Death by Inferior Design

by Leslie Caine

  But what if the clients object to being able to see the dirty dishes on the kitchen counter when they’re relaxing or entertaining in their living room? Also, kitchen islands can cut into floor space that might otherwise provide for a table large enough to seat eight diners in elegance and comfort. Hardwood floors are durable but have poor acoustic qualities. And they’re grueling on the legs when, for example, a gourmet cook spends long stretches at the stove. Rugs wear out faster and are harder to maintain than other floor coverings but are much more comfortable on the feet and to sit on, as I’d seen for myself that Myra liked to do.

  The key to doing my job well was being able to get inside the client’s head—to learn what she most valued, what activities made her the happiest. By asking Myra about her daily routine and listening as she described how she loved to sit every morning with her coffee and pore over the Crestview Sentinel for up to two hours, it was obvious that she needed a large sitting area at the kitchen counter. The space needed to be opened up somewhat; hence the proposed half wall that had led to Steve’s nearly crashing through the floor on top of me.

  Steve and I determined that the new wall would be three feet high and feature an oak shelf and an elegant, simple oak post for structural support. This compromise between a full wall and no wall would give Myra’s public areas definition, yet a more open feel than its current design.

  After grinning at each other about how smoothly our programming phase was going, Steve then said, “Now let’s talk about the front room—Randy’s office. There I’d like to consider removing the wall entirely and incorporating the space into the family room. You’d be able to make good use of the bay window in the former office, maybe build a window seat and turn it into your own private nook.”

  Much as I personally agreed with Steve’s proposal, Myra’s face was not lighting up at the idea. In fact, her upper lip was curling the way Hildi’s did just before she coughed up a hairball. My hunch was that Myra wanted to transform her overbearing late husband’s room into her space. “Or,” I interposed, “you could get some of that same spaciousness and openness with French doors. You’d be able to turn that room into a sewing room and close it off from the public spaces of the house whenever you wished, yet still be able to look through the doorway from nearly every spot in the living room and see that terrific bay window.”

  “Oh, I love that, Erin!” Myra cried. “That would just be wonderful for that room. Thank you so much for suggesting it.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Steve’s features had tightened almost imperceptibly, and he said, “Or we could convert your guest room upstairs into a sewing room. Then you’d have enough floor space in your living room for a grand piano, even.”

  “I don’t play the piano, Mr. Sullivan, and my guest room is currently occupied.” Decisively, she pointed at the closed door to the office. “French doors. Sewing room.”

  He flashed an unwavering smile at her. “That will look fantastic.” The smile turned to a glare the moment she looked away and his eyes shifted to mine. Drat! I’d flubbed an obvious rule of working in tandem—never show up your partner. I should have said that Steve and I would gladly entertain other ideas from her if she wanted to keep that room intact, and then steered the conversation so that the sewing-room idea seemed to be her suggestion. “Should we talk about the upstairs bedrooms now, or—”

  Myra shook her head. “Why don’t you two just surprise me with what you work up on your own? After all, Erin, you know how much I’d like to see something similar to what you did for Debbie and Carl.”

  “Yes, and thank you. But we’re not going to repeat it exactly. For one thing, the floor plans are very different. Did you like the bed best, or the faux finish . . . the fabrics . . . ?”

  “It would be impossible to choose, so you decide for me. I trust your taste and judgment implicitly.” She rose and turned her attention to Steve. “And you’re very good, too. Thank you both so much for coming.”

  As Steve and I gathered our belongings to leave, the tension between us was palpable.

  “How soon until we can get started?” Myra asked, looking directly at me.

  Steve replied, “We’ll need a few days to develop our presentation plans for the rooms. We’ll have a better idea of the overall time frame by then, after we talk to the contractors that we hire.”

  She furrowed her brow. “You mean you won’t be doing the work yourselves, like you did for the McBrides and the Hendersons?”

  “No, that was an exception, for both of us,” I said.

  “And you aren’t willing to make an exception in my case?” Myra asked, staring directly into my eyes.

  I was caught off guard, but Steve said with a gracious smile, “We can discuss that later on in the week as well.”

  We thanked her and left. On our way to our vans, I stammered, “I’m not used to working with a partner. That was really bogus of me to just blurt out the idea about—”

  “Forget about it, Gilbert,” he said icily. “We were gathering information about Myra’s likes and dislikes, and you just got the jump on me. Good for you.”

  He opened the door of his van with more gusto than was required. I hesitated, mulling over whether I should apologize again and offer to buy him a beer, or leave him alone to fume for a while. Before I could decide, I was distracted by something in the Hendersons’ driveway. “Huh. There’s a car in Carl’s driveway that I haven’t seen before,” I told Steve. “Maybe I should go over there right now to repair his wall. If he’s got company, he’ll be on his best behavior.”

  “What do you mean? What’s the matter with the wall? And when wasn’t he on good behavior?”

  “Didn’t I tell you about that?” I asked, then realized that, obviously, I hadn’t. The thought of Carl Henderson smashing holes in the walls of a room that had come out so superbly still rankled. “On Thursday, after Randy’s funeral service, I went over to repair damage the police caused while searching for evidence. But Carl had been drinking and punched more holes in the wall, and he accused me of ruining his life. I’m sure he’s calmed down by now, though, and I need to see if he wants me to arrange to have the drywall replaced.” Over my shoulder, I said to Steve, “I’ll talk to you later,” and crossed the street.

  Sullivan slammed his van door shut. “Gilbert! Wait up a second. It’d be a good idea if I came with you.”

  “Why? He’s not going to go berserk and kill me on his front porch, for God’s sake.”

  “Probably not, but if he was punching holes in a wall, it’s possible that he might greet you with a right cross.”

  “Nah. There’s no chance of that. He’s got a cast on his right hand, so it’d have to be a left cross.”

  “That cements it. I’m coming with you.”

  “How very gallant of you, Sullivan. Just don’t get any ideas about keeping this up for long. I’m an only child. I need my space.”

  He bowed slightly. “Lead on, O independent one.”

  I rolled my eyes but allowed him to accompany me to Carl’s house. “Don’t you think this will look weird to Carl? Your shadowing me, I mean?”

  “Not at all. I’ll explain that I didn’t get the chance to see the completed room, albeit with a few holes in the wall, and that I’d like to see it now. Which happens to be true, by the way.”

  “Are you just curious? Or are you checking out your competition?”

  “Both, I guess,” he replied with a shrug.

  I rang the doorbell. The door was swept open by a woman I’d never met. My jaw dropped slightly as our eyes met. She was in her forties and was my exact height and coloring. We had the same long neck, even.

  I fought to collect myself. This was merely a product of stress, playing weird psychological games with me. Myra had just now told me that I was her daughter. I’d dragged the information out of her, after happening across a well-hidden photograph. She would have had no reason to lie.

  “Hello. My name is Erin Gilbert, and I—”r />
  “Your name is Erin?” The woman’s face paled. She stared at me.

  “Erin Gilbert, yes, and I—”

  She relaxed and interjected, “Oh! you’re the interior designer Carl hired.”

  “That’s right. And this is Steve Sullivan, a colleague. Is Carl here?”

  “Who is it?” Carl called. He came limping up on crutches, his foot in what looked like a removable cast. He frowned as he spotted me. “You again? Haven’t you taken your pound of flesh already? You cost me an arm and a leg! Literally!”

  “Carl,” the woman chastised, “stop it! It’s hardly her fault that you’re such a hot-tempered ignoramus that you’ve broken some bones by pounding on a wall!”

  “It may or may not be her fault, but I sure as hell am not letting her back inside my house. I might break my neck next time!”

  “Come in,” the woman told us, swinging the door wider.

  “Hey! This is my house, not yours!”

  “Point taken.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll come outside, then.” She stepped onto the porch beside us. With a jerk of her head, she indicated Carl and explained, “I’m playing temporary nursemaid and was about to leave. He has a hard time driving his car in that cast.”

  “Which doesn’t give you the right to invite people off the street into my house!” he called indignantly through the glass door.

  She again rolled her dark brown eyes. “I’m Carl’s first wife. Emily Blaire.”

  “Nice to meet you. This is a fellow designer, Steve Sullivan,” I said, introducing him, I belatedly realized, for the second time.

  They shook hands, Steve turning on the charm as they exchanged pleasantries. I returned my attention to Carl, leaning on his crutches as he glared at us through the glass. “I just wanted to see if you wanted me to hire someone for you to repair the drywall,” I called to him.

  “No! I’m paying Taylor to do it tomorrow. Emily! You coming in or going home?”

  “Going home,” she growled as she trotted down the steps. She got into her car and started the engine.

  Jaw agape, Carl watched her leave as if unable to believe she wasn’t going to change her mind and come back inside. As she drove away, he yelled, “Fine! Goodbye!” Carl attempted to slam the door by whacking it with one crutch, but lost his balance. He toppled to the floor.

  Steve and I rushed into the house to help him up. His glasses had gone flying, and while insisting that he didn’t need any help, he lost his balance a second time and mangled the frames. Carl, in turn, accused me of having “blinded” him. I apologized, and after a minute or two of cajoling and being assured that he was fine by himself, Steve and I left.

  Partway down the walkway, I hesitated and snapped my fingers. “Oh, darn! I forgot to ask him if he’d mind writing me a letter of recommendation. Think I should go back and ask?”

  Steve laughed heartily. Then he accepted my offer to buy him a drink, seeing as he’d paid the last time.

  We decided to have dinner, along with our drinks, at a downtown restaurant. After the plates had been cleared and we were partway into our second round, I said, “I think I know why my mother felt it was so important for me not to look for my birth parents.”

  “Because she knew that they and their neighbors were raving lunatics?” Steve asked.

  “Exactly.”

  Steve fidgeted with his napkin. Then he finally met my eyes and said, “Emily Blaire sure acted strange. She nearly passed out when she first saw you.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the same reaction I got when Myra saw me for the first time. Myra claims I’m her biological daughter and that my mother was her nanny, which makes sense. Mom always said she knew me from the time I was six weeks old. My hunch is she got to know Myra when she took a class from her at CU.” I took another sip of my beer.

  Steve said nothing; his eyes stayed on my face.

  “What?” I asked, annoyed.

  “Erin, do I really need to point out to you that you and Emily Blaire look a lot alike? And when I say ‘a lot,’ I mean a whole lot.”

  I squirmed a little in my seat. So he, too, had detected physical similarities. I scraped at the label on my beer bottle with my thumbnail. “Not so much that Carl Henderson ever noticed. If it was anything other than a coincidence that she and I happen to look a little similar, you’d think her ex-husband would have noticed at some point.”

  “He’s not exactly Mr. Perceptive. He seems to have tunnel vision about everything.”

  “But Debbie didn’t notice, either. Nor did Jill or Kevin. And they all know Emily. Plus, why would Myra lie about something like being my biological mother?”

  “Maybe because she’s nuts or has some evil plan. Maybe she fed her husband a whopping dose of poison and lies about everything.”

  While sipping my Michelob, I mulled over Steve’s words, unable to dismiss the possibility that he was correct. “If Emily Blaire was my birth mother, that makes me Taylor’s sister. Or half sister, at any rate. Yet he and I look nothing alike.”

  Steve leaned back and squinted at me. “Hmm. Maybe if you grew a foot, shaved your head, took some anabolic steroids, and went into bodybuilding . . .”

  I grinned. “Now, there’s a coincidence. Your suggestions for self-improvement happen to be precisely what’s already on my Day-Timer as personal resolutions for New Year’s.”

  He laughed.

  I widened my eyes and feigned offense. “I’m serious. It’s going to be a whole new me come January. I’ll be six-eight, bald, built like a Mack truck, and competing for the title of World’s Strongest Woman.”

  “Far be it from me to object.” His hazel eyes sparkled. “By all means, go for it. My prospective customers won’t have such a hard time remembering if it was Sullivan Designs or Interiors by Gilbert that they want. As of next month, I’ll be able to explain that I, Sullivan, am the male, eminently qualified, and highly sought-after designer. Whereas Gilbert is the two-hundred-pound, bald, Amazon woman designer who works down the street from me.” He laughed. “Come to think of it, I think I’ll start doing that right away, regardless.”

  “Very funny.”

  A moment later, though, the humor left me as Steve’s words about Emily Blaire sank in. Could Myra have been lying to me after all? Was Emily my actual mother? The sudden awareness of birth parents in my life was all so foreign to me.

  “Anyway, the thing is, Steve, when you come right down to it, this is all just genetics. The people I consider my parents are the ones who raised me. They’re the ones who influenced me, shaped me into who I am. I mean, what difference does it make who my biological parents are?”

  “Nature versus nurture,” he replied thoughtfully. “They’ve done studies on that, you know, with identical twins separated at birth. A lot of personality traits are actually inherited.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And that’s what allows people to feel sorry for themselves . . . to say, ‘This is the way I am, and I can’t change.’ My mom, my real mom, that is, was this terrific person. She had a degenerative lung disease, and giving birth would have exacerbated the illness. As it was, she died when she was forty-six. But she taught me that what matters is now—the present. She knew from her twenties on that her life expectancy wasn’t the best, so she made the most out of every day she had. When her marriage fell apart, she was sad, but she picked up the pieces and she moved on. None of us has any guarantees in this world.”

  “So your philosophy is to live for the moment? To do whatever feels good now?”

  I gave a little shrug, worried that the natural follow-on to that do-whatever-feels-good philosophy might lead me to make some really stupid choices. “It’s that the present is whatever I make it be . . . lemonade out of life’s lemons, and all of that.”

  Steve nodded and lifted his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

  I regarded him for a moment, thinking about his own situation. “It’s probably a lot harder for you to move forward than it is for me. After all, I’m not the one whose par
tner took him for all he was worth.”

  He frowned and muttered, “You don’t know the half of it.” He forced a smile. “But one of these days, I might catch up to Evan and get him to give me my money back. If not, I’ll rebuild the biz one more time from the ground up. That’s what I had to do the first time, before he and I hooked up. It’s easier now that I’ve got an established reputation.”

  I winked at him. “Especially now that Gilbert of Interiors by Gilbert is going to turn into this bald Amazon who’ll scare the bejeezus out of anyone who wants to hire her.”

  “Right,” he agreed with a chuckle.

  I had to admit to myself that the more I got to know Steve Sullivan, the more I was tempted to like him. “How did you get interested in interior design?”

  Instantly he got a wistful, faraway gaze in his eyes. “I was originally going to be an artist—the next Picasso. And I still paint—that’s my big hobby. I love working with oils, mostly. But maybe it was growing up in such a noisy household that did me in . . . so there’s your nurture factor for you. My artistic bent wasn’t inherited, I can tell you that much. Anyway, being the middle kid of five—two brothers, two sisters—and living in a three-bedroom house, I was always fighting for my own private space. I had to share a room with my younger brothers, so when I was in high school, I built a partition.”

  “And it turned out well?”

  “Yeah, it really did. It wound up being really cool . . . a makeshift wall, even, with an accordion door. My sisters asked me to do the same thing in their room, and next thing I knew, I was helping them redecorate their entire room with their pooled babysitting earnings. My first semester at Colorado Art Institute, I took a design class just as something of a lark, and by the end of the class, I was hooked.” He shrugged and grinned. “How ’bout you? How’d you get into the field?”

  “It’s always been my passion. My mom was a big influence. When my dad moved out, we had to go to a smaller place, a two-bedroom apartment in Albany, New York, and Mom said we were going to make it gorgeous on the inside, since the outside was a lost cause. That became our big mother-daughter activity—for years, actually—looking at textiles and paints, envisioning how this would look with that. There was never a question what I’d study after high school.”