“So, you take dog pictures!”
“Yep.”
“Nice in-home business. That overhead can kill you, though. How long have you been doing this?”
He sounded like he really wanted to know. “Forever. I took over from my dad when he retired. He lives in the islands and takes charters on his fishing boat. I do calendars, too. A dog a month, that kind of thing. All breeds. I’m working on next year’s right now. I’d like to put Cecil on it, but I’ll need permission. In case your next question is ‘which one is which,’ I still don’t know.”
Jeff groaned. “I don’t do dishes,” he said, to avoid discussing the dogs. “I use those shiny plastic things you just toss in the trash. Listen, if you want to talk about…whatever it is that’s bothering you, I’m a good listener. If you pay me a dollar, we can log it under attorney-client privilege. I was just going to hang out today and write a brief.”
She didn’t mean to speak the words, but they tumbled out of her mouth anyway. “I was going to make chicken soup and maybe bake a cake. My dad always did that on bad-weather days.”
Jeff’s eyebrows shot upward. He removed his baseball cap, suddenly aware that he was still wearing it. He shoved it in his back pocket. Olivia noticed how the cap had mashed down his unruly curly hair. “My mother does the same thing. If it isn’t chicken soup and cake, it’s stew and a pie. We had a lot of bad weather back in Pennsylvania growing up, so we did eat hearty in the winter.”
Again, words she didn’t mean to utter tumbled from her mouth. “What’s your mother like?”
Jeff leaned back in his chair. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew nonetheless that he was treading on troubled ground. “I wrote an essay on her once for school when I was little. I got an A. Mom framed it. She hung it up in her bedroom. I think my dad was a little miffed. She has a wonderful smile. I kind of look like her, or so my dad says. She’s the one with the curly hair. All us boys have curly hair. My dad’s hair is poker straight. She wears glasses, and her hair is gray now. She says she’s a little heavier than she’d like to be. She’s active in church stuff, 4-H and the like. She enters all the cooking contests when they have the county fair. She wins, too. She helps Dad and can drive the tractor. Sometimes she mows the lawn. She never went to college, never had a job outside the house. Six boys were enough to handle. On Thanksgiving we always had to have two turkeys. When we’d get brave enough to take a girl home for the first time, we always knew right away if Mom liked her or not. If she was polite and formal, that meant a no-go. If she was herself, that meant the girl was okay. None of us ever pushed our luck in that department.
“When we’d get sick, she’d sit by our beds and read to us, play checkers, stuff like that. She made more noise at our graduation than the whole stadium combined. You can’t be embarrassed when it’s your mother.”
Tears flooded Olivia’s eyes.
Jeff ran his fingers through his hair, then rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. “What did I say? Talk to me. I’m a lawyer, I’m trained to deal with problems. If there are taboos, tell me.”
Olivia blinked away her tears. She got up and carried her plate to the dishwasher. With her back to him, she said, “I never had a mother. The day I was born, she told my father she didn’t want me and that she wanted a divorce. My dad told me she’d died. Then a few days ago a lawyer showed up at my door and said my mother had just died a few weeks ago and left me her fortune.”
Jeff was suddenly at a loss for words. When he finally found his tongue, he said, “Well, that damn well sucks.”
Olivia busied herself unplugging the toaster, wiping it off, and sliding it back under the counter. She tied a twist-tie on the package of bread and put it, along with the bacon and eggs, back into the refrigerator. “Yeah. It does. I called my dad, and he flew up. He left last night before you came. He said he was sorry.”
Jeff struggled for words. The only thing he could come up with was, “You didn’t pay me a dollar.” Olivia reached into the cookie jar and withdrew a dollar bill. She handed it to him. Jeff shoved it into his pocket. “We are now lawyer and client.”
“I hate lawyers,” Olivia said.
“Yeah, yeah, everyone hates lawyers until they need one. Is there more? There is—I can tell. You might as well spit it out right now.”
Olivia’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as she stared out the kitchen window at the falling snow. “How do you know there’s more?”
“My fine legal intuition, which is honed to a sharp point. Nah, it just stands to reason there’s more.”
Olivia poured more coffee into her cup. Jeff held his out for a refill. She obliged before sitting down. “My mother changed her name from Allison Matthews to Adrian Ames. Does that ring a bell with you?”
Jeff looked perplexed. “No. Should it?”
“She is Adrian Ames of Adrian’s Treasures. It’s a huge mail-order house. Wait here a minute.” Olivia ran into the great room and returned with her printouts and the letter. She had no idea why she was suddenly confiding in a total stranger. No idea at all.
Minutes later Jeff said, “Wow! What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. One minute I think I should do what she asked because ‘it’s the right thing to do.’ Then the next minute I say, screw it, she did it, I’m not making it right for her. What would you do?”
Jeff’s eyes almost bugged out of his head at the question. “I don’t know, Olivia. I guess it would depend on how much hate I was carrying around. You look to me like you’re carrying a bushelful.”
“I had such a nice life before I was bombarded with all of this. I had wonderful memories. I had this fantasy that my mother gave up her life so I could live. In my mind she was a martyr. Her picture—well, not really her picture—was on the mantel. My whole damn life was a lie. If that wasn’t bad enough, then I find out not only was my mother alive all those years when I hungered for a mother, but that she was a thief. I hate feeling like this. I don’t know if I can…I just want it all to go away, but, like my dad said, that isn’t going to happen. I have to deal with it.
“In addition, I have to deal with you and the dogs. Before I do anything else, I have to square that away. So let’s get to it. What are we going to do in regard to Cecil?”
“I do my best thinking in the shower. Do you mind if I take one in your bathroom? By any chance, do you have a razor?”
“Everything you need is in the downstairs bathroom in the linen closet. I’m going to take my own shower. I sure hope you come up with something.”
“Yeah, me too…. Who am I kidding?” Jeff mumbled to himself as he made his way to the bathroom.
Olivia was the first to return to the kitchen. She’d dressed quickly, in jeans and a bright yellow long-sleeved shirt. While she waited for her houseguest, she got out her soup pot and a frozen chicken from the freezer. She worked like a robot as she added frozen stock and water to the huge pot. She pared vegetables and proceeded to chop with a vengeance. Everything was simmering nicely when Jeff entered the kitchen, the four dogs at his heels.
“Smells good.”
“It gets better as it cooks. I love the smell. One of my friends used to say our house always smelled like celery and parsley. I think it was a compliment.”
“Our house always smelled like apples and cinnamon. Mom did a lot of baking. It was nice to smell when we came in from school. It still smells like that.”
Olivia looked out the window. “Let the dogs out, okay? While you’re out there, you could sweep off the patio before the snow piles up again. You need to earn that dollar I paid you.”
Jeff looked at his hostess. Really looked at