Finding Home (15 page)

“Wow,
Mom. You weren't kidding when you said you wanted to remodel,” Julie said appreciatively, only remembering at the last second to lower her voice as she took her mother aside to the living room. Initially, her reason for stopping by was to touch base and to hopefully catch her father before he left for the hospital. Although she hated doing it, she needed to ask him for money. She called it a loan against the day she could pay her parents back the cost of her education. She'd miscalculated again. The books for her courses had cost more than she'd allotted on her budget and her cash flow was down to zero.

Less than zero if she counted the money she'd borrowed lately from several equally impoverished medical students.

Because studying made daily commuting next to impossible, she lived with a couple of roommates just off the UCI medical school campus. Pulling up to the curb, she saw that the garage was open and her father's stately Mercedes sedan missing.

She had no time to lament the bad timing or the minor traffic jam she'd been in that had caused it. Her eyes had been taken hostage by the sight of the stud making his way up the front walk. He carried a two-by-four over his shoulder as if it was made out of cardboard. His muscles looked like boulders. Sculpted boulders.

Julie lost no time getting out of the car and in through the open door, right behind him. Her attention entirely focused on the stranger she followed, she almost walked right into her mother.

Stopping just in time, Julie caught hold of her mother's arm. It took effort to look at her and not the man disappearing around the corner. “Who
is
that?” she asked.

More important questions presented themselves to Stacey. The semester was in session. Julie was one of the most conscientious students she knew. For her to be here, something had to be wrong.

“Julie, what are you doing here?” She quickly scrutinized her daughter's face. Was that the new lighting, or was her daughter's complexion flushed? “Is everything all right?” She refrained from putting either her hand or her lips to Julie's forehead, knowing that the girl hated that. Hated to be fussed over almost as much as Jim did. “You're not sick, are you?”

The question brought Julie around for a moment. Questions about the handsome stranger were temporarily placed on hold.

“No, but my wallet is.” Even the flippant reference had her flushing a little. “I was hoping to catch Dad before he left.”

“You just missed him. These days, your father likes to leave the house before the workers get here.” Stacey walked over to the hall closet where she usually hung up her purse on the hook right inside the door. Taking it out, she opened her purse and looked at Julie. “How much do you need?”

Julie caught her lower lip between her teeth. The older she was, the more awkward she felt about asking. “A hundred should do.”

Stacey took out her checkbook and held it aloft, tucking her purse under her arm. “Check?”

“Cash?” Julie countered hopefully.

Returning the navy-blue checkbook back into the zippered compartment of her purse, Stacey began to rummage through the rest of it. She found her wallet quickly enough, but not the amount Julie needed. Stray bills turned out to be three singles, nothing more.

She looked up, shaking her head. “I'm sorry, Julie, all I have is a twenty.” She tried again. “If you need a hundred dollars, I can write you a check.”

“Thanks, Mom, but I really need to have it in cash,” Julie told her. “I owe the money to a couple of my roommates and this guy I work with in the research lab.”

They had a standing policy about borrowing that was summed up in a single word:
Don't.
But there was no need to belabor that point. “Julie, you should have told me you were short at lunch last week.”

A fleeting, contrite smile fluttered over Julie's lips. “I don't like to seem as if I can't handle money, it's just that…”

Stacey nodded, not wanting to make Julie feel guilty. They'd all been there. She could remember the pinch created by lack of funds all too well.

“If you really need the cash, I can make a quick trip to the ATM,” she offered, slinging her purse over her shoulder.

“You could write the check out to me.”

Both women turned to see that Alex had reentered the room and was walking toward them.

“I might have enough cash on me.” He nodded at Julie, but she could see that he was actually talking to her mother.
And that the quick, lethal grin was aimed at her mother as well. “I couldn't help overhearing—all but the amount.”

As he spoke, Alex took out his wallet. The worn, cracked leather had more than a healthy bulge. Maybe it was a guy thing, Stacey thought. Brad liked handling cash instead of using credit cards or even checks. And his wallet looked just as beaten up.

Stacey glanced at Julie, leaving it up to her to raise the amount if she needed to. “A hundred.”

Julie nodded in response.

He counted out five twenties. “A hundred it is.” Finished, he folded the bills and placed them into her hand.

Stacey felt slightly flustered, but banked it down, telling herself that she imagined his fingers lightly passing over the palm of her hand. She came to as Alex started to walk away. “Wait, let me write out the check for you—”

“No hurry,” he told her easily. “I know you're good for it.” Crossing the threshold to get another tool from his truck, he paused to look at her over his shoulder. “Besides, I know where you live.” A wink punctuated the end of his statement.

Stacey banked down another flutter, this one a little more insistent and intense than the one before it. Turning toward her daughter, she said, “Here,” and pressed the bills into Julie's hand.

Julie still watched Alex walk down the driveway. And appreciated the way the man's jeans adhered to his anatomy. It took her a second to catch her breath. “Wow.” She placed her hand to her chest as she turned to look at her mother. “Is he ever hot.”

“Really?” Stacey deliberately moved to the living room, where she knew they would be out of the way. “I hadn't noticed.”

“Like hell you didn't,” Julie hooted. She grinned broadly, as if she'd caught her mother in a huge lie. A turnaround from when she was a little girl and her mother knew when she wasn't telling the truth. “You got pinker just talking to him.”

Stacey shrugged, looking away. Wondering what was wrong with her and why she was acting like some adolescent barely into a training bra. And wishing that Julie hadn't witnessed it. “I'm uncomfortable taking money from people.”

Pocketing the money, Julie slipped her arm around her mother's shoulders. “That's okay, Mom. It looks like he feels the same way about you.”

Surprised, Stacey looked at her daughter. “Uncomfortable? Really?”

“No. That you're hot.”

Had she been eating or drinking anything, Stacey knew she would have choked. “What?”

Julie grinned. Putting her hands into her back pockets, she rocked back on her heels. “You heard me. He thinks you're hot.”

Ridiculous. The man was just being polite, nothing more. If she wasn't so starved for affection, her imagination wouldn't be going to places it shouldn't. “Julie, I've got to be at least five, six years older than him.”

“Mom, that's nothing. You're a very pretty woman. He's a healthy male. A very healthy male,” she underscored, glancing out the side window. Alex was outside, talking to someone in the yard. “Healthy males are attracted to pretty women.”

Yes, to pretty women their own age, not to tired war horses who only had misty memories of what romance had been like.

And this conversation was completely out of bounds. “Julie, I'm married. To your father. Remember?”

Julie shook her head. She pursed her lips as she watched Alex bend over and pick up something that had fallen out of his pocket. An appreciative noise escaped her lips. “I really don't think that makes any difference to him.”

“You're imagining things.” Stacey said the words with finality, hoping to put an end to her daughter's speculation.

But she should have known better. Julie was her father's daughter. Once she had latched onto a subject, she wouldn't let it go.

“Nope, I don't think so.” Julie grinned, her eyes sparkling as she seemed to roll the thought over in her head. “You know, if anything did happen between you and—” Rather than say the name, Julie nodded toward the window and the man who was directly outside.

“Nothing's going to happen, Julie, do you understand?”

“But if it did,” Julie persisted, placing her hand on her mother's arm, “it's okay.”

How could her daughter possibly say that? How could she even think that? Hadn't she raised Julie to think better than that? “Julie, you're talking about my breaking my marriage vows—to your father.”

Julie looked at her. Suddenly, they were no longer mother and daughter, exploring a fantasy. They were two women talking about something that both knew was a sad fact of life.

“Dad's always taken you for granted, Mom. Maybe he needs to be shaken up a little.” Julie saw the surprised, distressed look on her mother's face. “Didn't think I noticed, did you?” Julie laughed softly. “Just because he and I get along so well doesn't mean that I'm oblivious to the way he treats everyone, especially you. Dad needs to see you as a woman again.” Her
smile was understanding. Encouraging. “Maybe if he sees someone treating you the way you deserve, he'll wake up.”

There were a great many times in the past few years when she had felt lonely, alone in a marriage that was supposed to contain two people, two partners. But she had done her best to hide that from her children. She didn't want them taking sides. It was bad enough that Jim had made certain judgment calls, she didn't want that happening to Julie.

Especially since she knew how much her daughter loved Brad. “Julie, your father loves me.”

“I never said he didn't. He just doesn't know how to treat you, that's all.” She craned her neck, but Alex had disappeared around the corner and was no longer visible. “I think that hunk would know
just
how to treat a lady.”

Stacey tucked her arm through Julie's and drew her over to the front door. She knew for a fact that her daughter had a ten o'clock class and needed to be on the road if she ever expected to make the class on time. “Well, we're never going to find out. I'm too old and too married for him, and you, Julie my dear, are too young.”

Julie flashed a bright grin. “Never too old or too young to dream, Mom.”

“We'll talk about it next week at lunch,” Stacey told her as she walked Julie to the curb where the car was parked.

Just before she got into her vehicle, Julie leaned over and whispered into her mother's ear, “He is hot for you, you know.”

The next minute, Julie was in her car, driving away. Leaving Stacey to cope with a whole myriad of emotions.

“You
know, I'm getting really pretty tired of this, not to mention fed up.”

Stacey suppressed a sigh. Brad had barely been home ten minutes before starting in. Granted, his words echoed her own sentiments, but she wasn't about to let him know that. Any agreement would launch a diatribe of monumental proportions about how this remodeling was a huge waste of money, how he had told her that it would be. And on, and on, and on.

There was only one tiny light in the forest. A pinprick, really. Brad
seemed
to have gotten a little more involved in the remodeling process than she'd originally thought he would, although definitely not more than she'd hoped. After much coercion, he'd gone back with her to the tile stores and helped her pick out a style and color to be used for the kitchen floor. Once the decision had been made, she'd heaped an avalanche of praise on him—overkill, sure, but it'd had the desired effect. It got him to agree to look in a couple more stores. At the last one, just as they were about to leave, he'd been the one to point out the black onyx tiles. She fell in love with them and now they were on order for their master bathroom.

Empowered, Brad had even made the suggestion that they
use the tiles on the outside of the sunken tub she had her heart set on. She loved the idea and told him so, weakening his resolve enough to get him to look for new appliances. Alex had given them the name of a discount house he did business with that carried name brands.

Brad had made a snide remark about kickbacks, but he'd come along with her nonetheless.

As they looked over the sea of stoves, refrigerators and dishwashers, for a moment or three, Stacey had recalled the feeling she'd had when they'd first started out. Then they had pooled their money and carefully considered every cent before they bought the refrigerator they desperately needed. The one that had refused repair and formed ice inside the vegetable crisper no matter what she turned the temperature dial up to.

Funny, she didn't realize at the time just how happy they were. How nice those days were in retrospect. Not that they weren't struggling, but even so, they were struggling together. Every challenge encountered wasn't just his challenge or her challenge, but
their
challenge.

When had they stopped being “they” and dissolved into “him” and “her”? She didn't know. It had just happened.

And even though Brad had surprised her by getting more involved in the remodeling, there were consequences for this hard-won victory. There were lists issued on a daily basis. Lists generated because he conducted nightly inspections of everything that had been done that day by Alex's crews—the days they did come to work. When she complained that she had trouble reading his handwriting—which on its own merits would have qualified him to be a doctor if nothing else had—
he began dictating them to her. Frowning and passing judgments, constantly registering his dissatisfaction as he made his way from one item to another.

Stacey wondered if Brad was still capable of being satisfied. She certainly saw no evidence of it.

Now, after making his announcement about being fed up, Brad stood watching her. As if waiting to see whether she would ask him what he was fed up with. Silence seemed pretty good to her right about now, but she might as well play the game instead of aggravating him.

So she took a breath and asked, “And by ‘this' you mean…?”

“Those people we're paying to work aren't showing up,” he complained. So now “we” were paying them, she thought. Since when? She'd been very careful to put all of Titus's money into a separate account and was only writing checks against that. “What is this, the sixth, seventh time they haven't come when they were supposed to?”

She found it more irritating than he did because she was the one who had to hang around, waiting to let them in. But his tone made her gravitate to the crew's defense.

“They have other jobs.”

“Fine, I have nothing against free enterprise. Let them finish ours and then they can go on to their ‘other jobs.'”

“It doesn't work like that.”

He slanted an annoyed look in her direction. “So now you're a remodeling expert?”

Stacey pressed her lips together, physically keeping words back. She refused to get sucked into an argument. It was Friday night. The weekend was spread out before them. She wanted to be able to enjoy as much of it as humanly possible.
That wasn't going to happen if she had words with Brad that resulted in one of them saying something that couldn't be taken back.

“No, I'm not a remodeling expert,” she replied evenly. “But I think you were the one who pointed that no contractor has just one job at a time. It came under your list of cons as to why we shouldn't have any remodeling done.”

“And I was right,” he announced triumphantly. And then he shrugged, because it didn't matter if he was right or not. They were stuck in the middle of this renovation from hell and would be until it was finished.
Finished
being the operative word.

Brad surveyed the area. The kitchen opened up to the family room, which in turn fed into the living room, which eventually became the dining room. He could see parts of all four if he stood near the front door. And it looked exactly the same as it had this morning.

And yesterday morning as well.

He glanced at her. “They weren't here yesterday, either, were they?”

She had waited until almost ten o'clock before she'd decided that no one was coming and she might as well get to the office. When she'd called Alex's number on her way there, all she got was his voice mail. The low, seductive voice promised to return the call.

She was still waiting.

Stacey shook her head. “No.”

Brad had thought as much, but there was a certain triumph in getting her to admit it.

“That makes two days.” He held up two fingers, moving them to get her attention. “Two days that they could have
used to finish up the family room and move on to the guest bathroom.”

It wasn't the guest bathroom. It was Jim's bathroom. Right off Jim's room. The correction rose automatically to her lips, but she clamped her mouth shut. There was no point in getting into a discussion about what to call the room. Obviously Brad had earmarked the room for other uses rather than contemplate that Jim might need to move back.

Brad could call the room Irving for all she cared. Jim's things were staying in the bedroom until such time as Jim came and took them out himself.

She glanced toward Brad, waiting for the next salvo. It was too soon for the sounds of his displeasure to be over. And then she saw it. That look. That gleam he got in his eyes sometimes. The one that transformed him from a highly skilled, highly respected surgeon to a man who was willing to experiment in a field he knew nothing about. He literally felt he knew no boundaries because, as far as his abilities in medicine went, he had none. His feet of clay materialized when it came to other matters. Like fixing things.

The pit of Stacey's stomach tightened in uneasy anticipation.

Brad looked at the light fixture in the family room. Specifically, the switch that controlled it. Or was supposed to. They'd decided to have the ceiling scraped and textured, then had recessed lighting installed to brighten the entire area. Since there were times when all that extra wattage wasn't wanted, she had requested to have a dimmer installed. That part was still pending.

Alex had given her a list of dimmers that could do the job and told her she could find them in the hardware store. She'd
gone the following afternoon, after work, comparing switches until she found what she wanted. For good measure, she got a dimmer for each room in the house, just in case she decided to change over everything. She really liked the way the recessed lighting looked.

But neither Alex nor any of his crew had been around for the last couple of days to install the dimmer. She'd put her hopes on Monday.

In the meantime, the family room was technically out of commission, at least during the evening hours. The illumination from the one floor lamp she had in the corner of the room wasn't nearly strong enough to decently light up the entire area.

“I can do this,” Brad declared with no small conviction.

Oh, God, here we go.
“Do what?” she asked him, praying he was talking about something else entirely.

He glanced at her impatiently. “Install the dimmer.”

“No, Brad, you can't,” she told him kindly but firmly. “You can do a great many things and I'm always the first to stand and cheer you on, but I've known you forever and you are definitely not handy when it comes to fixing anything but the human body.”

His attention was focused on the protruding profusion of wires that pushed their way out from behind the single metal strip that held them and the defunct light switch in place. He regarded it from several angles, coming to the same conclusion each time.

“How difficult could it be?”

Very.
Out loud, Stacey said, “I don't know. If I knew, maybe I would have done it myself.”

“Get me one of the dimmers you bought.”

She gave it one last try. Maybe he'd be struck by a bolt of common sense if he met with any resistance. “Brad, no.”

No bolt came.

“Stacey, get me a dimmer switch,” he repeated, impatience weaving into his voice. This was a man who had infinite patience while performing an operation that, by necessity, had to be conducted at a painstakingly slow pace. But with anything else, he had less than a normally allotted share.

As she watched him stride toward the door that led to the garage, she knew it was useless to dissuade him. He was going to do what he was going to do. And right now, he was getting his toolbox where he kept a very handsome, complete set of tools that gleamed whenever he opened the box. Gleamed because in the five years since he'd bought them, they had hardly ever seen the light of day.

And when they did, the result was never good.

Like the time he had tried to install the garbage disposal and they had wound up, much to the plumber's joy, with a small lake in their kitchen.

“I'll get the dimmer,” she told him, bracing herself for disaster.