“Right. Of course. I’ll see you back at the house.”
Back at the house. She didn’t call it “home.” She didn’t even call it “her house.” She called it “the house” or “his house.” Because home was in Chicago.
He parked in his own driveway and greeted Duke. “Hey, buddy, you have a good day?” he crooned as the dog pranced and snuffled between his legs. A gentle scratching of Duke’s hindquarters sent fur flurries into the air. The dog was losing his winter undercoat. Lucas snagged the stiff-bristled brush and smoothed out his coat while Duke stretched.
Inside his house he changed into work jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and work boots, then grabbed his toolbox from the porch and crossed their adjoining driveways. As they had every year since his grandmother passed, the shoots and stalks extended from the carefully mulched beds lining the side of the house. The bushes grew on their own, a tangle of branches and thorns he’d let run wild. The year after his grandmother died, Mrs. Battle had come over and dealt with the beds, but last spring she’d had trouble shaking bronchitis.
His grandmother had welcomed him, the odd child out in a family of musical free spirits, because he cared about what she cared about: people, a place, a community. His grandfather and Uncle Nelson took him hunting, hiking, rock climbing. All his grandmother wanted was for him to take care of the house, the town, his family.
He’d failed her in every possible way, and her house was a silent reminder of promises broken, lives ruined.
Big-city girl that she was, Alana locked the house every time she left, so he used his keys to let himself in. Duke followed gamely at his heels, sniffing around until he lost interest, and settled under the kitchen table. Lucas set the toolbox on the linoleum and studied the house. He spent a fair amount of his career going into people’s homes and looking around. Serving warrants, searching for contraband, it all came down to finding out someone else’s secrets. But this house didn’t have any secrets from him. He’d spent summers in the room at the end of the hall, eaten more meals in this kitchen than he had in the house he had shared with his ex-wife.
Including a simple meal shared with Alana before a rather complex round of sex.
He looked around. The little shelf his grandfather had built for his grandmother now held African violets and a couple of pictures of Alana with a blond woman he assumed was her globe-trotting sister. The drop-leaf table was pushed against the wall and wiped clean. Salt and pepper shakers shaped like roses clustered in the middle with a sugar bowl. Opened mail was tucked between the shakers and bowl, a square letter mailed in the kind of thick envelope his ex had insisted on for their wedding invitations.
He opened a compartment in his mind and shoved his curiosity in with everything else he felt, but the shift in the house intrigued him. Observing the differences between the house his grandmother kept and the one Alana kept was scientific. Data gathering. Not emotional.
Note, for example, the books stacked by his grandmother’s chair, like they were when she was alive.
He flipped on the kitchen light. The cabinet doors were the original beadboard but painted in a green that reminded him of hospitals and retro television shows. The handles were a darkened iron. The counters were forty years old, and despite his grandmother’s care, marred with scratches and burns that came from making three meals a day, seven days a week. The wallpaper was faded yellowish and decorated with green and orange flowering vines that repeated in the linoleum. Both of those had to go, too.
It wasn’t the decorations that made it feel like his grandmother’s house. It was the care Alana took of it. The wood gleamed, the windows shone, and the grout looked like she spent an hour each weekend scrubbing at it with a toothbrush and bleach. Maybe she did, despite working thirty hours a week in the library and who knew how many more for Freddie and her family.
He’d spent enough time fixing Alana’s sink lately to know that this wasn’t going to be an easy project. The sink didn’t have any shut-off valves attached; in order for her to have water in the bathroom he’d have to install those . . .
He was standing in the tiny room, notebook in hand, developing a plan when the back door opened. “Hello?”
“In here,” he called back.
The sound of bags hitting the kitchen table, then her heels against the hardwood as she walked down the hall. The scent of her, spring air, a layer of faintly floral perfume over a more fundamental soap and heated female skin, reached him before she did. Then she peered around the doorjamb.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” he said. “Duke didn’t give you any trouble.”