to be taken care of, and Liv and her family would never notice that the heater in the garage had less dust on it.
* * *
Max’s examination didn’t rule out preterm labor, since he said it sometimes stopped on its own. On his instructions, they took Rachel home, propped her feet up next to Mom’s, and made sure her diet included plenty of water and nothing with caffeine in it. It was getting hard to keep Mom seated, but Liv insisted on waiting on the two of them for the rest of the day. It gave her something to do when she wasn’t at her laptop, poring over the business’s facts and figures.
The next morning, she sat next to Jake Wyndham at a round table in the Man Cave at the hotel, trying to read his mind as he studied the columns on her laptop screen. Fortunately, the history of the home organizing business was already laid out cleanly. It was the future that was a big question mark.
Jake frowned and nodded, and Liv tried to interpret the two conflicting signals. “You have an orderly mind,” he said.
“Sometimes.” Liv tried to relax in the admittedly comfortable chair. But she couldn’t keep from wrapping her arms across her stomach, as if to contain the turmoil that was going on inside it.
Jake nodded again, pushing back slightly from the table. “Okay. So, you’re trying to weigh all your options.”
We Need a Little Christmas Page 19