The Littlest Matchmaker

by Dorien Kelly

  “Thanks. They’re toffee.” As her mom approached the cooling baked goods, Lisa debated the fine balance between complying with health codes and her personal rules about the kitchen being off-limits, and not offending one’s mother. “Why don’t we go back out to our coffee?”

  “How many scones do you sell in a week?” her mother asked, apparently disregarding the suggestion.

  “As many as I can bake,” Lisa replied. Scones were trickier to fit into her schedule than shortbread, which was hardier and kept truly fresh for more than a day.

  “You should consider contracting out the baking,” her mom said, pulling open the refrigerator and peering inside.

  “Sure, except for the fact that this is a bakery. People kind of expect me to do my own baking.”

  “I suppose,” her mother said absently while closing up the fridge. “But if you contracted out, you could start selling goods in other locations, too. I think there’s a real profit potential there. Everyone raves about your shortbread, and these scones smell positively sinful.”

  Lisa completely bought in on the sinful thing. One sort of hot moment had translated very nicely into another. All the same…

  “Thanks, Mom, but I have no ambition to be the newest cookie queen or whatever it is you’re dreaming up for me. I want to make my customers feel happy and warm and I want to make enough money so that Jamie and I can be that way, too. End of story.”

  “I just see all this potential…”

  Her mother might have gestured at the room in which they stood, but Lisa felt as though she was the real target of that comment. My issue, she reminded herself. Not Mom’s.

  “I think it’s about time that I go get Jamie,” she said.

  “Great,” her mom replied. “I’ll come along.”

  “Great,” Lisa echoed in as cheery a voice as her mother’s.

  If diplomacy wasn’t the ultimate virtue, Lisa didn’t know what was.

  KEVIN WAS BEGINNING to define a good day at Decker Construction as one in which the brothers Decker weren’t in the office at the same time. He loved Scott, of course, and even liked him 99.99% of the time. But when the two of them were trapped in one small office space along with Rose, their office manager, two desks were one too few.

  The phone rang. Rose picked it up. While she was greeting the caller, he asked Scott, “Weren’t you supposed to be back up in Clinton today?”

  “No need,” Scott replied. “The drywallers are done.”

  “You could always go down to Muscatine and check on the remodel.”

  “Why don’t you?” Scott asked. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been dumping all of the out-of-town projects on me.”

  “It’s not dumping. It’s a logical division of labor. I have more office duties than you, so I should be closer to it.” And have my own damn desk….

  “Kevin, it’s your father on the line,” Rose said.

  He reached out for the handset so he wouldn’t have to give up his spot at the desk to Scott, who was prowling the room.

  “No way,” Rose said. “You come over here and get it.”

  Rose, who had worked for his dad for years, had more office seniority than either Kevin or Scott. Though she was somewhere in her late sixties—and Kevin had no intention of asking exactly where—Rose had an energy that he sometimes couldn’t match. Except for the desk that the brothers shared, this small office was her domain. In exchange, she let them mess up the attached workshop and storage area any way they wished. Actually, Scott messed and Kevin cleaned.

  “Playing favorites, Rose?” he asked as he stood to get the phone. As he’d expected, Scott immediately rolled the desk chair over the old black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor until it was out of Kevin’s reach.

  “No favorites,” she said. “I’m just adding a little sport to the day. Someone has to even out the odds around here, or you’re going to win all the time.”

  He shot her a “thanks loads” grin as he took the phone.

  “Hey, Pop. How’s life in Carefree?”

  “As advertised,” his dad replied.

  Four years ago, his dad and mom had moved to Arizona after wintering there for several years prior to that. Though it had wrung him dry financially, Kevin had put together a final buyout from the business and sold his own home to make it happen. Both his parents deserved the good life after raising what had been one challenging pack of kids. Carefree was their sort of town—lots of restaurants, lots of activity.

  Kevin tended to head down there when the slow work and persistent cold of January in Davenport got to him, then stick until April. He’d do small renovation projects—jobs good for one guy—to keep the cash flowing, and leave Scott to do the same in Davenport.

  “Your mother’s talking about Thanksgiving,” his dad said.

  “Already? It’s not even October, let alone November.”

  “I know, but she’s got it into her head that everyone should come down here. Mike’s already said that he can’t, so I’m counting on you and Court and Scott.”

  After a stint in the Marines fresh out of high school, Mike had gone on to college, then medical school, and currently was a resident at a hospital across the river in Moline. Kevin barely saw him these days. No issues other than crazy schedules were at play, though.

  “I don’t know. That’s early for me to be heading down,” Kevin said. “Any chance you guys could come up here?”

  “Too cold,” his father said. “It hurts my damn bones. Not that I’m complaining about being alive.”

  Kevin chuckled. “I didn’t think so. Let me see what I can pull off.”

  “I’m going to offer to buy Courtney a plane ticket, so she’s covered. How about traveling with Scott? You two could always make it a road trip together. It could be a good time.”

  He looked over at his brother, who was currently moving the stacks of paper Kevin had organized this morning.

  “That’s pretty tight quarters,” he said to his dad instead of what he was thinking, which was more along the lines of he’d rather be strapped to the front of a semi than do a road trip with Scott.

  “Think about it, okay? And ask your brother, too.”

  Kevin could hear his mother in the background, calling for his dad.

  “I have to run,” his dad said. “I think your mom’s started me in a yoga class this morning.”

  That was an image Kevin could have done without. “Right. Okay. Talk to you later.”

  After he’d rested the phone back in its base, he asked his brother, “I don’t suppose you’re planning on getting out of that chair?”

  “Not until I find the tile bids on the Clinton house.”

  “You might try the file marked Clinton. It was on the top of the pile before you started looking.”

  Scott glanced up. “Huh. Didn’t see it.”

  “You didn’t look. You just started taking things apart.”

  Scott’s gaze narrowed into clear annoyance. “You know, I’d ask what’s wrong with you today, except you’ve been like that since last night. I heard you slamming around in the living room in the middle of the night.”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Kevin said shortly. “I figured I’d get some work done. The sooner the house is listed, the sooner we can get it sold.”

  “I’m with you on that, but three in the morning doesn’t cut it as a work hour, roomie. And even if you worked around the clock, the house wouldn’t be done until the end of winter…as you know. So, what gives? Did you have a bad date with Lisa?”

  “Date?” asked Rose from her spectator’s spot at her desk.

  “It wasn’t a date,” Kevin replied to both listeners.

  Scott grinned, but said nothing, which was a smart move on his part.

  Even dead-of-the-night construction therapy hadn’t taken the edge off of Kevin’s frustration. Kevin knew it wasn’t his job to think for Lisa, and that she’d rip him up one side and down the other if he tried. All the same, even before they�
�d started kissing on Courtney’s front porch, he’d known the ending wasn’t going to be smooth. Both of them were too tightly wound these days for it to have gone any other way. And for that very reason, he’d steered clear of Shortbread Cottage this morning. If he needed to sort things out, Lisa did, too.

  “Is this Lisa from Shortbread Cottage that he didn’t go on a date with?” Rose asked.

  “Yup. The one and only Lisa in Kevin’s universe,” Scott replied.

  “How is she?” Rose asked. “I’ve missed her since James has been gone.”

  Not a topic Kevin cared to discuss. Life was sufficiently complicated trying to live it in the present. The past needed to stay there.

  He feigned a glance at his watch. “I think I’ll go do a walk-around on the new bid request in McClellan Heights,” he said.

  A couple had bought one of the many old mansions overlooking the Mississippi and decided to renovate the beast themselves. Two years into the process, they had determined that the beast was winning the battle and called Kevin. Kevin had worked on a handful of the houses that sat along that road, and he knew how complex they could be. If Decker Construction got the job, winter would be one huge custom carpentry project. He wasn’t hot on the concept of winter in Davenport instead of Carefree, but they needed the business.

  “You mean I get to keep the chair, no hassle?” Scott asked as Kevin reached for the door. “Something’s definitely wrong with you.”

  Kevin didn’t comment, since his brother was right. Instead, he closed the door behind himself and headed for his truck. The short drive would do him good, as would the time focusing on work and not Lisa. As he pulled away from the office, he immediately felt freer.

  On the way to the bid site, he called the owners and asked for their okay to walk around the property before coming inside. When dealing with large renovations, he always liked to get a mental picture of what they’d do for materials storage. They told him that he was welcome to do so, and to come to the front door when he was ready.

  A few minutes later, Kevin pulled between the brick columns that stood as sentinels at the end of the drive. One column bore a stone plaque with the street number, and the other, the house’s name: Fairview. Up the drive he wound until he reached the crest of the hill and the buff-colored brick home that crowned it. The owners had bought themselves a gem, albeit one currently in need of polishing.

  Kevin parked in the drive and pulled out his notepad, measuring tape and pen and took one circle around the large home. His practiced eye told him that the house was in excess of eight thousand square feet. Probably more, if any part of the basement was finished. The grounds were smoothly landscaped. The only way he could tell that construction was underway was by some of the third-floor windows, where plywood sat in place of glass.

  The backyard was steep, as were all along this ridge of land. A few hundred feet below ran River Drive, the main artery to downtown Davenport. Fairview and all of the houses like it sat so far above the road that noise wasn’t an issue.

  Just the other side of the four-lane street was a long, green ribbon of a park with a bike path, a narrow strip of railroad tracks, the broad river itself, and the Illinois shore far beyond. He could see why those long-ago captains of industry had chosen to build their mansions here. The view alone elevated the owner from a captain to a king.

  Finished with his stroll, Kevin returned to the house and rang the bell. When the massive front door swung open, he introduced himself to the Aldens, with whom he’d only talked by phone prior to this. Maya and Stan were middle-aged, energetic and a little rueful that they were in over their heads. Kevin asked if he could have a tour of the rooms they were currently working to complete.

  “We’ll go top to bottom,” Stan replied. “We’ve been avoiding the third floor altogether, so it’s the worst.”

  They took a sweeping mahogany circular staircase in the main entry to the second floor, then a less showy set of stairs up to the third floor. They entered one of the rooms with plywood for windows. It appeared that Stan had just propped a piece in front of broken glass. He pushed it aside, and light shone in.

  “This is going to be my craft room,” Maya said. “At least it will be once we have it free of uninvited occupants.”

  Bird droppings soiled the wide-planked floor. Kevin looked out the window and across to Illinois. Then he glanced at the manicured lawn below. When he did, the past crawled up to seize him. He braced his hand against the window frame as the room briefly bobbed and dipped beneath him.

  “Are you okay?” Stan asked.

  “I’m fine,” Kevin lied.

  Stan’s cell phone rang. He answered it, then asked whomever was on the line to hang on.

  “It’s our daughter, from college. If you don’t mind, Maya and I are going to step out and take this.”

  “No problem,” Kevin said. The room was sufficiently crowded with ghosts.

  The Aldens left, and even as Kevin turned his back on the window with its jagged glass, memories returned.

  It was an accident.

  Kevin was sure that never before or since that awful day had he uttered an emptier phrase than that one. Lisa’s husband had been in the hospital’s critical care unit with virtually no brain function, and that had been the best he could work up.

  No comfort.

  No sympathy.

  Just four words delivered with no emotion at all because he’d felt hollow and useless.

  James Kincaid had never been a model employee, but few were. Kevin had known that James was prone to be distracted and disinterested. He’d also been one to carry a grudge, and to feel as though he was being singled out when he was being corrected on his carpentry work.

  Countless times Kevin had been so damn close to firing him. The only reason he hadn’t was that the guy had had a young child, plus a wife working like a fiend to keep a new business afloat. None of that should have been Kevin’s problem, but he hadn’t wanted to add to Lisa Kincaid’s stress level. He’d always liked her, even back when she and Courtney had done their little-kid best to make his teenaged years a challenge, snooping and tattling whenever they got the chance. And so after hiring James just to help his sister’s best friend, he’d given the guy one final chance after another.

  Then, one humid August day, he, Scott and James had been working at a house about two blocks from this one. One built to the same scale of size and wealth. One with the same sort of steep yard and rolling lawn.

  Thunderstorms had threatened, but had yet to roll in. The heat and humidity had the attic space in which they’d worked a sauna. They’d been converting what had once been maid’s quarters into a studio for the house’s owner.

  Headspace had been good, but the room had been narrow, with one large window on the south wall to provide ventilation. Kevin had figured by its size that it had been a decorative piece, with stained glass, but somewhere along the line it had been replaced with a plain double-hung window. No matter. Even though it didn’t have a screen and they were inviting mosquitoes in for a snack, they’d kept the window open. They’d needed air circulation, such as it was.

  It had been lunchtime, one like any other. They’d just stopped working long enough to wolf down a quick meal and let tired muscles rest. Kevin had been on both James and Scott to keep drinking water. Hydration had been the only thing that was going to get them through the day.

  Done with his food, James had muttered something about being too damn hot, and then sat on the sill of the open window, bracing his hands on either side of his legs.

  “Gonna hog all the good air?” Scott had teased.

  James, who’d been in a pretty good mood all day—for dour James, at least—had egged Scott on by leaning back so that more of him was out the window than in.

  “I might take all the air outside, as well,” he’d said.

  “Get your ass back in here,” Kevin had ordered, then unscrewed the top of his water bottle, tipped back his head and taken a long, deep drink. An a
pproaching train horn had wailed, nothing so unusual with the tracks that ran along the Mississippi. Then, on top of the train’s cry had come another. Startled, Kevin had swung to look at his brother, but Scott was leaping toward the window. A window that stood empty of James Kincaid.

  In shock, Kevin had looked down. James had lain sprawled, unmoving, on the earth below. Kevin had pulled his cell phone and dialed 911, then sprinted down the sets of stairs, out the front door, and to James.

  “He didn’t make a sound,” Scott had kept repeating as he trailed behind Kevin. “Not a sound.”

  And James never spoke again, either.

  At the hospital, Lisa had been collected, if not calm. He’d tried to tell her what had happened, but because he felt numb and scared and sick, all he’d been able to say was that stupid, stupid comment. “It was an accident.”

  James had died that night of his brain injuries. He’d apparently hit a rock just beneath the surface of the green, perfect lawn. Some luck there. Because Kevin was the boss and James an employee under his supervision, Kevin had spent a solid year bearing the full weight of what had happened.

  He should have stapled screening into the window frame that day….

  He should have physically hauled James’s sorry ass from the window the moment he’d sat down….

  He should have fired him that morning, as he’d been so tempted to do, when James had been late again….

  Should haves.

  Kevin had damn near drowned in them until he hadn’t even been able to stand himself. And daily, he’d stopped by Shortbread Cottage once Lisa had reopened the place, at first looking for the words he’d wanted to give her that afternoon. The words had never arrived, and he’d begun to realize that all he could do was watch over her.

  She’d bounced back with the same single-mindedness she’d always shown. His respect for her had grown, as had his admiration. He’d waited for her to turn on him, to blame him for James’s death. Hell, he still took responsibility for it, if not blame. But Lisa had never gone that route. Sometimes he wished she had. He wanted it all out in the open. He wanted it done. But if she wasn’t going to raise it, he couldn’t.