Chapter 3 #3
There it was again. It came from upstairs, along with another voice. Sunny. He heard a scrape of furniture being dragged across a floor.
He went up quietly.
The door to Madison’s room stood wide open and neither of them saw him. Sunny was on her knees by the window, working a small old desk a few inches one way and then back the other. Madison was directing her with the absolute tyranny of someone who knew exactly where it went.
“No, back to the left. Your left. Right there.”
The room had changed drastically. It wasn’t finished, but it had transformed from a place where boxes were stored where someone slept and boxes were stored in a place where someone lived. An old mirror leaned against the wall waiting to be hung. A quilt he didn’t recognize lay folded on the bed.
And his girl: his careful, contained, locked-up-tight girl, who’d come to him three weeks ago, was flushed and bossy and happy, arguing with Sunny about an inch of desk placement like it was the most important thing in the world.
He’d tried to finish her room. He’d offered her every kind of furniture a catalog could ship. He’d stood in this exact spot a dozen times in the past three weeks and had no idea what his child needed.
He’d watched Madi keep that one corner perfect and live out of boxes in the rest of the space, as if she expected him to pack her up and ship her back to Lorraine any minute now.
He hadn’t known how to get her to open up. Not about herself, not even about how to fix up her room. With each passing day, he’d quietly despaired a little more of ever reaching through Madi’s walls to get to know his only child.
To his knowledge, Madison and Sunny hadn’t met prior to today. And here they were, putting a room together. Sunny had obviously no sooner met Madison than she knew exactly how to talk to her, to get Madi to let down her guard, and then to help her create the space Madi wanted.
An image passed through his mind unbidden of Lorraine. She didn’t create or decorate anything. She blew through their family like a tornado, tearing rooms and lives apart, leaving Madison and him standing in the wreckage. Sunny had done the exact opposite. No fuss, no drama.
He stepped back before either of them saw him and went back downstairs more unsteadily as his heart did weird flip flops in his chest. He stood in the middle of his office, which was still chaotic, but visibly less so than four days ago.
He waited until his pulse settled and his face went back to normal before he called upstairs that he was home.
They got the desk exactly where Madison wanted it.
By the time the afternoon light started to wane and went gold, the mirror was hung and the quilt was on and the curtains, which turned out to be a lovely pair of powder blue velvet side panels with sheer white center panels, were finally out of their plastic and hung.
The room wasn’t done. The walls still wanted paint at a minimum although Sunny would love to introduce Madison to the elegant and wonderful world of period accurate wallpaper design. The boxes still needed unpacking, but the clothes had nowhere to go, yet.
Madison had asked Sunny’s opinion about clothing storage, and she’d suggested a chest of drawers and maybe a small armoire if they could find one that wasn’t too expensive.
The space had a center of gravity now. It looked like the one perfect corner had claimed most of the space.
Sunny gathered her bag to go collect her own children, who’d been at a play date with Charlotte’s twins longer than was polite. After this morning’s shopping trip, she’d raced home, fed the kids lunch, and called Charlotte to take her up on her offer to entertain her four kiddos for an afternoon.
She had to come up with a better child care arrangement than dumping the kids with new women friends or relying on Presley, who was too young for such a responsibility, even if she was capable of doing it.
“Thank you,” Madison said shyly. “You could—if you wanted—when you come do the books next time, could come see if my paint color works. I haven’t picked it yet. I want to get it right.”
It was, Sunny understood, the only way Madison knew how to make the offer. Come back was dressed up as a question about paint.
“I’d like that,” Sunny said simply. She knew from personal experience not to acknowledge the importance of the question. She, too, had been that shy, wild creature creeping hesitantly out of the wilderness, ready to bolt at the first sign of a threat.
As she walked to Charlotte’s craft store in the lengthening light, she noticed with the suspicion she reserved for any good feeling that she’d spent a whole afternoon with her guard all the way down.
She was already raising one girl who kept her corner of the world perfect because she couldn’t trust the rest of it. She’d apparently just spent the day with another one.
It worried her how much both girls guarded their hearts. They needed to see adults around them, adult female role models like her, trust other people and not get burned by doing so.
Small problem. She was more guarded with her heart than both of them put together.