Suddenly (15 page)

Disgusted, he stalked out of the Tavern. He didn’t care if Lacey
did
have to pay for his beer. If she thought so poorly of him already, a little more was of no account at all.

P
AIGE STOOD ON MARA’S FRONT PORCH ONLY
until the realtor had backed her car from the drive-way. Then she reentered the house and went to work. She wasn’t up for it, but she didn’t have much of a choice. When one had a house to sell—when one hadn’t even put it on the market before a realtor approached saying that the new family in town was asking about it—one didn’t waffle. One tidied up the house, moved the furniture around a little, set the fireplace with the new birch logs the realtor suggested, and packed up anything and everything that was lying around loose.

The fact that Paige wasn’t emotionally ready was secondary to practical considerations. Besides, she wasn’t sure that emotionally she would ever be ready. Like Sami, Mara’s house was a little bit of Mara. Paige had known wonderful times within its walls. Selling it was final, another nail in the coffin, further proof that Mara was dead.

One of the problems was that Mara, in death, had become a mystery as she hadn’t been in life. She was unfinished business. Paige couldn’t stop thinking about her.

So maybe it was just as well that the realtor had forced the issue of selling the house. On her own, Paige might have postponed it forever.

She had promised the realtor that the house would be sparkling clean and ready to show by nine o’clock the next morning, which gave her little time to waste and even less to change her mind. She was wearing a T-shirt and the cut-offs that she had changed into when she had come back from Mount Court. Now she called Jill and explained that she would be late, left Mara’s number, and told her to forward calls.

Armed with a dustcloth, a can of furniture polish, a roll of paper toweling, a bottle of glass cleaner, and the vacuum that she had herself given Mara as a housewarming gift six years before, she set to work in the low orange glow of the evening sun, polishing the table in the front foyer, wiping down the mirror above it, polishing the swirling mahogany bannister, vacuuming the stair runner. She cleaned the front parlor in a similar manner, doing her best with furniture that Mara had collected much the way she had collected people. Just as she had always been drawn to the wounded, so the long leather sofa was an irregular with one discolored cushion, the woven carpet had a pattern that ran off the edge, and the coffee table was gouged in a way that only Mara’s magnanimous eye thought artistic.

The back parlor was another story. The furnishings there were simple—a Shaker bench, two Windsor chairs, bookshelf upon bookshelf of planks stretched over bricks. Three things saved the room from being stark. The first was Mara’s cushion collection—a wild assortment of pillows bought in a wild assortment of places and clustered in masses to rival the softest, deepest sofa. Paige smiled at the memory of Mara’s wards running and jumping, tossing and turning, laughing hysterically right along with Mara.

The second was her work bench, an old barn door with legs attached. It held books and magazines, mail—some opened, some not—and road maps, a basket of fabric scraps, a half-finished pillow, and an instruction book from the quilting class she had been taking.

The third were the photographs that graced every free wall. They were ones Mara had taken and developed under Peter’s watchful eye, and whereas one would have expected the pictures to be of children, they weren’t. They were pictures of nature—trees, bridges, meadows, animals—each capturing a feeling that was every bit as intense as the emotion on a child’s face might have been.

Given her druthers, Paige would have sealed off this room. The memory of Mara was nearly overpowering here, engulfing her with the same disbelief that she had felt so strongly during the first few days after Mara’s death. Then came sadness, because the mind knew what the heart still could not accept.

Taking a breath and delving in, Paige cleared the desktop, spritzed it, wiped it down. After fanning several of the magazines on the table, she put the rest, along with the mail and the maps, in the trunk of her car. She arranged the quilting materials as artfully as she could, feeling all the while as though she were fashioning a tribute to Mara. She took even greater pains with the pillows, arranging them one way, then another, then a third when she felt that neither of the previous arrangements properly caught the spirit of Mara.

And that was important. Paige had promised Mara on the day of the funeral that she would find a family that would love the house as she had, and she was determined to do it. If the realtor’s family disliked this room, they couldn’t have the house.

Dusk arrived. She switched on lights, moved into the dining room, and began polishing its contents. Mara had bought the long table and chairs at an estate sale. The pomposity of them had amused her—or so she had always claimed. Now, rubbing a cloth over the cherrywood, Paige wondered if there hadn’t been a deeper attraction. She had seen a set like this before. She could have sworn it had been at the O’Neills’ house in Eugene.

The sadness hit her in waves, occasionally so strong that she sank onto a chair until inertia proved worse. So she set a feverish pace in the kitchen. When she began to sweat, she tied up her hair with a piece of yarn from Mara’s basket, pulled her T-shirt free of her shorts, opened the window, and pushed on. When her muscles complained, she ignored them. She was willing to do most anything to blot out the sense of emptiness that seemed to have settled over her life.

It didn’t make sense, that emptiness. Mara had been a vibrant part of her life for twenty years; that her death should leave a gap was understandable, but that the gap should be so large—and
spreading
—was unfair.

She was cleaning the oven, scrubbing angrily, when the doorbell rang. It was just after ten. She wasn’t in the mood for guests, couldn’t begin to imagine who was there other than a neighbor curious about the lights. Traipsing through the hall to the front door, she switched on the outside light. A large form lurked beyond the wavy glass panel. Definitely a neighbor, she thought, picturing Duncan Fallon. He was the gatekeeper type and would be wanting to know who was in Mara’s house. Strange he hadn’t recognized her car.

But it wasn’t Duncan. It was Noah Perrine. One look at him, and she groaned.

“Bad time?” he asked in that soft voice of his.

“Yeah.” Her heart was pounding—a delayed reaction to the surprise of the doorbell, she told herself. “I’m tired and dirty. I’m not up for sparring. Maybe another time?” Then she frowned. “How did you know I was here?”

“Your baby-sitter.”

“Did you stop by at the house?”

He shook his head. “Called.”

“Ah.” She nodded. It was a minute before it occurred to her to wonder why he had come, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, God. Something happened—”

“No,” he broke in. “Everything’s fine.”

She pressed a hand to her chest. “I had a horrible image of—of—just a horrible image.” Pills, a car—her own imagination couldn’t match that of a teenager intent on self-destruction.

But he repeated, “Everything’s fine.”

“Thank God.” The doorknob steadied her. “So, were you just out driving around?” It was a nice enough night. He should have kept on driving.

“Campus was oppressive. I had to get away.”

“Oppressive? Mount Court?”

“You aren’t the Head there.” He took a deep breath, something of a sigh that didn’t know where to go. “I get tired sometimes. That’s all. So I thought I’d drive around town, but the loneliness of that was as bad as it was at the school. It might have been nice to stop off and visit someone, but the locals I’ve met since I came here aren’t wild about Mount Court. I didn’t think they’d appreciate my dropping by.”

“To tell you the truth,” she hinted, but he was looking beyond her into the house.

“Glad to hear you have a baby-sitter. It wouldn’t be good for the little girl to be here this time of night. This was your friend’s home?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Nice place.”

Paige sighed. “The realtor thinks she has a buyer. She’s showing it in the morning. I’m getting it ready.” She glanced disaparagingly at her shirt and shorts, which were smudged and spotted. Self-conscious, she looked back up.

“You wear it well,” he said with a crooked grin. “Can you take a break?”

She shook her head. “Not if I want to finish in time to get a little sleep before work tomorrow.”

“Just down the street for a hamburger?”

Paige never ate hamburgers. Between the red meat and the fat, she figured most anything else would be better.

But a hamburger sounded mighty good just then.

Still, she shook her head. “I have a ways to go in the kitchen, and I haven’t even hit the second floor.” Besides, she was a mess. She couldn’t go anywhere without a shower, much less anywhere with Noah Perrine. He made her nervous. He looked too good.

“Let me help, then.”

“Oh, no, that’s uncalled for.”

“Four hands can do a hell of a lot more, faster than two.”

“But—” She took a step back when he came inside.

“Where should I start?”

“But you look so nice,” she protested, feeling slightly overwhelmed. Noah Perrine was an academician, she told herself, but when she tried to picture him pushing papers around his desk, the image of the construction worker came instead. “You’ll ruin your clothes.”

“We’re not talking feeding the pigs in a mud storm, here. I’ve cleaned house before. My clothes won’t be ruined.”

“Really, Noah. I appreciate your offer, but—”

“You have the guilt to work off,” he said, looking her in the eye.

Her protest fizzled. His directness was sobering. “Yes,” she said quietly and with some surprise. She hadn’t pegged him for the insightful type. “How did you know?”

“I lost a close friend once, too. It’s been six years, now.”

“Was it suicide?”

“In a way. Gin was his thing. He swore he never had more than one or two with dinner and explained away the occasional late night drunk driving citation as an aberration. I took him at his word until the night he drove into the back of an eighteen-wheeler at a toll booth, and then it was too late.”

Paige couldn’t deny the analogy to her situation with Mara. “I should have done more for her while she was alive. I should have been more aware of her state of mind. I should have been able to help. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t.” Flexing her back, she braced her hands on the tired muscles above her waist and ran her eye up the winding staircase. “This is all that’s left. And I feel guilty about that, too. I promised I’d have the place painted and get a new screen for the door and replace one of the shutters upstairs. But if the family that’s coming tomorrow loves the place and buys it, I won’t have time.”

“Use my kids.”

She had no idea what he was talking about and said so with a look.

“Community service. It’s my thing. They may kick and scream, but they’ll have the place painted in a week.”

She shook her head. “If they’re going to paint any house, it should be one in lower Tucker. The people there could use the help. Me, I can afford to pay. And I may have time. Who knows, the people tomorrow may not be the right ones. The house may be on the market for months.”

“I hope not, for your sake. You need closure.”

It was another direct eye-to-eye statement, a succinct summation of the problem. “Closure,” she said with a sigh. “Painful, but it needs doing. Like the oven.” She gestured toward the kitchen. “I have to get back.”

“So what can I do?”

“Nothing. Really.”

“Please,” he insisted, “I have to do something. It’s either help you here, or drive around for another few hours. I can’t go back. Not yet.”

Paige wondered why but didn’t ask. She didn’t feel strong enough to take on his woes. She had work to do, and the longer she lingered, the later it would be before she finished.

“Upstairs,” she finally said with a wave toward the cleaning goods. “There are four bedrooms. Two are empty. You can start with those—dust, vacuum, do anything that might make them look more inviting. The realtor suggested putting a small piece of furniture in each, but I can do that later. I’ll be up to do the other bedrooms myself when I finish with the kitchen.”

“Can’t I help with that?”

She shook her head and set off down the hall feeling sadder than ever. There was something about Noah’s unexpected kindness that was touching. It wrenched her at a time when she didn’t want to be wrenched. She wanted to do the job she’d set out to do and go home.

So she finished the oven, scrubbed the stove top and the counters, then wiped out the refrigerator, which looked as forlorn as she felt with its single carton of milk, half loaf of bread, quarter stick of margarine, and gouged wedge of cheese. At first she left them there and mopped the floor. Then she returned, sniffed the milk, and, in a burst of furious action, dumped it into the sink, stuffed the bread, margarine, and cheese into the disposal, and ground it all up. They smelled of things gone bad. She was devastated.

Desperate for fresh air, she went through the bowed screen door to the back porch. She kneed the swing and watched it creak back and forth, but the knowledge of Mara’s fondness for it brought her no solace. An empty swing was a desolate sight.

With a sound of despair, she left the porch and, by the frail light that filtered from the house, wandered into the yard. The birds were still for the night, leaving a hollowness in the air that the chirp of the crickets and the rustle of dying leaves in the breeze barely touched. It was a warm night, but she was chilled. Rubbing her arms, she walked farther into the dark.

At the spot where grass gave way to the woods, she sank to the ground. The black of night matched the dark thoughts she held, enlarging them until they encompassed the whole of her future. The years lay before her, a continuation of the ones that had gone past, yet different. More quiet and, like Mara, alone. Increasingly empty. Profoundly sad.

She heard his footsteps but didn’t look up.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I needed air.”

She heard him settle in the grass and wanted to protest. Noah Perrine, with his rules and regulations, wasn’t the kind of person she was normally drawn to. But he was human and alive. His presence made the night less ominous.