Chapter 12
Finally, he was finished. “Yeah,” he panted, the word sounding pained, and then he closed his eyes.
The air whistled out of his lungs and the steam whistled out of the heaters, but everything else was quiet until he spoke again.
“That was great.” He used his fingers to squeegee sweat from his upper lip, and then wiped it onto the cushion of his chair.
“It’s good that you came back, because the other girl I hired couldn’t bend like you do. ”
“It’s from yoga.” Still no unassisted crow pose, but I didn’t need that here.
I yanked my t-shirt back over my head and, just for a moment, I breathed in the clean scent that lingered in the cotton before the odor of stale cigarettes, body odor, and…
my nose crinkled. There was also an undercurrent of rats or some other kind of vermin in this house.
“He dumped you?”
I hadn’t been looking his way on purpose, but now my eyes shot over. “What are you talking about?”
“I figured that you got a boyfriend who put his foot down, and that was why you stopped coming to me,” he said. “But now he dumped you so you’re back for more.” He laughed, a raspy chuckle that made him cough until something came up that he spat into a pop can on the table next to his chair.
“No, that’s not what happened.” I didn’t need to explain myself but I kept going anyway. “I unblocked you because I got another job but I already lost it, and it wasn’t what I wanted anyway but the vet had seen through me.”
“Like an x-ray?”
Yes, exactly. Pinar’s cousin hadn’t hired me because he’d read me like a radiograph and had understood that I couldn’t come work for him.
I’d gotten that news when he’d called me, which he didn’t have to do.
He’d said that he was sorry but I wasn’t the right fit for the position and he wished me luck for the future.
He’d explained that to Pinar, too, and she’d been mad on my behalf but I’d told her not to worry about it.
It was more important for her to maintain a good relationship with her family rather than to stand up for me, when clearly I was a bad fit for the job.
“The money’s next to the door,” he said, breaking into my thoughts.
I nodded and grabbed it and my coat before I hurried outside, into the continued cold of winter.
I kept thinking that spring had to be just around the corner, but the short, grey days continued without any hint of change. I needed some change.
“What are you up to now, Grace?” Nicola had texted just yesterday.
The last time I’d asked, Dion had refused to share what they were saying about me in the group chat, but I hadn’t bothered with that in a while.
Their opinions didn’t really matter and I didn’t bother to answer Nicola about what I was up to, either.
I was doing fine, just as I always did. Maybe I would even take a trip soon, if I could find my driver’s license and if my car underwent some type of miracle healing and stopped leaking whatever fluid was coming out from underneath it.
At least I hadn’t had to deal with our family’s weekend dinners and the threat of interrogations there.
Mom was still furious with all of us for keeping back the information about our father’s girlfriend-turned-fiancée, so mad that Dion had needed to move out (details about that had been scarce in the group chat).
She wasn’t even speaking to her perennial favorite, my brother Patrick.
It had been good for Dion because he had moved in with Carrington, the girlfriend that he loved so much, and a few of my other siblings were happy to have had these weeks free from the drama that the dinners often brought.
But other people, like Juliet, were upset by it, and even Brenna seemed to feel bad. “We should have told her about the engagement,” she wrote in the group chat.
“Would it have been any better to hear it earlier?” Sophie had asked, and Addie said that it might have been better to hear it from us.
“She would have shot any messenger,” Nicola had answered. “Grace, I don’t mean it literally.” I knew that because Theo had used the expression, too. He had told me that he didn’t blame me for constantly bringing him bad news about his cabin renovation.
But no one was happy with me now. Mom had told everyone that I’d been aware of our father’s affair and had kept it to myself, and they were furious like she was.
“Why did you do that to her?” JuJu had seethed via text.
“If you had talked to me, I could have helped with the situation,” Nicola had chided, although I had no idea what she thought that she could have done. Sophie was furious but for another reason.
“You made me think that you had no idea about dad and Rachel,” she’d written. “I was afraid to tell you and make you upset but you had known all along. How did you get so sneaky and sly?”
That had made Nicola jump in to defend me, because even if she was also mad, she would always do that.
I didn’t bother to defend myself, because I’d found that people usually liked to stick to their opinions no matter what you said.
I didn’t explain to Sophie that I had kept it secret because I had been so shocked by our dad’s behavior, and because I hadn’t wanted all of them to feel as let down by him as I had.
Once I was out of the hot house and in my car, I did my usual trick of pulling around the corner and out of sight before I decided what to do.
After I’d been fired from my latest job at the deli, I had gotten another one working at a party store, but that started late and there were several more hours of the day to fill before I was supposed to show.
I wasn’t even sure that I would show at all, which meant that I had a lot of time.
So I turned the car in the direction that I’d been going a lot lately: towards Theo’s cabin.
He wasn’t there, of course. He was either at the hospital or at his office seeing patients, and Pinar had reported that he was incredibly busy.
At least she was still talking to me, because Regina was just as mad as everyone else.
It didn’t relate to my dad and his fiancée, though—it was all about her beloved Dr. Winter and how I had mistreated him.
I hadn’t explained to her how my departure from his life had been in his best interest.
I drove out of the city and the suburbs turned into country that was very familiar.
Even if Theo and I hadn’t seen each other or even talked in a while, I had still been coming here as much as I could.
Keon’s crew was hard at work and everything looked terrible, but he swore to me that they were making good progress.
“I have a vision, Grace,” he’d told me, and laughed when I had squinted, trying to glimpse it too.
Sometimes it helped when you did that, but it hadn’t allowed me to picture much beyond the mess that was in front of me.
None of that destruction seemed to get him down at all and previously, it had never bothered me either.
I’d lived in a few places that were even worse than the current condition of the cabin, which looked like a bomb had been dropped on it and was surrounded by a moat of water that the crew was having to pump now that the temperature was consistently rising above freezing.
Maybe spring really was coming, although I couldn’t feel it yet myself.
“Hey, Grace,” the guys on the crew greeted me after I made it down the driveway, and I said hello and laced up my boots.
They made a lot more sense than the slippers that I liked to wear, the ones that Theo had given me the first time that I’d come to visit him here.
I’d driven to his cabin that day because I’d been prepared to clean it up and I still was, no matter if we weren’t… anything.
“Why are you waving your hands around?” one of the workers asked.
“I’m ready to do this. All of it,” I told him. “I’m not giving up. I got fired a lot but I wasn’t ever a quitter.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure,” he said, and then walked away but looked over his shoulder at me a few times.
I did my normal routine of strolling around the jobsite to check on progress but as usual, it was hard to spot very much different since the last time I’d been here. Except—
“What’s happening?” I yelled down to the guys in the basement.
“We’re pouring the new floor,” one of them answered, and I felt my heart leap. A new floor?
“Hey, Grace,” Keon called as he approached, and I turned around with my hands clasped over my heart. “What’s wrong with you? Did somebody say something?” He glared down at the men.
“No, I’m crying from happiness. It’s a new floor!”
“Sure, there’s a lot going on. Come on and I’ll show you.” He took a moment to give me a tour and he also told me what they were going to do next as we walked. “I explained all this to Theo, too,” he said. “He didn’t pass it along?”
“We’re not talking anymore.”
“You two broke up?” he asked.
For the second time that day, I said no. “We were never together as a couple. We were only a helper and help-ee.”
“Help-ee,” Keon repeated. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a person who needs help all the time,” I explained. “It’s a person who’s a problem worse than this cabin, and who is always on the verge of having her head stuck in a fence, getting fired, or being bitten by a snake two separate times because she put her hand into weird holes in the ground.”
“You’re talking about yourself, right?” he asked, and I nodded. “Pardon my fucking French, but why the fuck would you have put your hand into a hole in the ground? Twice?”
“I was looking for golf balls to sell. I was trying to get money.”
“So Theo got tired of playing the rescuer, but you keep hanging around here,” he said next, and now I shook my head.
“He’s busy helping all his patients and he also needs to help himself. He doesn’t need me as a help-ee.”
“I’m thinking that’s not a word. I’m going to look it up…” He tried but then shook his head. “Service here sucks.”