Eternally Yours (18 page)

He lasted five minutes.

His surveillance was irritating as hell, but I was determined not to let him get to me, not to run to River complaining about her meanie-mo brother. I sucked it up and went about my business.

As for Daniel, I saw that he was beginning to grate on even River’s nerves a bit. She and I were dusting in the front hall when he came out of River’s office, her carefully kept ledger in his hands.

“What on earth are you doing with that?” River asked.

Daniel squinted down at the book. “What’s this here?” he asked. “I can’t quite make it out.” River looked from him to the book, then said, “That was for a delivery of feed cake for the cows.”

Daniel frowned. “Why is it so much? Feed cake is surely cheaper than that, isn’t it?”

With an air of disbelief, River answered, “I order the organic feed from Peter Sorensen. It’s better.”

“Organic feed? For cows?”

River had practically smacked his hands away from the book, her face tight as only an older sister’s face could be.

Later that same afternoon I heard him ask Asher whether they had gotten three estimates for the broken windows, as he’d suggested, and whether it would be better to get a new, more efficient farm truck instead of repairing the one we had.

When I saw Asher more than an hour later, his face still looked pained.

And Joshua. At least this brother mostly kept to himself and didn’t talk much. He seemed to be there as an extra body in case of trouble, and besides giving me the occasional wary, suspicious eye, didn’t bug me much. I saw him around, repairing things, trimming tree branches, patching holes in the chicken-coop roof. Making himself useful. I wished Ottavio would also find a more worthy occupation than stalking me.

Fortunately, after about a week, River started putting
them on cooking teams, barn chores, etc., so that was fun, seeing ol’ Ott shoveling horse poop in inappropriate Italian sportswear. I wondered where the fourth brother was, and what was taking him so long to come here and be disapproving of me, but no one mentioned him and, God knows, I wasn’t about to ask.

Regardless, I made progress, even successfully scrying to find where the devil-chicken had been hiding her eggs lately. (Rather brilliantly, in the small lean-to housing one of the water heaters.) Chicken and eggs were now ensconced in an empty stall in the barn.

In my “spare” time, I started work on my shops in town.

Hiring a bulldozer and turning them into a parking lot was, I admit, a temptation, once I realized how much work I’d gotten myself into. But that would look bad.

River suggested I try going to the local unemployment office, to see if I could find help. So on a Friday afternoon I pulled open the glass door and was confronted with men and women who all looked as if the rug had been pulled out from under them. And I guessed it had.

“Uh, hey,” I said, and a few heads turned. “Um, anyone here know carpentry? Construction? Plumbing?” I thought for a second. “Probably roofing? Floors? Electrical stuff? Anyone know their way around a paintbrush?”

No one understood why my “dad” was letting me have a whole project for myself and why in the world he would give me a fat budget, but when it came down to having a paycheck
or not, they were happy to be hired by a crazy teenager who was offering decent wages.

Toward the end of February, I was having the construction process explained to me by Bill, a weather-beaten man probably in his mid-fifties who looked a lot older. He’d come with his own hard hat, which I thought was so cool.

“First you have to have a plan,” Bill said. “So you can tell people what they’ll need to do.”

“Plan, check,” I said. I guessed he was implying more of a plan than
Fix this up
.

“Then you take care of the roof, the foundation, the windows, and the outside walls.”

That made sense. “Okay.”

“Then you demo—take out all the broken stuff.” He squinted at me, looking a lot like the Marlboro Man in a hard hat. “Are you sure your dad knows what you’re doing?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding firmly. “This project will… teach me responsibility. And planning. Budgeting. And stuff.”

“And he’s in construction, but you don’t know any of this?”

“I was at school. And church camp. But you know, Bill, you seem to have a good grip on this. You should be the main guy and organize the other guys. Make them do things in order.”

Bill looked at me. “Like a general contractor?”

I seized this. “Yes. The general contractor.”

“General contractors get paid more.” He slapped his work gloves against his worn jeans, sending up a bit of dust.

“Okey-dokey.”

So Bill became the go-to guy, and I became the one who brought in Subway for lunch and kept a supply of Snickers bars and walked around nodding seriously, saying “Looks good.” I got into the pattern of doing study-type things in the morning and then showing up at the shops around noon. That day I had brownies. I figured, give them some sugar, they’ll work harder, right?

A tall woman with straight, corn-yellow hair was talking to Bill. They shook hands, and then he pointed at me. She came over, looking like someone out of a Wyeth painting.

“I’m Mary,” she said. “Subcontracting sheetrock and painting.” Her denim shirtsleeves were rolled up to her elbows, revealing hard forearms. Her white cargo pants were speckled with many colors of paint.

“Hi, Mary,” I said, shaking her hand.

Without smiling, she gestured with her head to another woman who was carrying in a four-by-eight-foot piece of drywall. “That’s Josie. She works with me.”

Josie turned around at the sound of her name, and I gave her a little wave, feeling like such a poser in my size-six work boots. She smiled at me, then headed back out for more supplies.

“Great. Thanks,” I said, and scuttled off.

I was hoping the whole thing would glide into a video montage set to fun music, where I’d see little cuts of activity and then go immediately to the “after” picture. There could
even be a short blooper reel, like when Harv put his elbow through a window and needed stitches. Of course he had no health insurance, so guess who got to pick up that tab?

But this, like every single other freaking thing in my life, had no fast-forward button. Instead it was day after day after day, and each day had a whoooole twenty-four hours in it.

There were some good things. I was seeing the shops slowly (I mean slowly) being restored, and that was kind of fun. Since I was downtown so much, I saw Meriwether, sometimes several times a week. That was really nice. She and Lowell were chugging along, and her dad was considering asking Mrs. Philpott to a movie, which made both of us squeal with disbelief and excitement.

I still hadn’t seen any sign of Dray, but practically the whole rest of the town was popping in to eyeball what we were doing. Dexter’s Ace Hardware, two blocks away, was injected with new life as Bill made me order tons of hardwarey stuff from them. I started getting most of our lunches from Pitson’s deli counter, and Julie Pitson, the owner’s daughter, began experimenting with recipes. She’d wanted to go to New York and be a chef but had fallen in love and gotten married at nineteen. So we guinea pigs were paying the price for her life choices.

“What is this?” I asked suspiciously, peeling back the white butcher paper. “Julie, I swear to God, if you put wasabi aioli on another tuna salad, the guys will riot, they really will.”

“You tell them to eat it and shut up,” she said. “That there
is Brie, watercress, and Granny Smith apple, touched by a bit of champagne Dijon.”

I looked at her.

“I’ll throw in some chips,” she muttered.

Then there was the mysteriously growing number of pay slips I found myself signing. I’d originally hired eight guys. Bill had subcontracted out the sheetrock and the plumbing, so that was five more people. Now, almost three weeks later, I had twenty-two people on the payroll.

“Bill!” I yelled. I had set up a card table and a folding chair for myself in one of the bay windows of the last shop on the right.

Bill came through from one of the back rooms.

“What is this?” I demanded, waving a pay slip. “Who the hell is Rusty?”

Bill looked around, then pointed to a short, red-haired teenager who was sweeping up drywall dust. Of which there was an abundance.

“I’m paying him to sweep?” I made my voice frosty. “You subcontracted the sweeping?”

“Well…” Bill took off his hard hat and brushed his sleeve against his forehead. Just then a heavyset woman with curly, fading auburn hair bustled through the street door.

Seeing Bill, she said, “Whew! Sorry to be a few minutes late. Got held up at church.”

Bill mumbled something, looking at the ceiling, anywhere but at me.

“Mama!” Rusty had heard her, and I saw immediately that he was what Russians used to call “angel-touched.” Down syndrome. Back in Dostoyevsky’s day, people believed that these children had a special innocence and a direct line to God, and they were treated accordingly.

Rusty’s mother beamed at me. “I can’t thank you and your father enough for this, sweetie. When Bill said Rusty could work here two hours in the afternoons—well, I can’t tell you what a difference it makes.” She lowered her voice. “He loves this job—he feels so important.”

“Hi, Mama,” said Rusty, and she kissed him.

“Hey, angel,” she said. “You ready to go?”

They headed out the door, and the woman turned around again and mouthed
Thank you
one more time.

I looked at Bill, who pulled his lips back from his teeth in an ingratiating grin, like a deerhound. Without saying anything else, I went back to my card table. After a moment, Bill headed off.

Dropping my head into my hands, I felt a wave of… discomfort sliding over me like a cloak. Discomfort tinged with anxiety. Formerly treated by an immediate and substantial influx of something mood-altering, preferably of the margarita persuasion. Four short months wasn’t enough to completely wipe out old habits, old ways of coping, and everything in me right now was screaming to jump up and find the nearest bar. Which I happened to know was a run-down pub called Salty’s, out on the service road by the highway.

And this was just me being emotionally incapable of dealing with life—I wasn’t even a legitimate alcoholic. It made it seem extra pathetic, somehow.

Around me were the sounds of change—sawing, hammering, people talking loudly. Inside me everything was changing, too. Suddenly I felt unmoored, unsure of who I was, what I was doing. For a frantic second I longed to be back where I was six months ago, even though I now understood that to be my all-time low. But it was a low I knew, could do, was intensely comfortable with—until I wasn’t comfortable with it anymore.

For the last four months, River and the other teachers had told me, over and over, to slow down and feel the feeling. Sit with the feeling until you know what it is. Thanks to their guidance, I could now accurately identify fear, panic, dismay, disgust, anxiety, anger, fury, and disdain. Figuring out why I felt any of those things was something else entirely.

My breathing was coming more shallowly. I wanted to tear out of there more than anything. I would kill for something that would make me not feel this. But why was I feeling it? What was going on?

“What’s going on?”

My head jerked up at the voice, startled, as if God herself had reached out and put her hand on my shoulder.

God? Not so much. It was Dray.

She’d come in through the street door and was standing
in front of my card table. I hadn’t seen her in months. She was wearing a short, inadequate jacket with tattered faux-fur hood fringe, and her hair was growing out its weird brown/green combo that made it look like she was trying to hide in a jungle.

“What?” I said.

She waved fingers with chipped black nail polish at all the activity. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”

“I bought these eyesores,” I said. “Now they’re fixing them up. Either that or I have to start charging the rats rent.”

Neither of us smiled.

“What are you gonna do with them?”

Her eyes were still caked with heavy eyeliner, but she’d chewed off her lip gloss, and her bare mouth made her look younger than a really old seventeen.

“What have you been doing?” I asked. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”

A familiar look of bored patience. “My mom sent me to my aunt’s for a little while, to help with the new baby.”

“Whose baby?”

“My aunt’s. Anyway, now I’m back. At my mom’s.”

“How was the baby?” I was surprised by an unconscious softening in Dray’s eyes.

“He was cute,” she said, sounding almost like a regular teenager. “Kind of a lump, you know? But then he started smiling. That was pretty cute.”

“And now you’re back.”

“Duh. So what are you gonna do with this place again?”

“I’m praying people will rent these shops. And there are four apartments upstairs. I want to rent those out, too. They’ll be all fixed up.”

Speculation came into her eyes. “How much are you gonna gouge for the apartments?”

“Not that much. They’re little. And on this street. In this town.”

Dray looked at me, and I wondered if she would try to rent one of the apartments, get away from her mom again. I knew one thing: Her loser boyfriend was not going to be welcome.

As we’d been talking, two men had stopped and looked through the glass, going to the other bay window and cupping their hands around their eyes to see better. Now one pointed to me, and then they came through the street door.

“Hello,” said one of the men. He was tall and slender with a pink-cheeked, well-groomed air. The Burberry coat didn’t hurt.

“Hi,” I said. Dray sidled away, meandering toward the back, maybe to see the apartments. They were all open right now, with people going in and out. With a twinge I prayed she wasn’t going to nick anyone’s tools.

“Is the owner around? We looked for an agent’s number,” the man said. “We’re hoping to rent the shop on the end.” He pointed down the street, meaning the shop at the opposite end of this one.

“That would be great,” I said, not believing it could be this easy. “What would you do with it?”