Hovering outside the bathroom door, Emma asked eagerly, “Did you do something bad?”
“Great. Wonderful,” Kathleen muttered.
“It’s okay.” Jo was already envisioning the work to be done. Way more than she’d signed up for, considering this wasn’t her house, but she wasn’t the quitting type. Besides, she wanted to take a shower again someday. With false confidence, she said, “We’ll tear the boards up and lay down plywood.”
“What if the beams underneath are rotting?”
Brutality was sometimes necessary. “We call your brother.”
Kathleen’s jaw hardened. “Then let’s pray,” she said, and began yanking up the linoleum again.
Jo couldn’t quite figure out why Kathleen was so determined not to accept Ryan’s help. Pride—sure. She’d been a dependent wife, now she wanted to show the world she could manage very nicely on her own, thank you. But her determination also struck Jo as a sort of competition—I can do it better than you can. A childish game. When you got right down to it, wasn’t it a little silly that three women who knew nothing about construction were refusing to let a willing contractor help gut the bathroom, just so they could prove…what? That they could do it, too? Could do it better?
Yeah, right, Jo thought with humorous derision. Do it? Maybe. Make a dozen mistakes? That, too.
“Well,” she decided, while Helen was carrying the tattered roll of linoleum out, “we’ll definitely need the circular saw. But let’s pry a few boards up and see how bad it is.”
The first board splintered—well, disintegrated was probably closer to the truth. Squished into pieces. But under it, the thick, rough-hewn beam looked solid. Jo pulled out nails and moved on to the next board. Somehow, as the only one with any know-how whatsoever, she was ending up doing most of the work. But she’d always enjoyed doing simple projects like building a floor-to-ceiling bookcase in her last condo. She’d been proud of the results. This was more than she’d bargained for when she had shrugged and said, “Sure, I don’t mind helping,” during that interview/visit this summer. But, heck, it wasn’t as if she had any friends with whom to spend a sunny Saturday, and she liked a challenge.
“It looks okay,” she announced, after the second board shattered with a soggy sound. “These boards weren’t rotted quite through.”
Kathleen sank back on her heels and sighed. “Thank God for small favors. Okay. Tell me what to buy, and I’ll go back to the lumberyard while you and Helen pull up the floor.”
Jo measured the dimensions of the bathroom floor. “Ask somebody what kind of plywood you should buy. Tell them we’re tiling on top of it. Oh, and what kind of nails. Get a circular saw…”
“But we already bought a saw,” Helen protested.
“That was a jigsaw. We can’t cut big pieces of plywood with it, not and make straight lines.”
“Oh.”
Kathleen was busy writing notes. “We’ll probably need the tools when we work on other projects anyway. We should have bought one in the first place.”
“The thing is,” Jo paused, the hammer suspended in her hand, “we really need to get a plumber.”
Kathleen looked dismayed. “A plumber? Why?”
Jo put it in simple language. “Something was leaking. I don’t know what.”
“But you know we’ll never get anyone out here on Saturday or Sunday. And that’ll leave us without a bathtub or shower, never mind a toilet upstairs, until next weekend at least, when we have time to tile.”
“Uncle Ryan could fix it,” Emma said. “If you’d let him.”
“He’ll promise to come and then not show up until tomorrow evening.” Kathleen sounded waspish.
Jo raised a brow, but didn’t comment on this assessment of Ryan Grant. Instead she pointed out, “Tomorrow evening would be better than Monday, when one of us would have to be home to let a plumber in.”
“That’s not true, anyway!” Emma’s face flushed red. “He always comes when he says he will!”
“You haven’t known him as long as I have,” her mother said crisply. “If he were more ambitious, he wouldn’t still be working with his own hands. He’d be running the business instead of driving nails.”
“He likes working on houses!” the teenager cried.
“If he wanted to be successful…”
Apparently he didn’t, at least to his sister’s standards. Maybe he didn’t like wearing a white shirt and tie and spending his day sending faxes and talking on a cell phone.
On the other hand, Jo amended, maybe he was one of those irresponsible jerks who’d rather go fishing on a nice day than show up to do the work he’d promised to. Just this summer, when she put her condo up for sale and needed to lay a new vinyl floor in the kitchen, the first two days she’d stayed home from work to let workmen in, they had neither come nor called.
Her interest in Kathleen’s brother waned. Not much for lazing around herself, she liked workaholics, not playboys.
Still…
“You’d better call him,” she advised.
Kathleen made a face. “Oh, all right.” As she backed into the hall, she explained, “Emma, it’s not that I don’t like Ryan…”
“You don’t!” the teenager cried. The venom in her voice startled Jo into swiveling in time to see bitterness transform the fifteen-year-old’s expression as she finished, “Maybe he has dirt under his fingernails sometimes, or he smells sweaty, or he doesn’t know what to wear to one of your parties, but he’s nice!”
Kathleen seemed frozen in shock. “I’ve never said…”
“You have!” her daughter flung at her. “I heard you and Dad! You were embarrassed by Uncle Ryan! Just like you’re embarrassed by me!”
With that, she turned and ran. Jo heard the uneven thud of her feet on the stairs, and then the slam of the front door.
None of the women moved for what seemed an eternity. Ginny had her face pressed into her mother’s side.
Kathleen finally gave an unconvincing laugh. “Teenagers!”
Helen smoothed her daughter’s hair. “I was awful when I was thirteen.”
“Me, too,” Jo admitted. “And when I was fourteen, and fifteen, and sixteen…” Actually, she hadn’t quit rebelling until at eighteen she’d realized that her father didn’t even notice her snotty comebacks or sulky moods. She wasn’t upsetting him, she wasn’t even making a blip on his radar screen. That’s when she left home and never went back.
Looking unhappy, Kathleen left the room. A minute later, her voice floated up the stairs. “I left a message on Ryan’s voice mail.”
“Okay,” Jo called back.
Helen and Ginny made repeated trips up and down the stairs, carrying boards from which Jo was careful to remove all the nails. In her quiet way, the six-year-old seemed to be enjoying herself. She’d hold out her arms and wait for Jo to pile on a child-size load, then carefully turn and make her way out of the gutted bathroom. Sometimes she even went ahead of her mother, or reappeared before her.
Kathleen had been right, Jo had discovered: Ginny wasn’t any bother. Living with her was more like having a mouse in the house than a child. Tiny rustles marked her presence.
Once, when Ginny reappeared ahead of her mother and stood waiting patiently while Jo pried at a stubborn board, she felt compelled to make conversation.
“Your mom says you’re