Fix You (11 page)

9

             
B
eth cried when Willa was finally pried from her arms and they drove off. Twenty minutes later, Jo
wanted
to cry as she stood in the middle of her new living room and surveyed the years of grime and old tobacco stains that covered… everything.

             
“You know,” Tam mused, “sometimes I think my total devotion to you leads to some bad decisions.”

             
“This isn’t one of them,” she protested. “It just needs a little TLC.”                           

             
“Or do you mean
TNT
?” Will was sitting on his shoulders, tugging at his hair.

             
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she said, which probably meant she wanted down, or was trying to steer him like he was a horse.

             
“Is whipped, whipped, whipped,” Tam added, but he didn’t look too upset about it. “Are you sure about this, baby?”

             
She wasn’t – not in the least. Suddenly, her mother’s outdated, creaky-floored and popcorn-ceilinged house seemed like the Taj Mahal. Moving out on their own – or relatively, anyway – would have been scary regardless. In this grimy little white cottage, it was watching
Halloween
with her brothers at age eight scary.

             
But she said, “Yes,” and found a smile somewhere. “If you can watch the kids, I’ll have the floors clean enough to eat off by bedtime.”

             
He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I’m gonna eat off them regardless.”

             
“No, I wouldn’t.”

             
It truly was a cottage: small and cozy and, somewhere beneath the dark spots and mildew, it was trimmed out with once-white bead board and pine floors. There were only two bedrooms, but that was all they needed. The living room and kitchen were open concept and there was a big sun room in the back with a dark slate floor. They had no furniture save the bed and crib they’d brought, Mike’s old black leather sofas and a few Target finds, some of Gram’s hand-me-down dishes and an assortment of rugs Beth had hauled out of the attic and dusted off.

             
It was anything but perfect, but Jo could hear Chris and his guys down the hall in the bathroom, putting in their new vanity and sinks, and if nothing else, they’d have a brand new bathroom to shower in at the end of the day.

             
Jo pulled an elastic off her wrist and scraped all her thick, wavy hair up into a ponytail.

             
“I can take Will back to your mom and help you,” Tam offered. “You know Beth wants her back anyway.”

             
She took a deep breath. “Thanks, but no.” She pulled up another smile and it was easier this time. “Don’t start feeling guilty. You’re off the hook,
today
. Your time’ll come, Wales.”

**

              It was white – white tiles, white toilet, white walls, white sink mounted in a white cabinet and a white tub/shower combo – but it was new and clean and in her budget and once the house’s main waste stack was replaced, it would drain well. She’d sicced Chris on the bathrooms – at least the staff bath and the one in the cottage – first. She and Jo couldn’t spend their days in abject squalor and then step into filthy showers at night. Nothing in either bath had been salvageable, which was just as well because like hell was she using some fifty-year-old toilet.

             
Jess put a checkmark beside
my bathroom
on her mental list, then turned and faced her new bedroom. She hadn’t wanted the heavy-bodied king she’d shared with Dylan, so it was the guest room queen with the mint green comforter Mike and Jordan had carried in and assembled amid every possible use of the word
fuck
. The wallpaper was a repeating pattern of red and white flower bouquets, but all she’d had time to do was bleach the baseboards and windowsills and vacuum the floor before the furniture was brought in. There was a second, smaller bedroom that was really an office that was part of the staff quarters beside the kitchen. Tyler would be using it and she’d given it the same fast disinfecting routine.

             
She heard boots out in the kitchen that didn’t belong to her brothers – because both of them had made excuses about getting back to work and fled as soon as they were able. Chris stepped into the bedroom, in a tool belt and dirty jeans and tile-laying knee pads, and gave all her posh furniture a once-over. It all looked ridiculous against the wallpaper and she suspected that was the cause of his half-frown. He shook his head and made eye contact. “Your sister’s bathroom’s done, but the grout needs to set before she uses it.”

             
Jess checked her watch. It had taken three guys only two days to demo and redo both the bathrooms. The materials had been on hand already, but still, she was impressed. And it was only four o’clock.

             
“Come out here and we’ll talk kitchen makeover,” he said with a tilt of his head, and left the room.

             
Okay, so done before four and moving onto other projects. Another mark in a growing list of positives about this guy.

             
The kitchen was big, a long rectangle lined with counters and cabinets with room for an island in the middle. She was thinking butcher block with storage space beneath: a serviceable prep space. Her kitchen – the kitchen where she’d cooked all of Dylan’s meals – had been black granite and dark cherry cabinets. She’d never liked it – it had always felt too dark – and beneath the green laminate and teal painted cabinets of this home’s kitchen, she had a vision of white on white, soft yellow walls, buttery light pouring in through the window above the sink. The light was there now, touching off the faint lines around Chris’s eyes as he frowned down into the sink, and the rest would come. With time. With money. She told herself to take a deep breath and not let the stress get to her.

             
“You know what would look good here,” Chris said as she joined him, arms folded over her chest, “is one of those apron front farm sinks. In white, maybe.” He drew the shape of it through the air with his hands. “We’d have to trim the cabinets down, but it’d be a nice touch, I think.”

             
“An expensive touch?” she asked.

             
He shrugged and scratched at his goatee. “Not if we cut costs somewhere else.”

             
Jess lifted her eyes to the window and through the clouded panes, already running the budget through her head. She had packed a box of empty binders and would begin filling them tonight. Chris wanted to “see as they went,” but she couldn’t work that way. Every room had a budget, and every budget had a ranking according to priority. She couldn’t cook for guests or for them without a kitchen, so it was top of the list. It was also the most expensive room, so she had to weigh every single decision down to the last cent.

             
She sighed before she could catch herself, wishing she was outside with the warmth of the summer sun on her face. Tam had dug a Nerf football out of one of the boxes and he and Tyler were throwing it across the gravel drive to one another. Tyler was far from adept, but was improving, his throws getting stronger, his catches more frequent. Tam was saying something to him, smiling; he was patient and tossing the ball just gently enough that Tyler wouldn’t feel overwhelmed or babied. Willa was in her playpen, watching. In another year or so, Jess had no doubt she’d be in pigtails and a backwards baseball cap, tossing the ball right along with them.

             
“Would that work for you?” Chris said, and pulled her attention.

             
Every time she glanced at him, she was startled for some reason. She kept expecting Dylan’s narrow, chiseled face, the permanently jaded slant to his eyebrows. Chris’s nose was just a smidge too big and his tan was uneven because it hadn’t come out of a bottle, and the goatee and his height kept throwing her off. She looked at him and for a moment, panicked. And then she remembered that her husband was an adulterer and her old home was for sale, that her life was her son and this mansion around her now, and the man in her life was the contractor who’d just asked a question she hadn’t heard.

             
“Would what work?” she asked, feeling like an idiot.

             
He smiled, because apparently he was just one of those people who smiled all the time for no reason. “Coming with me to pick out what you want.”

             
“Sure,” she said, absently. She’d planned on hand-picking every drawer pull herself anyway; at least he had sense enough to ask. Her gaze went back out the window. She had a million things to do before they could even comfortably go to bed that night, but watching Tyler’s face light up as his hands locked around the ball, seeing someone be sweet to her boy, was hard to pull away from.

             
“’Kay,” Chris said and his boots moved over the floor. “Lemme take some measurements and then I’ll get outta your hair. Did you get the AC working?”

             
“No,” she said to the window. “HVAC guy can’t make it out till next week.”

             
He made a clucking sound. “I’ll have a look on my way out.”

             
She needed to make up Tyler’s bed and find towels so they could shower, start stowing toiletries in her new bathroom cabinets. She needed to spread her binders across her desk and start converting the bedraggled house into a series of lists and spreadsheets. The disorder was overwhelming and standing here was doing nothing.

             
But she stood anyway, and some fifteen minutes later, a heavy thrumming sound kick started in the belly of the house and spread outward. Cool air came shooting across her bare ankles with a low hiss.

             
Chris had fixed the AC.

**

              The five of them had pizza dinner, without plates, on the floor of the cottage’s living room that now smelled of Lysol and glistened under a new coat of floor polish. Tucked into bed, with the night and the heavy, haunted house bearing down on her, Jess tossed and fretted and felt the burn of tears she refused to let slip over her lashes. The smell and the feel of the air around her was all wrong, but this was home now, and with a death grip on the emotions welling up in her throat, she finally fell asleep straining to hear Tyler rolling over in the next room.

             
Knocking at the back door just off the kitchen woke her.

             
Her eyes snapped open and there was sunlight filtering through the naked windows; it was morning, at least, but it was early. The knock repeated and she bolted upright, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Her first thought was of her sister, that something was wrong, and she flipped the covers back before her head had a chance to stop spinning. She’d slept in an old threadbare tank top and cheerleading shorts, so she shoved her feet in the sneakers she’d left beside the bed and headed for the backdoor without lacing them, the strings flapping around her ankles.

             
There was still sleep in her eyes and a coat of fuzz on her teeth as she threw the locks and pulled open the door, pulse thumping with worry.

             
It wasn’t a bloodied member of her family on the back stoop, but Chris, and he wasn’t bleeding.
Yet
.

             
Jess stood, stupid and blinking, for almost a full second before she remembered that she was greasy and tangled from sleep, in need of some mouthwash, and not wearing a bra under her see-through white tank. She crossed her arms over her breasts with a frown.

             
“Morning,” he said, cheerful, and almost managed not to steal a glance at her chest.

             
“It’s Saturday,” she said because she lacked the mental energy to scold him properly.

             
“Yeah,” he said, like
duh
. He shoved his hands in the pockets of what looked like clean jeans. His baby blue polo shirt was most definitely new. He wasn’t dressed for demo. “And we’re going shopping.”

             
Jess groaned inwardly. Yesterday, at the sink, she’d been too spaced to realize that he’d meant to go shopping
this
morning, and she’d agreed to it. And was now in her PJs and looking like a hot mess…which shouldn’t have mattered, but did for some reason.

             
“You forgot,” he said.

             
She managed to gesture to her ensemble without flashing nipple. “Obviously.”

             
She couldn’t figure out if she thought his white, constant smile was appealing or annoying as shit. Either way, he smiled. “Not a morning person?”

             
“Not a polite person?”