Chapter 11
I squinted and tilted my head, then I closed one eye to make the other focus. I still couldn’t really see what Keon was tapping with the end of the tape measure, but I tended to believe him. I still made a final attempt to make this latest problem go away.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe it’s some kind of illusion, like a rainbow or an eclipse. You think something is actually happening, but it’s just a trick of the mind. Like how blue jays aren’t really blue.”
“I can see a blue bird and as far as I’m aware, eclipses are also real. So is the problem here because all those beams are going to have to go,” he told me. “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
I had heard those words a lot from him since the cabin renovation had begun.
There were drainage problems. There were insect problems. There was rot, there was mold, there were all kinds of hidden issues that no one had been able to see until they really ripped things apart—even my wall removal in the dining room hadn’t been enough to demonstrate what was actually happening deep in the heart of the building.
“We can fix it,” he assured me. “It just going to be another cost.”
Everything was going to be more expensive, a lot more.
If you knocked the side mirror off your car by driving too close to a fence, that was one thing.
If you backed into a front-end loader, crumpled your bumper, and damaged your exhaust system?
That was something totally different. It was possible to tape a mirror back on, but that kind of repair wouldn’t work in Theo’s cabin.
Also, it was best not to back into a front-end loader, which might have been difficult to spot in spite of its size.
There had been progress with this project.
Keon also assured me of that, although it was hard to see because it looked so absolutely terrible and so much worse than before.
It was more like you’d want to cry rather than celebrate the positive changes that he swore were there.
Now, when he asked me how I wanted him to proceed in solving the latest problem, I said I’d have to get back to him.
It wasn’t just an answer so that I could stall for time like in a job interview, but so I could talk to the actual owner of this giant mess.
“I keep telling you the worst stuff,” I said to Theo a while later as I cleaned the aquarium in his office’s waiting room.
“Your brother-in-law Danny warned me about this. He told me to expect things to be much, much worse than anyone could have imagined, and Keon repeated that. He explained that his estimate was very fluid, because with a house as old as mine, anything could happen.”
“It seems like it has. I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Theo asked. “Why are you acting like this is somehow your fault?”
I paused my scrubbing to think about that.
“Mostly, things are my fault. Also, I don’t want to give you bad news.
” When I thought more about it, I realized that I never had liked to do that to anyone.
But who would? “I don’t want to be the person causing problems, even though I am a lot of the time.
Usually, I try to ignore things or maybe draw attention to something else.
Like I might not want to tell Nicola about my bad grades in school or that I got fired again, so I would escape somewhere or discuss different problems. If there might be an eclipse, for example, so we needed to prepare. ”
“There’s going to be an eclipse, and we need to prepare for that?”
“There probably will be one in the future but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I reassured him. “And I won’t have anything to do with the supposed disappearance of the sun.”
“And the fact that all those beams need to be replaced doesn’t have anything to do with you either, and I’m not going to shoot the messenger.”
I stared at him. “What—”
“No, not literally. I mean that I’m not going to blame you for the rotten cabin.
” But he didn’t seem happy about it, and why would he have been?
Keon the contractor could tell us again and again that things were going to look worse before they looked better, but they were now so much worse that it was hard to even look at all.
On top of all the extra problems at the cabin, it had been a bit of a difficult week for other reasons, too.
I’d been getting a lot of texts from the guy that I had done client services for, first asking me to come back and then getting pretty angry about how I refused.
I went ahead and blocked him but he kept finding new ways to contact me and he also got some information about me, like my siblings’ names and my mom’s address.
Maybe his sister the police officer had helped him or maybe it was all just publicly available, because my own sister Sophie had always been good at ferreting out stuff like that.
I felt bad now for the people she had targeted in her investigations, because I really didn’t like to be the target of ferreting myself, although I liked ferrets.
There had also been a terrible winter storm.
My car was bad at being a getaway vehicle for crime due to its vivid greenness, and it was also bad at being a reliable vehicle for driving in the snow due to its balding tires and extremely light weight.
I’d had a few close calls and I didn’t remember having any of those before, so maybe my ability to negotiate the roads had been compromised somehow?
Whatever was going on, I was a lot more nervous behind the wheel than I ever had been before.
And then there was the job at the vet clinic with Pinar’s cousin.
I had gone for my interview with a lot of makeup and carefully styled hair (thanks to Pinar) to cover the bump and bruise on my forehead and at the corner of my eye.
I had thought through every answer before I’d spoken and been honest about the problems in my résumé, even when they made me look bad.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been so honest or maybe the bruises had been too noticeable, because I still hadn’t heard back, not anything at all.
Addie told me that it was sometimes hard for people to make decisions or there could have been other issues at play in the business, but…
I didn’t remember ever worrying about a job before, either.
Maybe I had lost my confidence? So, I was now a poor driver with low self-esteem who was constantly bringing bad news to Theo?
None of those things were good! I didn’t want to be this person.
And when had I ever questioned myself like this?
I didn’t want to be that person, either.
“Grace, that’s very, very clean.”
I looked into the aquarium, at the spot I had rubbed hard enough that I was in danger of making the glass too thin. “I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
“Yes, you already got off all the algae,” he agreed.
“I mean that I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I said, waving around my dry arm. “I don’t know why I’m driving so badly, for one thing.”
“Did you get in an accident?” Theo asked immediately.
“No, no.” I had avoided several, though, and it made me wonder if everyone else was driving terribly, too? “There’s definitely something wrong, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Not literally.”
“Should we go somewhere?”
“Definitely, because I don’t want to spend the night in these chairs,” I answered, and he nodded in agreement.
“I meant, maybe we should plan to get away for the weekend. The office is closed for the holiday on Monday, so we’d have three days instead of two.”
I looked at him and didn’t immediately respond because I was thinking about that, about the cost of a vacation when those beams needed to be replaced.
I also remembered that Sophie had wanted to have us over for dinner, and that I should have focused more on a job search to find backups for the vet office if that didn’t come through.
But I had always been a person to jump up and go, and all those things could have been problems for another day.
Why wouldn’t I have just said yes, immediately and repeatedly?
So I did. “Yes, yes, yes,” I answered. “I would like to do that. Remember how I went to Calcutta? I’d be happy to return.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Ohio,” he said. “What about somewhere warm, like Brenna and Campbell?” They were in Anguilla right now and her pictures in the group chat had been beautiful.
“The Caribbean might be a little far, but there are direct flights from here to several cities in Florida.” But he frowned.
“Flying would depend on you having an ID.”
“I found it, but are you serious? You would want to fly somewhere for the weekend?” Then my previous worries started to emerge.
“I hardly have any money on hand since I quit my old job and since I was trying to find a new job that that I wanted. I knew that was a bad strategy.” There was always my secret stash… I nodded. “I can make it happen.”
“No, I wasn’t suggesting that you pay for us.
You have enough to keep yourself going for a little while if you don’t have to buy a plane ticket.
” He was sure of that, because we’d had a discussion about my day-to-day finances.
Unlike when I’d previously gone over things with some members of my family, we hadn’t argued and no one had escaped to avoid the situation.
He’d been happy to learn about the can of cash that I’d buried in my mom’s yard, although he’d suggested using a bank instead.
He had also been glad to hear that I did keep track of my living expenses, differently from how others used “accounting apps” or “spreadsheets.” My way worked for me, although not many others seemed to use the rock method.
“So I can’t buy a plane ticket at this moment,” I reinforced. This seemed obvious, but my mom had made a few mistakes with spending money that she didn’t actually have…oh, no!
“Theo, sit down.”
“What? Why?” He did it, though, without arguing.