“So did I, darling.”
After Sophie left with their black Lab, Cinder, in tow, Nate turned to his mother.
“You think I’m too hard on her, don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I think you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“Thank the Lord.”
She laughed. “She’s a good girl, Nate. But if you push her too hard to be who you want her to be, she’s going to instinctively run in the other direction.”
“What happened to my sweet little girl who a few weeks ago thought I was the coolest person in the world?”
“She’s growing up. Finding herself. Figuring out who she is. If you’ll recall, you and your father certainly butted heads plenty when you were around Sophie’s age.”
“And after that. For quite a few years. You don’t have to say it. I was a little shit, wasn’t I?”
Eleanor smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far. You wanted your own way and didn’t want to listen to us or follow any of our house rules. But we made it through and by the time you left for the army, you and your father had a good relationship. He was so proud of you.”
“I’m sorry I put you through that.”
“We all survived. And you’ll survive Sophie’s teenage years, too.”
“I hope so.” He hugged his mother, too, feeling the thinness that hadn’t been there before his father was diagnosed with cancer. Caring for him in his last days and then grieving him the past six months seemed to have aged her beyond her years. She had turned seventy a few months earlier and had never felt so fragile to him.
“Don’t overdo tomorrow,” he advised her. “I know you’ve been feeling under the weather lately.”
Her mouth thinned briefly before tilting into a reassuring smile. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”
“I told you, that’s part of my job description. Let me know if you need my help with anything, once you start sorting through what you’re keeping and getting rid of. I can help with the big items.”
“Thank you, my dear. Don’t worry about things here. I’m sure between Jess and I, we will have everything under control.”
“No doubt,” he said. After he said good-night to his mother, he walked the short distance to his and Sophie’s house. The lights were off in the little Airstream and he tried not to picture Jess Clayton stretched out inside, hair tousled, sleepy.
His conversation with his mother hadn’t shed much light on Eleanor’s reasons for taking on this project right now. Whatever her motives, he would support her. If she trusted Jess, he didn’t have any reason not to.
Eleanor had been withdrawn and sad for months since his father died. Perhaps clearing and organizing her house would invigorate her and help her shake off the grief.
If that happened, he would owe Jess Clayton far more than merely an apology.
6
Jess
The next morning, Jess drank her coffee while she watched the sunrise send ribbons of pink and amber across the water.
California was most known for its sunsets, of course, the sun’s nightly slide into the Pacific, but she was particularly fond of the sunrises. They might not hold the same drama as the sunsets, but she loved the way the morning light played on the water.
She tidied up her trailer, which took all of about three minutes, then grabbed her supplies and headed up to Whitaker House.
Eleanor answered the door only a few seconds after she rang the bell. Her features wore the peculiar mix of excitement and trepidation Jess was accustomed to seeing in her clients.
“Good morning. Can I get you some breakfast?”
“I’ve already eaten, thanks. I’m all ready to go.”
“Are you sure? I made blueberry muffins this morning.”
That did sound—and smell—delicious. Still, Jess shook her head. “No thank you. Maybe we could save them for a midday snack.”
“Right.”
“Should we take a look around the house so we can see where we want to start?”
“Yes. That would probably be best. What do you want to see first?”
“We can start here and then work our way through the house.”
This was always the most tense part of every job, when the client teetered on the edge of uncertainty and the wrong move by Jess could send them tumbling down the wrong side.
It was a delicate dance. Sometimes when she came into a job, it was inevitable that her clients would be moving, like when health problems required a different living situation.
Sometimes it was voluntary, when clients wanted to downsize in their golden years.
Eleanor’s case was a little tricky. She seemed to want to only clean out her house so that her son wouldn’t have to do the job after she died.
After her initial hesitancy, Eleanor entered into the tour with enthusiasm, showing Jess behind closed doors of the house.
“There are seven bedrooms in total, right?” she asked, after they had seen three.
“Yes, counting the master. I told you things were a real mess. I’m embarrassed that I let the clutter take over and get to this point.”
“I have been at this for five years, Eleanor,” she said gently. “Please believe me when I tell you Whitaker House is nothing compared to most of the jobs I’ve done.”
Eleanor seemed heartened by that information. “Jack didn’t like to throw things away. He wasn’t a hoarder by any means. I don’t want you to think that. But while his family had this lovely house, his parents were cash poor when he was growing up. Jack liked to reuse and recycle where he could. After he died, well, I honestly didn’t know where to start so it was easier not to do anything.”
“I totally understand. That’s not at all an unusual reaction upon the loss of a loved one.”
“It’s been six months, though. I thought things might become somewhat easier as the months pass. Instead, the loss seems fresher every day.”
The pain in her voice made Jess’s throat tighten. She remembered going through that after her parents died. For the first few years, the pain seemed to get worse instead of better. The regret and guilt haunted her sleep and turned her angry and hard.
Finally, right around the time she had enlisted, the ache inside her began to fade. She couldn’t point to any single event that had turned things around. But one day she had woken up feeling as if a cloud had lifted, as if the sun seemed to be shining a little more brightly and the world seemed a little more beautiful.
She still had moments of raw grief sometimes.
Did Rachel?
They didn’t talk about their parents. It was like a huge, painful topic neither of them wanted to broach.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, laying a comforting hand on the other woman’s arm.
“Thank you.” Eleanor patted her hand, then seemed to push away the sadness.
“Are you comfortable helping me go through your husband’s things?” she asked when Eleanor led the way to an office space facing the water, the desk crowded with loose papers and the bookshelves overflowing.
“I don’t know.”
“I can do it on my own if you want.”
Eleanor didn’t seem to like that suggestion either so Jess offered one more. “If you would like, we can save this room until later and start working through some of the empty bedrooms first.”
“Let’s do that,” Eleanor said with alacrity. “That way I can have Nate go through one more time to make sure he takes any of his father’s effects he might still want. He was here last night but only went through quickly. I would like to give him another chance.”
They would have to get around to this man cave eventually but Jess could wait. “All right. Why don’t you show me the other bedrooms and we can pick one to start.”
“Perfect,” Eleanor said.
Whitaker House was tr
uly lovely. Built into the hillside, it featured large, airy rooms and stunning woodwork. Most rooms opened up to views of either the ocean or the surrounding forest of redwoods and coastal pine.
Eleanor had described the house as cluttered and dark but Jess didn’t see that. She saw a structure that had provided a home for multiple generations, where each had left a mark.
She would have loved to wander through every room admiring both the view and the contents but knew their time was limited.
“How long has this house been in your husband’s family?”
“Since it was built. Jack’s great-grandfather came from banking money back East and wanted to make his mark in California. He was a haphazard rancher at best, from what I understand. By the time Jack and I married, much of the surrounding land had been sold off over the years, leaving just these two acres, the main house and a few run-down guesthouses.”
“I didn’t notice any run-down guesthouses.”
“We tore one down years ago because it couldn’t be saved and Nathaniel fixed up the other one after he came back home with Sophie. Basically he completely rebuilt it, saving only the bones. We had plenty of room for them here, of course, and he lived here when she was little. When she started school, he felt like it was important that the two of them have their own place. It’s a darling house. No more than a thousand square feet but he’s done a great job with it.”
Where was Sophie’s mother? She wanted to ask but didn’t want to be nosy. She was here to help clean out Whitaker House, not pry into the business of the inhabitants, no matter how intriguing she might find them.
“It’s nice that you know all this history about your husband’s family.”
“Oh, we can trace back generations. My late mother-in-law was obsessed with Whitaker genealogy. On my own side, I can’t keep track past the great-grandparents.”
Jess couldn’t trace her family even that far. She knew her father had been orphaned young and her mother had run away from home to marry him when she was seventeen. Neither had ever talked about their parents much.
Maybe Rachel knew more than she did. Her sister had always been interested in that sort of thing.
Eleanor opened a door at the end of the hall. “This was Nathaniel’s bedroom. Let’s leave this one for now, too, so he can go through it one more time himself. I think he’s taken most of the mementos he might have wanted. His surfboards, favorite books, that sort of thing. What’s left are things he probably doesn’t mind leaving behind.”
Jess stood inside the door, scanning the room to mentally catalog the work ahead of her. It smelled like him, an outdoorsy mix of soap and cedar. Which was completely irrelevant to anything.
“He’s a surfer?” she asked. There was a gorgeous framed photograph of a surfer on the wall across from the bed, the figure tiny as it made its way through a huge translucent green curl of water.
“Yes. That’s him in high school when he went to Hawaii with some friends. He never competed, only for fun, but he was good enough to be on the professional circuit, if you ask me. Of course, I’m his doting mother. What else am I going to say?”
Eleanor gave a rueful smile that Jess couldn’t help returning.
“In some parts of California, the schools have surf teams but Cape Sanctuary is too small for that and the surfing isn’t all that great. After high school, Nathaniel was torn between moving to Southern California to pursue professional surfing or joining the military after high school. The military won.”
She had suspected he was ex-military. It wasn’t any one thing she could pinpoint, more his general bearing.
Yet one more reason, if she needed it, to ignore her unfortunate attraction to the man. She had nothing against the military in general. She had given years of her life to the army, after all. In that time she had known mostly good, honorable men and women who worked hard to uphold the ideals of their particular branch of the military.
But she had also been sexually harassed more than once and had even physically fought off a sergeant who wouldn’t take no for an answer and thought his higher rank allowed him to touch whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. She had defended herself with a well-placed knee and an even better-placed warning that the asshole needed to keep his hands to himself around her and any other female recruits or she would personally make sure he received a dishonorable discharge.
She had spent too much of her life being an unwilling victim to her father’s emotional abuse and complete dominance in their family to tolerate male hegemony in any form.
“It’s probably for the best if we have, er, Nathaniel help us clean this out.”
Eleanor chuckled. “He won’t appreciate you calling him Nathaniel. No one does but me, now that his father’s gone. It’s been ‘Nate’ to just about everyone since he was in school.”
Jess forced a smile. “I’m the same way when people want to call me Jessica. It’s my name but Jessica ought to be wearing frilly dresses and have her hair perfectly curled. That’s never been me.”
“Isn’t it wonderful that our names do not always have to define us? Everyone called me Eleanor Roosevelt when I was a girl. I’ll admit, I might have become a bit more outspoken, with that sort of role model, but they were hard shoes to fill. Jack just called me Ellie.”
Her smile wobbled and Jess worried she might be on the brink of tears. She pretended to mark something on her checklist to give the other woman time to recover.
“All right,” she said. “We have ruled out the two rooms we’re not clearing out yet. While I am enjoying the tour and the history immensely, maybe you should point me in the direction of one we can start on.”
Eleanor’s laugh sounded shaky but no longer tearful. “You caught me. This is harder than I thought it would be. My whole life since I was twenty-five years old is wrapped up in this house. My husband’s entire life was wrapped up in it. Sifting through a legacy is hard. Now I understand why some people leave this until after they’re gone.”
“If you have changed your mind about doing this now, I completely understand. I have other jobs I can do. I’ll charge you my travel fees and for my time today and we can leave it at that.”
For an instant, Eleanor looked tempted by the offer but she finally shook her head. “That would be the coward’s way out. Eleanor Roosevelt was certainly not a coward and neither am I. No. This won’t be easy but I think I just have to push my way through the hard, don’t I? That is what life is all about.”
Oh, she liked Eleanor. The woman’s grace and dignity made it very tough to maintain a cool, impersonal business relationship. Jess wanted her as a friend.
“Come on,” Eleanor said. “I’ll show you the rest of the rooms, then we can decide where to begin.”
In the end, they both chose to start in one of the spare bedrooms on the south, lesser-used wing. That took most of the morning, during which they cleared away several boxes of old holiday decorations that hadn’t been used in years as well as various knickknacks from previous generations.
She carried some of the boxes down to her pickup truck, which left several more boxes and an old velvet rocker recliner in the room.
“I don’t want you to have to carry everything by yourself. Let me get Nathaniel to help you.”
“It’s my job, Eleanor.”
“But it’s all my old junk. I can call him. He might be busy but he can probably come later.”
“How about this? Now that this room is mostly cleared out, let’s use the space for a clearing house of sorts for this wing of the house. We can put the things going to a charity shop on one side and the things you might want to sell yourself at an estate auction on the other.”
“I don’t know about an estate auction. Unless you or your partner can run it for me, the whole thing seems like so much bother for a few hundred dollars.”
“From what I’ve seen, you might be looking at s
ubstantially more than that.”
“I wouldn’t mind being able to donate to Sophie’s college fund. Her grandfather would love that.”
“Good idea. You don’t have to decide that right now. We can sort through things and you can make up your mind later. If you decide it’s too much bother, we can donate everything to the charity shop.”
Eleanor sighed. “You’re trying to make this as painless as possible on me, aren’t you?”
“That’s the idea.” Jess smiled.
They broke for lunch shortly after that. Eleanor looked tired and said she needed to rest for a half hour before they started up again.
“Perfect. Would you like me to take Charlie for a walk?” Jess suggested.
“Oh, he would love that. His harness and leash are by the back door of the mudroom. Thank you, my dear. I only need a few minutes, then I should be right as rain.”
Jess quickly found the dog’s leash and a chest harness that took her a moment to figure out while the dog watched on with clear anticipation.
Finally they were ready and she headed with the little hybrid dog on a trail that wended through the trees along the rocky cliffs overlooking the Pacific.
The air was sweet with the scent of redwoods and pines, with a salty underlayer from the ocean.
She would never get anything done if she lived here, Jess thought. The scenery was just so beautiful, she wanted to sink onto a fallen log and just watch the waves.
“Should we go back?” she asked Charlie after a few moments. He gave her a quizzical look but trotted ahead of her back toward the house.
This was one of the downfalls of her itinerant life. She had always wanted a pet but didn’t think it was fair to leave one in a tiny trailer all day while she worked. Clients who had pets were her favorites because she could shower all her pent-up cuddles on them.
When she returned to the house, she found Eleanor back in the kitchen, looking much more energized.
“How was your walk?”
“Beautiful. I can’t get enough of your views here.”
“Aren’t I lucky?” Eleanor said with a smile.
The Path to Sunshine Cove Page 5