The Renovation

by Terri Kraus

  “I mean … like, did you guys hug and make up? Did he say he was going to take you to dinner? Is he going to buy you something cool, like an iPod, to make up for it?”

  Chase shook his head. “No. But he did say we might go to McCort’s.”

  “McCort’s? That’s not much of an apology, if you ask me.”

  Everyone inside the bus swayed in time with the bus as it turned the corner on Buffalo Street.

  “No. But he wasn’t really apologizing.”

  “He wasn’t?” Elliot asked. “How do you figure that? He said he was sorry, right?”

  “He said he was sorry for yelling at me. That doesn’t mean he thought it was okay—I mean, what I did and all. He was just sorry for yelling—especially in front of people like that. That’s all. He still blames me for losing the game.”

  “But the coach said it was nobody’s fault. Somebody wins, somebody loses. None of the guys think you screwed up. I mean, we all screwed up. I didn’t get any hits that game. And I don’t feel bad.”

  Chase shrugged. Elliot unzipped his backpack, stuck his hand into it, rustled about, and extracted a wrinkled and creased bag of Fritos.

  “Want some?”

  “That your lunch?”

  “Nope. Saved ’em from last week. I traded for them.”

  Chase took a few and tossed the handful into his mouth. “Who trades away Fritos?”

  Elliot shrugged. “Dunno. Some dumb sixth-grader.”

  As the two friends finished dividing the bag, the bus bounced against the curb in front of the school, and they joined the stream of students charging toward the main entrance.

  Paige may have been waving her hand in greeting as Cameron dropped her bag and purse onto her desk in a heap. She couldn’t be sure. Paige also could have been swatting at a fly.

  “You waved?” Cameron said as she stuck her head in the doorway.

  “I did. Come on in. Take a break. Sit down. Have some coffee.”

  “All at once?”

  “Sure. You’re good at doing more than one thing at a time.”

  “After this week, it feels like I’ve had more than my fair share of practice at multitasking.”

  “The fashion section looks great. I saw the galleys. Everything looks terrific. I’m impressed. Really, really impressed. Our best ever.”

  Cameron felt as if she were beaming. Paige gave compliments, but seldom were they this effusive.

  “Thanks. I had fun doing it, though my days of knowing what’s ‘hot’ fashion must be over. None of what they wear nowadays seems to be feminine in the least.”

  Paige waved the air again, as if swatting at invisible flying bugs. “Don’t get me started. Young girls looking like streetwalkers. Terrible. I feel bad for parents.”

  Cameron took a deep breath and exhaled, feeling a sudden wave of age and fatigue sweep over her.

  “You should take a break for a few days after you’re finished with this. Take a long weekend. Get off by yourself somewhere. Recharge.”

  Cameron’s face gave away what she had been hiding for the past few weeks. “You heard?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  Paige pursed her lips, then said, “I did. This is Franklin. After all my years in this business, I still get surprised.”

  “Surprised?”

  “People love telling secrets. They love telling me secrets—I think just to see if I’ll put them in the paper.”

  Cameron offered a very brittle laugh. “I hope this isn’t that sort of secret.”

  “No. It isn’t. Twenty years ago, this would have made it to near the top of the society page. Today, not so much. To be honest, the few people who mentioned it to me did so because they were actually concerned about you. They said it was such a shock to hear Ethan talk that way—to both you and his son. ‘That’s just not him,’ they said.”

  Cameron tried to say something in reply, but no words came.

  “Cameron, don’t let this get to you. He’ll get over it. His son will get over it.”

  The young woman shook her head in reply. “I know it was only a few words, but you didn’t hear him. It was like he was a different person. He was so mad. I don’t know what happened. I hardly said anything.”

  Paige opened a desk drawer and rummaged about the contents. She sat straight up. “Goodness. You know what I was doing? Looking for a smoke. It’s been decades, and all of a sudden, I wanted one. Must be the subject matter.”

  “I’m sorry, Paige,” Cameron said. “I didn’t …”

  “Not your fault. Old habits die really, really hard, I guess.”

  Paige appeared as if she were considering standing and giving her young editor a hug. But she didn’t. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you? You think it’s hopeless.”

  Cameron squeaked out a yes.

  “It isn’t. This is just a little bump in the road. If it’s meant to be, it can get fixed.”

  “No. I think this situation is screwed up completely. I was going too fast. He’s not looking for someone to share his life with. He’s not ready. I can see that. I blew it.”

  Paige did stand this time and began to pace behind her desk. “Hey, stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s not that bad.”

  “It is too,” Cameron replied, her words edging toward a wail.

  Paige sat on the front of her desk. “Listen, girl, you have no idea of what bad is.”

  The older woman waited, then resumed speaking, her voice darker, softer, deeper. “I have done more screwing up than you could even dream of doing. My second husband … he was a good man, but he was lost, had a bad past … overwhelmed by life … and everything. I was lost too. I was drinking all the time. He was drinking all the time. He was as bad as I was.

  “One Sunday night we came back from a party and kept drinking. I passed out. I guess I did, anyway. When I woke up, my husband was on the floor, blue and cold. They told me later that his heart had stopped. I was ten feet away from him when he died and didn’t know it.

  “After the police left, I staggered over to the church down the block, sick from a hangover, and just started to cry. For him. For myself. For what a mess I was making of my life. The pastor was kind. The people were accepting. God is good.”

  “I’m sorry, Paige,” came Cameron’s almost silent reply. “I had no idea.”

  “Well, I’m not telling you this for sympathy or pity or anything like that. I haven’t told this story to many people, Cameron. But you need to listen to one thing: Don’t be like I was, blind and deaf. Don’t waste time. Make it right, Cameron. And most important, get forgiven. God can do that for you. Then tell Ethan what a jerk he was—and maybe admit you were too—and start over. You owe it to yourself. And to him. You will never know if tomorrow is one day too late.”

  Cameron stared up at Paige, her eyes wanting to brim with tears, yet she did not cry. “I don’t know if I can do that. Any of that. I don’t know.”

  But Chase needs me. And Ethan. So maybe …

  CeCe and Tessa busied themselves with their samples, feeding her crew Italian pastries and asking them about wives and girlfriends and children and plans for the weekend. After the homeowner’s unequivocal demand that the pipe on the landing be moved, she left Ethan alone.

  Perhaps they were both surprised by her anger.

  The crew cleared out early, and CeCe claimed that she and Tessa were meeting someone for drinks somewhere. Joel and Ethan were left in the silent house to stare at the pipe, still protruding.

  “Well, I’m not paying him now, for sure,” Ethan said.

  “He’ll just put a lien on the house. He’s done it before. You don’t want that to happen. CeCe would get those papers, you know. She’d hit the ceiling. Literally.”

  Ethan lowered himself to the second step of the landing and
stared upward.

  “You mean I have to pay him—and then pay more to correct his mistakes?”

  Joel pulled a biscotti from his shirt pocket and chewed off one end. “Yep. I told you—don’t go with the cheapest bid on this. Those French Creek guys are pirates.”

  Ethan ran his hand over his face. “We can fix the upstairs, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s easy. But this pipe is the problem.”

  “We could move it,” Ethan said, his words not all that certain.

  “No,” Joel answered quickly. “We’re carpenters, not plumbers. Remember that time at the Travers’ place? I think their toilet still leaks.”

  “So, I’m supposed to pay for another plumber? I don’t want to.”

  Joel chewed softly. “You have to. I heard her talking. CeCe. On her cell phone. I don’t think she knew I was there. She said something about maybe having to go in a different direction. You know as well as I that when a customer says anything about ‘a different direction,’ it means they want to fire who they got now and get somebody new.”

  Ethan was startled. “She really said ‘a different direction’?”

  Joel nodded.

  After a long exhale, Ethan spoke. “We can’t lose this. I’m already buried under a second mortgage. We can’t.”

  Joel’s eyes showed an uneasy glint. “I can call my cousin. Maybe I can get him in tomorrow. It’s Saturday. Maybe it won’t slow us down.”

  The only sound was the creaking of the house in the cooling afternoon breeze.

  “Yeah. Call him. Ask if he’ll cut us a break on his labor. Tell him I can help.”

  Joel nodded again.

  Ethan despised acting as anyone’s assistant—especially a plumber’s assistant—but he was desperate.

  Somehow Joel knew. He understood. And he didn’t say another word.

  Cameron sat on the window seat, looking out at the dark street. Only the occasional car passed by on West Park. The wind rustled through the trees outside her window. The leaves had gone from the silken hush of green to a scratching, brown, ominous rattle.

  She opened her journal on her lap. She wiped at her eyes, clicked the pen, and began to write:

  What do I do now? I am pretty sure Paige was talking about a lot more than calling Ethan when she said, “Make it right.”

  I don’t think I did anything wrong.

  And maybe he didn’t do anything that bad.

  A few harsh words is all that happened. That’s not so terrible.

  But why do I hurt so much? I can’t let it go.

  We’re both so screwed up.

  Why doesn’t he call me?

  She clicked the pen again, slowly closed the notebook, and blinked, trying to get the trees back in focus. She kept seeing Chase’s face crumble under his father’s words. And every time she remembered that painful look, she felt a resonance of an earlier time in her own life.

  Forgiveness frees the forgiver.

  It extracts the forgiver

  from someone else’s nightmare.

  —Lance Morrow

  Once forgiving begins,

  dreams can be rebuilt.

  —Beverly Flanigan

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ETHAN AND CHASE DID not go to McCort’s that evening. When Chase returned home he found a scrawled note on a three-by-five note card propped up between the salt- and peppershakers on the kitchen table. It was the one spot where all notes between father and son were left. The kitchen was the first stop for anyone entering the house.

  Chase,

  Have to work late tonight to catch up. Called Mrs. Hewitt. She said to go there for dinner. I’ll be home by 9.

  Dad

  Elliot was the oldest of six children, so mealtimes at the Hewitt house were often hectic affairs with multiple choices to satisfy multiple palates. After a dinner of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, Fritos, meatloaf with real mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and Jell-O, Chase and Elliot slipped out of the house.

  They walked toward town, not having a specific destination, but walking. If you lived in the older sections of Franklin, you could walk just about everywhere. If your house was in one of the newer subdivisions south of town, you had to drive. Sidewalks didn’t go that far, and both 13th Street and Route 322 out of town were narrow roads.

  “You want to go to Fountain Park?” Elliot asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Maybe we can stop at the Minute Mart. You have any money?”

  “Yeah, but we just ate.”

  “Oh, yeah, we did,” Elliot replied. He thought for a minute, then added, “So, can I borrow some?”

  Chase reached into his pocket and pulled out three wadded and wrinkled singles. “Will this be enough to get you to the park and back without fainting?”

  Elliot screwed up his face. “Maybe. I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to try it and see.”

  They each bought a small Slushee—one grape and one wild berry—and Elliot promised to divide the bag of Sweet Tarts equally between them. They slurped as they walked down Liberty Street, pausing several times to stare into windows. They passed the Senaca Outpost, the local sporting goods store, filled with athletic jerseys and hunting gear.

  “How come you didn’t try out for football this year?” Chase asked. “You’re big. You’re a natural. You’re good at knocking things down.”

  Elliot poked his friend with an elbow, careful not to spill the remains of his Slushee in the process.

  “Hey, careful,” Chase answered and poked back.

  They kept walking, and Elliot tossed his empty cup into a trash container.

  “My dad wanted me to. He thinks I could be good. My mom didn’t. She thinks you have to be sort of mean to play football. She tells everyone that I have a gentle temperament.”

  Chase laughed out loud.

  Elliot took a mock swing at his friend’s shoulder and connected by accident, almost knocking him down.

  “See! You are mean. You hit people for no good reason.” Chase made a show of nursing his injured arm.

  “I think she might be right,” Elliot explained. “I don’t particularly like football. Last year when I played on the seventh-grade team, there was a whole lot of practice for not a whole lot of time to play.”

  Elliot looked over at Chase. “So why didn’t you go out for the eighth-grade team? You have a good arm. You could have played quarterback or something like that. You wouldn’t get stuck as a lineman like I was.”

  Chase shrugged. “My dad wants me to play hockey. I think he was some big sort of star hockey player when he was a kid like me.”

  They sat on the ledge around the fountain, in the center of the park, listening to the splashing water. Elliot made a game of pretending to reach in for the coins that lay at the bottom of the fountain. He had actually tried it once, but a police car had stopped in midblock and had used the bullhorn to tell him to cease and desist.

  “Yeah, well, my dad wasn’t that good at anything in school. He doesn’t push me that way.”

  Chase lay back on the ledge. The stone was still warm from the sun.

  “He’s not pressuring me, I guess. But I know that’s what he really, really wants.”

  “So, you going to try out for the Oilers hockey team?”

  Chase shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe. If we’re talking by then.”

  “He apologized, Chase.”

  “He didn’t mean it.”

  Elliot took three pieces of candy and pushed them into his mouth. “The pastor talks a lot about forgiveness. He says we need to forgive people. Otherwise we get stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “That’s what he said. You might have missed that Sunday when you were camping. I’m no
t sure what that means, exactly, but it sounds bad, doesn’t it? Stuck. Like you have chewing gum all over your backside.”

  “That doesn’t sound churchlike.” Chase laughed.

  “Well, that’s what it sounds like.”

  Chase sat up then and began to walk around the fountain on the ledge, pretending as if he were walking a tightrope, his arms extended for balance.

  “But isn’t everyone supposed to forgive everyone … for things that went wrong? That’s what Mrs. Whiting says.”

  Elliot chewed thoughtfully. “Sure. I think. I mean, if something’s not your fault and you ask—then yeah, they should forgive you. Like God forgives us.”

  Chase was on the opposite side of the fountain. He called over to Elliot, who remained seated. “Maybe I should ask the pastor to talk to my dad.”

  Elliot looked mystified. “Well, maybe. He does stuff like that. I bet he wouldn’t mind. He’s nice. Even though my mom says he never visits people in the hospital anymore.”

  “Are they supposed to do that?”

  “I guess. That’s what my mom says. My dad just waves his hand when she says that.”

  Elliot attempted to imitate his father’s silent, dismissive wave, and in so doing dropped one of his last pieces of candy into the fountain. He toppled over trying to rescue it, barely holding himself out of the water with one arm, while flailing for the errant candy with his other.

  From somewhere on the east side of the park came a loud voice. “Hey, kid, get out of the water!”

  Chase jumped from the ledge, ran to Elliot, and grabbed his free arm, pulling him upright. “Hey, I could have bought another bag. No sense drowning—or being arrested for one lousy Sweet Tart.”

  “But … it was the last one. I was waiting for the last one. If you don’t know it’s the last piece, then you don’t get to appreciate it as much. You know?”

  And with that, Elliot carefully blew on the last piece of candy, trying to dry the fountain waters. When it was sufficiently dry, he popped it into his mouth with a lopsided smile.