The One That Got Away (6 page)

After I leave Noah a groveling voice mail, the next person I have to call is my stepfather, John. I remember trying to explain my family situation to Anne-Marie, Noah's mother, not long after he and I had started dating: she kept trying to understand it in relation to her own Martha Stewart existence, where everything has a neatly printed little label that makes simple, logical sense.

“So your stepfather was your mother's second husband, is that right?”

“Well, no,” I said. “My mother never married my father, and he's not a part of my life at all. She never married John, either, for that matter.”

Her face took on an expression of understanding pity. “I see. Did John not want to be”—she lowered her voice—“legally responsible for you?” In her mind, southwest Virginia was the kind of place where men shirked their family duties in favor of whiskey drinkin', and unwed mothers maintained a booming cottage industry of unwanted welfare babies.

“Oh no, he did,” I said. “He asked her to marry him at least once a month. She was convinced it would ruin their relationship.”

The thought of a single mother rejecting a marriage proposal was plainly a stumper for Anne-Marie. “So he essentially
was
your father…”

I shook my head again. I knew it was pointless to try to make her grasp the nuances, but for some reason I wasn't willing to let her jam my stubborn square-peg childhood into one of her tidy round holes. “John didn't come into our lives until I was nine, and it took another year before my mom let him move in with us. I love him dearly, but he's not quite the same as a father.”

John thinks of me as a daughter, though, I know. He and I are closer than he is with his own daughter, Janet, who's twelve years older. Which is probably because I am almost exactly like him.

The only thing John has ever loved as much as he loved my mother was building things. I'm convinced that, if he'd ever gone to college, he could have become one of the leading engineers of his generation, putting his brilliant mechanical mind to use developing wind energy or designing spaceship wings. He says he never had the money to go to school, and while I know that's true, I don't think it would have stopped him if he had actually wanted to go; the only thing he truly lacked was ambition. He loved those wild, rolling green hills too much ever to want to leave. So he builds things close to home; which, in Floyd County, means fixing things as much as anything else. Tractors, retaining walls, split-rail fences. The 120-year-old farmhouse my great-great-grandfather built, which was about to fall down around my mother's and my ears by the time we met John.

He rebuilt that house from the inside out, with me trailing behind him at every step. Watching as he reconstructed the decorative wood trim on our front porch from scratch, using the one remaining fragment of it as a model. Crawling behind him into the attic while he repaired the roof beams there. From him I learned how to check level and plumb, how to repair old plaster with a flawless skim coat, how to strip a hundred years of clotted paint off a piece of molding until you get down to the pure, smooth form beneath.

To this day contractors are astonished at the depth of my knowledge about construction; they don't expect it from architects in general and they
certainly
don't expect it from a woman. John cackles with delight every time I tell him one of these stories; as uninterested as he was in advancing his own career, he could not be a more enthusiastic cheerleader for my own accomplishments. He is going to be beside himself when he hears about the project for Eamon.

“Hello?” he rumbles when he picks up the phone. John is perhaps the only person left alive who still relies on a rotary landline
phone for his communication needs. I got him set up with a cell several years ago, but he always forgets to turn it on or else leaves it at home entirely.

“Hi, John,” I say. My smile illuminates my voice like a lightbulb.

“Ree-Ree!” he bellows. He and Danny are the only people on earth allowed to call me that. “What's going on, girl?”

I tell him my news, not sparing any detail. Of course, he wants to know everything about the house, so I describe it to him as best I can, with promises to send my site photos later. I know he will pore over the photos, patiently waiting for them to load on his gerbil-powered dial-up connection. He will also Google Eamon, and call me back tomorrow to share his most interesting findings. John hates email but, having spent his entire life in a county of less than fifteen thousand people, is fascinated by the Internet's ability to offer up an unimaginable wealth of information about millions of total strangers. And Eamon, while not a celebrity, has been publicly documented long enough that there is a lot of content related to him: articles on swimming websites and blogs, old Olympics coverage, and a couple of breathless but infrequently updated fan sites authored by teenage girls. I know;
I've
Googled him.

“Well, I am just so proud of you, little bear,” John says when I have answered every single question. His rich Virginia accent always gives me a wave of nostalgia for my home, and as if he can read my thoughts, he asks, “So when are you going to come home and visit?”

“Oh, not till Christmas, I don't think.” I give him the same answer every time. I've relied on the same system since my mother died: John visits me for my birthday in February and again in the summer, and then I spend Christmas with him and my stepsister Janet's family at her home in Harrisonburg, a safe two-and-a-half-hour drive from Floyd. The only time I have to visit my hometown
is for the annual Christmas Eve performance he does with his bluegrass band. “But you're still coming out for July Fourth, right?”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “So what's going on with Mr. Harlow these days?” As always, he says Noah's name in a tone of broad solemnity. Ever since Noah ignored John's instruction to call him by his first name instead of Mr. Kurzweil, John has insisted on referring to Noah by his own last name. Even though Noah has long since come around to calling him John, it just tickles my stepdad to torture his future son-in-law. When I tell him about the glacier, he insists that Noah forward all of his photos so he can see the wall of blue ice.

“He's going to take me to see it on my next trip down there,” I explain.

“Just as long as you two are careful!”

“Yes, John, we will be.”

He snorts. “Kid, you sound like a bratty teenager again.
Yes, John. Stop worrying, John
.”

“ ‘Again'? When was I ever a bratty teenager?”

I was teasing, but his voice is soaked with sadness when he answers. “Ah, you weren't. You never got a chance to be, what with your mama and all. Too busy worrying about her to be shitty to us like a normal kid.”

“Yeah, well, I don't think you missed much,” I say, forcing a smile back into my voice.

I hear the soft gravelly sound of his chuckle. “No, I don't suppose we did.”

When we hang up, it's after ten. Now that I've actually locked down Eamon's project, I'm exhausted just thinking about the amount of work it's going to be. Starting bright and early tomorrow: I had planned to spend the day working on layouts for the new expansion of the spa I finished last year, but instead I'm going to need to go back to Eamon's house to take a full set of site
measurements. I have weeks of drafting his drawings ahead of me, and then, once construction starts, I'll be spending hours each week visiting the site, sourcing fixtures and finishes, designing the millwork, then, eventually, sourcing the furniture—I'm going to be working nonstop for the next nine months.

My elation over landing the job seesaws into anxiety as I realize that visiting Noah this summer is going to be almost impossible. Between now and August, I'm going to be too busy to breathe, and that is exactly the time we'd discussed that I would go back to Argentina—once in May, and once in July. And while Balm, the spa project, isn't scheduled to start demo on their new space until later in the summer, I know I'm not going to feel comfortable walking away from Eamon's job for two whole weeks right while we're in the first push of construction.

I blow a long breath out through my lips, and nudge my chair backward till I can rest my cheek on my desk. It was a gift from Noah, this desk—he noticed me drooling over it at a vintage furniture store on South Congress, and then when I came home from a business trip a few weeks later, there it was in the middle of my office, in all its Danish teak glory. I stroke my fingers across the cool, smooth wood, wishing it were the face of the person who gave it to me.

My eyes clench against the thought of how disappointed he will be if I have to miss one of my visits. This is
way
worse than the time I booked a conference on our anniversary weekend. But unless I can convince him to come up here instead, I just don't see how I can help it. He'll understand, eventually. After all, his job is the whole reason we're separated at all right now. We will get through this. But all of a sudden, the bubbling excitement I'd felt about Eamon's job has evaporated. Instead, I just feel like I swallowed a shovelful of broken gravel.

Monday, April 2, would have been my mother's fifty-third birthday. As it happened, she died ten days after her forty-third, but I made a conscious decision at the time never to commemorate the anniversary of her death. Every April 12, when the redbud blossoms hang like pink mist in the gray woods around the old farmhouse, John calls me, voice shaking with memories. But I'd far rather celebrate her birth instead. I have a ritual: I take the day off work and head to the plant nursery to pick out flats and flats of petunias, her favorite flowers. They come in every color you could dream of between blackberry purple and angel-wing white, but my mother loved the deep magenta ones best. She grew them everywhere she could find room: in our already crowded flower beds, in splintery whiskey barrel planters on our tiny porch, in the old plank boxes that listed from our windowsills.

I think Danny was surprised, the first time I celebrated my mother's birthday after I moved in with him. Not, obviously, that I marked the day, but that there wasn't a visible outpouring of emotion. As if her birthday were the Valentine's Day of bereavement—the one day a year when you're obligated to make a really big deal out of something you take for granted the rest of the time.

She died toward the end of my junior year of college, and after her funeral I went back to school immediately, to finish up the semester. My friends were convinced I was on the verge of a meltdown; I remember their quietly watchful faces, waiting for an explosion of grief that never came. Nicole sat me down on our lumpy green futon one evening, with the kind of well-meaning arrogance that only a twenty-one-year-old could muster, to tell me she was worried that I wasn't “letting my pain out.” As if it was an infection that would heal up all tidy and new once the pus was released.

Instead, it's like groundwater. Pooling underneath my skin, seeping to the surface here and there, now and then. Endlessly replenished. Easy to forget about, until it startles me with the depth of it. The usual suspects—cancer movies, weddings. And then there are the times it catches me completely off guard, like once, when I fished a mat of long, golden-brown hair out of my shower drain and suddenly remembered her, trying to make a joke of her baldness, defiant in a hot-pink bobbed wig at my high school graduation. But her birthday is never one of those times; it's a day I enjoy, just keeping her quietly in the back of my mind, thinking of how much she would have loved the petunias, and the spring sunshine. Drinking them in, for her.

Gardening is as close as I get to meditation. Instead of chanting, I have the texture of the earth in my hands, the varied colors and textures of the plants, the rich smell of mulch. The solitude and simple repetition allow my knotted mind to uncoil like nothing else. After several hours working in the front yard, laying each plant into place, then patting the soil down over its roots and giving it a welcoming soak, I feel more relaxed than I have in weeks.

I've been spending eleven hours a day in front of my computer
drafting the drawings for Eamon's renovation, but they're finally finished and ready for his review at our meeting tomorrow. It scared the crap out of me to move so far along in the design process without multiple intervening drawing reviews with the client, but he's approved most of the ideas I've put in front of him since the very first day, and his response to almost every question I've asked him so far has been some variation on “I like it, I trust you, just keep on drawing.” We've been in constant communication over email while he got ready to move from Berkeley. But as of yesterday, he is officially back in Austin; he found a cute little bungalow to rent in Travis Heights, and, if I know Eamon, he is already completely unpacked.

At first it felt a little strange, having him back in my life such a long time after I'd accepted that he never would be. Especially because he's not just hovering around the periphery, he is front and center. But after the first shock of seeing his name in my inbox wore off, his current context as my client quickly submerged his previous one. I haven't forgotten, of course, but now it's more of an asterisk at the bottom of our working relationship instead of a boldface headline. Neither of us has mentioned or even alluded to our history, and that's the way I'm planning to keep it.

And meanwhile, I am giving him one hell of a house. It's about four thousand square feet laid out over a single level, divided between the four bedrooms on the southern side of the building and the living-entertaining spaces on the northern side. And, of course, the covered terrace with its own outdoor fireplace, built-in grill, and surround-sound speakers. I have already notified him that he has to invite me to a party or two once construction is finished, so I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I still haven't talked to Noah about visiting, though. The May trip I can manage; the July one I cannot. I've been working and reworking my outline for the construction schedule, trying to figure
out a good week to go to Argentina, but nothing is budging. Especially because Eamon himself is going to be gone for most of the summer, covering the elite swim meets leading up to the world championships in Dubai at the end of August. If he and I are both out of town at the same time, the construction crew will spend the week playing bocce on his lawn. Though I'm nauseous at the thought of not seeing Noah between May and September, I just don't see how I can do it.

I'm almost finished with the plants when a shadow falls across me. I look up to find Eamon himself smiling down at me—thanks to my iPod, I never even heard him arrive. I yank the earbuds out of my ears and shoot to my feet, face flooding with heat; I'm dressed in a ratty tank top and running shorts, sticky with sweat and dirt. My hair looks like a feather duster. And meanwhile, it becomes immediately obvious that working with him in person is going to be challenging until I develop some antibodies to him. Today he's wearing faded jeans and a fitted plaid shirt in a shade of deep blue that emphasizes his smooth olive skin.
How in the hell does someone with as Irish a name as Eamon wind up with skin like that?
I think wildly. And what the hell is he doing here?

“Hi,” I squeak, like a cartoon chipmunk. I take a breath to settle my voice into its usual range. “Sorry I'm such a disaster; I wasn't expecting you today!”

“But we said we were meeting today, didn't we? At one?”

I shake my head slowly. “No, that was tomorrow.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I wouldn't have scheduled a meeting for today. I was taking the day off.”

“Damn. I don't know how I got that mixed up. I'm sorry. Let's try this again…. I'll see you tomorrow,” he laughs, jerking a thumb toward his car as he walks backward down the driveway.

“No, don't worry about it,” I call after him. “I have everything
ready, so we might as well go over it. No sense in making you come back again.”

“No, I interrupted your day off,” he says. “I feel terrible.”

I wipe my grimy hands on my shorts. “Seriously, Eamon, it's not a big deal. If you don't mind waiting for me to shower, let's just go over it now. Come on inside.”

Newman trots out to greet me as soon as we step into the cool darkness of the house, twining himself around my ankles and wailing in a way that suggests he has not been fed in the last six months. “Hi, puddin',” I croon, picking him up, but he struggles until I set him on the counter, where he regards me with accusing yellow eyes. “I understand,” I say, continuing our one-sided dialogue while I fish out a can of cat food and a bowl. “You're just a half-starved little creature, aren't you?”

Eamon watches from one of the stools, an amused smile tugging up one corner of his mouth. When Newman has eaten his fill, he stalks across the counter and plants himself in front of Eamon, who obligingly scratches him behind the ears.

“I'll leave you two to your bromance while I hit the shower,” I say.

When I return, clean and presentable, I spread the drawings on the dining room table and systematically walk Eamon through them. The way the house exists now, what we're tearing down, what we're adding. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC. He wants to know what every single one of the symbols means. I explain to him that he doesn't need to, that, as long as he understands the concepts, the drawings themselves are only going to be useful for the contractors; but he ignores me, scowling with concentration. By the time we're finished reviewing everything, he has only minor changes—I'll be able to get the drawing set submitted for approval within a few days.

Eamon asks what contractors I'm planning to have bid the job, so I give him the rundown on the companies I have in mind.
Two are big outfits, highly efficient and highly organized, and they charge accordingly. The third is my personal favorite, Platinum Construction.

“The GC is Joe Martinez. Joe's one of the most skilled craftsmen I've ever worked with. He's fantastic at problem solving, his eye for details is flawless, and he takes a personal interest in making sure everything is done the way it's supposed to be.”

“But?”

“But,” I acknowledge. “He's disorganized. The other guys will have the entire job planned and budgeted and scheduled to the hilt, and they will deliver it on time or, at worst, ninety-five percent complete. Joe, on the other hand, will take thirty percent longer than he tells us—though as long as we plan for that, we should be all right. And the quality of work you get for what he charges is frankly absurd.”

He taps his lips, considering. “So you'd prefer to work with Joe.”

“We'll get bids from all of them, but yes, if I had my way, I'd choose Joe. I think he'll do the best job, for the least amount of money; and he knows what I expect from him. Plus I just like the guy, and I enjoy working with him.”

“And he's the only one of the three who never puts up attitude at taking orders from a woman.”

“Yeah,” I say, surprised at his perceptiveness. “He is.”

He stretches back in his chair and folds his arms behind his head. I try not to stare at the sliver of golden skin that appears between his shirt and jeans. “It's Joe's job, then.”

“We should still have the other guys bid, though.”

“No reason to waste their time,” he says with a shrug. “I trust you. If you think he'll do the best job then he's in. Obviously don't
tell
him until he gets the bid in, but I'd just as soon simplify the whole thing.”

“Wow. That was unexpectedly painless,” I say candidly.

Wry amusement flickers across his face. “Can't promise I'll always be.”

“I believe you,” I say.

After he leaves, it's time for the second half of my mother's birthday celebration: ice cream and daytime television. Nutritionally and intellectually bankrupt, respectively. They were her guilty pleasures. I am two-thirds of the way through a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch when Noah calls.

“Hey, sweetie!” I say, struggling to mentally extricate myself from the twisted coils of a stepbrother-stepsister romance on
The Young and the Restless
. “What are you doing calling me so early? I thought you'd be chained to your desk for another few hours, at least.”

“Oh, I'm not out of work. I was just thinking about you and wanted to say hello.”

Warmth spills through me—he remembered. Last year he asked me to save some of the petunias so he could help me plant them when he got through with work. “Ah, honey, thank you for remembering about today,” I say. “It's been a good day. Eamon came by to go over house stuff, which wasn't supposed to happen till tomorrow, but we got a lot done so it was just as well.”

There is a long, deep silence. “Wait, don't kill me but…what should I have remembered about today?”

Oh
. “It's my mom's birthday.”

“Oh, of course. Kitten, I'm sorry. I was just thinking about you 'cause I missed you, but now I'm extra glad I called. Are you…okay?”

I sigh. Should I be prostrate in bed cursing the heavens and drenching my pillow with tears? “Yeah. I'm fine. I'm just thinking about her a lot today.”

“Ah.” He pauses, uncertain of what to say next. It is a familiar hesitation: steer clear of the dark and bottomless lake, or dip in a cautious toe? He elects to stay dry. “So it sounds like work is going well?”

“It's going at warp speed,” I tell him. “I'm getting stressed out by this pace, and we've barely even started. I've been cranking on the expansion for Balm, too. And Jamie, the owner, keeps hinting that she's going to have some exciting news soon, which sounds like a new project.” I hesitate, dreading what I have to say next. “The worst thing is, this schedule means I'm not going to be able to visit this summer like we had talked about.”

There is a long silence on the other end of the phone. “What do you mean? Not at all?”

“I'm still coming next month,” I say quickly. “But the next few months after that are going to be insanity, and I'm too freaked out to drop everything and fly halfway around the world for a week.”

“You're saying we wouldn't see each other for four months? That's insane.”

“I know. But this is too important to me. To my future.”

“To yours. Okay. But what about
our
future, Sarina?” The hurt in his voice gnaws at me, just like I knew it would.

“I know, babe, and I hate it. I've thought it over a hundred times, but I just can't see a way to do it. There's going to be too much going on.”

“I get that,” he says sharply. “But what I don't get is why you won't hire an assistant. Seems like that would solve the entire problem.”

We've had this conversation before. Many times. “I want to, once things get under way. But I'll have to see how it goes. It's a lot of money to hire somebody, even an intern—and no, I am not going to ask somebody to work for me for free.”