A Place to Call Home (35 page)

SULLIVAN ROAD
, the sign told all.

“He’s official now,” I said.

He put up a gate. I put him on the map.

The small gold box was delivered by Roan’s foreman, a burly, middle-aged man who put a hand over his heart as he stood under the yard oaks gazing from the house to me, Mama, and Renfrew on the veranda. “I don’t know which is lovelier,” he announced with unexpected courtliness. “You ladies or the workmanship on this place. Mr. Sullivan should have warned me.”

I leaned on a cane I’d borrowed from Grandma Dottie.
Roan hired a bullshit artist, I thought, chewing my tongue. “Have you worked for Mr. Sullivan before?” I asked.

“Here and there over the years.”

“What kind of projects?”

“Oh, this and that.”

“I see. Here and there. This and that. No ifs, ands, or buts. You’re a discreet man.”

He smiled. “I’m a well-paid man, and I like working for Roan Sullivan, and I’ve already heard that you used to be a newspaper reporter, so I suspect you’re trying to charm all sorts of information out of me.”

“I’m rusty. I’ll have to be more devious.”

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Sullivan for any details you want.”

Mama nodded shrewdly. “Mr. Sullivan,” she mused.

“The boss man,” Renfrew intoned.

They refused to budge while I frowned deeply and opened the gift package.

Inside a long, slender jewelry case was a delicate gold chain and a small, filigreed shamrock pendant dotted with shimmering stones. A shamrock to replace the cheap dime-store original. My breath caught in my throat.

“Good God Almighty,” Renfrew murmured. “Those rocks ain’t made of glass.”

“They’re emeralds,” Mama said with troubled wonder. “And diamonds.” Roan was trying to rebuild, erase, or upgrade everything about our past.

“Would you like for me to take a reply back to Mr. Sullivan?” the man asked.

I hesitated. Mama looked at me firmly. “I didn’t raise you to run off without a backward glance the way I did with your daddy, or for that matter the way your Grandmother Elizabeth did when she met your Grandpa Patrick in London during World War One. But then it can’t be denied that you come from two generations of women who couldn’t resist a dare. The dare turned out fine for your grandparents, and it turned out fine for me and your daddy.
So if you go over to Ten Jumps and Roan gets you off balance, just
promise me
you’ll eventually come back home and make him come home, too.”

I felt as if Mama and I had finally come home ourselves, back to the trust we’d had between us when I was a child. I nodded. “I promise.” Then I turned toward the mercurial-looking foreman. “Tell Mr. Sullivan,” I said as calmly as I could, “that I’ll be over to see him in the morning at first light and I intend to trade this necklace for the letters he owes me.”

“Well, will wonders never cease.” Renfrew sighed.

Mama hugged me.

I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath for years.

W
hat he and his crew had done to Ten Jumps in less than two weeks would become the stuff of local legend.

He’d built a dirt landing strip for his Cessna. The small plane sat there with the cocky assurance of one of the large dragonflies that perched on ferns at the lake’s edge.

He had rebuilt the old cabin—a new roof, a new porch, doors, windows, wiring, plumbing; he’d added a handsome kitchen at the back and a low, large deck that stair-stepped down the slope toward the lake, narrowing to a stone walkway that led to a gazebo under the water oaks.

When I arrived in the pinkish light of early morning, I was dressed for a construction site, not a handsome scene that could have served as background for the L. L. Bean catalog. I eased from one of the farm trucks in my jeans and T-shirt and hiking boots and was confronted with an elegant little Eden filled with men who were installing squares of sodded grass along smoothly graded earth, where the blackberry thicket had been.

“It’s perfect,” I whispered, just before Roan reached the truck, cupped his hands under my elbows, and gave me a quick, hard kiss on the mouth. “It is now,” he corrected.

The kiss happened so fast—the feel of him imprinted on my lips; I was dizzy and the breath went out of me. A dozen men were gazing avidly at us with chunks of grassy earth in their hands.

I cocked my head in the direction of the cane I leaned on. “Borrowed it from Grandma. No more crutches.”

“And no more excuses?” Roan asked quietly.

“Who’s dodging reality? Me or you?”

He arched a brow, then slid his arm through mine as cozily as an old pal set for a stroll, except for the fact that his arm was warm and hard and covered in rolled-up blue cotton sleeve and that he brushed his forearm, deliberately, I thought, along the side of my breast. “Let’s both ignore reality a while,” he countered with a fine, casual smile, and he was as handsome as I’d ever imagined him and I felt soft inside and scared.

He’d taught himself so many sugaring lessons over twenty years. He knew exactly what he was doing.

“They’re finishing up this morning,” he said about the crew, as if the project had been no problem at all. “They’ll be leaving by noon. I’ve got the cabin completely furnished inside, too.” He paused. “Would you like to take a tour inside?”

“No,” I replied. Nearly barked it at him. “No, thanks,” I added in a more normal voice. “Maybe later.”

We sat in the gazebo at a picnic table covered in linen and decorated with a silver vase filled with red roses. A boom box broadcast Mozart from atop a stack of lumber on a flatbed trailer.

“From this angle,” Roan said, “you don’t even notice the cabin has an addition on the back.”

“Grandpa would be glad you bought the place.”

“Are you glad?” Roan asked.

I looked at him for a few seconds. “You know I am,” I said finally.

“I wish you’d worn the necklace.”

“I did.” I pulled it from under the neck of my T-shirt. It was the old one, the color in the pendant worn thin and brassy.

Roan studied me with narrowed eyes. “I want you to wear the new one.”

“I want the letters you wrote me. They’re mine.”

He nodded and gestured calmly toward the cabin. “I told you all you had to do was come here and get them. But I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until the crew’s gone. The letters are private.”

We traded polite, stilted nods of agreement. It was an excruciating deal.

Roan introduced each man in the crew to me. Wolfgang, the middle-aged foreman who’d delivered the necklace, bowed to me. He wasn’t actually a foreman; he was an independent contractor; the crew were his employees.

Roan said Wolfgang had taken up contracting to support a wife and five children, but before that he’d been a disc jockey at a small radio station that broadcast classical music; Mozart was his favorite. He owned the boom box, and the crew made a running joke of hiding his Mozart tapes and replacing them with Snoop Doggy Dog and Hank Williams.

There was so much familiarity and affection in these descriptions, so many people and events in Roan’s history I hadn’t shared, and the same was true for what he knew about me. “I thought you bought and sold land,” I said. “What do you need a building contractor for?”

“I started by buying tract houses in poor neighborhoods. I bought one, made all the repairs myself, sold it for a profit, bought two more. Renovate, resell. Buy more. Wolfgang handles the renovations for me now. It’s a sideline.”

“You do it just for the money? I don’t think so.”

“Money and satisfaction,” he said, shrugging.

“Tell me more about your business. And tell me how you ended up on the West Coast.”

He turned his chair to face mine. I clasped my hands between my knees, shoulders folded in, compressed and tight. I was creating a narrow focus for absorbing information. “I find land in opportune places,” he said carefully. “Potential for commercial, industrial growth. I study zonings
and planning prospectives; I read local newspapers, research the market trends.” He paused. “I slip in and buy land before it’s worth much, hold on to it, then sell when it’s worth a lot more.”

“Buy low, sell high. Take what nobody suspects is worth having, prove it’s special.”

“It’s all about looking closer than other people will and looking farther. I learned that from you.”

The mood was tender, electric, and strangely serene between us. But because there was no easier way to do it, I asked quietly, “Are you married?”

“Good God. No.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Because you could think I wouldn’t tell you if I was married.”

“Why aren’t you married? You’ve never been married?”

“Never,” he said slowly, searching my face. “Why aren’t you married?”

“I’ve been around. I just never cared enough.”

“Same here.”

“There’s a lot you still haven’t told me.”

He reached beneath the table, retrieved a manila folder, and handed it to me. I opened it and skimmed more documents. Properties he owned on the West Coast. There was a business address under the name Racavan, Inc. I shut the folder and laid it aside. “You still think this is what I’m most interested in? How much money you have?”

“I just wanted you to know that part first.”

“You mean you wanted the family to know.”

“All right. I wanted them to know.” He filled two crystal glasses from a bottle of champagne he’d set to chill in a bucket crusted with dried concrete. “My serving style isn’t fancy,” he said with a droll curl in the words, “but the champagne is one of the best.” He handed me a glass and then clicked his to mine. Holding his glass against a ray of morning sunshine and studying the sparkle of crystal and
liquid, he added simply, “I don’t drink very often, and when I do it’s for quality, not quantity.”

He’s hard on himself because of Big Roan’s drinking, I thought. I started to say so, and from the look on his face he wished for the right words, too, but finally we settled for the ritual tap of fragile glass against glass again. I cleared my throat. “I haven’t had a drink since before, well, before that night—”

“The night of the accident. Just say it. Get past it.”

“It was no accident. I don’t know what to call it.”

“It was as much an accident as everything else life throws at people.” Roan leaned toward me intently. “The only part of my life that feels like destiny, not just plain dumb accident, is
you
.”

I bent my head. I didn’t want to cry in front of him for some reason. I didn’t want to be that vulnerable yet. “Go ahead and indulge,” he whispered. “You’re safe with me.”

Safety had nothing to do with us. Desperate togetherness, tense kindness, something darkly sexual and politely remote, twenty years of space between childhood and adulthood, squeezed together like a time warp.

I drew back, swallowed my champagne, and stared blindly at the pods of several portable construction toilets nearby. One was set off by itself behind a sweetgum shrub and bore a hand-lettered sign that said
LADY ONLY
. “Thank you for hiding my personal outhouse behind a shrub. You’ve got indoor toilets by now, I guess.”

“I wanted to be ready if you visited sooner. I didn’t want you to feel like you were on display.”

“I was hoping to avoid that, for both our sakes.”

“We can’t. I knew that when I came back.”

Jenny Sullivan gave her son a face that escaped godawful comparison with his father’s blunt, fleshy features. Big Roan gave him the height, the thick shoulders and heavy chest and dark hair, but Jenny gave him the large gray eyes and handsome mouth. And he had made himself into a man, with all that implied. “You look untouchable,
but I know better,” I said. “And I want to touch you, but I don’t want to hurt you.”

“That’s how I feel about you.”

I sat there, blinking helplessly. We were both desperate to get beyond these cautious formalities, but we didn’t know how yet. “What does Racavan stand for?” I asked.

He took a pen from a dusty breast pocket of his workshirt, pulled the folder between us on the table, and wrote
Rathcabhain
. “Irish,” he said somberly. “I’m … sentimental. Like Maloneys and Delaneys. I boiled the words down to Racavan.”

“
Rath
. Fortress.” I squinted, struggling to translate the second term.

“Hollow,” he said. “The fortress of the hollow.”

The crew left just before noon; I’d watched them come to him with questions or suggestions and he had the easy confidence of a man who was accustomed to being called “sir,” though none of the crew were that formal with him.

“You need lunch,” Roan said when we were alone, and before I could say,
I want to read the letters now
, he bounded to his feet and left me sitting in the gazebo while he disappeared into the cabin. A few minutes later he carried a wicker hamper back and set out white china plates, heavy silverware, white napkins, and tall etched glasses that he filled with ice from a small insulated container. And then he produced ceramic bowls and as neatly as a schooled waiter dished out boiled shrimp and colorful salads and croissants. He finished with a flourish, pouring cold white wine from a tall bottle.