by Wendy Wax
“Okay,” he said easily, and she knew she wasn’t the only one holding back. “You’re on.” He glanced down at his watch. “But you better hurry. You’re down to about fifteen minutes.”
She gave him a wink. “Make it the original thirty minutes, and I’ll give you a few days off before you have to start.”
His soft laughter followed her, floating in the hallway until the bathroom door clicked shut behind her.
The YouTube post was cut to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. At each boom of the cannon the shot changed.
The morning bathroom line was punctuated by the door being yanked open and slamming shut. The sunset toasts were broken down into a sequence of shots: caviar and Cheez Doodles. Toasts and hoots of laughter. The sun rising and setting in a frenzy of animation that illustrated the passing days as well as how much progress had been made and how very much was left to be done.
The work shots were compelling: Nicole leaning over to swipe chemicals across the door stretched out in front of her. Avery sanding beside her, her face determined, her muscles defined. Both of them shot from every conceivable angle. Not a smiling point or gesture to be found.
There were shots of the trucks and the workmen and Chase from all sides; he apparently didn’t have a bad one. The standoff in the pool house was there, apparently shot through the open door. The sweet-faced Robby at work was intercut with the bathroom line each morning. The swarm of the white-haired garden ladies was there, too. Throughout the three minutes of video were close-ups of Maddie’s hands, mother’s hands, polishing and wiping, cooking and cleaning, writing lists and clipping coupons.
Kyra, who was only seen in the occasional reflection of a shiny surface, had caught it all: the sweat and the tears, the toasts and high fives, the agonies and the ecstasies, the growing friendship and the bonds that had formed. She’d managed to demonstrate the magnitude of the task and each struggle and mistake, even more clearly than she had with her sneering commentaries.
Avery watched it twice and though they could have used hair and makeup people and quite a lot of airbrushing, she was impressed with how well Kyra had captured the essence of their efforts to renovate Bella Flora.
And she wasn’t alone. The video got more than twenty thousand views and hundreds of comments. She had no idea whether a video like this could actually sell a multimillion-dollar home, but one thing was for sure: they and the house at Ten Beach Road were no longer a secret.
Twenty-five
They were already breakfasted and out back when their new recruit reported for duty. Nikki watched Giraldi carefully as he strolled toward them and then introduced him as an old friend of the family just as they’d agreed. She’d decided that his past appearances had been brief enough that no one would remember him.
Chase stuck out a hand. “Glad to have you on board, man,” he said. “We can use a little more testosterone on this job.” He cocked his head. “Have we met? You look familiar.”
“Joe Giraldi. I have been on site a few times. I don’t think we were introduced, though.” Giraldi gave everyone a smile. His manner was low key and personable. Somehow he’d dialed down the hard-assed cockiness several notches; he could have been the good-looking guy next door.
“Hey,” Avery said considering him more closely. “I thought you worked for the cable company.”
Deirdre raised an eyebrow. “I thought he was just here on vacation fishing.”
“He was helping Robby yesterday,” Kyra said.
Nicole opened her mouth to explain further, but Giraldi beat her to it.
“I’ve been doing some odd jobs out here on the beach, and I happened to notice Nicole. Her brother’s an old friend of mine. I figured Nikki would be able to help me track him down.”
Nicole kept her lips pressed into a smile in order to stifle her reaction to how close to the truth he’d come. Giraldi gave them all a wink and snaked an arm around her shoulders, pulling her against his side. “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve always had the biggest crush on her.” He tilted his head against hers, playing it to the hilt. “Even when we were kids and she was an ‘older woman.’ ”
Appalled at the past he was inventing, Nikki stepped out from under his arm. “Behave yourself.” She shook a finger at Giraldi. “Or I’ll have to . . . warn my brother about your behavior.”
He shot her a cocky smile that said, “please, be my guest.” Nikki was relieved when a man who looked like Enrico but wasn’t walked out onto the loggia from the house.
“I kind of hate to miss what’s coming next, but Umberto, our plasterer, is here,” Chase said. “Do you need me to get you all started?”
“Um, that would be a no,” Avery said. “I’ll get Joe and Nicole going out here and then I wanted to pull the chandelier down so that Kyra and Maddie can start cleaning the crystals. I’ve got a crude sort of pulley hooked up.”
Kyra groaned, but Maddie barely seemed to be listening, which Nicole found decidedly un-Madeline-like.
Avery turned to Joe. “Nicole and I will be working over there.” She pointed to the two doors already set up in the shade. “I know how men feel about power tools, so we’ll try you out over here on the sander.”
Deirdre went inside to make phone calls, presumably from her air-conditioned bedroom. Avery led Kyra and Maddie into the dining room. Nikki might have been envious of the indoor assignment except that the spot beside the reclinada palm was fabulously shady and the breeze off the Gulf not only lowered the temperature but carried the scent of the stain away with it. And then there was the view. Which got even better about twenty minutes later when Giraldi, who was working smack in the sun, peeled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt and dropped it on the ground.
Two hours later Avery put down her rag and wiped the sweat off her brow. “I think we’re going to have to fire Joe.”
“We’re not paying him. I’m not sure firing is the right word,” Nikki said.
“He’s a distraction.” Avery pointed to Nicole’s door. “You’ve redone that one three times now. You can’t stain uniformly when you’re not even looking at what you’re staining.”
Nikki would have liked to argue or deny the accusation, but Avery was right. Nicole had spent far more of the morning watching the muscles ripple across Agent Giraldi’s broad back and shoulders than she had her own brushstrokes.
“You’re a little behind yourself,” Nicole pointed out.
“I know.” Avery laughed. “And I think Kyra made more trips out here than she needed to. Of course that could have been out of boredom; there’s nothing more tedious than cleaning a chandelier of that size one drop crystal at a time.”
“Or not.”
They smiled at each other, complicit, but Nicole didn’t feel at all good about how often her gaze had stolen over to check Giraldi out. She’d asked him to help partly to torture him and partly to keep an eye on him—not his rippling muscles or near-perfect butt.
During lunch, a make-your-own-sandwich affair that Maddie only halfheartedly supervised, Nikki did her best to stay far enough away from the FBI agent not to be caught staring and close enough to make sure he wasn’t saying anything that might expose her as Malcolm’s sister. For the most part, he talked baseball and boats and other manly topics with Chase and Robby and Umberto, who was apparently Enrico’s cousin. The agent came across just as he’d presented himself, and she had to admit if she hadn’t known he was there to keep her under surveillance, she never would have known. Still she didn’t begin to relax until Giraldi left around two thirty, saying that he had some things he had to take care of. She blew out a breath of air, grateful to see him go with no real damage done.
She was so relieved to be rid of Giraldi that she almost didn’t hear what Chase was saying as he packed up his tools an hour or so later so that he could get to one of his sons’ baseball games. “Robby says the master bath will be functional at some point tomorrow, so if you’ve got the fixtures back it could be usable.”
There was a hu
shed silence as they all took this in. Then came a group smile, although Maddie’s seemed a bit strained. Nikki heard what might have been a celestial choir singing in her head.
“Figures it would be Deirdre’s bath,” Avery grumbled. “She’ll be the only one here with air-conditioning and her own bathroom.”
“Well, I’ll share it with you,” Deirdre said. “And anyone else who wants in. It’ll give us a chance to get better acquainted.”
“Gee, I can hardly wait,” Avery deadpanned. “Will you call the King of Chrome, Nikki, and see if he’s done with the master bathroom fixtures?”
“Sure.” She’d find a way to send smoke signals if it would expedite the increased bathroom time.
Chase laughed. “You took the faucets to Alfred?”
“Yeah.” Avery crossed her arms across her chest, which Nikki already knew was not a good sign. “What’s so funny?”
“He’s never been willing to look at anything that didn’t belong on a car. And he’s not exactly an inexpensive option.”
“Well, we didn’t have a problem at all, did we, Nikki?” Avery just loved one-upping Chase.
“Nope.”
“In fact, he was kind of like a great big teddy bear. Wouldn’t you say, Nikki?”
“Yep.”
“And how much did he charge you?” Chase asked, clearly not yet willing to concede.
“Well, his original estimate was a little high,” Avery admitted. “But Nicole’s going to pick up the finished pieces and handle the final negotiations. We’ll let you know how things shake out.”
“And he’ll undoubtedly be too busy drooling over Nikki and her car to put up much of a fight,” Chase said. “That’s so Vanna-esque.”
The choir stopped in mid-hallelujah. There was another silence nowhere near as pleasant as the first as Avery squared off in front of Chase.
Avery couldn’t believe he’d called her Vanna again. Even as she straightened her shoulders and angled her chin upward, she was aware of how much shorter she was than Chase. Which pissed her off even more. “What the hell is it with you?” she asked.
Robby and Umberto eased out of the kitchen and ostensibly back to work. Kyra lifted her video camera, but Maddie, who still seemed to be doing an imitation of a limp rag, took the camera from her daughter and led her out of the kitchen.
Out of the corner of her eye, Avery saw Nicole motion to Deirdre. Before Chase could open his mouth to respond, they left the kitchen with about as much subtlety as rats abandoning ship.
“I am so tired of this,” Avery said when she and Chase were alone. “Tired of your judgment, tired of your automatic disapproval, tired of your damned superior attitude. No matter what I do, you find a way to belittle it. And I’d like to know why.”
Chase’s jaw tensed; she could see it working. For a brief moment she regretted not letting his comment slide.
“You want to know why? Then I’ll tell you,” he finally said. “I hate like hell that you’ve taken all the advantages you’ve been given and let them be pushed aside by the way you look and act. You have an architecture degree from Duke, for chrissakes, and you managed to get your own show on television, and what did you do with all that?” He shook his head in disgust. “You wore tight sweaters and you smiled and pointed. Your father was so proud of everything you’d achieved, and you trampled all over that.”
The anger in his voice spurred her own anger even higher. Who was he to judge her? What did he know? And why on earth would her humiliation matter so much to him? “What business is this of yours?”
“When my mother died and my father had his first heart attack, I had to go into the business instead of architecture. You had every damned thing I wanted and you wasted it!”
“Well, your mother may have died, but at least she didn’t leave you.” Avery couldn’t stop the things that came out. “She never would have left you.”
She looked at his face, flushed with anger and indignation. “That’s not nothing.”
“You were given every opportunity and you let yourself be dismissed.”
“It was beyond my control!” Avery shouted, her neck hurting from having to crick back so far. “Do you think I liked the way I was presented? Do you honestly think I agreed to any of that?”
“You sure looked perfectly happy doing it.”
“Well, then you’re as stupid as I looked!” she shouted.
They glared at each other. But even as she watched, the anger in his eyes became tinged with embarrassment. It was clear he hadn’t meant to reveal so much.
She was surprised by all of it: That he’d been as angry as she’d been at the way she’d been portrayed. That he, more than anyone, had understood that her role on the show was far beneath her training and capabilities. That it had become nothing more than an ongoing insult.
Avery could hardly catch her breath as he continued, now in a calmer but no less biting tone.
“And I absolutely hated the way they turned that egoridden husband of yours into the ‘expert’ when he shouldn’t even have been on the same stage. And I bet he never argued that it should be any other way.”
Avery didn’t think she’d ever felt more pathetic. “No,” she said as she drew herself up and prepared to leave the room. “He never did.”
She could not, would not, tell him that she hadn’t chosen to leave; that even after she’d allowed herself to be turned into a laughingstock, they still didn’t want her.
Twenty-six
In the late afternoon the sunbaked sand was toasty between Maddie’s toes, the breeze a warm caress on her bare skin. She walked toward the pink castle walls of the Don CeSar soothed by the rhythmic wash of the tide and the erratic caws of the gulls, trying to draw the beauty of it inside, willing it to alleviate the worry and panic that she’d felt churning inside ever since she’d issued her ultimatum to Steve.
Tilting her face to the sky, she tested the smile she’d kept plastered on her lips, and knew that if she’d been a sailboat that smile would have been at half mast. A part of her would have liked to simply keep walking north from Pass-a-Grille, to St. Pete Beach, and on to Treasure Island, from one sandy beach to the next all the way up into the curve of Florida’s panhandle. Instead, she turned and headed back toward Bella Flora where her responsibilities lay, hoping she could corral her thoughts and worries; had she gone too far? Was she right to bring up divorce? Was there some other way she’d missed?
Kyra was the first to accost her when she got back to the house. The others were getting ready for sunset. Kyra had her hand out.
Maddie saw her daughter staring expectantly at her, but had missed what she’d said.
“Mom?” Kyra said, clearly irritated.
“Hmmm?”
“Your keys. I’m going to a movie at the Beach Theater. Can I borrow them?”
“Oh. Sure.” Maddie walked to the kitchen to retrieve them. The fact that it didn’t even occur to Kyra to invite her should have hurt, but it was barely a pinprick. She was far too numb to feel the sting.
Maddie watched Kyra leave while Nikki and Avery bustled around the kitchen, getting ready for sunset. She saw the looks they sent each other and knew she wasn’t behaving even remotely like herself, but then her self had never been contemplating divorce before.
“Come on, Maddie,” Avery said. “I made you your own personal bowl of Cheez Doodles. And we’ve got those cute little cocktail hot dogs in buns you bought at Sam’s Club.”
The blender whirred. “Strawberry daiquiris coming right up,” Nicole added. “It’s just the three of us tonight.” Nicole poured the first glass and set it in front of her. “Take a sip and come on. We don’t want to miss the show.”
Maddie took a long sip of the drink, letting the iced strawberry slide over her tongue and down her throat. Out on the pool deck she sank into her orange neon–strapped beach chair and rested her elbows on the short aluminum arms. By the time Nikki and Avery had arranged the snacks and poured their own drinks, Maddie had fini
shed hers. She held her empty glass toward Nikki.
“Goodness, we’re thirsty tonight.” Nikki refilled her glass to the brim.
“That’s an understatement.” Maddie felt as if she could drink a Gulf full of daiquiris and still be thirsty for more.
Avery raised her glass toward the setting sun. “Well, I think we should toast having the air-conditioning up and running. And our second bathroom. Even if I do have to share it with Deirdre. Who, by the way, owns more makeup and beauty products with the word ‘antiaging’ on them than Nikki, which I didn’t think was possible.”
Nicole laughed. Maddie managed a small smile. “To the air-conditioning and the bathroom,” they said. “And to Alfred, the King of Chrome.”
“And to Maddie,” Nikki added. “Who needs to tell us what’s wrong.”
In the fading light, Madeline looked out over the sea oats and the jetty. It was hot and muggy, the breeze off the Gulf thick with heat and salt. “Let’s just say I’d be pretty hard-pressed to come up with one good thing tonight.”
A Cheez Doodle crunched nearby and Avery lifted the bowl as if it contained an offering from the gods. Maddie had no appetite.
“Is it Kyra?” Nicole asked. “Because I think she should be grateful she has a family to turn to. I could have a talk with her if you like.”
“Thanks.” Maddie tried to picture what that talk would be like. “But she’s just a part of it. Everything feels completely out of whack. Especially my relationship with Steve.” She hadn’t had a real conversation with him in so long she wasn’t even sure they still had a “relationship.”
“When do you think he might come down?” Avery asked. “Is it hard for him to get away?”
For a moment Maddie thought about making up some excuse, trying to change the whole sorry topic. But the concern in her partners’ eyes demanded her honesty.
“No,” she said. “It’s hard for him to get up off the couch.”
For a moment she wasn’t sure if she’d actually said it out loud. A look at her partners’ faces confirmed that she had.