Chapter 14

I’d tried to downplay it, but there was really nothing to say except for one thing.So I said it.

“Sorry.” Looking at the situation from an outsider’s perspective, I could understand that things weren’t…good.

“Damn, Nicola,” Jude whistled as he stared around my vacant bedroom. Well, it was vacant of furniture and normal bedroom items, but I had found another way to use the space: I had filled it with boxes and those boxes were covered in dust. “The rest of your place looks like you cleaned it with Q-tips.” He looked around again, because this particular area of the house was very different from the rest. “It’s amazing how much you fit in here. It’s practically floor to ceiling,” he noted. “And what is all this stuff?”

“It’s memorabilia. You have a box of it, too!” I reminded him. “You have yours, and I have mine.”

“I have mine, and you have a mess,” he corrected, but then he grinned at me. He seemed to be doing that even more lately, and I was basking in his smiles like a cat in a sunny window. “We can fix it.”

“You said that about the attic floor, too,” I reminded him.

“I’m sure we can strengthen that and after we do, we’re going to load all your memorabilia up there so that this is a three-bedroom house again.”

“This bedroom still won’t work for Eddie, though,” I said, because I’d already thought of that idea. I’d tried to convince everyone that we could add a lift to the stairs and make the bathroom totally accessible, but both he and Jude had stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. The staircase was too narrow and the bathroom was too small, Jude had told me, and there was no way to change the size of either of them without major construction—like ripping apart the house, that kind of major. Then Eddie had announced that stair lift or not, he wouldn’t live with me if I had the last refrigerator full of beer on the planet.

“You’re crazy. Not only on this occasion, but all the time. No way,” he’d stated, so I’d given up on the dream.

“Even if this room won’t work for him, it could for someone,” Jude said now.

“Like another roommate?” That wouldn’t have been bad for me monetarily, but I couldn’t have imagined taking in another person to live here. I liked how we had things, with only the two of us together.

“Sure, another roommate,” he answered off-handedly. “Or someone else.” He paused. “I hear your phone.”

It was the alarm reminding me that I had to leave for work and I was going into Presbyterian a little early today. “Ok, I’m off,” I said. I stepped forward and realized that I’d been about to kiss him goodbye, so I jerked away. What was I doing? I’d been tilting up my face, lips pursed! I held out my hand instead and he shook it solemnly, and then started to laugh.

“Jude,” I chastised, but then I laughed, too. I made it halfway down the stairs before I turned around and came up again.

“Yes?” he asked.

“I just…” I looked past him into the packed bedroom. “You’re not going to look in all these memorabilia boxes, are you?”

“Nope. I’m going to put them in the garage so we can get to the attic access,” he told me, and pointed to the door in the far corner of the bedroom ceiling. “You can sort through them in your leisure time and make sure it’s all stuff you want to keep. You can do it in your leisure time,” he repeated, and then stared at me pointedly.

I knew what he meant. He actually wanted me to have leisure time, which meant quitting one of my jobs—and I’d been considering it. I did that again as I drove toward Presbyterian Hospital. He’d made a very messy and confusing spreadsheet that was supposed to capture my financial situation and despite the misaligned columns and questionable math in a few places, it had proved several points. One was that I had a project ahead of me when he took over the woodshop from Cal and was in charge of the business. We were going to totally rework how that place was run and it wasn’t going to be with spreadsheets like the one he’d handed to me.

It had made my eyes sting a little—not because it was so bad, but because it was so nice that Jude had made it to try to help me. That gesture showed, yet again, what a sweet, caring, thoughtful…I could have gone on, but I stopped myself. There were already many pages in my journal devoted to lists of all his good qualities.

Despite its problems, the spreadsheet had demonstrated that my financial situation had changed a lot. Eddie had sold his house for an ok price to his neighbor Monique, and he was temporarily living with her while her son and his construction crew started work to prepare the place for her daughter. It was not a situation that could last long, even with their…physical connection, because they were already arguing and Monique’s son hated him with every fiber of his entire body. Probably the lint between his toes hated Eddie, too.

Anyway, according to the numbers, I could do less. If Jude continued to pay the increased rent he’d insisted on, then I could afford my life on only one paycheck for the first time in years. Even if I did continue to cover some or most of Eddie’s expenses, I could still work part-time. Well, it would be full-time, but only half of what I was currently doing because I could give up a job at one of the hospitals. Which one would I quit? And how would I fill all those extra hours of free time? There were certainly a lot of projects for my house, but I could do even more. I could encourage Tamara with extra art projects, because she was always drawing. I could develop a more advanced curriculum for Michael because I believed that fifth grade, which he’d just started at the same school as before, wouldn’t challenge him enough. I’d done that for Sophie when she was a kid, making her study the things that I had been working on even though I was two years ahead in school. She’d been bored, so I’d tried to help.

She’d graduated at the top of her class, gotten an academic scholarship to college, and now? She was still hiding in her house. If we were closer, like when we were younger, then I could have helped her more. It made me consider whether I needed to commence another Operation Fake Friend.

No, because I wanted her to be my real friend again as well as my sister. So I called her as I drove, but she answered suspiciously.

“What do you want? If this is about what I said to Mom, I don’t take it back.”

“I haven’t heard anything about that but I’m sure whatever it was, she had it coming,” I told Sophie. “I need your help.”

“Give me the name and I’ll research him. Sugar, you already broke up with Jude?” she asked. “I guess I should badmouth him now, but I liked him a lot. He was really nice and he was really cute, too. What went wrong?”

“Nothing, and we didn’t break up.” Because we had never been together. “I need your help to figure out if I can quit one of my jobs.”

“I have no idea why you’re working that much, anyway. One salary should be more than sufficient to support you, given that your house payment must be…” She thought for a moment, then guessed it almost exactly. “You paid off your car when you were in college, you don’t have any educational debt. Honestly, I’ve wondered for years where you’re putting all your money since I know you wouldn’t waste it on something like drugs or shopping. You must have a huge nest egg by now.”

“I don’t. I’ve been supporting a guy.”

There was silence. “What, like…oh, holy Mary! Do you have a kid?”

“No,” I answered, but that was also something I’d been thinking about. It seemed that my mom had accomplished her purpose, because I often heard her words in my mind: you’ll be thirty-one this fall! You’re not getting any younger! What are you waiting for? If you can’t get pregnant right away, then what? And on, and on.

Fall was here, but it wasn’t only my approaching birthday that was making me think about having children. I kept imagining Jude as a father, about him holding an infant and watching her laugh. “No, I don’t have a kid right now but I may want to. Soon,” I said, and there was more silence from my sister.

I wasn’t expecting what she said next.

“Nic, you’ll be a great mom,” Sophie announced.

“Do you think so? I wouldn’t be…” I thought of Liv returning all the post-it notes I’d given to her, the ones where I’d written my suggestions, opinions, and directions. “Would I be too much? Would I make them crazy?”

She understood what I meant. “Jude would help to tamp you down. He seems pretty easy about stuff, so you two would balance out,” she answered. “And you’d love your kids more than anything. I know how well you’d take care of them, because that’s how you took care of all of us. You spent so much time being a mom that I don’t think you had much of a childhood yourself.”

“No, but I don’t regret it when I look at you guys. I’m so proud of you all.”

“You are?”

I’d said the same thing to Jude, and he’d sounded just as surprised. “You know that I only want you to be happy, right?” I asked. “That’s why I try to give you advice and tell you my opinions. I worry about you and I want you to be happy and safe. Secure.”

“I know that. I do, even when I get so mad at you.”

Good.

“So this would be your second family,” she noted. “Are you sure you want to do it again?”

“I’m pretty sure,” I told her, and then amended that statement. “I’m very sure.”

“Well, if you say that you’re going to do something, you will. Send me your numbers and I’ll go over them and confirm that your financial plan makes sense. But about that guy you’ve been paying for—”

“He helped me with something a long time ago, and I owe him,” I said. “That’s it. But things are changing and he’s not going to need as much from me.” And I had a plan that I’d been working on, too. It had come to me as I’d studied the list of major problems in my journal, staring at the names that I’d written there: Sophie, Eddie, and Shannon.

I’d been having trouble connecting with that last person, because she was definitely avoiding me. She’d gotten the job at Presbyterian and had become the nine-to-five worker that she hadn’t believed was in her. According to Michael and Tamara, it was going really well. According to those kids, she was still looking for a new rental, but they didn’t know much about it. According to them, she was also still seeing Gnu Guy.Jude reported that her boyfriend was often across the street and that they’d spoken and interacted a few times.The increased contact had lowered his opinion even more.

“He’s a jackass,” he had summed it up.

But Shannon didn’t seem to think so and now, I was going to step in. So after I hung up with Sophie and before my shift started in the ED, I walked through the main visitor doors into the hospital and straight to where she sat behind a big, half-circle desk.

At first, she didn’t see me, but when she did, her eyes darted back and forth like she was going to bolt. I didn’t think that would happen since we were at her workplace, but I was fully prepared to climb over the desk and grab her if necessary. Grace had been a bolter when she was little so I knew that I could trust my reflexes.I also wore my old gym shoes, the ones that Jude had puked on, and they’d never recovered their original beauty but I could still run in them. I’d been doing it around the neighborhood, in fact, and I was getting faster.

“Nicola,” she said. My name tilted up in the end, almost like a question. Or like a plea.

“It’s me,” I agreed. “You and I need to talk. When do you take your lunch?”

I already knew the answer because I’d checked the day before and had seen that between 12:30 and 1:00, there was a sign on this desk with a number to call for assistance rather than Shannon sitting behind it. Because of my prior knowledge, I just shook my head when she told me now that she didn’t get a break, and she sighed and checked the time on her phone. It was 12:31, so she reluctantly picked up her lunch bag from the floor by her feet, put out the sign about where people should call, and followed me through the front doors and around the side of the hospital, to a bench in the shade.

“Yeah?” she rudely demanded. “Why are you stalking me?”

“Be quiet,” I told her. “I have an idea and you have to listen.”

“I don’t have to do shit!” she answered, but I talked over her and gradually, she did pay attention.

“Did you tell Eddie about that plan?” she asked me when I finished.

“First I wanted to clear it with you. He’s really...”

“I’ve met him. He’s rude as fuck.”

“I was going to say difficult and foulmouthed, but I don’t think those qualities will bother you,” I answered, and she stared at me and frowned. “The kids keep telling us that they don’t want to move.”

“Yeah, they like living there,” Shannon said slowly. “I don’t mind it either, even though the neighbors are annoying.” She nudged me.

“I get it.”

“I don’t really think that you’re annoying, either,” she told me. “I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, dealing with some stuff.”

“If Eddie moved in, it would take a load off your mind. I measured the front door and it’s wide enough for his chair,” I noted. “Jude could easily build a ramp over the stairs up to the porch. I measured the hallways and the interior doorways, too, and they’re all good.”

“Were you wandering my house with a tape measure? Is this why Tam gave me a post-it about the expiration date on our cheese?”

“You need to carefully look at what’s in your fridge,” I confirmed. “Anyway, the house is pretty good for him already. The bathroom is kind of a problem, but Jude has some ideas about how to make it work.”

“You mean my bathroom, on the main floor,” she said, and I nodded. She would have to move upstairs if Eddie joined them, since he would take the space she currently occupied. “Was Jude in my house, too?”

“No, I took pictures and sent them to him.” I’d moved all her thongs out of the frame, first. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. The landlord might not want to add another person to the lease.”

The landlord was ok with it and with alterations to the bathroom too, since I’d promised that we would fix other broken parts of the house along with them. We would write up a formal agreement and sign it before we started any construction projects, so I didn’t bother to mention now that I’d already talked to the guy. Shannon was already touchy enough.

“If your landlord agreed, it would take a big load off you,” I mentioned again. “Eddie would be good for the money every month and he may not always seem like it, but he’s not a bad guy. He likes your kids. Not in a creepy way,” I added. “He would be a pretty easy housemate and I would be there if he needed help with anything. I’ll be around more, since I’m going to resign from one of my jobs.”

“Really?”

I nodded. “I need to make some changes.”

She breathed in and out. “Me too.” She opened up her lunch bag and all I saw were processed foods and candy. We’d work on that later.

“What were you saying about dealing with stuff?” I asked casually, and she picked up a bag of chips and then put it back down.

“I’ve been having some boyfriend issues,” she admitted and then she kept talking, as if things had been bottled up inside her for too long.

When I got home the next morning, I wanted to wake up Jude and discuss with him what she’d told me. I had wanted to call and text him that night, too, but we’d gotten slammed and I hadn’t had the time. I meant to get up early so I could talk to him before he went to work, but I slept right through that so when I finally did open my eyes, I got dressed and went to see him.

“Well, look who’s here.” Cal, also known as Drawknife Dumbledore, sauntered over when I entered and let some light into the dismal pit that was his woodshop. His tone might have sounded threatening, but he was smiling at me as he continued to speak. “It’s Nicola, the one who sent me the email about my OSHA violations.”

“You read that?” I was shocked. “You check your email?”

“My girl does it for me,” he answered. “You made her all worked up about shop safety, too.”

“Then why are you smiling?”

“She got this protective thing going, and one thing led to another.” He winked. “You look cute today.”

“I do?” I asked, and he nodded.

“You’re a pretty girl.”

Apparently, all women were girls to him, no matter our actual ages. But I appreciated the compliment anyway. “Well, thanks,” I responded. “You don’t look too bad yourself, except that if I were you, I’d get that mole on my forearm checked. Jude!” He was walking towards me and I’d called his name spontaneously, because it was so nice to see him. When was the last time I’d laid eyes on him? Whenever it was, it had been too long.

He held out his hand and I happily took it. “Hi,” he told me, and sugar, I almost kissed him again. I held myself back and kept my lips away from his.

“I have a lot to tell you,” I said, but first he needed to finish something with Sergio. I ended up telling both of them as they worked.

“He’s been scaring the crud out of her,” I started off and Jude understood that I meant Shannon and her boyfriend, because she’d been on my mind a lot, but I had to explain to Sergio who she was and all about the Gnu Guy.

“Your neighbor is with him?” he asked, and he looked concerned. “Hell, I feel responsible. I’m the one who got you guys involved with him because of the car repairs.”

“I don’t blame you and I don’t blame her, except that she should have listened to me sooner,” I said, and Jude patted my shoulder before he returned to what he was doing, something with wood. Obviously. “The day that she was gone and didn’t call the kids? It was because he had taken her phone.”

“Is he hitting her?” Sergio asked. Now he sounded very angry.

“No, I don’t think so. Not yet,” I added. “But he doesn’t let her do what she wants, like he stops her from coming and going when she needs to, and he’s trying to make her move in with him. Her and the kids.”

“No way,” Jude said flatly. He’d put down his tools. “Over my dead body is he living with Michael and Tamara.”

“That was what I said, too,” I told him. “I was going—”

“Nicola, so help me, you stay away from him!” he exploded, and I said I would, of course.

“But I did talk to a cop I know from the ER,” I said.“I helped him years ago when a woman bit his arm.DPD can shut down illegal businesses, places that aren’t in compliance with licenses or operating in an area not zoned for them.Like a mechanic running a shop out of his house in a residential neighborhood could get raided and fined. And if they find anything in the course of that raid, other illegal stuff, then they can arrest and charge the businessowner for those things, too.”

“Wow, Nicola. I never want to get on your bad side,” Sergio said.

“That’s true. You should ask my sister Grace about what happened to her seventh grade math teacher after he made a private comment about her breasts growing in.”

“This conversation is making me very upset,” Jude said. “What are we going to do about Shannon? The third bedroom isn’t cleared out yet after the attic work, but I can get that done tonight and the kids can camp there. Shannon can take the couch.”

“Let’s let Gnu Guy get arrested first,” I soothed. “I’m sure they’re going to find drugs, based on the look of him. I smelled it, too. He’s dealing, right?” I confirmed with Sergio, and he nodded slowly back to me.

“You didn’t tell me that,” Jude said to him. “Why didn’t you tell me that? I wouldn’t have gone near him and I wouldn’t have let Nicola or Shannon, either.”

“I’m sorry,” Sergio said. “I didn’t know that the neighbor was going to date him. And lots of people deal, and they’re all right.”

“Not around Nicola or the kids!”

“Anyway, he’s going to jail,” I broke in. “Then Eddie’s going to move in with Shannon, Michael and Tamara won’t have to change schools, and it’s all going to work out perfectly.” There were a few more intermediate steps, such as me informing Eddie of this new circumstance, but I was going to figure it all out.

Jude was still upset, though, and that continued when we were home together that night, my time off for the week. I made dinner and as I did, he continued to talk about Shannon and Sergio and it seemed like he was furious at both of them.

“I’m not mad at her for getting into a relationship with Gnu Guy,” he started to tell me, but then he stopped. “No, I am mad at her for that. Did she know that he was dealing?”

“I’m not sure but even if she had found out, she was in too deep, too fast.”

“Why didn’t she come to us for help? Why did it take you stalking her and twisting the truth out of her? Which I’m sure you did in a nice way,” he qualified.

My knife slowed until I was barely moving it through the cilantro. “Sometimes it’s hard to ask for help. You’ve been there.”

“I never asked for help because I didn’t want it,” he said. “Shannon does.”

“But you can understand. Would you have gone to a friend when you were so ashamed?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. You’re right that I felt like that.”

I remembered him at the hospital. It had been clear to me then that he’d been horrified at himself. “I’m just glad she was able to listen to me now,” I said.

“I have a feeling you made yourself heard. Did you tell her that you informed on him to the police?”

“No. I was afraid she might let that slip and he’d clean everything up.” Yes, I was worried that she might have told him by mistake, but I was also concerned that she could have done it on purpose. No matter what she said about being afraid, I saw that she also liked Gnu Guy. She wanted him to stop scaring her, but she wasn’t entirely sure about breaking up with him, either. But she wouldn’t let the kids be around someone out on bond, if he managed to swing that. She loved them more than she cared about him or about herself.

I washed the last knife so our dinner was ready, and he went to call Michael and Tamara in to eat. We cared about them, too, and it was better for them to have a balanced meal with us when I knew that their mom was going to get home late. Afterwards, we all sat on the front porch until Shannon pulled in. “Wait for her to come over,” I ordered, so impatiently, they stayed on my steps. She did come to us and as she got closer, I could see that she’d been crying.

Jude must have seen it too, because he offered dessert. “I got ice cream,” he mentioned, and the kids hugged her but then eagerly followed him inside.

“I did it. I broke up with him,” she told me when they were gone. “We went to dinner and I told him there at the restaurant.” She sat tiredly.

“That was a good choice.” I checked my phone to see a text that had just come in. It was a very good choice.

“Was it?” she asked me. “Because I feel like shit.”

“Would you want Michael growing up with that guy as his example?” I asked in return, but she didn’t have to say anything. We both knew that the answer was no.

“Well, I still feel like shit. How do you manage it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been alone all this time, right? Eddie told me that you haven’t had a boyfriend since he’s known you. Seven years.”

“Seven years,” I agreed. “I’ve been busy working, and I have my family.” I swallowed. “But I’ve been really lonely.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’d rather be alone than be with an idiot, though.” I thought of Grover, the shuttle bus driver, and his wife’s words of wisdom regarding their daughter’s choices in men. “I heard that it’s better to pick the right guy in the first place, rather than twisting things around to make someone right enough.”

“Fuck, that’s a good line,” Shannon marveled, and then she thought for a minute. “That’s what I do. I’m always trying to make them right enough for me.”

“Maybe you could take a hiatus from dating. We could make a list of what you really want in a guy so that you know what you’re looking for,” I suggested. We watched as another car drove slowly up our street. It came to a stop at the curb in front of my house and Sergio from the woodshop got out. I bet that he was there to make things up with Jude after their earlier argument over the Gnu Guy.

“Yeah, maybe I should wait. Who’s this? He’s cute,” she said. She stood up to brush off the back of her skirt, and I felt like she’d be getting over her recent breakup very quickly. And based on the text I’d recently gotten from my police acquaintance, that man would be booked shortly, and I had faith that he was out of the picture for good.

I left her introducing herself to Sergio in the yard and went inside to check on the dessert, but I refused a bowl of my own.I had been getting more exercise in preparation for what I’d planned; an extra load of ice cream wouldn’t have made an actual physical difference at this moment, but it would have stayed on my mind.

“Are you worrying about the Shannon situation?” Jude asked me later. He had talked to Sergio and they’d cleared the air, and now he had his tablet open to another science fiction movie. That had driven the kids back to their own home.

“No, I’m not thinking about her,” I said. “It’s something else.”

“Something like how you’re going to quit a job?”

That had also been on my mind, but not right now. “No, it’s something else. I had an idea.”

“Ok,” he said, and waited. “Well? What is it?”

“It involves not watching your movie and going upstairs instead.”

“Ok,” he said again. “Right now?”

I nodded and we walked together up the staircase that was, admittedly, too narrow for a lift. It was going to work out much better when I convinced Eddie to move into Shannon’s house, but that hadn’t been what I was thinking about, either.

“We’re upstairs,” Jude noted. “Do you want to work more on the third bedroom?”

“No, it’s about your bedroom,” I answered and again he said ok, and followed me through that doorway.

“Here we are,” he commented. “What’s next?”

I drew in a breath to steady myself. My sisters always said that I was so tough. I’d had to be for a lot of my life, but it didn’t mean that I hadn’t been nervous or scared. I was right now, for example; I was very scared that he wouldn’t accept or enjoy what I was going to do.

“Nicola?”

I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him, a peck right on the lips.

His head jerked away. “What?”

“Oh, sugar.Well—”

“No, this is great,” he told me, and folded me into his arms. Then he kissed me, more than a peck, more like…more like I was going to swoon. I held onto Jude, pressed against him, and kissed him back. I hardly remembered anything like this—yes, it had been a while since I’d made out with someone, but had any guy’s lips and tongue ever made me dizzy before? The gooey feeling that I had whenever he touched me came back in full force. Everything in me melted in the heat of this kiss.

“Holy Mary,” he said when we broke apart briefly. “It’s even better than I thought it would be.”

“You were thinking about this?”

“Nicola, damn, you walk around here with that attitude and that ass and yeah, I’m thinking about it a lot.” He kissed me again and I forgot what I was supposed to be doing.

Then I remembered. “Will you take your clothes off?”

“Are you kidding? Yes.” He was already pulling his t-shirt over his head. “You, too.”

So my t-shirt came off, and then my jeans and his as well. And I made him take off his socks, and he suggested that I lose my bra, and his eyes widened when I did.

“This is also better than I thought it would be,” he mentioned, and he reached to touch me.

But I took his hands in mine. “I want to do something,” I said.

“Go for it. And then I’ll—oh, damn,” he said, because I had let go of his hands to reach for another appendage. “This is going to be over really quick if you—oh, damn,” he breathed again.

“Can you lie on the bed?”

“I sure can,” he said, and that was when I decided to use my mouth instead, and he was right. It was really quick, and with a lot of swearing in what sounded like ecstasy.

When I returned from the bathroom, where I hadn’t taken a shower but had spit, flossed, brushed, and then used mouthwash, Jude was still in the same position on the bed. He looked dazed.

“Come here, please,” he told me, and I did. When I reached the bed, he slid off the robe that I’d put on, and he tugged my arms until I was lying pretty much on top of him. “Thank you.”

I nodded. It hadn’t just been for him, though. I’d wanted to make sure that I was going to be ok with all this, and it turned out that I really was.

“Can I—” he started to ask, but I shook my head, my cheek moving against his chest.

“No, that was enough. Ok?”

“Definitely ok with me, but I’d like to reciprocate. You tell me when.” He pulled me even closer and his hand slipped inside my underwear to cup my butt. “Right now is also excellent.”

It was, because he was massaging. “You like cuddling?” I asked. I’d never been into that, not before now.

In response, he pulled me even closer. “We should be sleeping together every chance we get.”

“It’s harder for you to go diagonally with me in the bed, though,” I noted. His feet were hanging off the end of it.

“I don’t mind,” Jude assured me. “I like having you here.” He squeezed and used his other hand to draw my thigh up over his. “I like you right here.”

Good. And I was good, too, which was a relief. I hadn’t been sure, but now I was.

“What gave you that idea?” he asked. “Were you thinking about it, too?”

I was thinking about a lot of things, so I nodded. “You always say that you like surprises.”

“That was an excellent surprise. Anytime you want to surprise me that way, I’ll be thrilled.” He kissed my head, and then let go of my thigh to tilt my chin so he could kiss my mouth. I stopped thinking for a good long while.