Chapter 11

“No, it’s good. I swear.” I’d added those last two words when Shannon swiveled again and frowned at her reflection in the mirror as if she didn’t trust in my opinion. “It’s a great outfit. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Nicola, no offense, but I’ve only ever seen you wear scrubs.”

“Not today,” I pointed out. Today, I was wearing…I looked down. “Today, I’m wearing sweatpants.”

“Exactly. And it doesn’t look like you’ve done your hair, you don’t have on any makeup, and that t-shirt has a hole in the armpit.”

Maybe I also needed a little wardrobe help. “But I’m not going to an interview like you are,” I pointed out. “I think what you have on is totally appropriate for that. It seems like something I would wear. If I were dressing up to get a job,” I amended, because she’d frowned again. I definitely would have worn that exact dress if I were four inches taller than my actual height, as Shannon was. “Your outfit has a similar feel to what I actually had on when I applied at Presbyterian, and remember that they hired me.” I had brought my interview attire over to her house to serve as an example, and now the neat pantsuit hung on the back of her closet door above the mess of her own clothes on the floor. There was a lot of mess in the house, which I’d noticed as she directed me to her room. It had been hard, but I’d kept all advice and opinions about cleaning to myself because I was aware that they would make her upset.

But now Shannon was asking what I thought and she was also upset, despite the fact that I was correct. “They hired you there because you have a ton of experience,” she told me, “not because of that blazer combo. It’s a little…”

“What?” I prompted. “Go ahead and finish your thought.”

“It’s dated. Out of style. Unfashionable,” she concluded and I stared at my pantsuit in shock.

Dated? “I just bought it eight years ago,” I countered. Yes, I had bought it at a resale shop, but it couldn’t have been that old. “It looks very nice and it still fits me perfectly. I did my hair for my interviews, too.”

She rolled her eyes and stared at herself in the mirror. “Fuck,” she sighed, drawing out the vowel sound.

“I know what to do,” I told her. “I know someone who’s really good at this stuff.”

“You do?” She sounded like she didn’t believe me, again.

“Look at these pictures,” I said, and opened my phone to Brenna’s social media. “See?”

“Is this your sister? You look so much alike.”

“We’re all somewhat similar,” I agreed. Brenna didn’t have what she referred to as my rack, and she didn’t have my butt, either. But we all had red hair and blue eyes, and we all had what my dad called the Curran features. I looked at my sister’s pictures and thought that she was so pretty. “You really think we look alike?”

“Yeah, a lot, except you’re more…natural.” She glancedagain at my sweatpants. “What is your sister going to do?

“I need your help,” I wrote to Brenna. “My neighbor has a job interview and I’m supposed to give her fashion advice but it’s going badly.”

Again, I waited. Brenna didn’t text or even call; instead, her name popped up on my screen and I opened to chat with her face to face.

“You’re the one giving fashion advice?” she greeted me, also frowning. “Is that a joke?”

“No. Here’s what I suggested,” I told her, and turned the phone so that she could see Shannon in the neat, tan sheath dress with the matching blazer. The blue was gone from her hair, because she’d decided (on her own) that it might not have matched up with what they were looking for in a receptionist at a hospital, and she’d also removed many of the hoops from the helix of her ear. I maintained that she looked great.

“Holy Mary,” my sister said. “What is the interview for, a position as a pallbearer? Sidewalk repair? Like, she could just lie down over a hole and blend in?”

“It’s to be a receptionist at Presbyterian Hospital,” Shannon said.

“That outfit is so bad that I just threw up in my mouth,” Brenna commented. “Show me your clothes.”

It didn’t take the Brat too long to choose something else, and I had to admit that it was more interesting than the beige dress and it did look more like something that Shannon would wear on an everyday basis, except showing less skin and not so tight. “That’s very nice,” I complimented. “I wouldn’t have picked it myself, but it looks good.”

“I know you wouldn’t have picked it,” Brenna said from my phone. “I can see what you’re wearing right now and I’m ashamed that we’re related.”

“I say that a lot,” I answered, and she called me some names. I’d heard worse.

“I can’t believe you wanted my help,” she said after she was done with the insults.

“You’re the best dressed person I know,” I explained. Juliet seemed to spend more money, but Brenna always looked good, even when she was only wearing a tank top and shorts like at my parents’ barbecue on the Fourth of July.

“Thanks,” she answered, and she sounded very surprised.

“Thank you,” Shannon called, and then I said it too.

“You’re welcome,” my sister said, still with that edge of bewilderment in her voice. “I have to go back to work.”

We all did. I wished Shannon luck and told her to let me know how it went, and then she took her car (now running well) to Presbyterian and I went over to Midtown General. I hadn’t cut back on any of my shifts since the big talk I’d had with Eddie and Jude, so I was still working at both hospitals. I had decided to stop doing the extra home healthcare visits, though, and Eddie was refusing my assistance at his own house so I had more time.

And the roof? That issue was kind of put to bed, because he had decided to sell his birthright.

“There’s too much,” he’d announced at our meeting on the lawn. “I haven’t been upstairs in years and I’m tired of trying to squeeze through all the doorways to get around on the ground floor. I know you could fix those,” he’d said to Jude, “but there’s too damn many things to fix. There’s too much for me to take care of and I never liked that place, anyway.”

But it had been his mother’s house.

“Stop crying,” he’d ordered me, and I’d said that I wasn’t. I also wasn’t ready to quit and give up on the goals I’d set for myself so many years ago. Yes, I had cut out my gig work, but I wasn’t about to relinquish my plans to help Eddie. So we kept arguing about it, with me saying that he had nowhere to go if he sold his inheritance and last tie to his family, and him telling me that I wasn’t in charge of where he went and to shut the hell up about his mother. Then we’d start everything back over at the same place. It was infuriating and endless.

On top of that, things were also strained with Jude. He was clearly upset with how I was dealing with everything, which I understood. I was also upset with myself for how I’d gone to pieces and ended up in a conference in my front yard. I wasn’t usually a person who couldn’t handle things; I’d handled six siblings, a job, school, and all my activities, and then I’d handled working my tail off while studying to become a nurse so I could graduate debt-free and buy my own home. That was the kind of person I was. I was tough and resilient and I didn’t bow under pressure.

Maybe I didn’t exactly feel that way at this moment, but I knew that I could pull things back together. I needed to prove to Eddie, Jude, and myself that I could.

I got back home from Midtown General just as Jude was getting up to go for his run, and we greeted each other as he went out the door. Just a hello but it was enough to see that he was still out of sorts with me, and that suddenly made me furious back at him. Who was he to have an opinion, anyway? He was only my housemate; he paid rent to live in the place that I owned. He had plenty of problems of his own! When he tried to poach eggs, the yoke went everywhere. Also, he didn’t know how to properly fold fitted sheets. He had ruined his own life—

No, I wasn’t going to blame him for that. His life had blown up because he hadn’t cared enough about himself to prevent that from happening. And more than a year and a half later, he was a different person from the man who had been pushed out of a car at Detroit Saint Raphael Hospital. I stood at the window and watched him run down the block at a very fast pace and despite the fact that he thought I was making poor decisions and also believed that I was stubbornly stupid, I was still proud of him.

I would prove to him that he should have a good opinion of me, as well. After all, I was the one who…

I tried to think of something good, something that Jude could also admire about me. Well, I could fold those fitted sheets, but that was useless. It didn’t bother him if they weren’t in a neat square because he only had one set that he washed and put right back onto his mattress. Ok, I was a good nurse, wasn’t I? But there were plenty of good nurses at both hospitals where I worked. The longer I continued with Operation Fake Friend, the more I seemed to admire them.

I thought harder. I could clean, I really was good at that. So rather than going right to bed this morning, I started working on the house. Jude came back from his run, showered, and left again. He hardly looked at what I was doing, which was scrubbing down all surfaces until things were bright and sparkling, as bright and sparkling as an old house with poor lighting that needed a lot of repairs could be. And when I was done, it wasn’t the amazing transformation that I’d hoped for.

Sugar. Well, I could also cook. Jude had been making amazing progress with his culinary skills but I thought I still had him in terms of prowess in the kitchen. By now, I was fully exhausted, but I still didn’t go to bed. I went to the grocery store instead and when I came back, I took a shower and tried to pick out an outfit that Brenna would have approved of. I put on makeup and then I went downstairs to start on dinner.

I had written out a complicated menu in my journal and I opened to that page and read it again carefully before I started prepping. The words seemed slightly blurry and I blinked to make my eyes focus, then leaned my head on my hand and felt my eyes droop…no, I wasn’t going to do that! There was no time for sleeping. I pinched myself hard and got right back up so that by the time that I heard Jude coming in from work, I was fully awake.

He walked slowly from the entryway into the kitchen. “Hi,” he said.

“Hello. I made dinner.”

“It smells good.” He turned.

“I meant, I made dinner for both of us, if you would—if you don’t have other plans, and you’re hungry. I’m inviting you to eat with me.”

“I was going to go wash my hands. I’ve gotten a note or two about that,” he answered, and then I heard him head upstairs. By the time he came down, I had checked myself in the mirror at the door and reapplied the makeup that was supposed to make me look less tired. It had done the best it could.

Jude didn’t comment on my appearance but I couldn’t help thinking that he was good enough to eat, himself. His looks were so overwhelmingly appealing—not too many people in the entire world could have possessed eyes like his with a color that was such a beautiful, warm brown, and not too many other men could have had his nose with the little bump that balanced so well with his chin and jaw. Something about his features made you want to kiss them, which you would have to stand on your tiptoes to do because he was tall but not overwhelmingly large like Liv’s giant husband. He wasn’t skinny anymore but he was so nice and muscular and lean, like you would want to put your arms around—

“Nicola? Are we going to eat?”

“Yes,” I said calmly. “Have a seat.”

The dinner I’d made was four courses, beginning with salad, then soup, then chicken, and then dessert. I thought it was good and it was obvious that Jude thought so too, because he snarfed down everything on his plate, but he also talked to me. We discussed Shannon’s interview, which she thought had been ok but had made her sweat enough to have to mop her pits in the bathroom when it was over. We made conversation about his friends at work, like about Sergio’s post-girlfriend troubles and about Cal’s attempts to fix more of the equipment in the shop, this time a lathe that was seriously vibrating. I told him the story of Jamila and her useless feud with one of the ED docs, and we tried to brainstorm ideas for Michael and Tamara to alleviate their constant boredom now that school was out.

We stayed away from topics like where Eddie would live, Jude’s attempt to control my life, and my poor decision to try to do my job while sleepwalking. We kept things light and noncontroversial and I walked on eggshells rather than saying everything that I wanted to. I was getting through this dinner and repairing our relationship, and Sophie would have been proud of my lack of honesty and how I was keeping my opinions to myself.

Jude took the last bite of his peach cobbler and sighed, content. “Damn, that was good. Thank you. Anyway, right now Cal’s still saying that he can fix it himself, but—”

“Will it help if I apologize?” I burst out.

His eyebrows lifted. “Apologize? For what?” he asked calmly.

Well, here I went. “I would say that I’m sorry for…I don’t know,” I said, also lifting my hands. It was a gesture of surrender. “I don’t know, but I don’t like how you’re upset and disappointed with me and I want it to stop. So if I say I’m sorry, will you be happier?”

“I’m not disappointed with you,” he said. “I also don’t see the point of apologizing when you don’t really feel it.”

“I am sorry, though. I’m sorry that we don’t talk to each other and I’m sorry that I’m not doing what you want. I know you think that I should quit one of my jobs and tell Eddie that I agree he should sell his house.”

“But you’re not going to do those things. So you’re kind of sorry, but not enough to change what you’re doing.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry, but only because it makes you upset, not because I’m actually sorry that I’m doing what I think is best. It is for the best, but it’s not what you want.”

“What I want is for you to stop working six days a week so that you’re walking around here like a zombie.” He had lost some of the calm tone from earlier. “I want you to stop worrying about Eddie all the time and be able to enjoy your life.”

Frustration brimmed in me. “I can’t do those things. It’s not like I can give up.”

“Why?” Jude asked, as if there was an easy answer that I could provide.

“Because—because,” I tried to tell him, but I didn’t have the words to explain.

“He might be able to clear some money for his house, and we’ll look for an apartment for him, somewhere that he can access everything by himself so that he’s not dependent on you,” he told me. “We can set him up with a meal service so that you don’t need to cook everything, we can have groceries delivered so that he always has food. Yep, those things are expensive,” he continued when I opened my mouth to say exactly that, “but it might work without the weight of his mortgage and the rest of the money you spend on repairs for the place. And don’t you think it would be good for him to be around other people? He’s alone all day, except when you come by. You don’t have the time to give him any more attention.”

“I’m doing the best I can!”

“I know that. He does too, now. But you can’t do everything.”

“So you’re going to keep on being upset with me,” I summarized. “Even though it’s none of your business.”

“You are, in fact, my business.” Maybe he didn’t get mad very often, but his voice was currently getting louder. “You are my business and I’m going to help you with Eddie.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going to pay you more rent, for one thing,” he answered, “and I’m going to give—”

“No,” I interrupted. “No, no, no. You need to save to restart your life. You can’t work at Cal’s Black Hole Woodshop forever! You’ll need to rent another building or maybe buy it, and to get equipment and materials. I won’t take anything from you and if you try to give anything to Eddie, I’ll take it and give it back.”

“God damn it! Why are you so stubborn? Listen to me, for once!”

“I do listen to you,” I told him. “I can hear you just fine, but I have to do this for Eddie.”

“It’s so short, Nicola.” His voice had lowered and he leaned forward over the table. “Life is so short and we hardly get any time at all. I almost wasted it and I don’t want you to.”

“I owe him,” I said. “You don’t understand.”

A short silence met my words and I watched him thinking of what to say next. When he did speak, it shocked me: “Eddie told me the story. I know.”

There was more silence as my brain tried to take in that knowledge. “What?” I finally asked. “What did he tell you? What do you think that you know?”

“He told me what happened seven years ago,” Jude answered. “He explained it to me, because he also thought that I didn’t understand. He told me so that I would.”

“No,” I announced. “No, he didn’t. He swore he never would.”

“He’s worried about you, too. He’s concerned that you’re going to work yourself into an early grave over him, and he doesn’t want that. He told me because he thought it would help if I—”

“Stop talking. Stop, please.”

He did. I could feel him looking at me, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. “When did he share that information with you?” I asked, addressing my dessert plate.

“The day after you spent the night in your car and then slept for more than twenty hours. I picked him up and told him what was going on, how you were killing yourself, and then he said that there was something I should know.”

So it had been a while. I had been going about my days, unaware that Jude had that knowledge about me. I stood and picked up the plates on the table.

“Nicola.”

I didn’t answer.

“I didn’t ask Eddie to tell me. He did, on his own, before I realized what he was talking about.” He also got up and then walked to stand behind me. “I was going to discuss it with you when you woke up but…fuck, it seemed like you were on the edge. I waited because I wanted things to calm down, but they haven’t. I made a mistake by not bringing it up before now.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m sorry anyway, and I’m sure you’re angry at both me and Eddie but I want you to know that he did think that he was doing the right thing, and so did I.”

“Yesterday in the emergency room, we treated a woman who had a bad headache so her husband gave her five times the recommended dose of OTC pain meds. She almost went into liver failure. He figured that if two pills were good, then ten must be better. A lot of times, people really overestimate their ability to do right thing.”

“That’s true, but I’m sure her husband didn’t mean to cause any damage.”

“People can cause a lot of damage by being thoughtless and dumb.”

“That’s also true. I sure have in my life and I’m not the only one.”

No, he wasn’t the only one who had been dumb.

“Want to go for a walk?”

“No,” I answered. “I have dishes to do.”

“I can do them when we get back. Come on.” He put his hands on my shoulders and without thinking, I leaned back against him. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“What?” I asked, but he was leading me out through the front door, tugging my hand so that I came along with him. He let go when I pulled away and then crossed my arms over my chest, but I did keep walking.

“What?” I asked again.

“Where are the kids?” he asked me back. “I would have thought they’d be following us by now.”

“Shannon said that they were going out to celebrate her good interview with a friend. What did you want to show me?” I asked. I wasn’t in the mood for a mystery tour.

He was walking us to the house that was being renovated, and he wanted to point out some new features that he thought would be great for my house, too. “See the pergola in the side yard? I could make that with no problem at all,” he said, and there were several more things that he admired and wanted me to admire as well.

Instead, I found myself getting even more upset. “That’s great,” I said sarcastically. “Won’t it be wonderful for these people to live in a house that’s so nice?” They’d probably be able to use their basement, too, because it would have been waterproofed and thus free of unwanted arachnid activity.

“It will be nice for them,” Jude agreed.

“That was what you wanted to show me?”

“There’s one more thing.” We turned two more corners then walked up my driveway, through the side yard that didn’t have a pergola, and into the back. He went right over to the shed. “Come on,” he told me over his shoulder, and I still followed him.

“What is that?” I asked, looking at a pile of bricks.

“Did I tell you that Cal has a lot of old building supplies behind the shop? Those are some of them. I thought that they would make a nice path back here. What do you think?”

I nodded. “That would be nice.”

“Great, I’ll put them in. And I also wanted to install this,” he said, pointing to a door that leaned against the back of the shed. “The old one was rotten.”

“You already built it?”

He nodded. “I never tried a Dutch door but I always wanted to. They seem kind of friendly.”

I agreed that they did have that kind of a feel. “Sure,” I agreed. “Did you have to buy the lumber to make it?”

“I used scrap from around the shop. This would be made of scrap, too,” he answered. He took out his journal from his back pocket, opened it to a page, and handed it to me. I saw a sketch of a portico, the kind he’d suggested for my own house when he’d first moved in.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Well, Tamara has decided that instead of a stable, a tiny cottage would be fun. Michael is good with it as long as we don’t paint it pink, because he likes purple better. Do you have any objection to us painting?”

“No, I like all this. I like it a lot,” I told him, handing back the journal.

“Good. This is what I want to do inside.” He turned to another page that had a diagram of a loft with a railing and a fixed ladder for safety, features that he pointed out to me. “Underneath, I’d install a few cabinets for snacks. We plan to be doing some eating out here,” Jude explained. “I made a mock-up.” He entered the little building and picked up a box from the floor, which he held to the wall. He pointed out its simple door style and how well it swung. “I have a few more ideas, too.”

“This will be the nicest shed in Detroit.”

“That’s the plan. Then, when this is done, we’ll start the work on your house. First we’ll fix all the safety issues, like the unstable floor in the attic and the front railing that’s falling off. Then we’ll work on the things that are going to cause problems in the future, like the leaking window in the living room and the HVAC that’s fifty years old. Then we’ll work on all the pretty stuff. I have a plan.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he told me. “It’s going to be a long-term project but—”

“No,” I repeated. “No, I can’t afford this. Even if Eddie does move out of his house, which I’m not saying will happen, then he’ll still have a lot of other expenses.” And even if I felt furious, hurt, and betrayed, I still wasn’t going to renege on our deal.

“Yep,” Jude nodded. “But I’m going to pick up some of them.”

I shook my head.“I just said no to that.”

“But I’m saying yes.I’ve been saving,” he told me. “You charge shit for rent, by the way, and I haven’t been robbed once since I moved in here. Things are good and I have money put aside.”

“That’s money that you should use for your business. I already told you that you need to get your own space and you need to buy equipment. You need to save for a place of your own.” Those words hurt to say, though, because they meant that he would be leaving me. He would be leaving my house, I meant, but that was normal behavior in a landlord/tenant relationship. People moved on.

“I have some options there,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“Cal’s thinking about changing things. He wants to keep working, but he doesn’t want to be in charge.”

I couldn’t tell exactly what Cal was doing that made him “in charge.” He wasn’t “in charge” of legal hiring and doing things like paying payroll taxes, since both Jude and Sergio got a weekly envelope with cash. My earlier visit to the shop had shown me a dump that may not have had electricity, so he wasn’t “in charge” of the physical plant, either. “What does that mean for you?”

“It would mean that I could take over and gradually buy the building and the business. That would include the equipment.”

“You would need to improve all of it,” I said immediately. “There’s no way anything is up to OSHA standards. You would need new equipment, because I hear a lot from you about things breaking and Cal doing stupid repairs.”

“He does a pretty good job with the repairs, but I agree that I would want to step up the quality of our tools. That would take time no matter how much I kick in now. None of it will be overnight.”

“Well, the answer to you paying for stuff for me is no,” I said. “No.”

“One time, you asked me about my worst qualities. I told you that I don’t lose my tempter too often and I don’t like to pry.”

“That’s debatable.”

“What I am is stubborn,” he continued, ignoring my remark. “Even when I was at my worst, I was stubborn enough not to die. I did get a lot of help with that at Detroit Saint Raphael,” he added. “Now that I’m clean, I stubbornly refuse to drink. Every day, I make a choice to be sober and contribute rather than suck away other people’s resources. You have a lot of that stubbornness yourself, but I’m going to best you.”

“What? How do you think you’ll best me? You won’t!”

Jude nodded. “I will. I’m going to outlast you on this, and outwit you. For example, I already gave Eddie some—”

“Whatever you gave him, I’ll get it back!”

“I gave him some advice,” he resumed smoothy, “about how we’re going to handle things.”

“You mean, how you’re going to ‘handle’ me? So the two of you are ganging up together?” Hadn’t they already done that? They’d been secretly discussing me and all the things that I never even wanted to think of again.

“We’re going to band together to help each other. You should join the team,” he offered, and he held out his hand.

I looked at it and didn’t move or speak.

“You can’t say that what you’re doing is working. You’re too smart to have missed that the situation is off the rails. Everything is going to give out. Right now, it’s his roof,” Jude said. “Next, it’s going to be the foundation. Then he’ll need new windows. Then the wiring.” He hesitated and then stepped closer to me, and he reached down and took my hand. “I’m most afraid that you’ll give out, Nicola.”

“I’m not going to let you spend what you’ve saved. I won’t.” He’d earned it and he was going to be a success, I knew it. I wouldn’t let him hold himself back.

“Will you let me give you more rent? You’re not charging me enough and we both know it. I appreciate how you did that for me, but I’m not going to freeload anymore. And will you let me work on the house, doing some of these things?” He pointed to the shed. “I’ll start with the scary ones and work my way up to pretty.”

I also hesitated, thinking about it. “Yes. I would appreciate if you did that. Was the shed like a model home to convince me?”

“Pretty much. How about Eddie?”

“I’m so angry at him that when you say his name, I think I’m turning red.”

“You are,” he concurred. “He’s mad too because he wasn’t getting to play with a full deck. I mean that you were keeping things from him, like how you were struggling. It pisses him off because it makes him feel like you didn’t respect him. You were treating him like he was a kid.”

“That’s not what I was doing.” I hadn’t told him because I hadn’t wanted him to worry, and because I knew that he wouldn’t have accepted my help if he’d been aware of the truth of my situation. “I wasn’t treating him that way on purpose,” I revised. But I could understand why he felt that way.

“Can you let things go a little? Let him make some decisions for himself, based on all the information?”

I hesitated more, and then I nodded. A little.

“And that thing I brought up earlier, after dinner—we don’t ever have to talk about it again. Never.”

I nodded again. Never.

I thought we were done but when I started to walk toward the front, he didn’t let go of my hand. “What?” I asked.

“Things can be better,” he said. “You told me that, and you were right.”

We would have to see.