The Woodworker

by Westlake, Samantha

  What would a seven-year-old give a crush? “Maybe you gave him your dessert from lunch?” I tried.

  Lisa snorted again, but Shay considered this with a serious expression. “He’d have to be really nice. I like dessert.”

  “Maybe he was really nice, which is why you gave him the dessert. But then afterwards, he started being mean to you again. Maybe you start thinking that you shouldn’t have given him your dessert at all, because he clearly doesn’t deserve it. You should have just kept your dessert for yourself.”

  “You need to take chances, though,” Lisa interrupted. “Sometimes, even if a boy might turn out to be mean in the end, it’s still good to give him some dessert. After all,” she added, winking at me, “it can be a lot more fun to share dessert with someone else than to just have to eat it alone every night, right?”

  Shay looked back and forth between us. “Is this some sort of adult code?” she demanded. “Because I don’t think it’s fun to share dessert! It’s fun to eat it all by myself!”

  “And you remember that until you turn twenty-one,” I told her solemnly. “No boys until you’re old enough to drink.”

  She stuck out her lower lip at me, looking so hangdog that I had to give in and laugh. “I’m sure your mom will let you keep having dessert, as long as it’s the sugary kind,” I amended.

  She turned her attention to Lisa. “Can I have some now?”

  “One cookie, but that’s it.” Lisa produced the small sweet baked circle from the cupboard and handed it to Shay, who grabbed it as she sprinted out of the kitchen. “See what you make me do, Ellie? Getting my kids fat on sweets?”

  Shay looked skinny and gangly, like any seven-year-old ought to appear, so I ignored Lisa’s dig at me. “Anyway,” I told Lisa, “I’m washing my hands of this entire thing. The last couple months – ignore them. They might as well have never happened. I’m staying here, redoubling my efforts to find a new job, and I’ll keep hounding my insurance company until they finally pay out. Then I can put a down payment on a new house, get on with my life, and never need to even think about that man again.”

  “Just like that?”

  I nodded. “Just like that.”

  “And you won’t hold onto the work that you did for Rick?” Lisa pressed, looking closely at me. “For a while, you seemed to really be getting involved in his business, and you seemed…”

  She trailed off, searching for a word. “What?” I prompted.

  “Happy.”

  I didn’t want to think too deeply about that. Had I truly been happier around Rick, working on his silly little business? Had I been happy because I had a new project to tackle? Or because of the man who’d created it, who encouraged all my progress with smiles and appreciation?

  Well, he hadn’t encouraged me on this last step, I reminded myself. He’d thrown me out, and I was better off without him.

  “I’ll be happier once I’m back on my own, working for another company and not thinking about Rick any longer,” I told Lisa. “And that’s final. So please don’t start playing sappy romantic movies or doing anything to try and change my mind.”

  She held up her hands. “Wasn’t planning on it. Here, let me show you to the guest bedroom.”

  It wasn’t as nice as the little bedroom that Rick had, with a spartan looking bed and dresser, no ornate carvings or personal details to be seen. Still, it was good enough for what I needed. I dropped my duffel bag at the foot of the bed, dropped down onto the sheets face first.

  It felt impossible for me to put Rick entirely out of my head, so I instead focused on all the negatives, replaying all the mistakes I’d ignored, the red flags that I should have spotted earlier. The man was rude, brash, cared only about the physical stuff. He’d been all interested in getting me into bed, but he never even considered a real relationship.

  …not that I’d wanted one either, but still.

  He ran his own business, but he didn’t seem to have any ambition for growing that beyond just a subsistence operation. I’d shown him even the basics of what needed to be done – building up a brand, creating a website, marketing his product, getting his name out there – and instead of thanking me, he’d responded with anger and frustration. Did I get any word of thanks for bringing in dozens of new orders? Not a one. And when I dared to take a little initiative by entering him in a very prestigious competition, he exploded, throwing me out just because he was scared that he might not win! What kind of man had an ego so fragile that it couldn’t even handle losing a contest like that?

  …although, I found myself considering, Rick seemed to measure himself by his woodworking skill, almost more than anything else. Had I thrown a grenade right into his core of self-worth?

  What I needed to do, I told myself, was stop thinking about this. I took a deep breath, looked around Lisa’s extra bedroom again, tried to see the positive in this situation. I had all the basic components I needed; I could move forward from here.

  Tomorrow, I’d start hunting for a new apartment. For right now, I could still do something productive.

  Sitting down on the bed, I pulled out my laptop, refreshed the search pages for possible jobs. Finding a couple that seemed to fit my skillset, I dashed off quick applications, dropping in my well-used resume and making slight updates to my cover letter to suit each individual position.

  There. Already moving forward.

  I pushed a smile onto my face. Closing the laptop, I headed back out to Lisa and Shay. Maybe I could help them with cooking dinner, or could entertain Shay to give Lisa a few minutes of breathing room. I’d been neglecting my friendships for too long.

  My heart still felt heavy as I left the room, but I still kept that smile on my face. Inside my head, I kept my promise to myself that everything would be all right.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Rick

  * * *

  “Good riddance!” I declared, hoisting my glass high.

  When I didn’t hear any accompaniment from beside me, I turned and frowned at Niall, sitting next to me at the bar. “Hey, aren’t you paying attention? Come on, man, toast with me!”

  “What are we toasting again?”

  I sighed. He’d been leaning over the counter again, making moon eyes at Bethany, who was once again on duty and serving us drinks. “Come on, can you at least pay attention to my misery for a few minutes?”

  “Right, yeah, sorry.” He turned back to face me. “Catch me up again? You lost the woman of your dreams, and now nothing can replace her?”

  I wished I had something more dramatic to show him than my raised middle fingers. “You ass. Look, she knew how I felt about contests. She went behind my back and did this!”

  Niall sighed. “Yeah, but she did it for you, didn’t she? Isn’t that what you said? She did this to help your business?”

  “Maybe I didn’t want her helping my business!” The defense was weak, and we both knew it. “She at least could have asked me before jumping in and just doing it,” I plunged onward. “Why can’t she ask me about anything? Why’s she always got to act like she knows what’s best, and it’s all on her?”

  “Maybe that’s the way she’s had to live her whole life,” Bethany offered, uninvited. At the very least, she brought me another couple shots of Jameson, so I didn’t snap at her. “You said she’s in business, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Bethany shrugged, her hair tossing about her shoulders. “You have any idea what it’s like for a woman in the corporate world? We need to be cutthroat bitches to survive there.”

  We both looked at her, standing behind the bar. “What?” she said defensively. “I watched a documentary on it.”

  “Bethany’s right, though,” Niall chimed in after a moment. “Eileen’s probably had to keep her shields up all her life, always take the lead on projects just to get any sort of credit. She was just doing the same thing for your business. And you said that orders were coming in, right?”

  I groaned instead of answ
ering. Even after the damn woman left, she still managed to pull one last trick on me – she’d apparently set up a printer in my workshop. The thing scared me half to death when it suddenly sprang into loud, noisy life. Thankfully, I hadn’t been using an electric saw, or I might have lost a finger or two!

  The printer, I discovered, printed off the order forms that I’d been finding stacked on my workbench each morning. Each order form had a neat description of what had been requested, a price total, and an address label. All I had to do was make the item, stick it in a box, and then cut out the address label and tape it onto the box.

  After a couple orders rattled in, I’d started to wonder about the money. I didn’t see any unexpected windfalls in my normal checking account, but I found a link on my computer’s Favorites bar marked “business account.” It brought me to another account with my bank, this one under the name of “The Woodworker.”

  And this account had close to four thousand dollars in it.

  For a minute, I just sat there on my sofa, staring at that number. Four grand? In the week or so that she’d been running my business, Eileen managed to already generate four thousand dollars?

  I stared at that number until the buzzing in my head told me I needed a drink. That brought me down to DeVere’s.

  Unfortunately, the support that I’d hoped to find from my best friend hadn’t materialized. Instead, he seemed eager to agree with anything that the bartender commented, as long as she refilled his beer and flirted with him as she told me that everything I’d decided was wrong.

  “So?” Niall finally asked.

  I looked blankly back at him. “So what?”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  I started to ask him what he was talking about, but realized that I didn’t have an answer for any of it. The art? The website? The stupid Design in Wood competition? Eileen running off, probably swearing off men and deciding that, next time she saw me, it would be down the barrel of a shotgun?

  I shook my head at that last thought. Eileen wasn’t the type to use a shotgun. She’d have a high-powered rifle with a scope, smoke me before I even knew she was there. Cold and clinical.

  Somehow, that thought almost made me miss her. She wasn’t cold and clinical, after all, not once I’d gotten to know her. She kept up that tough exterior, but it hid a fiery and passionate interior, a lurking wild side that she tried to repress, but made her a blast to be around whenever I lured it out with good food, a good movie, and a glass of good wine.

  Dammit! I growled at myself to stop thinking about her. “I’m going to keep on making art,” I said aloud, finally. “Just keep working. Maybe I’ll just swear off women altogether.”

  Niall and Bethany exchanged a glance, one that I pretended not to see. “What about the competition?” Niall asked. “Are you going to withdraw?”

  I considered it, and it wasn’t the first time I’d turned the idea over in my head. But somehow, even though I hated the idea of my artwork being judged, of being told that I wasn’t good at the one skill that I clung to for a sense of self-worth, I didn’t want to deal with the horror of manually withdrawing my name and entry from the running. How would that be interpreted? Would the judges see me as someone scared of getting feedback? Would they think of me as a nervous newcomer who couldn’t even imagine being judged in the same realm as real artists?

  “Hopefully they just lose my sculpture and I never hear about it again,” I said, forlornly admitting to myself that this was a pretty lost hope. “If I never get another letter from the Woodworkers’ Association, I’ll consider it too much contact.”

  Another glance exchanged between the two of them. God, it was like they were both gossiping girls from high school, returned from my childhood nightmares to haunt me. “If you’re going to say something, just spit it out,” I snapped at them.

  They both leaned back, Bethany’s eyes going wide. Shit. My voice had come out angrier than I’d intended. I was aiming for bitter frustration, but it sounded like I wanted to leap over the bar and rip her damn head off.

  “Look, just…” I gestured down at my glass. “Just keep them coming. I’ll be fine.”

  Niall reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, more gently than his usual touch. “Maybe drinking isn’t such a good idea for you right now, Rick.”

  “Yeah? And what is?”

  He blinked, looked momentarily lost. “Damn, wish you hadn’t asked. Normally, this is where I’d just point you at the nearest sorority girl and things would sort themselves out.”

  “Like I said, not interested.”

  He thought hard. “What about a movie? Die Hard? That’s always a great one. I could get a ride back to your place with you, watch the flick, come back and reclaim my truck tomorrow morning.”

  The mention of the movie sent another unexpected spike into my chest. “We watched Die Hard together. All of them.”

  “What, even the fifth one? If she made it through all five, she’s got more stamina than I bargained.”

  I remembered sitting on the sofa beside Eileen, my eyes glued to the television. Sometimes, I’d glance over at her and find her nodding off to sleep, her head resting on my shoulder, hands looped loosely around my forearm as she dozed against me. I’d initially start to nudge her awake, but then she’d just sigh and curl more tightly against me, and I’d feel my conviction soften. Besides, I always told myself, this just gave me another excuse to replay the movie later, since I could decry that she hadn’t stayed awake for it the first time.

  “Nah. No Die Hard.”

  “Oh god, this is really serious,” Niall said, and I was glad to not hear any trace of mockery in his tone. Otherwise, I might have smacked him, right then and there. “Look, just head home and get some rest. I’ll stop by in a day or two and check on you, maybe pick up some new stuff to feature at the gallery. I could make space for you to exhibit some stuff in the front window, if you wanted.”

  I suppressed a sigh. “Thanks, Niall,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just sleep this off.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  I turned to Bethany, fishing out a couple of bills to pay my tab – now that I had four thousand dollars sitting in a bank account, and more on the way, I could finally pay – but she held up a hand. “No need,” she said. “I’ve got this one covered.”

  “Really, I-“

  “Really,” she insisted. “You’ve been drinking down some of the old stock that’s on the edge of expiring, anyway.” She smiled at me. “I figured that, with the heartbreak and all, you wouldn’t notice if it tasted a little stale.”

  I strongly suspected that she was lying, that kegs of beer weren’t going to go stale if I didn’t drink them, but I didn’t press the subject. “Thanks.” I stood up, swayed slightly, turned towards the door to catch a cab home. At least I had cash to handle the cab fare.

  After an uneventful trip back to my house, I dropped heavily into the couch, tried to ignore my nose claiming that it could still smell hints of Eileen’s perfume. She didn’t wear perfume, I pointed out to myself. Too girly.

  That just meant, my nose countered, that I could smell her scent. Sure enough, if I leaned down and pressed my face against the cushions, right where she rested her head against the back of the sofa, I could get a little whiff of the clean note, almost like vanilla, that brought her instantly to mind.

  I groaned again, dragged myself back up to my feet to summit the stairs and plunge into my own bed. At least I wouldn’t smell her there.

  In the darkness, the drawn curtains blocking out any sliver of moonlight and causing me to be unable to tell if my eyes were open or shut, I replayed the last scenes of her leaving, of the fight. I’d told her that I hated competitions, had given her that carved stag as a gift. I didn’t think that she’d go behind my back and do something like this, enter it in a competition to put my skills to the question, to force me to be compared against others!

  Didn’t she see that I wasn’t as strong and fearless as I
projected? Did she not understand that, deep down under my layers of happy-go-lucky armor, I had a vein of deep self-doubt running all the way to my core, especially when it came to the one thing in my life where I wasn’t a total fuck-up? Didn’t she realize that, by making this stupid, impulsive choice, she’d ripped away all my armor and exposed that weakness to the world?

  She probably did it because she thought it would be a good move for the business, I figured morosely. And sure, it could bring in some new customers, especially if I managed to make it to the final round of judging. But was that worth the risk of being told that, in the one area of my soul where I felt like I had some value, the one way I brought some tiny amount of good into the world, wasn’t enough? Were sales worth knowing that even my gift, the one that had consumed more of my life than any other activity, was merely second-rate?

  I couldn’t believe that it was worth the wager.

  I tossed and turned, trapped between memories of Eileen and fears of the criticism I’d receive from iron-lipped, tongue-lashing judges of the woodworking competition. Sleep was a long time in coming, but it thankfully, finally swallowed me into deep and dreamless depths.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Eileen

  * * *

  “Auntie Ellie! You’re back!”

  Just a single step through the front door, I braced myself to take the hit of a seven-year-old child. Shay got me just above the knees, exhibiting form that would make a pro football player weep with envy. I rocked, but managed to stay upright, dropping a hand down to pat her on the head.

  “Good afternoon, Shay,” I replied to Lisa’s precocious little child. “How was school?”

  Looking up at me, she squeezed her eyes shut and stuck out her tongue. Even though I didn’t normally feel too comfortable around children, I had to laugh at the girl’s antics. “And do you have homework?”

  “No…” I didn’t need to be a detective to hear the falsehood.

  “Yes you do. Go on, get it done before your mom gets back from her errands.”