Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Running small businesses made coordinating schedules a challenge, so when Darla met with Marty for a casual walk downtown early Saturday morning, she was feeling overdue for some sister time. When she saw her sister approaching, wearing a cute pair of overall shorts and her curly hair pulled back, Darla waved to get Marty's attention.

"Hey," she greeted her younger sister as they embraced. "You look cute."

Marty reflexively looked down at her outfit. "Oh, thanks! They're new," she said, tugging on one of the straps of the overalls.

"Very summery," Darla said approvingly. The overalls were more Darla's quirky style than Marty's classic one, but there was no law against branching out. They fell easily into step with one another and began to walk down the sidewalk at a leisurely pace.

"Do you want to stop in at Seastar Espresso?" Darla asked when Charity's shop approached. "I already had a cup, but I wouldn't say no to an iced chai or something."

To Darla's shock, Marty paled at the suggestion. No, not paled. She looked positively green.

"What's wrong?" Darla asked, alarmed, as she whipped her head around, looking for whatever could have so clearly upset her sister.

Marty too took a furtive look around, then let out a wry little chuckle and pulled Darla over to sit on a nearby bench.

"Okay," she said. "So I was going to tell you when we got to somewhere with a little more privacy, but…" Marty bit her lip but beneath the expression, she was obviously grinning. "I'm pregnant."

"What!" Darla yelped. Quickly she looked around. There was nobody out on the street this early, but her sister had just mentioned privacy. More quietly, she said, "Oh, Mar, that's amazing! I'm so happy for you! Tell me everything!"

Marty looked so happy she was already glowing.

"Well," she said, "I had this feeling recently, and I suspected, but I made myself wait a few more days. It was torture, trying not to get my hopes up. But then I took a test and, bam!" She grinned down at her midsection. "Baby Jameson is in the works."

"Oh, goodness," Darla said, already feeling herself tearing up. She reached out and gave her sister a squeeze… but not too tightly, just in case.

This was the most exciting news. A small part of Darla did give a little pang of jealousy, but she brushed that off. She and Rick hadn't been trying for too long, and these things took time. Maybe Marty's pregnancy was a good omen that Darla would soon have her own big news too.

She pulled back from her sister. "How are you feeling? How is Wyatt feeling? Are you having any symptoms?"

Marty laughed at her sister's eagerness. "Emotionally, Wyatt and I are both over the moon. Physically?" She wobbled her hand in a so-so gesture. "I'm a little queasy, but it's not too bad. Weirdly, feeling a waistband around my stomach makes it worse, hence my overalls. I think there are a lot of dresses in my near future."

"Good thing it's summer," Darla said. It was the season for light, airy clothing.

"Right?" Marty asked with a chuckle. "And I'm actually allowed to have a little caffeine, but for some reason the mention of coffee was not what my stomach ordered this morning." She frowned over this so sadly that Darla had to press her lips to hide her smile.

Marty brightened again moments later, letting out an excited squeak and pulling Darla into a hug that was much tighter than the one Darla had dared.

"Oh my goodness, it feels so good to tell you," she said, laughing happily. "It's very early, so we're not sharing it around yet, but I really wanted to tell my big sister." She nudged Darla with her shoulder as Darla mimed locking her lips up tight.

"I know I'm way too early to ask this," Darla said, "but I can't help myself. Are you thinking of any names?"

Marty laughed. "Oh my goodness, Wyatt and I basically started having this conversation like twenty minutes after I took the test. We couldn't help ourselves either. And we don't know about boy names, but…" She gave her sister a fond smile. "We're thinking Abigail for a girl, maybe. We'd call her Abby. After—"

"—Grandma Abby!" they finished together.

"I love that," Darla said.

"Me too," Marty agreed. "But," she said, holding her hands to her side in a gesture of nonchalance, "I am keeping cool. I am getting a normal level of excited. I am definitely not looking at baby stuff online. That would be nuts and I am being so, so chill."

"You," Darla accused, "are a total liar."

"I'm a total liar!" Marty exclaimed. "I saw a stuffed cat that looked like Peaches and I cried for like half an hour. Really freaked Wyatt out, but the hormones are real."

The two sisters stood and continued their walk down the sidewalk, chatting happily and giving a wide berth to Seastar Espresso, lest the mere smell of coffee wafting outside upset poor Marty's stomach. Giving up an iced chai was, in Darla's opinion, well worth the exciting future that stretched out ahead of them.

When Hudson had started in real estate, he'd assumed that the job of a realtor was simple—sell the house.

In his thirty-odd years in the business, he'd learned that a realtor actually wore many hats. Sometimes, he was a cleaning crew, there to polish up a house to a shine. Sometimes he was a designer, staging a home to help its future inhabitants imagine a space's possibilities. Sometimes, he was a handyman. After all this time, he could practically change a lightbulb or rehang a picture frame in his sleep.

He'd even learned that when he was doing that supposedly simple task of selling the house, he wasn't just selling the house at all. He was selling the dream of living in that house to the right family.

He had to hand it to Dorothy Burrows though. Her listing was the first time he'd ever done proper construction work.

And it wasn't even technically his listing, not that he minded that part.

Still, he couldn't help but chuckle over the irony as he made what had to be his seventh trip to the hardware store in Whale Harbor since he'd started helping Lori in earnest the previous week.

He felt a strange pride at having broken down Lori's defenses and getting her to accept his help. He'd even been having fun with it, although he knew his back would not agree, given how much heavy lifting had been involved in helping with the listing. Today, Dorothy had demanded a shot of the water from inside the living room that had gauzy curtains fluttering from outside the windows. Since the outside of houses didn't tend to have curtain rods, Hudson and Lori were trying to build a sort of scaffolding that would hold up the curtains at the right angle.

Fortunately, the scaffolding wasn't going to be visible in the photo because, given what Hudson knew of their collective building experience, it was going to be functional but not beautiful.

Although, he reconsidered as he stared at the notes in his hand and at the display of wood in front of him, maybe it wasn't even going to be functional.

"Um, hey, Hudson, do you need some help?" came a polite voice from his left. He looked up to see Wyatt Jameson, the man who had married Lori's younger daughter.

"Wyatt, hey," Hudson said with a sheepish chuckle. "Is it that obvious?"

He didn't know the younger man well, even though Hudson had attended his wedding, where he'd been Claire's "date." Still, he'd only every heard good things, and Wyatt's gray eyes looked kind and nonjudgmental, so Hudson didn't feel too embarrassed about revealing his struggles.

"It might have been a little obvious," Wyatt said with a laugh of his own. "You've been muttering at the wood display for like five minutes."

"Oh, good," Hudson quipped. "So you already knew what you were dealing with when you offered to help." He held out his list to Wyatt.

Wyatt took the list and peered down at it. "I'm not an expert," he said absently as he read, "but I lived through the world's longest construction project on my house this past winter, so I picked up a thing or two."

"Oh, right," Hudson said, remembering. "Liam worked on that. Liam Hiller." This was Claire's boyfriend who had spent a few months working construction before he'd taken his role in the Whale Harbor Fire Department.

Wyatt looked up with a grin. "Yeah, exactly. Anyway," he continued, waving the paper. "I think you're in luck. This says you just need a bunch of two by fours cut to certain lengths. The two by fours are here," he said, gesturing, "and they cut the length for you for free in the back."

"Aha," Hudson said, feeling somewhat less foolish now that he knew Wyatt had also been tricked. "That's what I thought too. But I thought these looked small and so I measured." He pulled a tape measure from his pocket. A real estate agent always had a tape measure. "They're smaller than that. They're more like an inch and a half by three and a half."

Wyatt smiled patiently and all of a sudden Hudson did not feel less foolish.

"Well, that's actually correct. Two by fours are measured when they're first cut, but they shrink as they dry. But it's still the right thing, I promise."

Hudson drew in a deep breath. "So what you're telling me is that I've been standing here grumbling for five minutes because I can't find the righty thing, only to learn that it's right in front of me and labelled correctly."

"I'm afraid so," Wyatt said with a laugh. Hudson joined in.

He shook his head at his own goofy mistake. "Man, I can't wait to see the look on Lori's face when I tell her about this."

Wyatt's expression morphed into one of surprise. "This is for a project you're working on with Lori?" he asked carefully. "Lori Sims?"

"Yeah, up at the Burrows house, that big listing she's working on." When Wyatt's look shifted to outright skepticism, Hudson chuckled. "Yeah, yeah, I know what you're thinking, son. We have been more rivals than collaborators in the past."

"That was my impression of it," Wyatt admitted.

Hudson shrugged. "Even rivals can set aside their differences to lend a helping hand," he said casually. "Apparently, old dogs can learn new tricks."

"Lori would yell at you for calling her old though," Wyatt said jokingly.

"I meant me! I meant me!" Hudson exclaimed, as if Lori might somehow hear him.

This made Wyatt laugh outright. "Well," he said with an affable grin, "I wish you both the best of luck. I've heard a little bit about this project from Marty, and it sounds like it's a real pain in the behind, so I'm glad Lori has somebody who can help her out with all the changing demands. I have to head back to my own store in a few minutes, but can I help you carry these boards to the back to get cut?" Hudson recalled that Wyatt owned the business in town that rented and sold quads.

"I appreciate it," he said gratefully. Together, the two men grabbed the number of boards Hudson needed and carefully maneuvered them down the aisles to the cutting station in the back. Wyatt returned to his own shopping as Hudson paid for his materials, but as Hudson left, he could feel the younger man's gaze on him, assessing and curious.

Hudson chuckled to himself as he loaded the wood into the back of his car. He hadn't realized that his rivalry with Lori was so widely discussed among their children, although perhaps he shouldn't have been surprised, given how much Claire liked to tease him about it. And Lori's daughters had always been fun-loving too. Perhaps it made sense that Marty had told her husband.

A part of Hudson even liked the idea. He liked that people were talking about him and Lori together and liked that Lori's son-in-law seemed protective of her. Lori was good at getting things done for herself, but she deserved someone to look after her too.

Hudson didn't dare dig too deeply on the origin of these thoughts. Instead, he turned his mind to the upcoming task, letting a smile take over his face as he imagined tackling the next challenge… with Lori alongside him.