She was right to leave him, he decided, giving up his aimless wandering and turning on the road toward Denver. She deserved better. It pained him to the marrow of his bones, but she deserved better than a broken down carpenter still haunted by things that happened decades ago.
He turned on the radio to stifle the flood of memories threatening to overwhelm him—of Norah, of Mamere, and of all the other women he had never been good enough for. The drive passed in a blur of pain and memory. He was home before he even realized how he’d gotten there. He got out of the truck, but couldn’t bring himself to go in the house. Instead, he went into his workshop and pulled out a bottle he had hidden in there for safekeeping so long ago he couldn’t remember exactly when it had been. Then, he did something he hadn’t done in years, since his short-lived stint in the Air Force, in fact. He got very, very drunk.
Chapter 12
Giving up the bookstore job had been the height of cowardice, not to mention completely unprofessional, and Caine knew it. He had never before skipped out on a job he had contracted to do no matter what the circumstances. It wasn’t something he thought he would ever do nor did he ever plan to do it again. Even so, he’d known the moment he'd woken, bleary-eyed and with a raging hangover, that first morning after he left Norah’s that he couldn’t go back there again. The thought of seeing her again was like pouring salt into an open and gaping wound.
Jim had been understanding, a lot more understanding than Caine deserved under the circumstances. He’d offered to swap Caine to a different project, but Caine had declined. It meant he had lost money, but at the moment, that was far less important than staying the hell out of Corbin’s Bend. He might work with Jim again eventually, and he would probably end up back there for lunch with Jerry and/or Ben occasionally, but right now he needed to get his head on straight. He was sure now that Norah had been right. They were too incompatible. They never had any business getting into a relationship. No matter how good it had seemed at the time. No matter how much they had enjoyed each other’s company, both in the bed and out of it. They had no business being together. They were just too different. She had needs he would never be able to meet. Pretending otherwise was just foolish. They’d been setting themselves up for failure from the start. Now he just needed to put the pieces back together of his pre-Norah life and try to move on. The best way to do that was to stay far, far away from Corbin’s Bend.
For a week or two, his plan worked just fine. He stayed busy with his custom furniture business, and a few smaller interior jobs, deliberately staying in Denver and avoiding anything that would take him near Corbin’s Bend. It wasn’t as if he needed to go elsewhere. He was doing fine with just what he could get right here. A little boutique that was opening in Wheat Ridge was interested in carrying a few of his pieces, both for sale and to use as display pieces for the owner’s own art. That brought yet another spate of new orders. It wasn’t long before he was so busy that he was practically living in his workshop only going into the house to eat or sleep. Everything fell into a comfortable, if slightly hectic, routine.
If he was occasionally haunted by thoughts of Norah late at night, well, that couldn’t be helped, could it? The only thing to do was work through it. The pain would go away eventually. It had to.
Of course, it was inevitable that his peace—if you could call the kind of getting by he’d been doing peace—would eventually be shattered. That moment came in the form of a phone call from Jim O’Brien. He should’ve expected Jim would call him for another job eventually. After all, their working relationship had predated this debacle with Norah by a long shot. Apparently, they had a new resident who had just been approved to move in who was in a wheelchair and would need modifications to his house to make it accessible. He wanted Caine to contract with him to be the lead on this project, much as he had done with Norah’s bookstore. Caine had never done one of the houses before, but it didn’t surprise him that Jim would tap him for this. He’d done these kind of accessibility modifications before. After his first client to request accessibility modifications had made him aware that Denver had a fairly large disabled community, Caine had made it his business to learn the accessibility guidelines as well as tips and tricks that weren’t necessarily demanded by the guidelines but generally made life easier. To his mind, it just make good business sense as someone who made custom furniture to be knowledgeable about and available to a group of people for whom custom work was often essential to their ability to live and function independently. It had paid off more than once. It looked like it was going to again, but that also meant he had to go back to Corbin’s Bend. There was no question whether he would take the job. He was fully qualified to do it, and he couldn’t in good conscience refuse it knowing that not many carpenters and contractors had his level of knowledge and experience. Not to mention he owed it to Jim for bailing on the bookstore job, even if that meant going back to Corbin’s Bend. He made arrangements with Jim to meet with the client the following morning and braced himself to make it through.
The drive was painfully familiar, but Caine was able to mostly ignore that, keeping his mind occupied with music. Jim had given directions to the client’s prospective house. The client, Mr. Alvarez, was there and waiting for him when he pulled in the driveway. The man was roughly his own age with dark black hair, dressed in a T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans that made him feel positively overdressed in his standard client meeting uniform of a polo and chinos. Caine killed the ignition and made his way over to where Mr. Alvarez was waiting on the walkway leading up to the front door.
“Caine Landry,” he said by way of greeting.
“Emanuel Alvarez, call me Manny,” the man replied, shaking Caine’s proffered hand in a surprisingly strong grip. “Jim told me you’d be coming by.”
Caine nodded. “He asked me to work with you on the modifications you need. We’ve worked together before. I’m out of Denver, but I’m more familiar with accessibility modifications.”
“You’ve done this sort of thing before?” Manny asked.
“Several times,” Caine assured him. “I’m not an expert by any means, but I’m familiar with the ADA requirements. I can give you the names of my clients in Denver that I’ve done modifications for, if you’d like.”
“Sure, that’d be nice,” Manny said. “I might actually already know them. I’m from Denver myself. If Jim vouches for you though, I’m sure it will be fine.”
Caine took the small notepad from his pocket, jotting down the names and phone numbers of a couple of his previous clients who had been willing to serve as references before. Tearing off the sheet, he handed it to Manny. “I appreciate your trust,” he told him. “Here are the names of some of my other clients who needed similar modifications if you’d like to contact them.”
Manny took the paper and quickly scanned over it. “You did Riley’s house?”
Caine nodded. “You know her?”
“We play basketball together,” Manny explained. “Denver Rolling Nuggets coed team.”
“I went to a game or two when I first met Riley, but I don’t remember you,” Caine replied.
“It might have been before my time,” Manny said. “I’ve only been playing for a year or so.”
“In that case, it was,” Caine told him. “This was several years ago. So, should we take a look around and talk about what you need?”
“Sure,” Manny said. He turned smoothly and headed for the porch. Someone had constructed a makeshift ramp from piece of plywood until a permanent structure could be put in place. Manny navigated it with ease.
“What are your plans for the ramp?” Caine asked, following. “Are you going to build a wooden one or buy a pre-manufactured one?”
“I’d prefer to pour a concrete one,” Manny told him. “It’s a fairly small step up, and I think that would be easier than dealing with wood or metal in the winter.”
Taking his ever-present ruler from his pocket, Caine measured the height from the porch to the gro
und. “Concrete will still ice over in winter. There are pre-manufactured steel ramps that have a type of steel mesh on the bottom to allow snow and ice to drop through. That might be your best bet, given the weather we tend to get around here. I could get you a quote on what that kind of ramp would run you if you’d like.”
“Absolutely,” Manny said. “Looks like Jim was right about you. You know your stuff.” He fished keys out of a zippered pouch that hung beneath the seat of his chair and unlocked the door, pushing it open and going inside
Caine followed him in. “It’s my job.” These days it seemed like his job was the only thing he could get right. His recent track record with relationships was a complete disaster, Norah being a very strong case in point. They had come into an open kitchen and living room area, and Caine was struck almost immediately by an eerie sense of familiarity. That was to be expected, he supposed. All the houses in Corbin’s Bend followed one of seven distinct floorplans. As such, many of the houses were very similar. He couldn’t quite place why Manny’s felt familiar. It was totally bare and had none of the distinctive touches that he was familiar with in Jerry’s or Ben’s houses. Maybe it was just that the layout was the same.
He could immediately see why Manny had chosen this particular layout. The openness of these two rooms made it easy to navigate around. On the opposite wall there was a door, across the two open rooms that undoubtedly lead to a bedroom and bathroom. Between them, in a short open hallway was a small laundry area with two open corners, which given that this was Corbin’s Bend would likely be taken advantage of for disciplinary purposes. Suddenly, he knew why Manny’s house felt familiar. It wasn’t Ben or Jerry’s house he was thinking of, it was Norah’s. Though Manny’s house was a detached single-family home rather than an upper floor apartment, the layout was identical to Norah’s apartment.
The instant the realization occurred to him, Caine was flooded with memories—sprawled comfortably on Norah’s sofa watching movies with her curled by his side, an arm slung over the back of the couch so that he could pet her demanding cat; stepping over Maverick sprawled on the floor of her kitchen and pressing Norah against the counter to take her mouth with his; that last awful night when Norah had stood in the empty corner across from the laundry room sobbing like her heart was broken, and then she had broken his.
“What do you think?” Manny asked in a tone that made it rather obvious that this was not the first time he’d asked that question.
Caine shook his head to chase away the memories and dragged his mind forcibly back into the present. “Sorry,” he said absently, realizing abruptly that he had followed Manny into the bathroom at some point in his reverie without consciously being aware he was doing it. “I didn’t quite catch that. What do I think about what?” Giving himself a firm internal shake, he mentally scolded himself for not paying attention to his client. Manny was the important one here, not Norah. That ship had sailed. That bridge was long burned. It was time he got past that and moved on, even if his heart didn’t quite believe that yet.
Manny had obviously done his research. He asked good intelligent questions about the viability of tearing out the bathroom to install a roll in shower and a sink with open space underneath. “I can use a transfer bench to transfer into the tub if it’s not structurally possible to do a shower, but I would vastly prefer to change it,” he told Caine.
Caine examined the structure of the walls and floor around the existing tub. “I don’t think it will be a problem. The tub will need to be torn out so that we can tile in a new shower. We will also probably have to tear up the flooring and replace it with new flooring to match the shower, but that’s nothing difficult. You won’t be able to live here while the work is being done on the bathroom though since this is the only bathroom in the house.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Manny assured him. “I’m not planning on moving into the house until all the renovations are done anyway. I have no desire to live here through construction.”
Caine chuckled. “I don’t blame you.” He took out his notebook and made notes for the renovations in the bathroom. “I’ll get with the plumber I work with regularly and let you know when we will be able to get started in here. I can probably go ahead and do the demo anytime you’re ready, but I want his opinion on the plumbing aspects. I’m primarily a carpenter. The other things I leave to people who know what they’re doing more than I do.” Any contractor worth their salt knew when to bring in people who could do the job better than they could. Few things, aside from purely unethical work practices, would ruin your reputation quicker than trying to do work you weren’t qualified to do and doing it poorly. Caine had seen more than one person fall into that trap, and he didn’t intend to do that himself. It was important to know when you were in over your head. He should have paid more attention to that with Norah. “I’ll let you know when I’ve got some good dates from the plumber and probably from the electrician as well.”
Manny nodded. “That’s fine.”
“In the meantime,” Caine went on, “if you want to pick out the sort of tile you want in here, I have accounts with most of the larger home improvement stores in Denver. Anything you pick out there I can probably get easily. Now, aside from the ramp and the bathroom, which are obviously the two most important parts, what else is there?”
The rest of the renovations were actually fairly small: widening doors, changing out doorknobs and cabinet pulls, lowering closet rods, light switches and the thermostat, tearing out the cabinet beneath the sink in the kitchen and insulating the pipes to allow him be able to roll up under it safely. Most of those things would take very little time at all. The only other major renovation would be adding the back deck. Manny had gotten permission to add a deck and ramp at his back door to make his back yard more accessible for him as well. That was where Caine would likely spend most of his time. Though he would contract and supervise all of the renovations, the deck he would do himself. Wood was his forte, and the work would be a good distraction from the fact that he was once again back in Corbin’s Bend. Not to mention that the deck would be another significant difference that would make Manny’s house distinguishable from Norah’s. Anything that would make that distinction clear and help him chase away the memories that were even now nagging at the edges of mind, Caine was in favor of. He did his walk through and made his notes as quickly as he professionally could. Then, he made arrangements to bring the necessary paperwork back to Manny the following week and fled.
Of all the houses in Corbin’s Bend, why did the one house Jim had asked him to work on have to be identical to Norah’s. Logically, he could appreciate that Jim had asked him because he happened to have the expertise needed, expertise Jim himself didn’t have, and it made sense that Manny had chosen that open floor plan because it was the easiest of the seven floor plans used in the community to make accessible, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. It felt like Norah was haunting him.
As if he needed her haunting him to remember. He missed her every day, with an aching need he could never remember experiencing before. He had been through breakups before but they had never been like this. Most of his previous relationships had been casual, of the easy come easy go variety. There had been women whose company he enjoyed and might’ve even cared for in a casual, affectionate sort of way. There’d been a few he regretted losing and still looked back on with a tinge of sadness, but there had never been anything that felt even remotely like this. The only thing that ever came close was when his grandmother died. That massive, overwhelming grief had brought with it the same sort of breath-stealing intensity and the sense of an emotional hurt that actually made him hurt physically, but it had been buffered by anger, both at God for taking her and at Ruben for the years of harsh treatment that had made her old before her time. This time he had no such buffer. What had happened with Norah had been his own fault, and he knew it.
He should’ve stayed away from her like he had originally intended. It had been obv
ious from the beginning that he could never give her the kind of relationship she sought. He was too damaged, too broken. The scars he carried were too deep. It hadn’t been fair to either of them to pretend he could. Sure, it had been fun to ignore reality for a while, but it had been a mistake. No matter how deeply he felt for her, their relationship had never been anything more than a pipe dream. Pretending it could be more had done nothing but hurt them both. Some dreams just needed to stay dreams. Someday, when the hurt left behind finally faded away, maybe he would even be able to look back on it as a pleasant dream. Someday. Right now, he just needed to find a way to do the job he had just agreed to without the hurt killing him.
The first step, at the moment, was going to be hightailing it back to Denver and getting the heck out of Corbin’s Bend. At least, that was the plan, but before he could make it to his truck and out the entrance, his phone rang. Seeing Ben’s number on the caller ID, he almost didn’t answer. He hadn’t really spoken to Benjamin—or Jerry either, for that matter—since this whole debacle began. It probably wasn’t fair to his friends to ignore them, but the alternative was just too hard. After all, they were both the kind of men Norah needed. They could have easily given her the discipline she asked for, the one thing he was too weak and too broken to give.
At the same time, he knew he couldn’t ignore Ben forever. Lt. Col. Steppings could and would track him down if necessary. There wasn’t the first doubt in Caine’s mind about that. Ben had threatened it more than once, though he had never actually done it, yet. Hell, it probably wouldn’t even be that hard to do, considering Jonathon processed all the paperwork for the work Caine did for the community. It would be far easier just to talk to Ben now.
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