Malaika said, “Yes. We’re not sure what he’s doing, when he does that. Sam thinks he’s chasing moles.”
“Sam’s here?” I hadn’t seen his truck, but then I wouldn’t have. The driveway access to Malaika’s house was from a side road that dead-ended in a cul-de-sac around the back.
“He must be. He probably came by to pick up the window.”
It took me a minute to make the connection. “The window you bribed him with, so he’d come help at Fall Harvest?”
“The very same.”
“Must be some window.”
“It is,” she said. “Come have a look for yourself.”
The beagle had skidded a little way down the hill and now popped up again out of the flowers and with a quick wag of his tail bounded off again, leading us around to the backyard, where we found Sam and Darryl loading something large into the back of Sam’s truck, near the shed.
Malaika said, “Hang on, now. Charley wants to see my window.”
Sam corrected her, “My window.” But he stood aside to let me see, and then I understood why he had wanted it.
“That’s beautiful,” I said, because it truly was. Victorian, and round, and huge—at least four feet across—it had been crafted of cast iron, with six petal-shaped glass panes all set around a central circle so the whole thing, with its flaking ivory paint and deeply bevelled edges, looked like an enormous flower.
Malaika said, “I got it from an old hotel upstate that they were tearing down, and ever since I put it in the shed Sam here’s been hatching schemes to take it off my hands.”
He grinned and didn’t bother to deny it. “Hey, you offered it. I wasn’t going to tell you no.” Securing it within the truck bed, he flipped up the tailgate. Taking off his gloves, he looked at me and asked, “She’s got you working on a Sunday?”
“It’s a social call.” My thoughts felt slightly fuzzy. “Well, a little bit of work, but mostly social. We’ve been sitting on the porch. Malaika made us these amazing drinks.”
“Uh-huh. They didn’t have tequila in them, did they?”
“Maybe.”
In her own defence, Malaika said, “I didn’t make them strong.”
“Uh-huh,” Sam said again. And then to me, “Well, when you’re ready, let me know. I’ll drive you home.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I told him. “I can walk.”
But half a minute later, I was pretty sure I couldn’t. “Sam?” I asked him. “Can you drive me home?”
“Sure thing.”
Malaika must have fetched my tote bag from the porch, because Sam handed it to me to hold before he reached to clip my seatbelt buckle safely into place. “Okay?” he asked.
I wasn’t. Everything was spinning, and my face had gone all tingly, and I felt a little bad for Bandit, relegated to the narrow back seat while I took his place, but all I said was, “Yes.”
The drive was mercifully short.
Sam came around, opened my door, and unfastened my seat belt for me. As he helped me out, I said, “I don’t think I can move my eyebrows. Is that normal?”
“Yep.”
It seemed an easy thing to walk across the yard with him beside me, and his hand beneath my elbow kept me steady as I climbed the porch steps. Rachel let us in.
“Is she all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
She leaned in close. “Your eyes are shiny.”
“Are they?”
“Really shiny.”
And then I was lying on the sofa in the living room, and somehow I’d been covered by my favourite crocheted blanket with the fringes.
From the kitchen I heard Rachel’s voice, and Sam’s. Oh, good, I thought. She’s been polite and asked him in for coffee.
And although the world was still spinning around me, it felt strangely peaceful. So I fell asleep.
? ? ?
It was a good thing that the next day was a holiday.
When I arrived at work on Tuesday morning Sam was working on the scaffolding. I put my boots and hardhat on and went around to talk to him. “I don’t think I said thank you.”
“Yeah, you did.” He grinned. “About ten times.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good. Because I really do appreciate it.”
“Anytime. Malaika mixed those drinks for me and Darryl, once. I think there might be video, somewhere.” The clapboards had already been removed along this section of the old house wall, exposing the underlying sheathing boards that Sam was now examining for rot or insect damage. We’d been fortunate. The structure of the house was fairly sound.
“And I’d be fine,” I said, “with Rachel looking after Bandit for you.” I’d reminded her that since it was her house she didn’t need to ask for my approval, but she had insisted on it anyway.
She’d gone all through it yesterday. “He said he’d pay me for it. He’ll drop Bandit off here in the mornings and come by to pick him up, and he’ll bring food and everything. He’s really so adorable. The dog, I mean. Did you know he’s a rescue beagle?”
I’d remembered Frank and Sam had used the term the day I’d first encountered Bandit, but I’d just assumed it meant that he’d come from the pound.
Rachel had set me straight. “They use them to experiment on. You know, in laboratories. Sam says they use beagles because they’re so gentle and sweet-tempered they won’t even bite you when you’re hurting them. And after a few years when they ‘retire’ the dogs, some labs give them to rescue groups who try to find them homes. Sam says that Bandit didn’t even know what grass was when he got him. It’s his second rescue beagle. He had one before, a girl dog, but she ended up with cancer and he had to put her down. So he got Bandit.”
“Beagles,” Sam said now, as he stood squarely on the scaffolding, “don’t like to be alone. So she’ll be doing me a favour.”
“What about the doggie daycare place?”
“Nah. There’s a Labradoodle there that’s always picking on him. He’ll be better hanging out with Rachel.”
I was not completely fooled. I knew he’d talked to Rachel for a while, because she’d told me that he had. “He’s really nice,” she’d said. “He listens.”
So I knew he knew that Rachel wasn’t finding this an easy time, and I suspected Sam just figured she and Bandit were a lot alike in needing some companionship from somebody who understood and didn’t push their boundaries.
Whatever his true motivations, it was an inspired move.
When I came down for breakfast the next morning, I found Rachel up and cuddling Bandit on the sofa. She was still in sweats and hadn’t washed her hair, but for the first time in four days she was awake before lunch, so I chose to count it as a sign of progress.
“It’s called situational depression,” Gianni said that evening, leaning on the fence that lay between his mother’s garden and our gravelled yard. “I looked it up. It’s rough, but most people come out of it fine without needing meds. She just needs time.”
I asked him, “Did she tell you what went wrong at school?”
He shrugged. “She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t read the books, and didn’t want to. She just wanted to lie down and cry and sleep a lot, she said. Between us, I don’t think she wants to be a lawyer. I think that was for her father. And now he’s gone, she ain’t sure what she does want.”
I had left that conversation feeling Gianni had just saved me all the fees I’d have been charged by a psychiatrist for that same diagnosis, and in keeping with his wise advice I’d given Rachel space.
I had enough to keep me busy. At the end of the week when Frank chaired the next meeting of our acquisitions committee, I drew him aside afterwards for a talk and explained what I’d found about Phyllis and Violet, the slaves who had lived at the Wilde house for almost two decades.
He listened in silence at first, with his head down. He read through the papers I handed him. Then he swore, once, but with feeling.
I thought he might need space, too, but all he said was, “I’m guessing you’ll want to bring this up next week at our board meeting.”
Frank liked directness, so I was direct. “Yes.”