Читать книгу Everything but a Husband - Karen Templeton - Страница 8

“Because you had a choice.”

Brow knotted, Galen dropped onto the rush-seated ladder-back chair in front of Gran’s desk. That’s all it said, the note wrapped around the large brown envelope, one of those old-fashioned kinds that tied in the back. That, and her name, marching across the front in her grandmother’s distinctive angular scrawl.

She’d had to pry it out of the top right-hand drawer of the desk, wedged as it was behind a cache of loose change and old receipts, a wad of tangled gumbands and at least two dozen long since dead pens. The old woman had refused to let her touch any of her personal stuff. Just because she couldn’t walk so good anymore—or see, or hear, Galen had silently added—didn’t mean her mind was gone, she’d said. Long as she was still breathing, she could handle her own damn finances. Except “damn” came out “dumb” in her thick Slovak accent.

Well, Gran had stopped breathing a week ago, twelve days short of her ninety-first birthday, leaving Galen to sort everything out. And find things, too. Like long brown envelopes with her name printed on them.

The phone—an antique of sorts, left over from the late forties—jangled on the back of the desk. Galen answered it, tucking a stray hank of hair back behind her ear as she distractedly informed the hyper telemarketer that she seriously doubted her grandmother needed another charge card.

She rattled the receiver into its cradle, stared again at the envelope.

“Because you had a choice.”

Now what on earth d’you suppose she meant by that? Well. There was only one way to find out, wasn’t there? Yet…a perverseness not unlike Gran’s stilled her fingers, kept her from untwisting the thin string, opening the envelope.

Or maybe it was more than perverseness?

Galen sighed, squinting out the naked paned window at the flanneled November sky, absently worrying a loose thread dangling from the hem of her sweatshirt. Never could convince her grandmother to splurge on curtains in her bedroom, the old woman insisting the vinyl roller shade was perfectly adequate. Odd how they’d always done that to each other, her grandmother and her. Goaded each other. Driven each other batty. Peculiar way of showing they cared, when she thought about it. Still, all they’d had was each other, for the last three years, a pair of widows keeping each other company in the tiny South Side Pittsburgh house her grandmother had lived in her entire married life.

Now Galen didn’t even have that.

A small, tight knot of anxiety twisted in her stomach.

She dropped the envelope, pushed herself up from the desk. Her hands lifted to the back of her neck, where she released her thick, straight hair from its tortoiseshell barrette, only to immediately finger-comb it back, reclip it. Her gaze lit on the sagging double bed in the center of the room, still shrouded in its yellowing chenille bedspread. Tears pricked behind her eyelids.

Maybe she’d returned to the house where she’d spent so much of her childhood because it seemed she had no choice. Because, after Vinnie died, his medical bills had eaten up whatever there might have been, leaving her flat broke. And without the opportunity she’d naively assumed would be hers. But she’d stayed because she’d wanted to. Somehow, Gran had mellowed in Galen’s absence, allowing a gentleness and sense of humor to rise to the surface of an otherwise dour personality Galen had sure never seen during those interminable years of living with her grandparents after her parents’ deaths. Had Gran’s iron-handedness simply been a reflection of her grandfather’s? She supposed so. After all, most women of her grandmother’s generation and cultural bent felt it their duty to defer to their husband’s decisions. And together, they’d certainly done all they could to clip a young girl’s wings. No makeup, no dating, no going off by herself… To this day, she wasn’t sure how she managed to talk them into letting her take that job at Granata’s, one of Pittsburgh’s most popular Italian restaurants. Four evenings a week, waiting tables. Which was where she met Vinnie, the youngest of the four Granata brothers, already thirty to her sixteen.

Another twist to the gut, this one sharper. Colder. To be sure, he’d courted her slowly. Sweetly. Secretively. Never touched her, except for the occasional stroke of her cheek, a squeeze of her hand, when no one else was around, and not even that the first year. Blinded by the dazzling glare of first love, Galen had been living a dream, hardly daring to believe that this handsome, older man really wanted her. That he might rescue her from the prison of her grandparents’ over-protectiveness. But he did. Enough to keep their secret for two years. The morning of Galen’s eighteenth birthday, they eloped.

He’d cheated her out of a wedding. Too.

A sharp breeze rattled the windows; with a sharp sigh, Galen turned back to the desk, saw the envelope.

“Because you had a choice.”

Yes, it was true. After all, she could have gotten a job—any job—and tried to make a life of her own. After all, it wasn’t as if there were any children—Galen shut her eyes, waiting out the tug of self-pity.

So. She could have refused her grandmother’s offer to come live with her. Just until she got on her feet, Gran had said. Except that within five minutes of moving back, Galen realized the indomitable woman she’d feared so much as a child had somehow turned into a frail and needy old lady. Still domineering, still set in her ways, to be sure, but now someone Galen could love.

But. Now Gran was gone, and Galen found herself back at square one. All she had, besides this house and a couple of not-exactly-impressive bank accounts, was a neurotic terrier-mix who piddled whenever she got too excited, and whatever was inside this envelope. She couldn’t imagine what it might be: Gran had insisted on putting Galen’s name on everything some time ago, insisting she didn’t want any “rigamarole”, as she put it, with the government, when the time came. Said there’d be little enough as it was, no sense making things complicated on top of it.

The old chair squawked as she sank back onto in it, began untwisting the strings on the suddenly blurred envelope. She knuckled away a tear, supposing when your very last relation dies on you, when, at thirty-five, you find yourself childless and husbandless and careerless and lifeless, it’s hard not to feel a little down in the dumps.

Steam hissed from the radiator squatting underneath the window, startling awake the walking mop. Speaking of personal effects. Eyes bulging, the tiny dog hopped out of her basket and clicked over the bare wooden floor to Galen, whimpering to be picked up. Gran’s dog, Baby, a cross between a Chihuahua and a Yorkie. Maybe. Not an attractive animal. For several seconds, dog and woman stared at each other.

With a weighty sigh, Galen scooped the raggedy thing into her lap, then finally undid the envelope, pulled out the contents. Oh. A life insurance policy, looked like. She scanned the first page. Blinked. Heard her heart begin to pound in her ears.

“Jiminy Christmas,” she said on a long, slow whisper, only to yelp like she’d been goosed, the mutt flying off her lap, when the phone rang again.

Galen managed a strangled “Hello?” as the dog made her stiff-legged way back to her basket, into which she flopped with a little doggy groan.

“Galen, baby? It’s Cora. You know, you’ve been on my mind so much the past couple of weeks, and it’s been way too long since I’ve heard from you, so I finally figured I’d better just go on ahead and call before I drove myself crazy. What’s going on, honey?”

The rich, soothing voice of her mother’s old friend swept over her. Just like that, Galen saw the frown pleating the coffee-brown forehead, remembered long-ago Saturday mornings in Cora Mitchell’s base housing living room in Norfolk, playing dress-up with Cora’s daughters to the comforting hum of their mothers’ conversation a few feet away.

Tears swam in Galen’s eyes, as her throat went dry and tight. She’d been out so seldom during the three years she’d spent with her grandmother, she’d lost touch with what few friends she had. Other than the parish priest and a few neighbors who’d hesitantly inquired about her grandmother, she’d talked to no one this past week. Not that she’d ever exactly been a party girl, but still—

“Oh, Cora!” spilled out on something between a sob and a sigh.

“Galen! What is it? What’s happened, baby?”

So she told the only real friend she had left in the world about her grandmother’s passing, about how things had changed between them, about how much she missed the old bat—this said on one of those crying laughs that happens when your emotions get all tangled up in your head like that wad of gumbands in Gran’s desk—which brought the expected moans of commiseration and sympathy. Galen honked into a stiff, scratchy generic tissue—Gran never would pay extra for the good stuff—then pointed out that Gran had been nearly ninety-one, after all.

“Still,” Cora said, and Galen could feel the hug. “Things had really changed that much? Between you?”

“Amazing, huh?”

“A blessing, is what I’m thinking.”

Barely eight years old, Galen had been staying overnight with Cora while her father, home on leave after six months at sea, whisked Galen’s mother off to New York for a quick second honeymoon. It was Cora, tears tracing silver tracks down dark cheeks, who’d gently told her that her parents had died because some drunk had run head-on into them, just on the other side of Dover, Delaware, on their way back. And, ultimately, it had been Cora and her husband who’d delivered Galen to her never-before-seen grandparents in Pittsburgh. Her father’s parents, they of the stoic, strict Slovak extraction, her mother’s Irish parents having both passed away some time before.

Now, if anyone had bothered to ask Galen her druthers about who she wanted to live with, she would have chosen Cora—who was more than willing—over her grandparents any day. The court, however, ruled in favor of blood over druthers, and that was that. Cora had stayed in touch anyway, even after her husband retired from the military and they moved back to her native Detroit, figuring she was still Galen’s honorary aunt.

Hearing Cora’s voice…well, it was a Godsend, is what it was. Not just because Galen was still getting over her grandmother’s death, but because—it all came back to her, now—there was the little matter of just having discovered she was the sole beneficiary of a life insurance policy worth a quarter of a million dollars.

She burst into tears.

“Oh, hell, honey…Oh, shoot, I wish I was there! Talk to me, baby. Get it out, that’s it, get it all out.”

So, between assorted choked sobs and blubbers, she did.

Cora went understandably, if uncharacteristically, silent for several seconds. Then she said, “And you had no idea?”

“N-none. And I have no idea how she did this, why she did this, where she got the money to make the payments on the policy…” Galen shook her head, pushing that stray wisp behind her ear. “I suppose I’ll never know, now. Thing is, though, I keep thinking I’m reading it wrong.”

“Okay. Tell me what it says. Word for word.”

She did.

“You’re not reading it wrong,” came the dry pronouncement across the wire. “So can I hit you up for a loan? This house I bought’s about to bleed me dry.”

Good old Cora.

“So…what’re you going to do with all that money?”

Galen blew out a sigh, stared again at the policy. Heavens. She was rich. Well, maybe not rich. But certainly not poor. She realized she was shaking. And that her head felt like a fly was caught inside it. “I have no idea,” she said over the buzzing. “Buy some new underwear, I suppose.”

“Don’t knock yourself out, now.”

Galen felt a smile twitch at her mouth.

“Hey! How about blowing some of it on a plane ticket?”

“To?”

“Here. For Thanksgiving.”

Thanksgiving? Oh, yeah…that was next week, wasn’t it? Galen’s stomach knotted. “Oh, goodness, Cora. I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it.”

“Now, don’t you tell me you were planning on spending the day alone?”

“I hadn’t planned on anything. Besides, people do, you know,” she said, only to be cut off by an indignant hmmph.

“Give me one good reason why you can’t come up here.”

A harsh, startled laugh tumbled out of her mouth. But no excuses.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. Look, my girls can’t get out here—Willa’s too busy and Lynette’s too pregnant—and I can’t go to either of their places without putting the other one’s nose out of joint, so I’m staying here, and I hate spending Thanksgiving alone. Gets too damn depressing, buying one of those pathetic little turkey breasts just for yourself. So, you wanna come out Tuesday or Wednesday?”

Galen felt the corners of her mouth lift. Right. Knowing Cora, she probably had a million friends she could spend the holiday with. But leave it to her to twist things around to make it sound like Galen would be doing her a kindness, not the other way around.

The house did suddenly seem extraordinarily empty. And quiet.

But…

She shifted in the chair, making it squawk again. “Oh, I don’t know… I’ve still got so much to do. About Gran’s stuff ’n’ that.”

“It’ll still be there when you get back, baby.”

True enough. “But what about getting plane reservations this late?”

“Hey, if it’s supposed to happen, the way will be made clear, you hear what I’m saying?”

Then the dog propped her chin on the edge of her basket, gave her doleful. Right. “I can’t leave the dog.”

“What dog?”

Galen let out a weighty sigh the same time the dog did. “This mutt of Gran’s.”

Doleful turned to indignant.

She tucked the phone to her chest. “Well, you are,” she said, only to realize she was justifying herself to a dog. An ugly one, at that.

“Last time I checked,” Cora said, “they allowed dogs in Michigan.”

Michigan. Crikey. Galen couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of Pittsburgh, let alone to another state. Something suddenly leeched all the air from her lungs. “Oh…I don’t know. This just seems so last minute—”

“For heaven’s sake, girl—you ever hear of the concept of spur of the moment? Besides, you live alone now. You can do things just because, and nobody’s drawers are going to get in a knot about it. So. Tuesday or Wednesday?”

Galen stood up, stretched, looked around the bleak little room. Realized she could go. Or she could stay. It was completely her decision.

That, for the first time in her life, she didn’t have to answer to a living soul.

“I’ll…call you back after I make the reservations,” she said, then laughed, nervously, at Cora’s squeal in reply.

Mirroring his increasingly dreary mood, a cold light drizzle began to mottle Del Farentino’s truck windshield as he pulled out of the Standish’s driveway. Two days before Thanksgiving, with four clients wanting/needing/demanding Del complete their remodeling projects by this afternoon.

He shoved his perpetually too-long hair off his forehead, glancing at the dashboard clock. Ten-o-three. Not bad, actually, considering he’d had a devil of a time getting his four-year-old daughter Wendy dressed and out of the house this morning. Something about the purple sweater—which had been her favorite up until five minutes before he tried to get it on her body—being itchy, and she only wanted to wear the pink one, which was buried underneath several strata of dirty clothes in the laundry basket. It had not been a pretty scene, but the last thing he needed this morning was to be late for his eight o’clock appointment with the Goldens, potential new clients with a large house out past Shady Lakes.

Now there was a bright note. Hot damn, would he love to get his mitts on that one. A complete redo, not just a kitchen remodel or add-a-room project. The architect had been there—a youngish woman who understood how to blend practicality with innovation—and the plans made his mouth water. A job like this would be a real feather in his cap. Prove to the world he was more than a handyman. Not that he was complaining about all the smaller jobs that seemed to drift his way. Between Wendy’s special classes and what-all, not to mention full-time daycare, the kid ate up his income faster than a dog ate steak. Money was money, and he’d take whatever he could get. But it sure would be nice to move up to the big leagues. Which, if these people accepted his bid, just might happen.

Damp gravel crunched underneath his tires as he pulled up in front of Cora Mitchell’s mongrel house, close to the center of town. It had a porch and some eaves and a gable or two and a couple of stories, more or less, but you couldn’t exactly call it anything. Except old. Cora, a long-widowed, vociferous, black earth mama in her late fifties, had worked her way up from temp to managing his step-mother’s Realty office. She’d recently bought the fixer-upper for some outrageously low price, only to discover the repair costs would be equally outrageous. Del pictured this project being on the periphery of his, or somebody’s, to-do list for years.

Cora was in a dither when he arrived, as only Cora could get herself into. According to Maureen, the woman was the epitome of order and decorum in the office, but for some reason—maybe because she’d be fixing up this house well into old age—this project seemed to keep her off-balance. This morning, she was a mess. Muttering something about a guest arriving that afternoon and she hadn’t yet gone to the store and did Del think the rain might change to snow, she barely allowed a glance in his direction as she tromped from room to room, eventually stopping long enough to shroud herself within a long woolen cape the color of a grape Popsicle.

From the basement, he heard reassuring clunks and clanks as his guys changed out her old furnace. They’d already tackled the leaky roof and the sagging living room ceiling where some overly enthusiastic soul had attempted to make a great room out of two smaller rooms by removing a load-bearing wall.

“Who’s the guest?” he asked.

“What?” Silvery eyes, startling against her dark skin, stared at him blankly for a moment. “Oh, you mean Galen,” she said, her breath frosting in front of her face in the cold house. They hadn’t intended on replacing the furnace until the spring, but the furnace had other ideas. Cora hooked the cape together at her throat. “Her mama and I were friends when our husbands were stationed in Norfolk, oh, Lord, more than twenty-five years ago, now. Galen and my girls used to play together, you know?”

She picked up her purse from the hall table, clicked it open, grunted, then clicked it shut again. “Anyway, Galen’s mama and daddy died in a car accident when she was maybe eight or so. Bill and I would’ve taken her ourselves, but whoever makes these sorts of decisions decided she should go with her grandparents instead. We kept in touch, though. The girls and I even went to Pittsburgh to see her, couple of times.” She hesitated, gazing at the doorknob, her brows drawn. “Strange, the way these things happen,” she said, more or less to herself, then looked again at Del. “In any case, I’m not gonna bore you with all the details, ’cause I know you got things to do and, God knows, so do I, but her grandmother died a couple weeks ago, and that was the only living relative she had left, so I strong-armed her into coming up here for Thanksgiving. Since I can’t get out to California this year to see the girls, you know, what with this house sucking every penny out of me like it is. And I didn’t figure there was any reason for her to just sit in that big old empty place of her grandmother’s down in Pittsburgh all by herself. I mean, can you imagine?”

Without waiting for Del’s response—clearly, one wasn’t expected—she tugged open the glass-paned front door and clomped out onto the slate gray porch, the surface marred with smudged workboot footprints. Del followed. The drizzle had turned to sleet, clicking on the porch overhang, bouncing like tiny white bugs off the winter-dry grass out in the yard; Del frowned, silently questioning the wisdom of Cora’s driving on what could easily become icy roads. He also knew better than to call her on it.

“So,” she said, her face smothered in breath clouds as she looked out over her whitening lawn. She yanked on a pair of driving gloves, taking her time smoothing them over her broad knuckles. “You gonna bring the baby to Elizabeth’s for Thanksgiving?”

Del stuffed his fingers in his jeans pockets, grateful he hadn’t yet removed his down vest if the woman was going to conduct a conversation outside. Elizabeth Louden Sanford was his stepsister, his father Hugh having married Elizabeth’s mother Maureen about a year and a half ago. To make things more complicated, Elizabeth’s husband Guy not only brought three children of his own to the marriage, but was the youngest of five sons. In what had to be either the world’s most courageous or dumbest moment, Elizabeth had volunteered to host Thanksgiving for everybody. At last count, Del’s father had said, the guest list was about to pass fifty, and still climbing.

“I haven’t decided,” he finally said. “That’s a lot of people to subject a certain someone to. I’m just not sure…”

Uh-oh. Cora was giving him her Look. “I swear to Heaven, child—when they pass out the award for Overprotective Father of the Year, you’ll win, no contest. You really gotta do something about those trust issues weighing you down, you know? Wendy loves being with people. She’ll be fine, if Paranoid Papa will give her half a chance. Okay, baby,” she continued without waiting for Del’s response, since clearly, nothing he could possibly say was worth listening to. “I’m going on to the store, then out to the airport. I should be back by one at the latest. You need me for anything?”

Del swallowed a smile. Cora drove his guys to distraction. Knowing she’d be gone for three hours would probably make their day.

“Nah. I think we can manage. I’ll be in and out myself, though. What with the holiday coming up and everything, we’re busting butt all over town today.”

“Huh,” Cora said, not paying any attention. She glanced at her watch, invoked the Almighty’s name and vanished. Del yelled, “Drive carefully,” as soon as he was sure she couldn’t hear him.

He stood on the porch for a moment, thinking about the conversation. About Wendy. About his—yeah, he’d admit it—obsessive need to protect her. He supposed it was only natural, considering. Still, Cora was right. Putting Wendy into a new situation was always harder on Del than it was on his daughter. But even though his kid was a fighter—yeah, a champ!—and even though it would take far more than throwing her into a crowd of strange kids to knock her for a loop…

He let out a long, ambivalent sigh.

Two clients later, in the midst of assuring Mrs. Allen that her stove would indeed be ready to go by that afternoon, his cell phone chirped at him. He’d no sooner said, “Yo,” than he was assaulted by a torrent of words from one really mad woman. The connection wasn’t wonderful, but he made out several choice cuss words, an injunction against nature in general and ice storms in particular, and two very distinct phrases: “won’t be ready until late today” and “her plane’s due in forty-five minutes!”

“Cora?”

“Well, who the hell else would be calling you to go pick up someone at the airport?” That came through clearly enough.

Uh-oh.

“Cora—why on earth are you calling me? I’m backed up clear to Canada—”

“Baby, you think I don’t know that? And I’m really sorry, I am, but I’ve called everybody else I can think of and you’re the first person to answer their damn phone.”

Great.

“Cora, I—”

“Oh, thank you, baby! And I’ll make it up to you, I swear. It’s just that the child’s all broken up about her grandmother and everything, you know—?”

Del didn’t have the heart to point out the “child” had to be significantly over thirty.

“—anyway, you got something to write down the flight number?”

With a sigh, Del pulled out a small notebook and pen he always carried with him from his back pocket, duly recorded the information. Clearly, strong-willed females were part of his karma.

“So, what’s she look like? Galen?”

“Oh, Lord. I haven’t seen her in years. She sent me a wedding picture, though. Poor baby. She’s a widow, did I tell you? Oh! And another picture, maybe four, five years ago. Don’t imagine she’s changed much since then. Longish red hair. Dark, like she uses henna on it except this is natural. Real fair skin, some freckles, maybe, I don’t exactly remember. Kinda tall, I guess. Slender. Eyes like those pictures of the Caribbean. Green blue. Pretty girl. You can’t miss her. Okay, this man is giving me a look like I don’t want to know how much this is going to cost me. I’ll see you back at the house.”

Well, that was that. Del hooked the phone back onto his belt, one eyebrow crooked. Red hair and green-blue eyes, huh?

“Mr. Farentino?”

Mrs. Allen was standing far too close, mouth pursed, hands clasped, one of those women to whom lipstick and a housecoat meant “presentable.”

“Does this mean you’re leaving? Before my stove is installed?”

“Now, Mrs. Allen,” Del said in his divert-the-potential-hysteria voice, flashing her his famous, and woefully unused, female-snagging smile. He fetched his vest from where he’d draped it over the back of a kitchen chair, slipped it on. “You gonna trust me here or what? I promise, Dan and Lenny’ll get you all fixed up, okay? By three o’clock this afternoon, you’ll be baking pumpkin pies in that baby, no problem.”

He was out the back door before she had a chance to point out the stove hadn’t even arrived yet.