“Does the will stipulate that she live here?”
“She has to live in the house for a year in order to inherit what, around here at least, is considered a sizeable estate.”
“That’s a heck of a job she’s got up there in New York.”
“I know, but I gather success comes at the expense of everything else. She stood on the back porch of the house, looking out at the lake, took a deep breath and said, ‘This is pure heaven. Imagine living in such a peaceful environment!’ I wouldn’t be surprised if she moved down here.”
Although that news revved his engine a bit, his head told him he’d be better off with as much distance as possible between the two of them. Hadn’t old man libido kicked into action this morning the minute he awakened with her on his mind?
“You’re interested? I thought the two of you didn’t get on too well.”
“That was on the surface. I had dinner at her place last night. She’s an elegant woman, to say the least.”
“That’s the impression I got,” Mark said. “You coming to the club meeting next week?”
“Probably. Thanks.”
He hung up feeling that he knew little more about Susan Pettiford, the person, than he did before he called Mark. He didn’t intend to get further involved with her, but it wasn’t in his nature to leave a problem unsolved.
Chapter Two
“I want another opinion,” Susan said to herself as she sat on a log by the lake near her late aunt’s house. She threw a small rock in the water and watched the ripples spread outward. “Just like my life,” she said of the sinking pebble. “The doctor hands me some bad news and before you know it, I get in bed with a man I’ve seen once, a man who’s given name I used for the first time only a couple of hours before I made love with him.” She pulled air through her teeth. “I must have been out of my mind.”
A smile crawled over her face. “But what a lover that guy is! Lord, that man is sweet as sugar.” She told herself to snap out of her lethargy and contact another of the experts on her list. She wanted to consult with Dr. Chasen in Baltimore, but she doubted he’d speak with her without a high-level referral. What the heck! She could try.
She needed a car, but she couldn’t use the one her aunt left her unless and until she signed the papers declaring her intention to reside in that house for a year. Until then, she wouldn’t even know the amount of money in her aunt’s account.
Suddenly, her mind made up, she stood and headed back to her apartment to call Dr. Chasen. She promised herself that if Chasen said she had to have the operation, she would accept it.
An hour later, she called Mark, her lawyer, with the news that she’d be out of town for three days. “I’ll be in Baltimore, Maryland, but I don’t have a phone number where I can be reached.” From his hesitancy, she sensed that he wanted more information, but she didn’t offer it.
She walked into Chasen’s office the following Wednesday morning looking as well as a woman could look, with her mink coat, alligator shoes and bag heralding the presence of a successful businesswoman. And she knew she had his attention.
“You made this seem as if you were minutes away from death,” he said, shaking hands with her.
“What I’m facing amounts to death.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”
After examining her, reading the de rigueur cat scans and MRIs that he’d ordered, he said, “There’s no escaping it. You have a multitude of tumors inside and outside the uterus. It’s best to get it over with as soon as possible. You are very anemic. Who’s your surgeon?” She told him. “I’ll send him my findings. It’s a simple operation, and you should be up and about in a very short time.”
“How many children do you have, doctor?” she asked him.
“Why, three. Why?”
“I don’t have any,” she said, looking him in the eye, “and even if I am up and about in a very short time, I’ll never have any children. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
She turned and walked out before he could reply, and before she lost her poise. The cheerful smile on the secretary’s face annoyed her, and she wrote the check for fifteen hundred dollars without speaking, turned and left.
Might as well go on and get it behind her. When she got home, she phoned The Woodmore Times, discontinued delivery of the daily paper, packed a few toilet articles and telephoned Mark. “I’ll be away for maybe a month. When I get back, I’ll let you know whether I’ll sign for the house.”
“How can you be so lackadaisical about wealth that most people would consider a fortune?”
“I’m not weak brained, Mark. I’m deciding whether to change my life, and I have to consider the positives and negatives. I don’t worship wealth. My aunt knew how I lived, and she offered me an opportunity to live a more normal, more satisfying life. I have some unfinished business in New York, and when I’ve taken care of it, I’ll be back.”
“All right. Everything will be here when you return.”
Five weeks later, Susan walked into her apartment on Eighth Street East, healed after a successful surgery, prepared to begin life anew in Woodmore, North Carolina. Her boss at Yates and Crown had assured her that she could have her job back whenever she wanted it.
“I practically raised you in this business,” he said, “and I know what you can do. You come on back, but don’t take forever.”
Susan thanked him, but she hoped she wouldn’t need her old job. With no prospects of marriage and a family, she reckoned that she’d be better off in a small town where she could find real neighbors and friends who wanted more than a lift up the rungs of success. She had to get her business started and renovate the house she’d inherited. While perusing the want-ad section of The Woodmore Times, she saw an advertisement for volunteer tutors for disadvantaged children, and called the organization that placed it.
“We’ll be glad to have anyone with a university degree, Ms. Pettiford,” the respondent told her. “Would you come in and fill out an application? Our semester begins in January, but we’ve lost a few tutors, and we’d like you to start at once.” Susan reported for work the following Monday afternoon and was assigned a group of second grade children with reading and spelling problems.
“What’s your name?” she asked the shy little girl who sat far behind the eleven other children.
“Rudy,” she said in barely audible tones.
“Come up here with me, Rudy.” Snickers from the other children alerted her to the possibility that Rudy was a target of ridicule. She walked back to where the child sat, took her hand and walked with her to the front of the class. “Rudy, I’m going to tell a little story,” she said, “and then I want you to tell us one. Something you read, or you can make it up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Susan made up a short tale about pigeons and then asked Rudy to tell her story. When Rudy had trouble beginning, Susan put an arm around the child. “Go ahead. I know you can do it.”
Rudy looked at her, and Susan smiled, praying that she hadn’t made a mistake. “My story is about the dog that jumped over the fence and got lost,” Rudy said, and as she told the story to her hushed classmates, her confidence seemed to grow. When she finished, Susan applauded and Rudy’s classmates joined in. Susan hugged the child, and a warm feeling flushed through her when the little girl smiled for the first time.
Now, Susan thought, I hope these children won’t ridicule this child anymore. As the children began to file out, she beckoned to a boy who hadn’t joined those who made fun of Rudy. “You weren’t unkind to Rudy,” she said to him. “Why did the others laugh at her?”
He hung his head. “I guess it’s because she wears those funny old clothes, and the people she lives with aren’t her parents. They get paid to keep her.”
“Hmmm. But the children were being mean to her.”
“Yes, ma’am. And she’s kinda nice, too.”
“So are you. What’s your name?”
“Nathan. Do you think I
can learn to read better?”
“Yes, I do, Nathan, because I’m going to help you.”
For the first time since she learned that she had to have a hysterectomy, Susan had a feeling of well-being, and she walked out of the building with quick steps and a renewed sense of purpose. She hadn’t known what to expect when she saw the old building that had served as Wade Elementary School.
“At least I’ll be too busy to moan over what can’t be helped.”
The next day, Susan looked at three sites as a potential location for her decorating business and, in the process, discovered that Woodmore already had one interior decorator. But she also learned that, because of his volatile temperament, Jay Weeks, the decorator, probably wouldn’t present serious competition. Besides, she planned to introduce herself and make him a friend. She rented space on the second floor of a four-story building at 131 Eighth Street West and considered herself fortunate in finding a good address.
She needed an architect, and a good one who she could trust, but she didn’t want to contact the only one she knew. Nor did she want to ask Mark for a reference, for he would want to know why she didn’t ask Lucas. After stewing over the matter for a time, she told herself that it was business, that she wasn’t proposing anything personal. The next day, exasperated at herself for wasting time, she phoned Lucas and asked if he would organize her space, including provision for a toilet and small kitchen.
“Thanks for your confidence, Susan,” he said, without inquiring as to how she was or uttering other preliminaries of a personal nature.
This guy’s a real piece of work, she said to herself, though she didn’t bother to note that she hadn’t asked of his health and well-being, either.
“I’ll have a look at it and see what I can come up with,” he said.
“Before we settle on anything, I’ll need an estimate.”
“Of course. I . . . uh . . . I hope you’ve been well.”
That took her back a bit and brought to mind her own shortcoming in that respect. “I have. Thank you,” she said, her voice losing some of its deliberate stridency. “My shop is at 131 Eighth Street West on the second floor.”
“That’s a good building and a very good business address. How’s one-thirty this afternoon?”
“Good. I’ll be there.” She hung up and sat down in the nearest chair, uncertain as to whether she had done the right thing. She didn’t know another architect, so what was she to do? Face it, girl, you didn’t look for one. Subconsciously, you haven’t let him go. She looked toward the ceiling and closed her eyes. Lucas Hamilton, the man, was water down the drain. She needed an architect, and he was the best in Woodmore.
On her way to meet Lucas at what she envisioned as her shop, Susan stopped at 127 Eighth Street West and introduced herself to Jay Weeks. “I’m Susan Pettiford, and I’m about to open a decorating shop two doors up the street.” She extended her hand in greeting. “I wanted to meet you.”
Tall, lean, self-assured, good-looking and with a streak of gray at the front of his otherwise black hair, Jay Weeks gazed down at Susan for a few seconds before he let a smile alter the shape of his sensuous lips.
“Checking out the competition, eh? I heard about you. I have my shop here, but most of my clients are over in Danvers where the money is. I don’t work for peanuts; I go for the white trade, so you needn’t worry about me.”
Both of her eyebrows arched, but she quickly smiled. “I’m sure there’s plenty for both of us. Since we’re in the same business, I’m sure we’ll have opportunities to compare notes and maybe even help each other. If you ever need burnt-orange and beige upholstery thread, I’ll probably have it.”
To her surprise and pleasure, his laughter appeared genuine. “Right. And if you need something too weird for the local stores to carry, I’ll probably have that. Let’s have lunch sometime.”
“Thanks, Jay. I’d like lunch. Bye.”
As she rushed to her appointment with Lucas, she told herself she’d sort Jay Weeks out later.
She arrived to find him leaning against the door jamb. “Sorry if I’ve kept you waiting. Thank you for coming,” she said, feeling as if she were talking to someone she hadn’t previously met. It was either that stilted conversation or greater intimacy, but she couldn’t assert her softer, more feminine self with him for fear of sending him a deeper, unmistakable message. Appraising him from her peripheral view, she hadn’t remembered that he was such a big man, but why should she have; she had tried to blot him from her memory.
He stepped aside while she unlocked the door. “I had lunch nearby, so I got here early,” he said. Gazing around even as he walked into the vast room, he began moving slowly from corner to corner, paused at the window on the street side and looked out.
“You need a private office, a showroom that takes advantage of this big window, a toilet, storage space with built-in shelves and cabinets, and a small kitchen. I propose the following.”
She stared at him as he outlined his idea. The man had been there ten minutes and had envisaged a plan that suited her perfectly.
“I’ll get you a contractor who ought to do what you want for two or three thousand.”
Shaking her head in wonder, she said, “So far very good, but what about your services?”
When he rubbed the back of his neck, she knew what was coming. “It’ll take me all of half an hour to draw up the plans for this.” He took a rolled metal tape measure from his pocket, measured sections of the room, made some notes and winked at her. “Willis will divide the space floor to ceiling so that it resembles an apartment. That suit you?”
“Sure it does, but you haven’t told me what you charge.”
“I’d be ashamed to charge for this, and I won’t. Willis will charge you enough. I’ll give him the plan, and he’ll be in touch with you, or you may call him. I’ll give you his number.”
When she appeared skeptical, he said, “Don’t worry. I’ll tell him it’s urgent. His work is impeccable.”
“I can’t imagine that you would recommend him if it wasn’t. Thanks.”
As he handed her his card on which he’d written the phone number for W. L. Carter, contractor, his hand touched her, and she backed away quickly, bumping against the wall. He stared down at her, and she imagined that he heard the thundering of her heart. She didn’t dare shift her gaze.
“Willis will call you tomorrow morning,” Lucas said in a voice that had suddenly become hoarse. “It’s . . . been good to see you again.” He walked to the door, opened it and, as if remembering something, turned back to her. “What’s the name of your business?”
“Pettiford Interiors, Inc.”
“There’s a good sign maker in the Market Street promenade. Be seeing you.”
With nothing on which to sit, she leaned against the wall and inhaled deeply. Was she going to come apart whenever the man came near her? God forbid that he should touch her. Well, what the hell! He wasn’t exactly immune to her, either, and he showed it when she backed away from him, but that was small consolation. He had no place in her life.
She had to stay in Woodmore for at least a year because she had taken a one-year lease for the shop, so she might as well stay in her aunt’s house. She phoned Mark and told him she was ready to sign for her inheritance.
“I had hoped you wouldn’t make the city a gift of your aunt’s property,” Mark said when she signed the papers. She left his office with keys to the house, the new BMW, a safe deposit box key and papers allowing her access to two bank accounts. Since she didn’t have time to go to her apartment, she put the keys and papers in her purse and half walked, half ran the seven blocks to the old Wade Elementary School building. With five minutes before the tutoring classes were scheduled to begin, she rushed inside and stopped abruptly, as if a ghost suddenly loomed before her. Lucas.
“You!” she gasped.
“What are you doing here?”
“I tutor a reading class of second graders,” she told him.
“Since when?”
“Since the day before yesterday. Why are you grilling me?”
“I didn’t know I was. I do have a right to know, Susan, because I’m the principal for this program.”
She gaped at him. “Nobody told me that.” If she had known it, she would not have answered the ad. She wanted as little contact as possible with him.
Lucas exhaled a long breath and assumed the posture of one resigned. She would have given much to know his thoughts, but he didn’t reveal them by gesture or by word. Yet, his very stillness told her he was no more comfortable than she. He pushed back his leather jacket, shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and said, simply, “No one told me about you being here, either.”
“I answered an ad in the paper for volunteers,” she told him, “but I can occupy myself with my work and my house, among other things. This isn’t something I have to do.” She turned around and headed in the opposite direction.
“Susan!” It was part command and part plea. Urgent, yet soft.
She stopped, but didn’t face him. When she felt the weight of his hand on her arm, she spun around and encountered his body. Like a deer caught in headlights, she stood transfixed, staring into his eyes. Shaken, she gazed at him, but she didn’t see the man; it was the lover who stood before her and the lover’s aura that nearly entrapped her. But as quickly as the shadow of their lovemaking returned to haunt them, she backed away, releasing herself from the spell.
“The children need us,” he said. “If we don’t help them, we’ll lose them. Without the ability to read and read well, they’ll have a hard life. These children are more important than my emotions and yours.”
“Don’t worry. I wasn’t planning to resign.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said, Lucas. I was telling you that I won’t fall apart if you don’t want me here.”
“I want—” He caught himself. “The children need you. I have almost two dozen fifth and sixth graders down the hall hoping for tutoring in math, so I’d better go. Be seeing you.”
Getting Some Of Her Own Page 3