Finding Home (8 page)

“I'm
going through with it.”

The statement had sounded a lot more confident when she'd told Kathy yesterday morning at work. And Julie over the telephone during her lunch break.

As she said the words out loud to Brad now, they sounded extremely shaky to her. Like something she would utter just before plunging off a cliff in a first-time bungee jump attempt.

Brad looked at her for a long moment over the length of the breakfast table. The way he looked at her made Stacey think of a professional gunfighter from the Old West, eyeing the upstart who had called him out on the street, challenging him. It was as if they were squaring off. Standing on opposite sides of the long, dusty street. Rosie was at his side, Dog was at hers. That both animals were hopeful of handouts was beside the point. They could have easily been seconds. Backups in an old fashioned duel of honor.

God, but she hated the tension that seemed to be in every corner of the room.

“And nothing I've said has made any difference to you?” he asked.

She could have broken icicles off his words. “Don't make this about you, Brad.”

“How is it not about me?” The icicles were gone, melted in the sudden flash of heat that rose in his voice. “You're willfully choosing to throw away a fortune, leaving me with the responsibility of providing for our futures when I could very easily just take this money and have it compounding daily—”

Stacey cut in. “It's not about you because I'm not doing it to deprive you, Brad. I'm doing it to enhance something that we live in. Something we can both enjoy when it's finished.”

He looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. When he spoke, his tone did nothing to negate that impression. “Do you have
any
idea what's involved in remodeling?”

Damn it, why did he treat her as if she was some backward ten-year-old? She ran the house, for God's sake. And a medical office with seven doctors.

“Yes.” And then, because those same green eyes she'd fallen in love with were boring into her, she relented. “Not specifically,” she allowed, “because we've never gone through it, but I am aware of the concept.”

There was just enough of a smirk on his lips to infuriate her. “You have to find contractors. Decent ones. And when you do, they're already all booked up or they'll disappear for days at a time.”

They both knew he wasn't speaking from experience, either. Just from stories he'd heard from others who had gone through it. With a slight incline of her head, she acknowledged, “I've heard the horror stories. Same as you,” she added.

He took it as a jab at his authority. Brad glared at her across the table. “Just don't expect me to help, that's all.”

“Help?” she echoed, not following. “Help what? Remodel?”

He was kidding, right? Brad was a wonderful surgeon. As
brilliant as he was in the operating room, that was how bad he was with anything that required the least bit of mechanical savvy. That included the proper way to hold on to a saw or a drill. In the final analysis, Brad had to be as unhandy a man as God had ever created.

He could tell exactly what she was thinking. It was there, in her expression, in her voice. He took it as belittling his abilities. Granted, he couldn't build a palace out of toothpicks and twine, but he was handy in his own right. Brad frowned his displeasure. “No, help finding a contractor. I'm too busy to sit around, interviewing guys with more tools than brains.”

Whenever he felt threatened or insecure, he had a tendency to hide behind sharp words and criticisms. She didn't bother defending the world where manual labor was king. She was gaining ground. Winning.

She was actually winning.

You go, girl!

Julie's voice echoed in her head, egging her on.

“That's okay,” Stacey told him cheerfully. “I can do it. I can schedule the interviews for Saturdays.” Actually, with her work schedule, she would have to. “That way, if you decide that you want to be part of the process—”

“I don't,” he declared with feeling and finality, like a judge refusing to augment a death sentence.

Stacey pretended he hadn't said anything. “You can.” Brad scowled at her. But at least he wasn't lecturing, she thought. Or pouting. That was progress. “And if you're too busy,” she allowed, “that's okay, too.”

Brad sighed. He'd lost his appetite. Moving aside his plate,
he reached for the glass of orange juice she'd poured and took another sip.

“Look,” he finally said, setting the glass down again. “If your goal is a new house, why not just do that? Get a new house. One of my former patients is a real estate broker. I could—”

“Brad. Brad, stop,” she pleaded, holding up her hand to get his attention. “My goal isn't a new house,” she contradicted.

“It's not?

“No, it's to get
this
house to look like new.”

She could see that what she was saying wasn't making any sense to him. She tried again. Because she really did want him to understand. Not to accept and walk away, but to understand. It wasn't all that hard.

“I love this house, Brad. This is
my
house.
Our
house. This is where all my memories are.” As she spoke, emotions swept through her, intensifying every word she said. “This is where we started out together when you finally got your practice. Where Julie and Jim became tiny people instead of just babies. This is where we celebrated all our Christmases, all our birthdays. Where we had good times and bad.” She swept over the last word and the images it evoked. Because lately, although it hadn't been actually horribly bad, it hadn't been good, either. “I love this house,” she told him again with feeling.

She searched his face to see if she'd gotten through. But there was no indication that she had. Had they really grown that far apart? Had their dreams, the things that mattered to them, veered that much off course?

He shook his head. “Then why change it?”

It wasn't changing, it was improving, but she had a feeling
that comparison would be lost on him, too. For a brilliant man, he could be so dumb.

“Because,” she told him patiently, trying to put it in the simplest terms she could think of, “like everything else, the house needs a face-lift. The bathrooms are in critical need of updating. The patio is cracked in dozens of different places. Patching it is useless. We need a new one.”

“Which will crack in turn.”

She'd done her homework. “Not if we use pavers instead. They'll give.” She smiled, pleased with herself for having collected articles and ads on remodeling for years now. Dreaming. “Our closets could do with some expanding,” she continued. “And the bonus room is sagging.”

Brad rolled his eyes, the ever suffering husband. “You're exaggerating.”

But for once in her life, she stood ground. “No, I'm not.”

“The bonus room isn't sagging.”

To Brad's surprise, Stacey rose from her chair and came around to his side of the table. She took his hand, tugging it. Urging him to his feet.

“C'mon.”

Finishing off his juice, he rose. “What are you doing?”

When they had originally moved here, they had used the bonus room to entertain their friends. But slowly, they had gotten out of the habit of entertaining. Brad hadn't been inside the bonus room for what seemed like years. In the last few, Jim had taken it over, doing all his studying and occasional entertaining there. Brad stayed clear of it and Jim. It was as simple, as upsetting, as that.

“I'm taking you upstairs so you can see what I'm talking
about for yourself.” He began to protest, but she didn't release his hand. Instead, she led the way to the staircase. “If it doesn't have a nerve ending attached to it, you hardly notice it.”

It wasn't a complaint, it was just the way things were. The longer he was in practice the more he became oblivious to things that existed outside of the work he had dedicated himself to.

Because he didn't feel like arguing about yet something else, Brad allowed himself to be led up the stairs, although he did reclaim his hand.

The bonus room was at the end of the hall. The large, patio-style doors led out to a tiny balcony that in turn looked out onto the cul de sac. Over to the extreme left, there was a desk with a computer and all the peripherals. Adjacent to that and in between the two patio doors, was a rather outdated television set on a swivel stand. Directly opposite the desk with the computer was a leather sofa that had seen better decades.

Most of the furniture in the room, as well as the house, was approximately the same age as her children. Brad didn't believe in getting rid of something until it was beyond saving. The only new thing in the room was the pool table and that was more than fifteen years old.

Brad put his hands on his hips. “Okay, what am I looking at?”

She gestured toward the floor lamp that stood beside the television set and right next to the patio door closest to the computer.

“That, for starters.”

Tall, slender, with a shade to match, the lamp was listing
several degrees to the right. Resembling a sailor at least three sheets to the wind.

“And that.” She gestured to another floor lamp, an exact duplicate of the first. This one was over beside the leather sofa and it leaned in exactly the opposite direction. “And those.”

This time she indicated two tall maple cases filled to capacity with DVDs and CDs. The cases bowed toward each other like two polite Europeans, encountering each other on the street for the first time in months.

“All that proves is that we have cheap lamps and that the cabinets are overloaded. Get new lamps and get rid of some of those movies and CDs. You don't need to have that many.”

He stubbornly refused to see the big picture. And trust Brad to find a way to tell her to curb her spending. She might not “need” the movies he dismissed so cavalierly, but she did like having a library of old movies. She liked the idea of being able to rummage through them and find something to lift up her mood when it needed lifting.

“It's not the lamps, which, by the way, aren't as cheap as you think,” she slipped in, then hurried along before he could question her about the price. “The bonus room floor needs to be reshored.”

He glared at her. It was obvious what he thought of her estimation. “You sure that a quarter of a million will cover everything you want done?”

Stacey had no idea what possessed her to glibly answer, “If not, it'll be a start.” But it felt good to say it.

Brad
stared at her as if she had completely lost her mind. For a moment, she thought he was just going to get up and walk away, freezing her out. But the next moment, she realized that he was digging in.

He took in a deep breath. Stacey braced herself for the storm.

“Look, Stacey, if you think that I'm going to let you just pour good money after bad into this money pit we're living in—”

Stacey held up her hand like a policewoman intent on stopping the flow of traffic before it got out of hand. “First of all, why would you call Uncle Titus's money bad?” She knew that Brad thought the man eccentric, they all did, but it wasn't as if he'd been a robber baron. Uncle Titus was gone and deserved a little respect. “Second of all, you don't have to worry, I'm not about to go overboard. I might not be as conservative as you are when it comes to money, but I don't exactly run around blowing it on everything I see, either.”

The expression on Brad's face did not change. “Until now.”

This was still about the IRA, she thought. “Until ever.”

Stacey struggled to keep her anger from taking over, making her say things she couldn't take back. She knew where Brad was coming from. Growing up, he had been relatively poor. A lot poorer than she had been. While other
kids were hanging out after school, Brad was working any job he could get, not just for spending money to line his pockets, but to put into the bank. Knowing his parents couldn't help him, he wanted to save as much as he could to pay for his college education.

When he wound up getting an undergraduate scholarship to the same university their daughter was now attending, there was no sigh of relief, no symbolic loosening of the purse strings. Not even a little. Instead, Brad seemed to hang on to the money more than ever, always concerned that the scholarship he'd been awarded would be yanked because his grades fell, or because some other, unforeseen event happened.

Brad always made sure that he was prepared for the eventuality of that inevitable rainy day. In a cloudless sky, he was the one always anticipating storm clouds.

Her voice softened and she tried to reason with him, to get past phobias that seemed to her to be deeply ingrained in him. “You know, Brad, we are at a place in our lives where we can actually relax a little.” Reaching over, she put her hand on his. “I'm still working, your practice is doing very well—”

He pulled his hand away. And left her isolated.

“We have a daughter in medical school and a deadbeat son who's a financial drain on us.” He saw her start to protest. She was always defending Jim. Maybe that was why his son had never tried to amount to anything. He knew his mother had his back. “Don't think I don't know that you've been slipping him money to get by.”

She hated the way Brad picked on Jim. Hated the way he tried to push his own goals, his own values on their son. Brad
didn't believe in people finding their own way. As always, it had to be
his
way or it wasn't acceptable. “Jim is not a deadbeat.”

The look Brad gave her said that he knew better. “He has a part-time job as a delivery boy and spends the rest of the day clutching his guitar and contemplating his navel.”

Brad had always thought of the arts as frivolous. Only the world of medicine was important. Everything else took a back seat. And the arts were relegated to the back of the train. She, on the other hand, had always thought that while medicine treated the body, the arts fed the soul.

“You're being insulting, Brad. He is
not
contemplating his navel, he's writing songs.”

Disgust filtered over his handsome features. Once, a very long time ago, when he had bought Jim a toy stethoscope and miniature doctor's bag, he'd thought about what it might be like, having his son join him in his practice. Now it was Julie who might someday come aboard. But it didn't ease the sting of disappointment as far as he was concerned.

“The world doesn't need more songs, Stacey. It has damn well enough already.”

She opened her mouth, then shut it. Throwing up her hands, she withdrew from the field of battle. “I'm not doing this.”

He'd fully anticipated another volley, something about Jim having the soul of a poet or some garbage. She'd surprised him. Again. Obviously, Stacey was going for some kind of record. “Doing what?”

“Getting into another argument with you over the kids. We've had these fights before.” So many times that she could have just shouted numbers at him. Argument 307. Argument 119. And just as much would have been resolved. Nothing.

“It's not ‘kids,'” Brad corrected tersely. “It's Jim.” He didn't bother trying to suppress the sigh. “It's always Jim. Julie is doing great,” he reminded her. “And they're not fights.”

“Okay,” Stacey allowed. “We've had these ‘discussions' before and they've all gone nowhere.” And before he canonized their daughter, she added, “There was a time, you know, when you thought Julie was a lost cause.”

He looked at her as if he had no idea what she was talking about. As if he'd suddenly realized that his wife had had a lobotomy without his knowing about it. “No, I didn't.”

“Yes, you did.” Stacey glared at him. “She was dating that Goth, wearing nothing but black and looked like a walking magician's wand, she was so skinny. You threatened to send her off to an all-girls Catholic school if she didn't eat something and find an alternative color to wear.”

He shrugged vaguely. “If you say so.”

Stacey didn't know whether to laugh or cry. “The point is, it happened and you
were
ready to write her off, but she turned herself around.” She got to the heart of her statement. “And so will Jim.”

“I'm still waiting,” he said.

Had he always had this cruel streak? she wondered. Or had she just been blind to it all these years? “Some people take longer than others. He was damn near perfect until his third year in high school,” she reminded him. “Every kid goes through a rebellious period. He's just taking longer than most, I guess. But then, he got started later than most, too.”

Brad grew quiet for a moment, as if debating on whether or not to believe her. “And you honestly think he's going to go back to school and at least get an MBA?”

She knew Brad wanted her to say yes. That, pessimist supreme though he was, if she said that Jim would eventually go back for at least an MBA, then he would have some hope of his son's success.

But she couldn't lie to him. Not even to make him feel better. Not unless he was on his death bed as well. Then all bets were off.

“Probably not.” She saw hope shrink away, replaced with annoyance and frustration as if the two emotions had never been away. “But I know he'll make something of himself.”

Brad's mouth twisted. “Yeah, if we're lucky, he'll be promoted to singing waiter.” He shook his head. How had this happened? How had his son not inherited any of his genes? “And we'll wind up having to subsidize him for the rest of our lives.”

Money. It was always about the money. She was so sick of hearing about money. It seemed to her that was all they ever talked about, when they did talk. How could something so perfect have gone so awry?

For a moment, because she looked so genuinely sorry, he thought she was being serious. “And here you were, planning to take the money with you. I guess it's true what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men.”

It took everything he had not to shove the table away from him. He was trying to look out for her, trying to get a backbone for his son without having to surgically implant it, and she was being flippant and sarcastic.

“What the hell has gotten into you?” he asked. “Ever since you came back from your uncle's funeral, you're a completely different person.”

Welcome to the new, improved Stacey Sommers. The one who came with a spine.

“The difference is,” she replied tersely, “I've decided to stand up for myself.”

The pause was so long, it made her want to scream and climb the walls. When he finally spoke, it made her long for the pause. “And life's been that bad for you. I've been beating you into the ground every night.”

“No, you haven't been beating me into the ground, Brad. But you haven't been listening to what I've been saying, either.”

“Yes, I have,” he contradicted. “The trouble is, what you've been saying hasn't been right.”

Second verse, same as the first.
“And you would be the only one who knows what's right?”

“Apparently. At least when it comes to the matters that you've been dragging up.”

Brad looked down at his watch. He was running late. Even if he wasn't, he wanted to get away from this woman he didn't recognize. Wanted to stay away until the woman he'd married, the one he loved and had promised to cherish, returned to him.

He knew he couldn't hide out at the hospital and his office indefinitely, but he could leave now. For the moment, he gave in. He didn't have time to try to win her over. With a movement that signaled finality, he threw down his napkin and rose from the table.

“Do what you want, Stacey.” His voice was no longer heated. It was distant, removed. As removed as a public transportation announcer explaining the reason for a train's delay. “As you've pointed out, it's your money.”

“The will made stipulations—”

He continued as if she hadn't said anything. “Just as long as you don't touch our bank account,” he warned coldly. And then he spared her a look. “One of us has to be fiscally responsible.”

She could feel the hairs on the back of her neck rising again. “Meaning I'm not.”

He began walking to the front of the house. And escape. “I don't have time to do an audio replay of our conversation. I'm late.” Reaching the door, he looked at her one last time. “And don't expect me home for dinner tonight. I've got a board meeting. I'll grab something in the cafeteria.”

He always ate at home, no matter how late he was. “You hate the cafeteria.”

He looked at her significantly. “Right now, the cafeteria's looking pretty good.”

And with that, he left.