Chapter 5
The dining room smelled like dust, old varnish, and the staleness of a room that hadn’t properly breathed for years.
Sunny stood in the middle of it on the first real morning of renovation with a paint scraper in one hand and the deep, faintly illicit happiness of being about to take something apart.
“You’re sure we’re allowed to do this?” Madison hovered in the doorway with her dark hair knotted up out of the way and one of her father’s flannel shirts on over her clothes, the sleeves rolled three times to find her hands. She held the second paint scraper anxiously.
“Your dad signed a release this morning that I typed up myself, mostly to watch his face while he read it.” Sunny knelt at the wainscoting, where somebody—in a decade that ought to be ashamed of itself—had painted battleship gray over the original.
“And he fixed the leak before we touched anything. Rule one of restoration. You don’t bring a body back to life while it’s still bleeding. ”
Madison grinned. “And he griped about fixing that gutter the whole time he was on the ladder. But quietly. To the gutter.”
That sounded exactly right. In two weeks of working in his front parlor-turned-office, she’d learned Hank did his complaining the way other men prayed, privately, often aimed at inanimate objects that weren’t cooperating with him.
She scored a line through the gray with the corner of the scraper and worked a curl of paint loose with her thumbnail. It came away in a long, satisfying ribbon, and underneath . . .
“Oh,” Madison said, very quietly.
. . . underneath was beautiful, age darkened oak. The grain rayed out in the nearly black stripes against rich gold that the old mills used to call tiger stripe. It looked entirely unbothered by the decades it had spent buried under dull gray.
“That’s been under there the whole time,” Madison said in wonder.
“Everything that’s best in this house has been hidden under something else.
” Sunny sat back on her heels and smiled at the honest wood she’d just uncovered.
The old joy of doing restoration work rose to the surface of her awareness, shocking her.
She’d thought her first life had permanently curdled it for her.
She commented, “Whoever painted this was trying to make the room look like a room in a catalog. They couldn’t do it, though. The bones wouldn’t let them.”
She showed Madison how to keep the scraper blade shallow and go with the grain, so the wood underneath never had to know it had been rescued. Madison’s first pull was too steep and gouged a little.
Sunny waved an unconcerned hand. “This wood should have dings here and there. They’re proof a place has been lived in. Twenty years from now, you can point out that dent to your kids and tell them that’s where you first started restoring this house.”
Madison smiled a little and tried again.
Her second scrape was clean. By her fifth she’d stopped checking Sunny’s face after each one.
They worked the lower wall together until they’d worked all the way around the room. Then Sunny stood, tipped her head back, and frowned at the ceiling, which was a grid of acoustic tile the dull color of old teeth.
“That,” she declared, “is the single most cowardly thing anyone has ever done to this room.”
“Dad said it was probably hiding wires.”
“Your dad is a wonderful doctor and doesn’t know the first thing about historic restoration.
This house was built after electricity was invented and will have been built around wiring already.
” She dragged the ladder under the worst tile, right beside the Idaho stain, climbed it, and pushed the panel up off its frame.
Dust sifted down. She turned her face away, waved it clear, and looked up into the dark.
Coffers. A whole coffered ceiling was up there in the gloom—oak beams crisscrossing into deep recessed squares, every joint cut a hundred and twenty years ago by an artisan man who would’ve never guessed someone would install a drop ceiling eighteen inches beneath his best work.
“Madison.” Her voice came out funny. “Get up here.”
Madison climbed the other side of the ladder and looked up. Her face lit with wonder. The careful, guarded expression she wore like armor simply wasn’t there. There was only a fourteen-year-old looking at something old and true and far better than she’d ever expected.
“The magazine’s going to lose its mind,” Madison said.
“The magazine is going to take all the credit.” Sunny pushed up the next tile, and the next, walking the ladder down the room while the coffers came out of the dark one square at a time. “But yes. They are going to be thrilled.”
By the time the last tile came down, the dining room was a dusty wreck—gray ribbons of paint curled across the drop cloths, ceiling tiles was stacked like sad dominoes by the pocket doors, plaster dust was going to paste in the sweat on her arms. It was the most beautiful wreck Sunny had stood in for a long while.
She heard him before she saw him. The screen door squeaked, then the unhurried tread she could already pick out of a crowd, which she chose not to examine any more closely.
Hank stepped into the doorway and took in what they’d done to it. He didn’t say anything for a moment. He had a way of arriving at a thing slowly, the way he took a pulse, and she’d stopped finding the silences uncomfortable.
“You found the ceiling,” he said at last.
“Did you know it was up there?” She came down the ladder.
“I didn’t.” He gazed up at it, and surprise crossed his face. It was laced, though, with caution. She recognized that look from her own mirror. He was afraid to love it in case there was a catch forthcoming.
“Huh,” he said. “And to think, it was up there the whole time.”
“I’m starting to think that’s the motto of this house.”
“There’s a hole where the mantel should be.
” She pointed at the chimney breast on the far wall, where a rectangle of rough brick sat naked between two runs of paneling.
“Somebody pulled the original out. Probably sold it in a lean year. And there was a fixture in the center of that ceiling once—you can see the patch. The room’s missing its two best décor pieces. ”
“Can’t you just—” Hank made a vague gesture she’d learned meant do whatever it is you do.
“I can’t manufacture a hundred-year-old mantel out of good intentions.
I’ll have to find one.” She wiped her hands on her jeans and looked at him with a bright smile.
“Both of you. Saturday. There’s a salvage yard in Bozeman that might have what this room needs.
But it’s your house. You two will need to make the final decision on something you like. ”
Madison went still but practically vibrated with excitement.
Hank looked at his daughter. Then at the naked brick. Then, with the air of a man being measured for a noose, at Sunny.
“I’ll bring the truck,” he said on a sigh.
The salvage yard sprawled across three acres. The main barn smelled of rust and cut cedar and the insides of old houses—a mingling of soot, beeswax, and time that Sunny would have worn if anyone bottled and sold it.
Presley was spending the day with Makayla at her farm, and the twins were spending the day with Bobby Foster out at the Foster Ranch. Tessa and Jenna had both promised to return her offspring to her this afternoon both fed and exhausted.
She’d ridden in the front seat of Hank’s pickup, while Chloe’s car seat and Madison sat in the back.
Sunny had spent forty minutes of mountain highway pretending she didn’t notice everything about the man beside her.
The way he drove with one wrist hung over the top of the wheel as if he had all the time the good Lord ever made.
How he smelled like coffee and clean soap with a hint of cedar underneath, which was unfair because she’d just that morning decided cedar was her favorite smell.
You’re thirty-five years old and behaving like a teenager, she lectured herself. She stared fixedly at the mountains, which were stacked in receding blues and had the decency not to have tanned forearms revealed attractively by the rolled up sleeves of a flannel shirt.
Chloe slept the whole way and woke up furious about it. She was restored to civilized behavior only by the discovery of an entire bin of brass doorknobs she was permitted to put her hands into up to the elbow.
“I’ll watch her while you and Dad make a preliminary pass to find the mantels,” Madison volunteered.
“Don’t let her eat a doorknob,” Sunny told her.
“She can’t fit a doorknob into her mouth,” Madison said with the confidence of someone who hadn’t known Chloe long.
“She’ll die trying,” Sunny replied dryly.
Madison grinned and waved them away on their search.
Sunny was coming to understand that, if she gave Madison a thing to be responsible for, she steadied like a level finding plumb. She’d been somebody’s keeper too young, same as Presley. It was impossible to take the pattern out of them. She could only hand them something worth keeping.
She and Hank found the mantel in the third aisle, leaned against a horse stall with four others.
Sunny knew it the way she always knew with fast certain recognition under her breastbone, the restorer’s version of love at first sight.
It was oak with a deep dentil cornice and columns worn smooth on their front edges where decades of hands had rested as fires burned down.
“This one’s telling the truth,” she said, running her thumb along the worn edge of the mantel shelf.
“What does truth feel like?” he asked quietly.
“Real wear collects where the hands go. You can’t fake where people touched a thing for a lifetime.”
Hank laid his hand flat on the cornice. It took a moment but understanding dawned on his face. She watched him learn something about his own house that she hadn’t yet found the words for.
“It feels right for the room,” he said quietly.
Sunny fetched Madison and Chloe to show them their find while Hank pulled the mantel out and leaned it by itself against the next stall door.