Finding Home (16 page)

“You
sure you want to do this?” Stacey asked her husband for the third time in as many minutes.

She held onto the dimmer she'd brought in from the garage, reluctant to surrender it. She supposed she could have bought herself some extra time by saying she didn't know where the bag of dimmers was, but he would have seen through that. She almost always knew where everything was located in the house at any given time. As far as she was concerned, it was all part of being a good wife and mother.

Besides, he would have gone into the garage like a bull in the proverbial china shop and hunted for the dimmers himself. And she would have been left with sorting out the chaos.

Brad still wore his good suit. These days, unlike when they were first married, all his suits were good instead of just a precious one. She doubted he knew she'd packed that suit away instead of giving it to charity the way he'd instructed. That was the suit he'd worn on all his medical school interviews. The same suit he had on when he graduated four years later. And then worn when he'd applied for his residency.

These days, instead of only one good suit, he had only one set of worn clothes that he wore on those rare days when he
had some extra time to spare. Still, old habits died hard. And she had been very careful of his one good suit.

“Don't you think you should change?”

“Yes,” he said, answering her first question about whether or not he was sure about trying his hand at installing the dimmer, “I'm sure about this and I don't think I'm going to get all that dirty working with a handful of small wires, attaching a dimmer.” He took the switch from her and pulled off the plastic wrapper around it. “You're my wife, Stacey, not my mother.”

She hated being compared to his mother. On any level. There wasn't a compassionate bone in the woman's body.

“I know who I am, Brad.”

He spared her a look. “Do you? Then why do you keep treating me as if I were some little kid you needed to supervise?”

She would have loved nothing more than to let him play the big, brave, capable husband. But while Brad might have been one and two, he definitely wasn't number three. Not capable by a long shot. Yet, armed with the knowledge of a dozen misadventures on his part, she was still enough of an optimist to hope that this one time, he would luck out and somehow manage to connect the wires correctly.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “I didn't realize I was treating you like one of the kids.”

“Worse,” he corrected. “At least you have faith in them.” He shrugged at the apology, his expression telling her that it was accepted.

Reaching for the screwdriver, he began to work the secondary screws along the light switch. Or attempt to. The tip of the screwdriver kept slipping out of the screw's slot.

Stacey waited a second for him to catch on. When the screwdriver slipped out again, she gave him a hint. “I think you need a flat one.”

Perturbed, Brad looked at her over his shoulder. “What?”

“You're using a Phillips head screwdriver.” She pointed toward the offending tool. “I think you need a screwdriver with a flat head.”

She didn't think, she knew. Stacey rummaged around the toolbox a little and then found what she was looking for. She took out a medium-size flat-head screwdriver and held it out to him.

He took it much the way he took a scalpel. “I was going to try that next.”

Stacey managed to suppress a smile.

As he went back to work, she said, “Jim stopped by the other morning.” She waited, but Brad made no comment. “He had some good news.”

She saw Brad stop for a moment, but he didn't turn to look at her. “He's decided to go back to school for a real degree?”

“No. He told me he has a gig.”

This time, Brad did turn around. His expression was quizzical. “A what?”

“A gig,” she repeated. And got the same results. She knew she'd used the term before, but Brad completely shut out what didn't interest him. She could probably repeat the term a dozen times and it still wouldn't register. “A job performing at a club. He and the band,” she added. Still no response. She gave Brad another sound bite of information. “At the end of the month. He wants us to come.”

Brad moved his shoulders in a dismissive gesture. “So go.”

“Us,” she repeated with feeling. “The pronoun is ‘us.' He wants
us
to come hear him.”

He turned around, a screwdriver in his hand, a scowl on his face. “I don't like that kind of music.”

She was pretty sure that Brad didn't know what “that kind of music” was since he'd never listened to Jim play. But that wasn't the important point.

“But you like your son, right?” When he said nothing, frustration made her press on. “Right?”

Brad sighed. It was an old battle, fought with bent swords and no promise of victory for either side. A truce was the best that could be hoped for.

“Yes, I like my son, I just don't like the course his life is taking.” He thought of the boy who'd been such a sponge, soaking up information faster than it could be dispensed to him. Where had that boy gone? And why, why had he gone? “He's wasting all that intelligence, all that potential.”

Brad was looking at it from a father's vantage point. Had he completely forgotten what it had been like to be young and starting out? A twenty-two-year-old who wanted some thing different? Who wanted to grab life by the waist and hang on, hoping for a wild, exhilarating ride?

“If your father had said to you that going to medical school wasn't sensible because you'd be going heavily into debt and it would take years before you could actually earn a livable wage, would you have listened to him? Would you have gone into the family business because that amounted to immediate gratification and an immediate salary?”

The family business had gone belly-up years ago. He'd
never thought of it as particularly stable, or a way to go. Even as a kid. “No, but—”

She grabbed what she could, not letting him continue and negate the point she was trying to make. “Everyone has to do what they feel is best for them. You can't live Jim's life for him.”

He wouldn't have if he could. But he would have liked to lay down the groundwork, the ground rules. “No, but I don't have to approve of it, either, and by going to listen to him play, I'm telling Jim that I approve of the way he's throwing his life away.”

Stacey looked at him, shaking her head. For an intelligent man who graduated first in his medical class, he could still be as dense as split pea soup. “No, Brad, what you're telling our son is that you love him and you support him even though what he's doing wouldn't have been your choice for him. Everyone needs to hear that. Even people who claim to be hard-nosed about it.”

“Support,” Brad echoed, saying the word as if it left a horribly bitter taste in his mouth. “That's what it all boils down to, doesn't it? Support.”

“Emotionally,” Stacey emphasized. “Not financially, emotionally. Jim needs to know we're behind him.” Because Brad had turned away, Stacey moved around him until she was in his face. She hated talking to the back of his head. Especially when she was pleading. “At least tell me you'll think about it.”

Brad's hand tightened around the screwdriver. He felt cornered and he hated feeling his shoulder blades against the wall. But Jim was his son and beneath the layers of misunderstanding that had begun to thrive between them, blood did count for something.

The memory of a small boy, looking up at him eagerly, hanging on his every word, echoed back to Brad. He missed those times. Missed that kid.

Brad blew out a breath, temporarily surrendering. “Okay, I'll think about it.”

These days, a little bit went a long way for her. A very long way. Impulsively, she threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Thank you. That's all I ask.”

With the screwdriver in his hand, Brad didn't trust himself to return the hug. His right hand hung limply at his side. He patted her back with his left.

“No, that's not all you ask,” he told her. “You ask a lot more than that.”

Turning back to his “work,” Brad took out first one screw, then another. Tiny though it was, a sense of triumph began to build. He put both screws down on the coffee table. Without the restraining metal bar, the profusion of colored, plastic-coated wires appeared as if they would shoot out of their confining hole at any second.

There was still the switch to deal with. The screws holding it in place were smaller. He went in search of a smaller screwdriver. Once he found one on the bottom of the toolbox, he applied it to the two screws.

Watching him, Stacey held her breath.

Brad continued, “You're asking me to go.”

“Well, ultimately, yes. That's what I hope your heart will get you to do.”

The relationship that he and Jim had enjoyed had long since died. “He doesn't care if I show up.”

“He does care,” Stacey insisted. Mentally, she crossed her
fingers as the lie passed her lips. “He said so. He told me to invite you. Us, remember?” she said, referring to what she'd said earlier about Jim's invitation. Brad's look was deeply scrutinizing, but she held fast, refusing to back off. “He did.”

The exact opposite was true, but saying so wouldn't help mend the torn fences between father and son. She'd been doing this verbal balancing act for almost a year now, lying to one about what the other had said. She hoped that if she issued enough little white lies, she would manage to draw the two men together close enough to have them willingly carry on a dialogue instead of avoiding each other.

But this time, Brad laughed shortly, shaking his head. Ordinarily, Stacey didn't lie. He could bet his life on her truthfulness. But this was something that was too close to her heart and it blinded her to everything but reaching her goal. Getting him to talk to Jim again, even though his son showed him no respect.

“I don't believe you,” Brad told her a second before he put two wires together. He could hear her draw in her breath, could feel her eyes widening as she watched. He grinned in triumph, twisting the ends of the wires together. “See, nothing to it.”

The next second, darkness had swallowed up the entire house.

“Apparently,” Stacey commented under her breath.

She
heard Brad muttering a curse under his breath. “Damn it, maybe if I just adjust—”

“No!”
Stacey cried with the same feeling she uttered the time Jimmy had stood on the edge of the glass-top coffee table, a towel tied haphazardly around his neck, and declared he was going to fly. He'd gone crashing through the table the next moment. But Jimmy had been four at the time. Brad was twelve times that and hopefully at least twice as smart.

“No,” she repeated when she heard no outburst of pain or saw any sparks flying from the general vicinity of Brad and the light switch. “Don't adjust anything,” she told him, trying hard not to sound as if she were lecturing. But what else could you do with an ordinarily intelligent husband who had taken leave of his senses? She couldn't very well stand by and egg him on.

She liked being married and had no desire to suddenly find herself a Merry Widow at the age of forty-seven.

“But—” Brad protested.

“Brad, please. The last thing in the world you should be doing right now is
anything
with live wires. There's no light. You can't see what you're doing,” she tried to reason with him. “You could get electrocuted.”

“Small chance of that happening,” Brad muttered under his breath, but audibly enough for her to hear. “It looks like the whole house lost power.”

She looked around. No light came from the hallway, which she'd been told by an electrician was on a different circuit. “I'd say that's a fair guess.”

She thought she heard Brad rummaging around in the toolbox. For what? Besides, he couldn't recognize anything by touch. This wasn't the operating table. As far as he as concerned, this was no man's land.

“Honey, wait,” she cautioned.

The rummage noise ceased. “For what?” Brad asked.

For common sense to come back to you.
“I'm going to get a flashlight,” she told him. “I started putting things away in the new cabinets in the family room this morning before I left. I remember storing a couple of flashlights in one of the upper cabinets.”

She'd thought about leaving everything for the weekend and was now glad that she was on the obsessive side when it came to restoring order. Putting things away had been slow going, but she refused to just haphazardly toss items into the cabinets and hope for a day when she would find the time to reorganize.

“All right,” Brad agreed. “I'll wait until you get the flashlight. If I see what two colors I inadvertently connected, I can remedy that and—”

“Brad, you're not a professional,” she insisted. “Why don't you just leave—Ow.” she cried as pain went surging up and down her leg, so intense that it felt as if the top of her head was coming off. Her kneecap, the point of contact, was throbbing.

“What?”

Brad's voice was utterly alert. As if he was ready to spring into battle and defend her. The pain began to recede, allowing her to smile to herself.

“I walked into something.” She took a deep breath, willing the rest of the pain away. “The recliner, I think.” It had wood trim around its edges.

She heard the rhythmic sound of nails hitting tile—and sliding. Mournful sounds of dogs followed. Despite their sliding, it was obvious that the four-footed creatures could maneuver far better in the dark than she could, Stacey thought.

“I should be the one getting the flashlight.” Brad's voice was closer than it had been a minute ago.

She bit back the instant command that rose to her lips. He wouldn't appreciate her ordering him to “Stay,” or saying that he had done more than enough for one night.

So she asked him a simple question: “Why?” Because his statement made no sense to her.

Her outstretched fingertips came in contact with something hard and smooth. The cabinet. She felt around the surface, making her way toward the far right. The cabinet closest to the right wall was where she'd placed the flashlights. She hadn't checked the batteries before she'd put them away. Stacey mentally crossed her fingers that they worked and that God didn't have a nasty sense of humor.

At least not one he wanted to exercise now.

Finding the wall, she worked her way back to the cabinet door. There were two cabinet doors at each of the locations, one above, one below. The cabinet with the flashlights was approximately chest level.

“Flashlight-finding isn't particularly gender-oriented,” she pointed out as she opened the cabinet door.

“No, but you're bumping into things.”

She turned her head in the direction of Brad's voice. “And you wouldn't?”

“Yes, I would,” he admitted grudgingly. “But I don't want you getting hurt.”

Because of something he'd done, Stacey surmised, filling in the unspoken part of her husband's sentence. At times, understanding Brad required a great deal of second-guessing.

“I'll live,” she assured him cheerfully. “It wasn't a rabid recliner.”

Where
had she put those flashlights? She reached in farther. The cabinets were a lot deeper than the old ones had been. Until just now, that had seemed like a good thing. She would have to remember to keep the flashlights in the front.

Her hand slid over something she didn't recognize. She tried to remember what else she'd put away in this particular cabinet and came up blank.

“What's taking so long?” he asked her.

“I'm being careful. I have X-Acto knives stored somewhere around here and I don't want to slice open my fingers.”

“Look, let me—”

Just then, her fingers came in contact with the long, smooth shank of the last flashlight she'd bought. Metallic-blue and sleek, it would have gladdened the heart of any night watchman on patrol. “Eureka.”

“Stacey, what's the matter?”

He sounded, tense, worried. “That was a good cry,” she told him. “I found one of the flashlights.” Withdrawing it from the
cabinet, she fumbled around, searching for the on-off switch. Finding it, she flipped it to the on position.

A strong beam of light emerged. Stacey grinned in triumph. The batteries
weren't
dead. “And the Lord said, let there be light, and it was good. For at least three hours,” she added, remembering what it said on the hard plastic that had encased the flashlight.

She turned the flashlight toward Brad and saw that he no longer stood by the defunct light switch. He crossed to her, his project temporarily forgotten. “What happens in three hours?”

“The batteries die.” The instructions had warned that the light was particularly strong and that it drained batteries rather quickly.

The news didn't seem to faze him. “I'll have it fixed by then.”

God, but he was a stubborn man. She hadn't found the flashlight just to watch her husband electrocute himself by its light.

“No,” she told him firmly, digging her feet in to take a stand, “you won't.”

And it was much too late to get an electrician in at that hour. There were a few around-the-clock emergency services, but she and Brad weren't at that life-and-death stage. Because they'd want immediate service, it would probably cost an arm, a leg and half a head to get someone out here before Monday morning.

Taking out the second flashlight, a smaller rendition of the one she was now holding, she handed it over it to Brad before aiming her own at the kitchen. “I'm going to get some candles from the kitchen and you're going to have dinner before it turns into a Popsicle.”

“But what about the power failure?”

She liked the way he made it sound generic, as if something had befallen the entire city and was not the result of his playing Mr. Fix-It.

“The ‘power failure' can take care of itself,” she told him.

He followed her, not because he was hungry but because standing in the dark that he had inadvertently created intensified his feeling of inadequacy.

“I know how to fix it,” he protested. “I just crossed the wrong wires—”

Stacey looked over her shoulder just before she took out a dinner plate. An amused smile played on her lips. “You think?”

He scowled, his fingers tightening around the flashlight. “You're not being very supportive.”

“Why? Because I don't want you playing with tools and possibly hurting yourself?”

She could see by his expression that she'd said exactly the wrong thing. That she wasn't supposed to say he was “playing” with tools or that she anticipated him hurting himself. But facts were facts and he was always the first one to point that out to her.

She tried to ameliorate her words, if not her sentiment. “Brad, honey, you have got a million attributes and I'm very proud of you. But none of those attributes involve being mechanically inclined—and why should they?”

Setting the flashlight on the counter on its end, with the beam of light hitting the ceiling, she sent out a pool of dim light while she retrieved two long tapering candlesticks from the cupboard next to where she kept the dishes and glassware. After returning to the dining room, she placed one candle into each of the two white ceramic candlestick holders on
either side of a very fragrant arrangement of flowers in the center of the table.

Carnations and baby's breath. Her favorite, he vaguely recalled.

Brad's eyes narrowed as the flower arrangement registered. “Who are the flowers from?”

“Not you,” she replied mildly.

Taking a match from the book she kept on the first shelf beside the candles, she struck it. The flame sizzled before it settled down. She lit first one candle, then the other.

“I know that,” he told her between his teeth. “Who are they from?”

For some perverse reason, Stacey was tempted to string him along, to make him think that perhaps someone else found her attractive. Attractive enough to send her flowers. But that was juvenile, she told herself. And she was beyond those kinds of games. Or should have been.

“Me, Brad.” Satisfied that the light would remain, she straightened up and softly blew out the match. “The flowers are from me. Because I like pretty things.”
And waiting for you to send me flowers would mean that I would probably have to be dead.

He looked at her as if he was having trouble processing her words. “You sent the flowers?”

“No, I
bought
the flowers. The store has a delivery charge.” And she wasn't a spendthrift, no matter what he thought of her, she added silently.

Returning to the kitchen, Stacey opened the now-dormant stove where she'd kept the dinner warming until Brad had killed the electricity. Taking out the pan, she placed it on top of the range.

“I tried something new with seafood,” she told him. “I thought you might like it.”

He looked over her shoulder as she arranged the food on a single plate. “Will you join me?”

The invitation surprised her. Ordinarily, he didn't think anything of eating alone. His hours were such that most of the time, meals were taken without him, even when the kids were growing up.

She didn't care for the fish she'd prepared for him. Salmon was his favorite. It wasn't hers. But this was the first time that he'd actually asked her to join him in years.

She didn't have the heart to turn him down. Especially while his ego was still suffering. So she smiled and nodded. “Sure. That'd be nice.”