What the Heart Wants

by Cynthia Reese

To Allison, though, once she heard her grandmother’s “ooh!” of pleasure, it had been worth it. The rest of the house might still be a disaster, but Allison had forcibly put that out of her mind and vowed to concentrate on finishing Gran’s bedroom and the upstairs bath.

  Gran had slid her hands over the periwinkle walls, the fresh white molding, the coverlet on the four-poster bed. Then she’d sagged down onto the mattress beside a contented Cleo, curled up at the end of the bed.

  Gran had exhaled sharply. Her mouth had trembled a bit, until she’d compressed it tightly and closed her eyes. Then she’d breathed out again and opened her eyes.

  “Thank you. Thank you both very much,” she’d murmured. “Why, I—I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see this room again.”

  It had been all Allison could do not to burst into tears. She knew that when it came time to take her grandmother back Sunday, to finish her prescribed physical therapy, she would cry coming home, just as she had the first time she’d visited Gran.

  Now, this morning, the memory of Gran’s pleasure brought a huge lift in Allison’s spirits and reminded her why all this trouble was worth it. It was for Gran.

  “Uh, yeah, thanks,” she told Kyle. “I heard her moving around a few minutes ago. Why don’t you get a cup of coffee and wait here while I go check to see if she’s ready for company?”

  “Point me to it,” he said.

  She turned in the direction of the coffeepot. It was empty. “Oh, no! I forgot to turn it on last night! I meant to...I set it on a timer—”

  “I got it. You go check on Gran. I think I can—whoa! This is the first time I’ve noticed, but that’s a Chambers stove, isn’t it?” Kyle walked over to the big hunk of junk Allison had kicked more times than she could remember as she was learning to cook.

  “Yes. It is. And Gran can’t bear to have it replaced.”

  He ran a hand over the enameled surface and gave her a quizzical look. “Why on earth would you have it replaced? What’s wrong with it?”

  “According to Gran, nothing. But it is the most aggravating, infernal device to cook on. What I wouldn’t give for a smooth top electric.” Allison reached past him for the coffee canister, surprised again at the sinewy muscles in his arms as she brushed against him. She nearly dropped the canister, but managed to save it, just as Kyle grabbed for it, too.

  “So.” Her face felt hot. “Clumsy.”

  “Too many late nights,” he said.

  She smiled at his joke. “You bet.”

  He took the coffee from her. “Go on. I’ve got this. Unless you’re particular about your coffee.”

  “All right—hey, let the tomato man in if he gets here, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  Upstairs, Allison found Gran dressed and ready, beaming at her bedroom.

  “Cleo and I have decided that I’ll just stay here and not go back,” she announced, stroking the cat. The Siamese gave Allison a smug know-it-all smirk before snuggling closer to Gran. “It’s much nicer at home, even if I wouldn’t see Harvey as much. Besides, his son took his keys away. Can’t go on a date with a man who doesn’t drive.”

  “Oh, Gran. I wish you could stay. And in a very short time, you will be home. But they made me promise to have you back so you could finish your therapy. Besides, after we put up all those tomatoes, you’ll enjoy a break and being waited on hand and foot.”

  “Pshaw! I don’t think so. It’s fun for maybe a week, and then you just itch to do something for yourself. But it’s always, ‘why, no, Miss Lillian, you can’t do that,’ and ‘careful, Miss Lillian, you’ll hurt yourself.’ Might as well put me in a wad of that bubble wrap. Has he brought the tomatoes and the beans yet? I heard voices.”

  “No, that was Kyle—wait! Beans? What beans?”

  “Just a few handfuls of green beans. He offered them to me free of charge. Said they’d dry up on the vine if we didn’t take them. No reason to let them go to waste.”

  “Gran! Speaking of handfuls—we’ll have our hands full of tomatoes today.”

  She waved off Allison’s protest. “Pish-posh. Anybody who can’t can a few tomatoes and beans, well, they need a lesson. So you’re going to help me down those stairs? I tell you, your lift chair might be just the thing once you get it installed.”

  “If I ever do... Just a minute. Kyle is here and is going to help us—”

  “Oh, good.” Gran grabbed her walking stick and pounded it on the floor, startling the cat. “That’ll bring him running. It’s what my grandmother did whenever she needed us. Worked a treat, I tell you!”

  It really did bring Kyle running. He appeared at Gran’s doorway after pounding his way up the back stairs. Allison found herself at once irritated and impressed that despite his haste, he wasn’t the least bit winded.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Gran said. “Are the tomatoes and beans here?”

  “Brought ’em not five minutes ago. Two bushels of tomatoes and a bushel of green beans. That sound about right?”

  “Why, no!” Gran frowned. “There should have been three bushels of tomatoes. Two bushels will barely get us started. That won’t even be fifty quarts.”

  Allison thought about all the painting and spackling and caulking and sanding that still needed doing, not to mention laundry. She’d hoped for a single bushel of tomatoes, not a mountain.

  “Gran...really, fifty quarts of tomatoes is a lot for just the two of us.”

  “I was planning on sharing them with some of my friends at the center.”

  “Oh, that’s sweet, but we’ll have plenty to share,” Allison assured her.

  “Plus, we have to share with Kyle here. After all, he’s graciously agreed to help us.”

  “We’ll have more tomatoes than you can shake a stick at. One pint per meal would be more than enough for either me or Kyle, probably both. But...” Allison took in her Gran’s disappointment and prayed her next words wouldn’t come back to haunt her. “If you’re not happy with the yield, I’ll can get some more for you next week.”

  Gran sighed. “If you insist. I still think, since we have everything out already, it makes more sense to...”

  But Allison was ushering her to the door as tactfully as she could, and then they began the arduous process of getting her downstairs. Allison had a sneaky feeling that her grandmother had not told her doctors at the center that she would be managing stairs...but then again, since they hadn’t outright prohibited the activity, maybe they thought it was good therapy. Or more likely they thought Allison would have better sense than to let Gran tackle a steep flight of stairs in a rickety old Victorian house.

  She appreciated Kyle’s calm, step-by-step approach to the staircase and then the tomatoes. He set Gran to work snapping green beans, and then somehow magically managed to convince her to can the beans whole—something Allison had never been able to con her grandmother into doing.

  Meanwhile, he started washing the tomatoes, while Allison began sorting the ones suitable for blanching.

  Kyle in the kitchen, she found, was as good a helper as he was with a paintbrush. He did argue with her about the most efficient method of doing something, and it aggravated her when Gran would wade into their squabbles and suggest that she try Kyle’s suggestion. It aggravated Allison even more when he hit upon a way that actually did work better.

  By 10:00 a.m. the kitchen looked as though a bomb had gone off in a produce stand, with dribbles of tomato juice here and there on the white enamel cabinets and yellowed marble countertops. Allison had long ago given up on keeping her T-shirt clean and had resorted to wearing one of Gran’s aprons.

  Still, the pressure canner was loaded, locked and starting to steam with a full quota of green beans. The first batch of tomatoes was coming out of the water bath canner, and the second batch was progressing. She wa
s beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel—or maybe it was light from a volcano, as hot as it was in the kitchen.

  The kitchen had begun to heat up as the first huge, hot-water-bath canner went on the stove. Now, Allison’s back was sticky with a film of perspiration. She noticed how Gran’s face was entirely too pink to suit her. Even Kyle, usually cool, calm and collected, had become more short-tempered.

  Allison swiped her brow with her forearm and gave up. “Let me go see if that air-conditioner needs turning down,” she said. “It’s really getting hot in here.”

  “Nothing compared to what it was before we had that unit put in, I tell you,” Gran called after her. “Why, Kyle, I could tell you stories...”

  Which, Allison thought, was what her grandmother had done all morning long as she’d supervised the two of them—kept Kyle entertained by telling stories from years past. It had kept Allison entertained, as well. She wished that she’d thought to tape her grandmother’s tales. They were always interesting, usually funny and sometimes even a little eyebrow-raising.

  Allison walked to the front hall, where the thermostat to the ancient central unit was located. No wonder they were hot—it was nearly 80 degrees in here. It had to be a half-dozen degrees hotter in the kitchen at least. But...

  She noticed that the thermostat was set to a reasonable 72. So why wasn’t the air coming on?

  She bumped it down first to 68, then to a snowball-ejecting 65. Nothing. The air refused to come on.

  Allison threw back her head with a groan and kicked the baseboard. “No!” she moaned. “No, no, no, please, please don’t do this to me, not today!”

  Kyle came into the hall. “What is it?”

  “The air-conditioner is broken. It won’t come on.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh? No—disaster, not huh.”

  But Kyle was already fiddling with the device, peering first at the numbers and then removing the cover to reveal its innards.

  “Why now? I mean, I know it’s ancient, but couldn’t it have lasted one more day?”

  “Shh,” Kyle said. “Let me think.” Then he looked over at her. “Where’s the unit? On the roof? Behind the house?”

  “In the backyard. It’s a heat pump Gran had put in fifteen years ago. Maybe twenty. It’s probably a goner.”

  “Is there a window near it? Go stand there and tell me if it makes a sound when I call out, okay?”

  She frowned. “You can fix this?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But before you spend a fortune on a Saturday emergency call, let’s see.” He grinned.

  Her spirits sank as she heard nothing coming from the machine when he signaled to her a few minutes later. She was halfway back to him when he called, “Hey, can you turn off the breaker to the heat pump?”

  “Uh, sure. Wait! Gran! You can’t lift that!” She had spied her grandmother trying to lever a basket of green beans from the pasta pot they were using to blanch them in. Allison dashed to remove the basket to the sinkful of ice cubes, and switched off the burner on the stove. “Just wait for a bit, okay? Let me see about the air-conditioner.”

  “Young woman, you are treating me like a two-year-old—” Gran protested, but her complaint was interrupted by a shout from Kyle.

  “Allison?” he called. “Got that breaker off?”

  “In a minute!” she yelled back.

  The breaker off, she hurried back to Kyle. “Off. Wait! That looks dangerous—”

  He was deftly wrapping the bare ends of two wires together, without gloves or electrical tape or even so much as a pair of insulated pliers.

  “Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. My dad was an electrician and my brothers and I helped him in the summers. See? The power’s off, and besides, it’s low voltage. Might give me a tickle, but it won’t kill me—got it! You can turn the breaker back on, and we’ll see what happens.”

  She flipped the switch, and to her joy heard the familiar, welcome groan of the air-conditioner coming on.

  “You fixed it!” she cried jubilantly as she raced back into the hall. “Yay you!”

  He shrugged. “No big deal. It’s your thermostat. Tell you what. I’ll run get another one and replace it, one of those programmable ones that will save you some money. How about it?”

  “I’d love you forever,” she told him. And then realized the words that she’d used. “Er, you know what I meant...”

  “Gotcha.” He snapped the cover back on the thermostat. “It won’t hurt it to run like this for a bit, just until I get back. That way the house will have a chance to cool off.”

  “Thanks. I—I really appreciate this.”

  “I know.” Kyle winked. “You’ll love me forever.”

  And then, before she could say anything, he was bidding goodbye to Gran and stepping out the door. Allison stood there, thinking how much easier the world was when you had someone in your corner.

  And maybe Kyle would stay in that corner...maybe he understood that she needed that variance. After all, he saw how much this place meant to Gran, how much she wanted to be home for good.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I’LL NEVER LOOK at a tomato the same way.” Kyle groaned and rubbed an ache in the small of his back as he collapsed on the bottom step of the front stairs.

  He hadn’t felt this tired since the early days when he was renovating his house. His feet hurt, his hands hurt, his body felt as though it had been pummeled from head to toe.

  A metallic “pop!” echoed all the way from the kitchen, and then another. The sound elicited a grin from Allison. “That was quart number thirty-one and thirty-two sealing,” she told him. “Beautiful sound, no?”

  “Pulverizingly close to angels singing on high,” Kyle muttered. “What time is it? And how on earth are you still so chipper?”

  She was beyond chipper, actually. Usually it was Kyle giving her pep talks, but now it was Allison whose face was wreathed in smiles. She grabbed him by the hand and tugged. “Almost midnight. C’mon. The sound will travel up the stairs and keep Gran awake.”

  “And you know this how?” He pushed himself off the stairs and stumbled for the living room. “Oh, whoa. I’m not even close to being clean enough to sit on Gran’s chairs.”

  “The front porch, silly,” Allison told him. She opened the door and led him outside, where the air had finally cooled off.

  Kyle collapsed onto the wicker love seat and pulled Allison to sit beside him. “Now spill. What’s your secret energy source? And let me guess, you sat on the landing and eavesdropped on all of Gran’s conversations.”

  “Uh, not all of them. Just the ones that concerned me, and only until I was about, oh, twelve or so. At that point, I figured I knew it all, anyway. The back stairs are even better, though, because I could hide just beyond the landing, and I was closer to the kitchen.”

  Kyle let the velvety night air soak into him, listened to the quiet of a small town put to bed for the night. Beside him, he sensed Allison’s high energy subside into something more calm and restful. “You’ve always lived here? With your gran, I mean?”

  “Yeah. Well, not always. My parents were killed in a car accident in 1987, when I was almost four, and that’s when I came to live here. I don’t even remember them. Gran and Pops were the only parents I ever knew, and he died when I was in high school.”

  “Had to be hard.”

  “Oh, yeah—Gran was sixty-three when she took me in, and Pops was five years older. My father was almost forty when I was born, so I came along late in everybody’s life. That’s why—well, Gran could have said no, you know?” A tremor shook Allison’s voice, and she bit her lip. “She could have arranged for an adoption. I mean, the way I understand it, the family and children’s aid people urged her to do that because she was so old at the time. Old! Sixty-three seems yo
ung now that I see Gran at nearly ninety.”

  That explains the tight bond between them, Kyle thought. “The Gran I’ve come to know would have never turned her back on her family,” he said. “I’m sure she never even considered it.”

  “That’s what I mean. She practically blessed those bureaucrats out when they advised her she and Pops should give me to a young couple. At least, that’s the story Pops told me when I was an ungrateful twit of a teenager. And I get it now, the sacrifices she made. She raised one child on her own—Dad—after my biological grandfather died in World War II. It wasn’t until my dad was five or so that she remarried. And then, boom! At sixty-three, she had to grieve for the loss of her only son and start raising a grandchild?” Allison shook her head. “She’s tougher than I ever could be, Kyle. And she deserves to be able to come home. She’s fought to keep this house through all manner of catastrophes, and I aim to see she lives out her last days here, and that they’re warm and comfortable.”

  There was an edge to her voice, a challenge that Kyle could not mistake. She was thinking about that variance.

  He pictured it, the thick stack of paperwork that Allison had painstakingly filled out. He’d started to circulate it around to committee members in an informal way, trying to get a read on any compromise they might be willing to give. But already he had heard from at least two members that they thought the same way he had... Belle Paix deserved to be treated right, and any substandard renovations would serve to damage not only the home’s value, but the neighborhood’s character.

  Plus, there was the question of precedent. If the committee allowed this, some other person, for less noble reasons, could take the committee to court and have a good chance of getting the entire ordinance thrown out.

  It irked him that never before had he gone to this much trouble with a variance request. He really shouldn’t be doing what he was doing—legally, it could get him into a bind. But it was for Gran.

  No. It’s for Allison and Gran.

  For now, Kyle chose to ignore Allison’s not-so-veiled allusion to the topic. “You’re making progress,” he assured her. “You’re pretty much down to the cosmetic part—you know, repainting the kitchen and all the rooms where the plaster had to be knocked out for the wiring.”