Chapter 25
HOME IMPROVEMENTS
Kate was acting weird. She picked me up in the Harvey Janitorial van after my shift on Monday to run company errands, and I went without complaining, even though I was very sleepy and wanted nothing less than to run errands.
The tasks weren’t all that bad; we went to a few of the buildings to replenish their stock of rags and various cleaning supplies, then stopped at Home Depot to pick up paint samples I decided on for the bathroom, before I convinced Kate to stop for waffles at the diner where Josie asked way too many questions about Barry.
I invited her and Marcus to the next game, and they were stoked.
And all the while, Kate was being weird. Quiet, defensive, and not even excited when I asked her to tell me about the latest book she was reading. Usually, describing books in detail to me was her favorite pastime.
“Did something happen with the professor?” I asked.
She’d been occasionally responding to his frequent texts after deciding maybe he didn’t think that janitorial wasn’t a respectable job path. She had not agreed to another date, though the man was persistent, I’d give him that.
“No, I’m normal,” she snipped, most definitely not normal.
“I’m tired,” I groaned when Kate said she wanted to just go one more place after waffles. “Can we go later? I need a nap.”
Kate glanced too quickly at me and chewed at a hangnail on her thumb. She never bit her nails anymore.
“Kate?” I asked, suspicious.
She let out a frustrated exhale and dropped her shoulders before getting in the turn lane that would take us to our neighborhood.
“I need you to not be mad,” she said, and suddenly I was very nervous.
“What did you do?” I asked. A question so rarely turned to Kate, as she so rarely did things without telling me.
“I didn’t! Well, I sort of did. Crime by omission.”
“Kate.”
“Okay! Okay.”
I turned off the radio and faced her, waiting.
“It’s just that Barry can be very persuasive,” Kate said, already wincing. “And he wanted to do something nice for you.”
I blinked, trying to parse just what the hell she was talking about. I didn’t even have to ask, though, because as soon as we turned the corner onto my street, I saw it: a long line of cars, a rented dumpster in the driveway, a row of men filing in and out of the front door.
“What the fuck?” I muttered. As soon as she pulled to a stop on the sidewalk behind a number of expensive cars, I got out of the van and rushed toward my house.
The people filing out of the house weren’t just anyone, they were hockey players, all of whom greeted me with a joyful chorus of “Hi Hannah” and “Morning Hannah,” most of them obviously sweating from the work of carrying out pieces of my kitchen cabinets or buckets of cracked tile.
They were carrying out pieces of my house. Pieces that were not broken when I left at four this morning.
As I was about to squeeze past into the front door, I was made to wait as a group of them team-lifted my literal bathtub, cut in half, through the front door.
“I’m going to kill him,” I muttered.
“Kill who? We need Wright for playoffs,” Kozlov, the goalie, said as he passed.
“Learn how to play without him,” I called back, and rushed inside to find the source of this chaos.
There were no less than fifteen people moving through the house, some in the kitchen, others in the bathroom.
The furniture in the living room was covered with plastic tarps, other belongings packed into large totes.
I even saw Jeremy in the kitchen, working harder than I’d ever seen him work on a project I needed his help with, beaming all the while.
Everyone had on safety glasses, and one of the defensemen handed me a pair before I could ask where Barry was.
I could hear my dad outside too, bossing everyone around and probably having the time of his freaking life. Traitors, the whole lot of them.
“Jer?” I called. He was using a crowbar to take out the old backsplash my grandma always hated but never replaced. I had the pink tile in boxes in the garage to replace it—Grandma would have fucking loved them, but I thought I was over a year away from being able to install them.
“Oh! Hannah.” A few more tiles fell at Jeremy’s feet, and he came over to give me a dusty side hug. “Isn’t this great? Barry got the whole team to come over on their day off.”
“Just great,” I agreed sarcastically, still overwhelmed by the chaos unfolding around me.
I was nowhere near ready to start on the kitchen—I didn’t have the money, for one thing, and also didn’t have the time or the energy to build a kitchen from scratch when I could barely lift heavy things without people telling me to take it easy.
I had most of the items for the bathroom, but not a new bathtub—how much was that even going to run me?
“Have you seen him, by the way?”
“Come on, Han, don’t be mad at him,” Jeremy pleaded, a peacemaker all of a sudden. Sure.
“Who is Hannah mad at?” O’Neil—Barry’s team best friend, by all accounts—asked as he came into the kitchen with a hammer and chisel in hand. I liked O’Neil. He always said hi to me at the training center when our paths crossed and asked how I was doing growing the baby. He was a good captain.
Which is good, because the team was about to be out a star defenseman. They needed good leadership.
“Where is Barry?” I asked again.
O’Neil and Jeremy shared a look, but before they had to rat out their fearless leader, he walked through the back door wearing a flannel, a Columbus baseball hat, and safety glasses. He halted when he saw me, looking afraid but not nearly as scared as he ought.
“Oh shit,” O’Neil muttered.
“Excuse us,” I said, walking past the pair and Barry, anticipating that he’d follow me. I was right, because by the time I reached the garage, he’d caught up to me.
“Look, I know what you’re thinking—”
“Oh yeah? Do tell.” I whirled on him, fists on my hips. I hated that I had to look so far up to glare at him.
Barry faltered.
“Actually, I don’t know what you’re thinking, only that you look very mad.”
“Yeah? Do I? And why do you think that is?”
“I wanted to do something nice for you—you’ve been working so hard, and the cabinets you wanted went on sale, and I just went for it.”
“You just went for it?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“Yeah! And the guys were so stoked to help out, and I thought it would be great to knock out all of the demo this weekend so we could start getting the floors and cabinets and everything done next week.”
“And the bathroom?”
“That was your dad’s idea, said if we already had all those guys here, we might as well put them to work tearing apart the bathroom too.”
“And you didn’t think to swing this past me?!” I demanded. “Like, you thought this was something I just wanted to come home to without say?”
“I didn’t make any decisions outside of your house bible, everything down to the letter like you planned.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that!” I burst out, too loud.
Barry looked startled and a bit chagrined.
I think he knew he was in the wrong, but his relentless sense of duty made him think this was all just fine.
Two goods outweighing the one horrible bad of not telling me he was about to start tearing down parts of my house.
“You wanted to do all this, you said you would have had the bathroom already done if you didn’t have to save for the baby.” He pointed in the direction of the house. “I’m helping.”
“You’re overstepping!” I said—or well, shouted, really.
“Why is it so hard for you to accept help?” His voice wasn’t as loud as mine but maybe just as frustrated. He propped both hands on his hips, shoulders tense.
“Because I’ve been trying to prove that I’m not helpless,” I burst, and I couldn’t take that truth back once it was dropped, so I barreled on. “I’m trying to prove that I can fucking do this.”
“Do what? Suffer alone?”
“No! Life, parenting, I can be self-sufficient. I wasn’t suffering when you found me, Barry, I don’t need you or my family babying me all the time—I can take care of myself, and I’ll be able to take care of this baby, too.”
“Never once did I say you couldn’t.” Barry pointed at me, and I wanted to swat his hand down.
“Oh, please. You haven’t had to say it, you say it with every action! Insisting you move in with me, cook for me, renovate my fucking house?”
“Hannah,” he started, then exhaled a big breath. His frustration bled from him, morphing into a supreme tiredness that settled over his face, his posture. He pinched the bridge of his nose, then shook his head. “You think I’ve been doing all this because I don’t believe in you?”
“Well—” I floundered, shrugged. “Yeah. But I can do this, Barry. I’ll be a good mother to this baby. I will.”
Barry winced and deflated further, arms falling to his sides. He was no longer on the defensive, but part of me wished he was. Fighting with him, being mad and having him be mad back, was easier than this defeated sadness coming off him now. After a quiet moment, he spoke again.
“Why do you still think I want to take her away from you?”
My breath caught. After a long, silent moment, I shrugged.
“Because sometimes I think that I would want to take her from me if I were you. Like, if I were a rich and successful hockey player and found out that Hannah Harvey from Utah was the mother of my unborn child, I’d maybe not think she was the best fit for a partner or a single mother either.”
“Why do you insist on thinking so little of yourself? Why can you not see how great you are?”
I swallowed, my throat dry, probably from all my huffing and puffing.
I did think I was great. Sometimes. I believed that I was smart, and creative, and knew that I was a well of really good ideas.
I was a hard worker, good at cleaning, I had a lot of friends, I supported my family, even if they supported me more, and I was generally a fun time. But I was also a bit of a mess.