One Door Closes (4 page)

Devon got to his feet and went in search of his checkbook. “Go for it.”

Good, because Danny might postpone paying his portion. Calvin knew the haggard, perpetually-worried-about-money look well.

He waited uncomfortably for Devon to write the check, the book having been unearthed from the pocket of a jacket. He was anxious to get out of there, back to his own room where he didn’t have to school his face or pretend other things he didn’t know how to feel. At last he was able to bid Devon a civil good-night and go. Devon’s door shut completely when Calvin was barely down the hall. The closure felt even more exclusionary, and final.

Getting into bed became an exercise in irritability, yanking at the blanket and cursing at the lay of his pillow. He shucked his clothes, grabbed the T-shirt he wore at night and dragged it over his head.

Fucking Devon. It was just a matter of time before the guy picked up and took off again. If he didn’t want to be here either, why had he bothered coming back?

* * *

“
Cookie
,
Cal.
”

He shakes his head, but the aroma persists, snug and smooth as the chocolate melting in the dough.

Audrey lifts an eyebrow, then sets the plate aside with a sigh. “
All right.
” Her eyes flick down and back, tracking from cookie to face.

He glares at her, because he’s already snatching the topmost cookie and taking a pointed bite. She laughs just as the flavor floods his taste buds, and he groans aloud before he can stop himself. Which only makes her laugh more.

“
One day this isn’t going to work for you
,
you know
,” he says.

She sticks the tip of her tongue between her teeth and grins, as cheeky as the twelve-year-old who arrived yesterday, and he can’t not smile. “
You know that
,
do you?
”

He bites into the cookie again and feels himself relaxing back into the couch. It’s a reflex, like breathing when surfacing from water, and Audrey strokes the lock of his hair over his brow.

“
Don’t do that when he’s here.
” He knows he’s grumbling, but she’s dismantled every other barrier he’s erected and he wants to keep this one at least.

She places a hand over her heart, fingers splaying across the deep purple of her blouse. “
I
swear on my life.
”

Outside the window, a basketball thunks hard against weathered boards instead of asphalt, and one of the boys crows. Audrey raps firmly on the windowpane but doesn’t take her eyes off Calvin. “
What do you say I close up the library for you two tonight?
”

He stares at her, thinking of clambering kids half his age, of the way locked doors just demand to be knocked on and slammed against in this house. “
I
don’t—we don’t need the library.
”

“
Oh
,
I
thought maybe you wanted to talk to Will tonight.
”

“
I...no.
”

“
Okay.
” She fingers the threadbare edge of a drape. “
Thought I might close it up anyway.
Max has been hiding the books again.
”

He scowls. “
He’s such a damn brat
,
why do you even let him—
”

She turns a look on him and he subsides, until her lip twitches upward. She touches his hair again, the motion continuous this time, fingertips brushing at his temple with each pass. “
He’ll catch on.
You all do.
” Her hand keeps moving, and she shifts on her end of the couch. “
Honey
,
don’t be nervous.
”

“
What?
” He sits up. “
I’m not.
Why would I be nervous?
”

The smile she gives him is sweet and real. “
I
don’t know
.” Her voice is wondering. “
But it’s fine.
It’ll be fine
.”

He swallows. Can’t explain, not here in the music room with all this afternoon light and the other boys just outside, and Will arriving any minute, probably walking up the front path right now in his oversized sweatshirt. What’s inside Calvin is getting too big for words, sliding out of him day by day in hitches and spurts when he looks at Will, when he reaches for his hand, when Will touches his cheek with his thumb and strokes down toward his mouth like it’s instinctive, like he doesn’t even think.

Audrey’s eyes track over his face, and she opens her mouth.

* * *

Calvin woke with a quick suck of air, fingers digging into the mattress. Moonlight streamed elongated rectangles across the floor, and the murmur of geese passing overhead filtered in from outside.

There was no sound in the room itself, but rather a cloying sense of it, as if someone had just spoken Will’s name aloud.

Chapter Three

Will mailed him an estimate as promised, and Calvin sat over dinner trying to quell his dismay. Even with only the bare bones, there was a lot to be done.

He read it once, and then again. Will wrote like he spoke, even in this, a business document. Calvin could hear his voice in the words, low and even, moving through the house as Will himself had moved through it, and Calvin just behind him, watching as he walked. Taking in, again and again, the new height, the breadth of his shoulders, the arc of his neck and the terribly familiar color of his hair.

Eventually Calvin went outside to the garage, got his bicycle out and pumped down the road until his lungs stung. His shoulders, aching from sitting all day in ergonomically incorrect chairs, either loosened or numbed completely from the ride. Even in the rapidly cooling air, the sweat ran down his nape by the time he wheeled back up the drive, tires crunching over gravel.

It must have been numbness, though, because his shoulders began to hurt almost immediately once his bike was locked away, a new, deep throb that demanded a heating pad.

Most of the lights downstairs had been left on again, and Calvin exhaled hard. He started in the library and headed in a circle around the house, turning them off one by one as he made his way toward the kitchen and the cloth rice bags he knew were still stowed away above the microwave. Audrey had scented them with mint long ago, mostly for the arthritis in her joints. She’d been far too young to develop arthritis when she had. Aged far too quickly in every way, really. Echoes of guilt nipped at Calvin’s innards, as well as anger placed squarely on the shoulders of certain
other
people, but he’d had a lot of practice brushing all that aside.

One day at a time. Heat pack, bed. Work tomorrow. Home, and on Monday, Will would be back to begin the most necessary of the labor.

Just inside the kitchen, Calvin stopped short.

Danny was leaning against the sink, glaring, the packet of papers Will had mailed in hand. He looked so damn young in baggy jeans and a T-shirt dirty from digging in dirt again. “What’s this?”

Calvin eyed the papers Danny waved between them. “Go ahead, read them.” He gestured at the sink. Danny didn’t move, so Calvin grabbed a glass and pushed in beside him to fill it with water from the tap. He guzzled it down with one hand still on the faucet and refilled it. He could feel Danny eyeing him, leaning a little away. When Calvin thought he could stand to be without a constant source of hydration, he got a rice pack down and tossed it in the microwave to heat.

By the time he sat down at the kitchen table and pressed the bag over his nape, Danny was still staring at him. “What?”

“No,” Danny said.

Calvin blinked. No, he wasn’t going to read the papers? “No?”

Danny shoved off the sink. Calvin thought he intended to join him. Instead, the papers were dropped in front of him. A long finger jabbed at a paragraph near the bottom. “No,” Danny repeated.

Calvin felt fuzzy, couldn’t get his brain to work.
Replacement of load-bearing timber in front atrium
, Will had typed.
Fireplace molding to be removed
,
fireplace itself pulling out of wall.
Needs to be rebalanced and replaced.

Calvin raised his eyes slowly to Danny, feeling belligerent for the first time. “Yes?”

“You can’t take that molding out.”

“You did read the next page, right?”

“I read the whole thing.”

“Then I don’t see why we’re arguing about this.”

Danny’s mouth dropped open, but his scowl was anything but shocked. “You’re not just going to take the place apart.”

“It’s rotten, Danny,” Calvin snapped. “It has to come out.”

“Then get it remade.”

And never mind that Calvin had been pondering the logistics of the very same thing. Maybe it was being told what to do that did it. Suddenly he didn’t care about anything but smacking Danny down. “Do you know how much money that’s going to cost? You can’t just redo a Victorian-era hearth. You need a specialist, an expensive one.”

“I don’t care. You’re not just replacing it.”

“What’s up?” Devon’s voice was cautious as he entered from the dining room. He had on a sweater and was holding a mug. He eyed the two of them as if he were sizing up an armed standoff.

Danny grabbed up the papers again, wrinkling them in his grip. “Did you see these?”

Devon looked from the papers to Calvin. “What are they?”

“Remodeling plans,” Danny said. “He wants to tear everything out and Frank Lloyd Wright it up.”

Devon dumped what looked like old coffee out of his mug at the sink. He met Danny with a shrug. “I didn’t read them. They weren’t mine.”

Calvin snorted, shook his head, but Danny’s glower intensified. “Of course they’re yours,” Danny said. “You live in this house, they’re fucking yours!”

Devon just looked at him. “I told you I don’t have an opinion about this.”

“No, just money,” Calvin muttered, drawing Devon’s eye, but Danny shoved the papers in front of his face.

“You’re not using it to do
this.
This house is old, you’re not going to rip its personality out by the floorboards.”

“You’d rather just fall through the floorboards? The tetanus is going to feel pretty good when this house’s
personality
slices your leg open or crashes down on your head.” Calvin looked at Devon. “Would you please say something here?”

Devon raised both hands in front of him like a shield. “Hey.”

“Yeah. No opinion, that’s fantastic.”

Danny turned on Devon this time. “You grew up here. How can you not care what happens to it?”

Devon arched an eyebrow. “Calvin ended up spending more time here than me.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Danny swung a hand out toward the table. “What, the more years we were here, the more of a stake we get? I remember Mom giving it to all of us, not just percentages.”

“What do either of you even care?” Calvin said. “You’re both out of the house more than you’re in it, you don’t even act like you want to be here.”

“I’m not going to let you wreck this place,” Danny hissed, spinning on him and slapping a palm down on the tabletop, the papers beneath it. “I don’t care who I have to call or what I have to do, you don’t get to—”

“It’s an estimate, Danny!” Calvin shouted. “If you’d read to the end, you’d see I haven’t agreed to a damn thing.”

It wasn’t strictly true. He’d already approved a certain amount of rewiring and work on the back porch, but those were safety issues. Danny stilled. His eyes dropped to the packet and rose again, but Devon moved nearer to the table. He slid the papers closer and flipped to the last one. Calvin saw his eyes widen when they lit on the estimated total.

Danny was more vocal. “Oh my God,” he said quickly, as if he hadn’t meant to utter a sound.

Calvin pushed his chair back hard enough for the legs to shear over the linoleum. “Yeah, it’s a fuck-ton of money. So you’ll forgive me for considering the cheapest possible solutions, even if they don’t have any personality.”

“What about Mom’s fund?” Danny asked belatedly, but Calvin was already on his way out of the kitchen.

“Tonight I don’t care.” He took his cooling bag of rice, jogged upstairs on the last of his anger, and shut himself in his room until morning.

* * *

Will brought an electrician with him on Monday, bright and early. Julia was tall, with sharp features and a bright smile. She pulled her almost colorless blond hair back with a tie as she frowned into the fuse box. “First off, we have to get you off fuses and onto breakers. These aren’t going to handle the power levels your appliances will need once you start updating or adding things.”

Calvin knew the electrical set-up at the house was much older than it should have been. He had no idea how Audrey had sidestepped the housing codes the last time she’d had the building appraised, but Julia had looked delighted to see the leftover ungrounded sockets upstairs. Even now, she was grinning as if she’d come across a winning lotto ticket.

“It should take me about three weeks to switch over and take care of the rewiring.” She looked to Will for confirmation. “I’ll get the others in to help if you need it done sooner.”

“Sure,” Will said, but Calvin cleared his throat.

“I don’t have a lot of money to pay for extra workers.”

Julia waved a hand at him. “You pay by the job. We’re good.”

Calvin glanced at Will and nodded. Just that acknowledgement set his scalp tingling, and he wondered if he was blushing.

Julia pointed at the box again. “I’ll pull the second-floor fuses today, get a good look at what I’m dealing with. That way you can still do stuff on the lower floor. And the guys’ll have a generator to power their tools, so we don’t have to worry about that.”

“Okay.”

She gave the box her full attention for the next minute, then snapped the panel closed. “Just get started, then,” she said, and headed back up the basement stairs.

Will shoved his hands in his pockets and immediately took them out again, thumbing in Julia’s wake. “I have a guy coming to handle the back porch around ten. Otherwise, today’s for plumbing.”

“All right.” Calvin looked more closely. “You look tired.”

“Lost a few hours’ sleep last night staring at my ceiling.”

Will did not seem concerned, so Calvin just followed him up to the ground floor again. Will headed toward the first of the bathrooms, and Calvin went into the dining room to the bills he’d left unfinished.

It was a long while of faint hammering and drilling noises before Calvin straightened up and thought about lunch. He went into the kitchen and stared into the fridge. They were sorely in need of sandwich fixings again, despite Devon’s recent shopping run, and he had to pick things up for the afternoon anyway. All the kids from the support group would be over by three, eating the house bare.

Holding group at the house was the least Calvin felt he owed Audrey, and the first thing he’d managed to organize upon his return. When the kids were there, the place felt less like a maze of hallways, more like the home he remembered. Now, with Danny and Devon pulling snacks from the cupboards on a regular basis, his habit of shopping once a week didn’t cut it.

If there was ever anyone to reimburse expenses, he’d jump on it. Right now, the group was barely an entity on its own, run completely by volunteers in a tiny, dull office crammed between a music store and a small insurance firm downtown.

“Should have just gone to the store Friday.” He worked down the street from a grocery store, after all. But his mind had been decisively elsewhere. He lifted his car keys off the hook by the pantry and headed out the front door.

When Calvin returned from town, bags in hand, the noise out back had ceased. He ventured around the side of the house to inspect their progress and found the flooring of the small back porch torn up, with freshly cut boards stacked by the steps and waiting to be laid. Someone had braced the porch’s roof—which didn’t bear any weight from above, thankfully—with jacks and extra timber, and Will’s nameless male coworker sat on the steps eating a banana.

“Hi,” Calvin said. The man made to get up, gesturing at his full mouth, but Calvin waved him back down. “Have you seen Will?”

The guy swallowed. “Yeah, he’s still on the lower level.”

“Thanks.” A makeshift ramp stretched across the gutted porch, made of sturdy boards. Calvin took the bags inside through Audrey’s old office.

Will stood at the base of the grand staircase, loaded down with sacks full of tools and carrying several pieces of piping under one arm. He heaved a deep breath and put the tools down, laying the pipes beside them, then fumbled at the hem of his shirt. He lifted it to wipe his face, and Calvin was caught staring at the stomach revealed, the pale skin and—

All the freckles. Many more than before, sprayed across Will’s abdomen as if he’d spent the years between high school and university lying out in the sun. Calvin could picture his flesh painfully reddened, sore to the touch but dotting up the next day and the day after, speck after speck surfacing until they made dense constellations over Will’s skin.

Will’s muscles, unexaggerated as they were, rippled visibly as he scrubbed the sweat off his temple.

A sound on the stairs made Calvin jump. Danny was in jeans, that filthy shirt again, a bottle of Yoo-hoo in one hand and what looked like a new pair of gardening gloves in the other, and staring appreciatively as he descended the staircase. His eyes flicked to Calvin, lingered for just a little too long, and affixed pointedly to Will again as Will dropped the edge of his shirt. Calvin’s spine went painfully rigid, but Danny just kept walking, crossing the space without a word to either of them. Nothing but a long slug of his drink. He headed out the front door and by the time Calvin turned back, Will was looking right at him.

Calvin ducked his head—not by choice. He headed toward the kitchen as if he’d never stopped. Once he was there he looked over his shoulder and then, when the doorway remained empty, slung the bags on the counter and leaned forward to brace his arms against the sink. He stared into the basin for a long while, and eventually the hammering outside started up again.

* * *

“Your sister back in town yet?”

“Nope. This weekend.” Glenna Stuart stretched up onto her tiptoes to grab a glass from the cupboard and filled it with water at the sink. “She has a class Friday mornings.”

“You can have filtered water if you want.” Calvin pointed at the refrigerator.

Glenna considered. “Eh.” She took a sip. “I like pipe water.”

“Yeah.” Calvin poured the last of the chips into a bowl and stacked cheese slices and vegetables on a plate. “Here, can you—”

She started opening cupboards, looking over her shoulder to make sure she was searching in the right places, and pulled down two boxes of crackers. “They’re half-empty.”

“Give me both, then.” He held out a hand, turning to look at her when neither box made its way into his grip.

She stood in the same spot, holding both boxes and peering at him as if he’d asked her a question. “Do you think Glenna really works?”