“Lice won’t kill you,” Patsy told Cody, patting his shoulder. “Sit still. Don’t move a muscle. Ladies, we’ve got to get something to debug this boy. And I mean quick.”
Ashley and Esther were pressed back into the farthest corner of the basement, holding hands and looking for all the world like they might be sick. Cody’s lower lip trembled. Steve stared for a moment, realizing for the first time that the kid actually had a lower lip.
And then Cody let out a yowl.
“Stop!” Brenda said suddenly. She rose from her chair and held her hands toward the young man. “Stay, Cody. It’s all right. I promise. It’s me, Brenda. I’m here with you, and everything will be okay. There’s just a little bug in your hair. A few little bugs. You don’t need to be scared.”
“Okay,” Cody said with a nod. He sniffled. “I’m not scared of bugs. Sometimes I eat bugs.”
“I bet you do when you’re really hungry.” Brenda nodded at him. “Lice are small, and they can’t hurt you. They just make your head itchy. Patsy and I will get rid of them for you.”
“Okay,” he said again.
Brenda turned to Steve and spoke in a calm but decisive voice. “Look on the bottom shelf of the closet in the girls’ bathroom,” she ordered. “Grab everything you can find.”
Then she told the other women, “Justin brought lice home from the nap-time mats in kindergarten, and Jessica got them from her T-ball helmet. I have everything we need. The stuff is old, but it’s probably better than nothing.”
“We’ll use whatever you have, and then I’ll bring more later,” Patsy said. “Oops, there’s a flea!” she exclaimed, taking a small jump backward. “Fleas and lice. What next?”
“Scabies, I’ll bet,” Esther offered from the far corner of the basement. “We used to get ’em when we were kids. Awful, just awful!”
“It’s all right, Cody,” Brenda was cooing as Steve hurried up the stairs. “You’ll be fine in just a minute. Patsy, can you shave his head first? And then we’ll put on the medicine.”
Steve rooted through the closet in the master bedroom. Nothing. Not a thing that looked like it might treat lice. His heart racing at the very idea of the parasites even now scattering on their six tiny legs throughout his house, Steve suddenly remembered that Brenda had told him to look in the girls’ bathroom. Why didn’t he listen to her better? He was going to have to start concentrating on something besides real-estate contracts if this kind of thing kept happening.
The stash of lice treatments was right there on the lowest shelf of the smaller bathroom, just as Brenda had said. He gathered up a few more items that looked helpful—triple antibiotic cream, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, anti-itch treatment. Throwing everything into a basket from which he had dumped a bunch of ribbons and hair clips, he raced back down the stairs.
“Can lice jump?” Ashley was whimpering from the back corner. “I feel like they’re all over me. I’m just itching something crazy!”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” Patsy said. “Lice don’t jump—they crawl from one host to another. They’re just little parasites, not Godzilla. Everybody’s going to be okay, including Cody. Steve, fetch us some plastic bags, would you, hon?”
While Patsy and Brenda worked on Cody, Steve ran back up the stairs and grabbed a handful of grocery sacks from the pantry. At least he knew where his wife kept those. Fleas, lice, scabies. This was not good, he thought as he took the steps two at a time back down to the basement.
“Good,” Patsy said, handing a bag to Brenda. “Put all the hair in this, and we’ll give it a good spraying before we burn it. Sweep all those snippings from the floor, too, Steve. That’ll take care of anything that might have been in the beard.”
As obedient as a child, Steve swept the masses of knotted hair into a pile on his basement floor and dumped it into a bag. The last he recalled, the floor had been plain, painted concrete. Had this new gray-green, stone-patterned vinyl been part of Brenda’s rehab project? If so, she had chosen well.
Standing, he took in the green walls, the new tables, the shelving systems, the sink, and the photographs of the children hanging on the walls. This was nice. Very nice. No wonder Brenda had been so eager to work on it—running back and forth into town to buy supplies each day, as Pete Roberts had told Steve. She and that LeClair fellow had accomplished a small miracle together.
Steve’s last memory of the basement involved seven or eight teenagers eating pizza while they reclined on the sagging blue sectional sofa and watched television. Pizza boxes, tennis shoes, backpacks, textbooks, and empty soda cans had littered the concrete floor. The walls had held a jumble of framed pictures, trophies, award ribbons, and original child-created artwork. Now the room was transformed. Perfect. Something you could show off in a magazine.
Even Cody, face and head now totally buzzed and tears streaming from his eyes, came across as something new and better. Patsy had begun rubbing some sort of cream onto his shiny head, and Brenda was dusting his neck with powder. As if communicating through telepathy, the women simultaneously hurried Cody over to the sink and began to scrub his fingers and arms.
To Steve’s surprise, the young man had started to look almost human. He had ears and a mouth, a long neck, and thin, ropy arms. He was skinny. Much too skinny. But he stopped weeping when Brenda ordered him to blow his nose into a tissue and then washed his face with a thick white cloth.
When Cody straightened from the sink, he focused his blue eyes on Brenda. “Okay. I’m better now.”
“Lots better,” Brenda echoed.
“Amen to that.” Patsy shook her head as she threw her tools into a plastic bag. “I’m going to have to sterilize all this stuff and then soak it in antiseptic liquid. Now listen here, people,” she said, turning to address everyone, including the two women huddled in the corner. “If word of this gets out, my customers are going to be wary about coming to Just As I Am. So we’ll consider today’s activity a TLC matter, and none of us will breathe a word of it. And I’m talking to you, Esther Moore. No matter what, don’t you dare tell Charlie.”
“I never keep secrets from my husband,” Esther said firmly. Then her shoulders sagged. “But…okay. On this, my lips are sealed. Charlie doesn’t care about the TLC anyway. Says we’re nothing but a gaggle of silly geese.”
“How about you, Steve?” Patsy asked.
“I’m mum.” He held up a hand in the Boy Scout pledge of honor.
“Cody?” She turned to the young man. “Don’t you say a thing about lice or fleas; you hear me? You just tell people that Patsy Pringle cut your hair, and she did a mighty fine job of it too.”
“Patsy Pringle cut my lice,” Cody began. “Wait…oh no…”
“I’m done for,” Patsy moaned. “Well, I guess I’ve weathered worse. No one ever lets me forget the time our new nail girl gave everybody a fungus. That was ten years ago. Lord, help us all.”
Still muttering what sounded like a prayer, Patsy grabbed her tools and the bags of hair and opened the sliding glass door. Steve watched as she climbed the hill to the street like a Sherpa headed for the summit of Everest. Esther and Ashley, still clinging to each other, made a wide circle around the area where Cody’s hair had fallen, and they, too, hurried outside.
Steve took a step backward as Brenda began dumping a variety of liquids and powders on the new vinyl floor. What could he do but help? He fetched a mop and several old rags, and together they bent over the task of disinfecting their basement.
“Smells like the hospital,” Cody said. He was standing near the sliding door. “Like when my daddy and me went there, and they said, ‘Mr. Goss, we can’t help you no more, so you’ll just have to make your way.’ That’s what they said. And then my daddy said to me, ‘Cody, you’re twenty-one, so you’ll just have to make your way.’ And that’s what we did.”
Brenda stopped mopping and looked up. “Cody, what happened to your daddy?”
He sucked on his lower lip for a moment. Steve could see those
blue eyes filling with tears, and he braced for another scene. Though he needed to call his office, needed to hurry off to an appointment for a house showing, needed to do a hundred other things, Steve realized that for the first time in weeks, something was happening in his house.
Cody had become a human being…and Brenda had too. Maybe there was hope for them after all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
My daddy put me out on the side of the road.” Cody spoke as he stared at Brenda, teardrops hanging from the ends of his long dark eyelashes. He reminded her of a newly pared potato, his bald head gleaming white and slightly misshapen. He sniffled loudly and shook his head. “Then he drove off, and that’s what happened to my daddy.”
Brenda reached out and laid her hand on his arm. So gaunt that he almost frightened her, Cody placed his free hand on top of hers. She knew the whole story was buried somewhere inside this troubled young man, but she had no idea how to release it.
Cody kept gulping down deep bellyfuls of air. He glanced at Steve. “Who’s he?” Cody asked Brenda. He looked at Steve again. “Who do you think you are, fella?”
“This is Steve Hansen,” she answered quickly. “You know him, Cody. He’s my husband.”
“He doesn’t look like Nick.”
A chill washed down Brenda’s spine. “Of course not. Nick was a handyman, remember? He painted the basement. Now, let’s get you upstairs and see if we can find some chocolate cake.”
“Nick didn’t share his hot dogs with me,” Cody complained to Steve. “He’s not like Jesus.”
Brenda knew she didn’t have any cake. She hadn’t felt like baking—or doing much else—for the past few days. But she had to divert Cody from the subject of Nick. If he said anything…
“Do you share your hot dogs, Steve?” Cody blurted out the question as Brenda urged him toward the staircase. “Because I like hot dogs.”
“I always share my hot dogs,” Steve replied. “Did your daddy give you hot dogs? I bet he did.”
Cody stopped walking and blinked his big blue eyes at Steve. “Yessir, he did. Whenever he could find work, they would pay him money, and then he bought hot dogs for us. We built a fire near our car, and my daddy read the Bible to me while we waited for the hot dogs to cook. We always said our Bible verses a few times, so we wouldn’t forget them. Sometimes the hot dogs got sort of black while we were doing Psalm 139, but we ate them anyway. Do you like hot dogs?”
“I sure do.” Steve stood from the chair where he’d been resting after mopping the floor. “If I had some, I’d share them with you. We could cook them over a fire, just like you and your daddy.”
“Hey, I like you!” Cody’s face broke into a smile, the sight of his joy marred only by his brown teeth. He turned to Brenda. “I like Steve better than Nick. You should like him, too, and not Nick.”
“Cody, I’m married to Steve.” Brenda continued to try to push the young man toward the stairs. “Of course I like him. He’s my husband. Now let’s go see what we can find in the kitchen.”
“Do you, Brenda?” Steve asked.
She paused. “Do I what?”
“You told Cody you like me. Do you?”
Brenda clenched her teeth for a moment. “That’s a ridiculous question. We’re married.”
“I know, but I’ve lost track of you. You’ve been gone a long time, and I’m not sure how you feel anymore. Do you like me?”
“I like you.” She shrugged. “I used to like you, anyway.”
“You called me a bum.”
“Well, you called Cody a bum.”
“What’s a bum?” Cody asked.
“Never mind,” Brenda said, “just go on upstairs. This has been an exhausting afternoon. Esther and her gaggle of women came barging into the house, and the next thing I knew, they were shaving you and everyone was screaming.”
“We all screamed because of the mice in my hair.”
“Lice…oh, never mind. Just go.” She gave him a gentle shove, and he stumbled onto the staircase.
“Don’t hug Nick anymore, okay?” Cody told her over his shoulder. “He’s not as nice as Steve. He doesn’t share, and you shouldn’t let him kiss you. Steve is like my daddy, because he wants to cook hot dogs on a fire with me, and we can eat them even if they’re black. That’s like Jesus. ‘And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves and the two fishes—’ ”
“Cody, stop!” Brenda ordered as they reached the foyer. She could hear her heartbeat hammering in her ears. Her cheeks felt blazing hot. “Stop talking and just get out that door. Sit on your swing, and be quiet. Stop blabbering all that nonsense, Cody. I mean it. Don’t say another word, because if I hear you, I’m going to stop bringing you soup and sandwiches. I told you before—just leave me alone!”
She shouldered him through the front door and shut it behind him. Sinking to the floor, she hugged herself around the stomach. Cody had said the words! He had told Steve about Nick. Her worst fear.
How could she convince Steve that Cody had been confused…or that he had lied…or misinterpreted what he had seen? She had to think of a way to cover it. Hide it.
This was what she had been dreading most. And yet, she had wanted it too. Let Steve know that another man desired her. Let him hear how deeply he had hurt her by abandoning her day after day. Let him understand how his apathy had choked off her hope bit by bit.
If Steve knew the truth, he might leave her. Or turn her out of the house. She deserved it. Maybe she even wanted it, didn’t she? A reason to turn to Nick. Or to flee to her parents in St. Louis. Or just to leave this house—desert Steve the way he had discarded her.
“Brenda?” Her husband’s voice drifted up from the stairwell. “Will you please come down here a minute?”
She wouldn’t go to him. She would leave now, and then she would never have to discuss anything. Covering her eyes with her hands, Brenda searched her mind for direction. Where was God at a time like this? Where had He been all along? How could He have allowed her such pain—a woman who had served Him faithfully all her life, whose home had glorified Him, whose oldest daughter had given herself to mission work on His behalf?
God didn’t care! He couldn’t possibly love her. He had known this was going to happen, and He had permitted it.
“Hey, Brenda? Are you up there?” Steve’s head and shoulders appeared, and his eyes fastened on her. “I need to talk to you. Right now.”
“I don’t want to talk,” she ground out. “Leave me alone.”
“I’m not leaving you alone anymore. I’m staying here in this house until you talk to me. And you’d better get down here and start talking, or I’ll come up there and we can let Cody and Charlie Moore and half the neighborhood hear us.”
Brenda leaned her head back against the door. This was it. The moment. She could lie, and lie again, and then do her best to cover those lies with more of the same. Or she could tell the truth. Confess. Admit her guilt.
Before everything crumbled, her life had been open and free and honest. But now…now she hated herself, her world, and everything in it.
Rising to her feet, she faced her husband. She realized they could never turn back time. There was no hope that things would be the way they once were. The kids had gone away. Steve’s focus had changed. Brenda had allowed Nick into her heart.
“Don’t you have a meeting?” she asked Steve as she started down the stairs. She tried to keep the sarcasm from her voice, but she couldn’t. “Or a house to show? Or a dinner guest waiting for you at the club?”
“No,” he said. “Not today. Not now.”
She stepped into the basement and perched on the stool where Cody had been shorn of his matted hair and raggedy beard. That’s how this would end too, she realized. She and Steve would shave their marriage. They would shear off all the layers, all the vermin, all the hurt and spitefulness that had built up between them. It would be painful…and ugly…and it had to be done.
Steve sat down on a cha
ir and stared at her. He looked worn and pale. Older. Tired.
Brenda drew down a deep breath. “Well, while you were out selling houses from dawn till midnight, I started to care for Nick LeClair. And he cared about me too. We had very strong feelings for each other.” With great effort, she held her head high. “There. Isn’t that what you wanted to know? Nick came to the house every day; he talked to me; he liked me. After a while, I realized how much I enjoyed being with him. He was funny and sweet. He admired my sewing and painting, and I admired his carpentry. We became friends, but we both wanted something more. On his last day here in the basement, he held me. Then Cody came in. After that, Nick left, and I haven’t seen him since.”
Not moving a muscle, Steve sat in silence. He blinked once. Then he swallowed. “So that’s what I saw the other day,” he said. “When I came home to change clothes and caught the two of you in the foyer.”
“You didn’t catch us.” She bristled. “We didn’t do anything.”
“Except fall in love.”
“Why not? What did you expect me to do with my heart, Steve? It was empty, and you didn’t care. Nick filled it.”
“He wasn’t interested in your heart, Brenda. He was touching you. I saw him, the way he was grabbing after you. He had his hands on you!”
“And that night at the country club, Jacqueline Patterson was touching you. What’s the difference?”
“You know the difference!” He jumped up from the chair and began pacing. “Jackie is a client, that’s all. She’s…she’s part of my business. But you’re my wife, and that loser had no right to—”
“I’m not your wife. You’re married to your business, Steve. That’s your one and only true love. When you started selling real estate, I supported you. I was proud of you and everything you were accomplishing. But then you betrayed me. You fell in love with your work, you married it, and you gave your whole life to it. Jackie touching you was no different from Nick touching me.”
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