The Woodworker

by Westlake, Samantha

  “No, we’re not,” I said.

  “Of course not!” Eileen burst out at the same time. We looked at each other, and I wasn’t sure whether I should be glad we were on the same page, or annoyed by how quickly she shot down the possibility of us being anything more than just… tenant and landlord.

  “Right,” my annoying, bothersome mother said after a minute that felt like an age. “Forget I said anything, dear. Now, what are you doing while here? You said you needed some time to get back on your feet?”

  “It’s quite the story, with plenty of horrible luck,” Eileen demurred.

  I could have told her that this wouldn’t be enough to deter Suzanne. When the woman caught wind of a good story, especially if there was any sort of gossip involved, she’d latch onto its trail like a bloodhound on a scent. Even as Eileen tried to brush off her story, Suzanne leaned in, eyes glinting.

  “Oh, I’m quite the good listener, or so I’ve been told,” she said, her eyes not leaving Eileen’s face. “Richie, maybe you’ve got some wine for us, as I get to know your newest ‘tenant’?”

  I winced as I heard those apostrophes clank into place, but I knew better than to try and argue. “Sure,” I gave in, seizing the opportunity to escape to the kitchen.

  When I returned with two glasses of white wine, and a well-deserved beer for myself, Suzanne had settled herself on my couch, pulled Eileen down beside her. “What’s with all these papers?” she asked, momentarily distracted from her gossip digging.

  Eileen smiled at me. “I’m helping your son get his business on track.”

  The words could have been mocking, but they didn’t sound so. And that smile felt genuine, and I couldn’t keep my own lips from spreading to smile back. It was nice of her, I had to admit (privately, just inside my own head).

  “About time someone whipped him into shape,” Suzanne declared with feeling. “He’s a good boy, but he just needs someone to crack the whip and give him some direction!”

  “I completely agree,” Eileen nodded, and this time I didn’t have to listen hard to spot the gentle mockery.

  Between occasional sips of wine, Eileen disclosed to Suzanne all the bad events that ganged up on her to land her here, as a temporary tenant in my house. Suzanne played the perfect dramatic audience, scowling and decrying Eileen’s boss for firing her, gasping in horror upon hearing how her house burned to the ground. Eileen finished by telling how both her former employer and the insurance company were taking their sweet time in delivering the money owed to her, and my mother looked spitting mad.

  “That’s outrageous!” she declared, waving her wine glass so violently that even the small remainder of wine inside came close to spilling over the rim. “We should protest – or sue them! They can’t do that to you!”

  “It’s okay, really,” Eileen said, reaching out to pat Suzanne on the knee. “I’ve found a way to get past it, and I’m secure for the moment. When they do deliver the money, I can get back to putting my own life together.” She looked over at me, smiling. “In the meantime, I can use your son’s life as practice. If I can get his mess of a business put together and organized, I certainly can handle my own affairs!”

  Suzanne sighed. “I know that he’s a great artist,” she said, speaking about me as though I wasn’t even there, “but he has such a motivation problem! He’s always had one, even when he was just a little boy. I had to bug him a million times to get him to just put his toys away! And getting him dressed – oh, the stories I could tell! All he wanted to do was run around naked-”

  “Mom!” I protested, hoping that my cheeks didn’t look as red as they felt. “Oversharing!”

  She just waved a hand at me. “I’m sure that Eileen knows plenty about you, if she’s been living here for a few weeks,” she said. “How is he? Do you think I’ll ever have any grandchildren?”

  “Mom!” Could this armchair just swallow me up and kill me already?

  Eileen made a soft choking noise, and I saw her struggling for a second to swallow the gulp of wine she’d been holding in her mouth. She managed to get it down, at least, without spitting it all over my living room.

  “I don’t think I’m the right person to weigh in on something like that,” she said, trying to escape.

  Bless her for trying, but I knew my mom wouldn’t let things go so easily. Sure enough, Suzanne pressed for more details. “Is he seeing anyone, at least?” She sat back, tilted her head a little as she examined Eileen. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

  This time, Eileen’s choking was audible, and she had to cover her mouth for a moment. Knowing now that my cheeks were burning red, I jumped up from my seat, stepping forward to physically insert myself into the discussion.

  “Mom, I think that’s enough questions for Eileen,” I said, trying to not grind my teeth together. “She’s being very nice by helping me with my business. That’s all. She probably wants to get back to the work she was doing before you interrupted.”

  Eileen shot me a look of pure gratitude as I took a protesting Suzanne’s arm and hoisted her up from the couch. I racked my brain for something that could successfully distract my mother.

  “Why don’t you come check out the second bedroom setup, upstairs?” I suggested with a rare, too-late flash of brilliance. “Now that Eileen is staying there, in the second bedroom,” I emphasized, “you might have some suggestions for other comforts I could add, or a way I could rearrange the furniture…”

  Thankfully, the distraction tactic worked. Suzanne’s eyes lit up with the prospect of putting her self-proclaimed ‘masterful’ interior decorating skills to work, and she headed for the stairs up to the second floor.

  I hung back for a second, wondering if I should say something to Eileen, make some half-hearted attempt to explain how my mother had always been this pushy, how sorry I was to have dragged her into it and embarrassed her.

  She caught me wavering. “We can talk about it later,” she said. “You should go keep an eye on her before she starts digging through my underwear and wondering what kind of woman is really sleeping under your roof.”

  That sentence offered a whole new world of possibilities, and I felt even more frozen than before. “What kind of underwear-“ I began.

  Eileen winked at me. “Gosh, you’re easy to tease with her around. Go on, keep her from tearing your house apart.”

  From any of the girls I occasionally dated, a comment like “we’ll talk about it later” would send a chill running down my spine. From Eileen, however, I found myself almost looking forward to that talk. I knew that I’d get a few good barbs in, take a few jabs in response, and we’d both end up smiling and laughing in the end, the whole deal put behind us.

  Friends. That was what friends did, talked about things. A good label, one that I liked putting on Eileen.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a crash from upstairs, followed by a tittering exclamation from my mother. I gave Eileen one last, exasperated look, and dashed upstairs as I heard her giggles drifting out of the living room behind my back.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eileen

  * * *

  “So what happened next?” Eyes wide, Lisa stared over the top of her latte at me.

  I shrugged. “His mother came downstairs and left, although not before she asked me a whole bunch of probing questions about how long I’d been single, whether I was interested in children – the sort of invasive questions I’d all but expect from someone like her.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I answered them, but only because I really liked watching Rick go through different expressions as he stood behind her.” I giggled at the memory. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the man look so embarrassed. It was great.”

  Lisa shook her head. “That’s great. I’m so glad for you, Ellie, getting your life back on track.”

  “Not fully,” I insisted. “I mean, despite repeated calls to both Integrated Technologies and my home insurance company, they still can
’t even give me a solid date on when my money will arrive. They keep telling me ‘soon’, and that’s all I can get from them. I’m still stuck at Rick’s house, waiting for all that to be resolved.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re really stuck, though,” Lisa said. “It sounds to me like you’re starting to really like him! Do I hear wedding bells in the future?”

  I wanted to object, but even as I opened my mouth, I knew that she’d just take my protests as further support for her theory. Instead, I sighed, shook my head.

  “I can’t say that it’s never crossed my mind,” I admitted. “But it’s a bad idea, Lisa. You have to realize that, at least.”

  She leaned across the table to poke me in the shoulder. “You need to make some bad decisions, girl! Haven’t I been telling you this for years?”

  “I have no memory of this,” I declared.

  She stuck out her tongue at me. “Don’t give me that. Before I left the corporate world to focus on the miracle of motherhood, I kept on dragging you to every office party.”

  “I went to the office parties on my own!”

  “Sure, and used it as an excuse to do more networking!” She reached up to brush some dark strands of hair back from her face. “Look, I know you hate hearing any criticism about yourself-“

  “-I’m always open to constructive criticism-“

  “-but you worry too much about always making the right choices,” she finished serenely, ignoring my interruption. “Rick might be a wrong choice, not a right one, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it out anyway.”

  Trying to find a response, I looked around the café where I’d met Lisa, searching for some distraction to buy me a few seconds of time to think. The place was upscale and trendy, but the seats weren’t filled with the typical corporate suit-and-tie crowd that normally populated cafes at midday and hammered away at laptops. Instead, I saw a wide range of people, from students at our local college to locals old enough to have their own kids off at college. It was a nice place.

  “Why’d you pick here for coffee?” I asked.

  Lisa shot me a look, letting me know that she was well aware of my feeble attempt to change the topic of conversation. “It’s right near downtown,” she said.

  I knew that couldn’t be all. “And?”

  She sighed. “And it’s near an after-school tutoring place that I want to check out for Shay.”

  “Shay needs tutoring?” That was news to me. Every encounter with Lisa’s daughter further reinforced my initial impression of her as a precocious, intelligent child.

  “I’m just worried about her future, that’s all. She’s near the top of her class at the moment, but there are so many other smart children out there, and she can’t be lagging behind when it comes to college exams!”

  I blinked. “College exams? Lisa, your daughter’s only seven years old!”

  “They come up really quickly, faster than you’d expect,” she protested. “And more tutoring wouldn’t be a bad thing, right? It can only make her better!”

  “Sure, until she gets so overwhelmed that she has a breakdown.” It felt a little strange for me to be arguing on the opposite side of this debate for once, but I didn’t like the nervous look on Lisa’s face. “Lisa, you can’t push her too hard. You have to give her time to be a kid, too.”

  She looked on the verge of protesting more, but then sighed and nodded. “I know, I know,” she let out. “It’s hard, Eileen. When you have a kid, you’ll realize that even though you know it’s bad, you still want to push them further, just because it’s the best for them.”

  I didn’t want to touch that ‘when I have a kid’ comment. Pointing out that there were no prospects for a future mate anywhere on the horizon would just drag the focus back to me, and I didn’t want to dominate the conversation. “You have to trust that she’ll grow up on her own, too,” I told Lisa. “Shay’s got a great set of parents to watch. I’m sure she’ll keep on putting in lots of hard work, will keep striving to excel – but she doesn’t need to spend every waking moment with her nose in a textbook to get there.”

  “Okay.” She still didn’t look fully convinced, but she dropped the conversational thread. “I suppose,” she added, “that this gives me more time to question you about Rick and how the two of you are getting along. Have you seen him without a shirt on? Is he super sexy?”

  I winced, praying for something to save me from this conversation. In truth, I had seen Rick quite a few times without a shirt on, when he wandered out of the bathroom after a shower, or when he took it off after a hard day of work to shake out the worst of the sawdust. At times like those, I had to tear my eyes away from his biceps and rippling arms, chest, and back. Thankfully, he usually wasn’t attempting to hold a conversation with me, or he’d have surely noticed how my tongue lagged a few seconds behind my brain as I tried in vain to not imagine running my hands over him…

  Thankfully, my phone came to my unexpected defense. I pulled it out of my purse with a jerk as it started ringing. I didn’t recognize the displayed phone number, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Let me get this,” I said to Lisa, standing up and taking a few steps towards the exit.

  Outside the café, blinking a few times against the brightness of the midday sunlight, I answered the call. “Hello?” I said, lifting the phone up to my ear.

  “Hello, is this Mrs. Davies?”

  “Miss Davies, yes. Who’s calling?”

  “This is Andrew, with Builders Insurance,” said the man at the other end of the line, and I suddenly started paying a lot more attention to the call. “Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Yes, yes, now is great!” I said quickly, squeezing my free hand into a fist in lieu of jumping up and down with excitement. Finally, I was hearing back from the insurance for my house!

  “Wonderful,” said Andrew in a bland voice that didn’t sound too excited. Then again, he probably dealt with calls like this all the time. “Now, as I understand it, you recently filed a claim with us?”

  “Well, my house did burn down a month ago,” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “So yes, that did lead to a claim.”

  “I see,” he replied, still speaking without much inflection in his tone. “Well, I wanted to let you know that we’ve received all the necessary paperwork.”

  Was that all? “Is that it?” I asked. “You’ve only now started working on this claim? Do you realize that I’ve been without any place to live for a full month, now?”

  “Please keep calm, ma’am,” Andrew said, in a voice that raised my blood pressure by another ten points. “It takes time for an investigation like this to conclude so that we can orchestrate a claim payout.”

  “Investigation,” I echoed. “You’re investigating me?”

  “Every claim over a certain threshold is investigated, Mrs. Davies,” he replied. “It’s standard protocol.”

  “Even when the claimant needs that money in order to, I don’t know, get a new bed so that she can sleep somewhere?”

  “All cases, Mrs. Davies.”

  “Miss,” I sighed, trying to push my anger down. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good, as much as I wished that I had this Andrew fellow physically in front of me, maybe show him with a couple well-placed knees what I thought of his policies. “Miss Davies. Anyway, so what’s next?”

  “Next,” continued Andrew blithely, “we’ll perform the investigation. After that has concluded, we should be able to let you know the status of your payout-“

  “Hold on. You haven’t even started the investigation yet? What have you been doing for all this time?”

  He paused for a second. “We were waiting to receive all the necessary paperwork,” he said.

  “From whom? From me?”

  “From various agencies,” he hedged, but I knew the sound of someone trying to bullshit his way out of a bad situation when I heard it.

  “So you’re telling me,” I hissed, “that all this time, you haven�
�t even started this supposedly necessary investigation? My house burned down! I just lost everything that I owned, my clothes, my furniture, everything – and now, a month later, you’re only just getting around to proving that for yourselves? Do you have any idea how much I’ve been through?”

  “Please remain calm, Mrs. Davies,” said Andrew implacably.

  “It’s MISS! Miss Davies! No Missus! I’m not married!”

  I held the phone out away from my ear, forced myself to take a couple of deep breaths. I glanced back over my shoulder at the window of the café, saw Lisa sitting inside look up at me. She gave me a smile, and I tried to calm my simmering anger.

  “Okay,” I said into the phone, after I’d let out my last breath. “So you’re starting the investigation now. Do you know how long this will take? Can you give me an idea of when I’ll finally receive a payout from you?”

  “It’s tough to approximate how long an investigation will take,” Andrew answered blandly. He, apparently, hadn’t been fazed in the slightest by my outburst. Made sense, I growled to myself. He probably got the same reaction from everyone who heard how crappy their insurance company was turning out to truly be.

  “Rough idea,” I pressed him.

  He sighed. “Perhaps another couple of weeks, but there’s some variability. You are always welcome, of course, to call in. If you give us your case number, we can retrieve the details of your claim.”

  “Case number,” I repeated. “Can I get that number?”

  “As your case is only now being opened, we don’t yet have a case number for you-“

  This time, I had to bite my lip to hold back my scream. I lowered my phone, glared down at the screen, silently mouthed several obscenities that I’d learned recently from Rick’s curses when he didn’t know I was listening. They did make me feel a little better.

  “How,” I asked Andrew through gritted teeth, “can I get the case number, if there isn’t one yet?”

  “You can call back in and request it.”