With a nod Malaika told her, “Yes, it was. So Eve was flattered, and said yes, and—”
Rachel guessed, “And that’s when Sharon lost it.”
“More or less,” I said.
Malaika put in dryly, “It was definitely more. But all that did was get Rosina—little, sweet Rosina—mad enough to make a motion that we offer Charley an extension on her contract.”
Rachel grinned. “It passed, I hope?”
“It did. The only vote against was Sharon’s, and that hardly matters anyway, now that she’s quit the board. She’s left an opening,” Malaika told my grandmother.
“Don’t look at me, dear. I’ve got better things to do these days than sit in meetings.” Pulling out a paint chip from the ones fanned across the table she said, “That one, I think. It’s the closest.”
She was right. We’d had a specialist come out to analyze the layers of the Wilde House walls and test the colours, and Sam knew a guy who knew a guy who made authentic reproduction paint, and he’d made us sample chips we could compare to the originals, from room to room.
“I like that blue one,” Rachel said.
My grandmother smiled. “That’s my favourite, too.”
They had been getting along better with each visit, although I still had my doubts about what they’d planned for this morning, and those doubts grew stronger when I heard the footsteps on the porch.
“Here’s your boyfriend,” my grandmother said.
Rachel’s eyes rolled. “He isn’t my boyfriend.”
I told her, “He acts like your boyfriend.”
She said, “You can talk.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” But she’d already gone past to open the door.
Gianni breezed into the kitchen like a blast of cheerful sex appeal, with perfect hair, an easy smile, and a fluorescent life jacket held swinging in one hand. Hot pink. “It’s not for you,” he said, when Rachel raised her eyebrows. “It’s for your great-grandma.”
“Are you sure,” I asked my grandmother, “you want to do this?”
“Certainly.”
“We’ll keep her safe,” said Rachel. “I’ve been out in it already, and it doesn’t leak.”
Malaika reassured me it had passed Darryl’s inspection. “He knows boats. If he says this one floats, then you can trust his word.”
Agreeing, Gianni added, “Rachel did a real good job.”
“I know she did.” I’d watched her. Watched the care she took. I’d been impressed. I’d told her, joking, “Maybe this can be your new career.”
She’d answered, seriously, “I know. Sam said if I wanted to, I could apprentice with him. Learn to be a carpenter.”
I’d left it there and hadn’t pushed her further, but I’d noticed lately she’d been reading articles online about apprenticing. And watching her be interested in anything was wonderful.
She told me not to worry now, and then she told my grandmother, “I’ll go help Gianni get the kayak on the car, Elisabeth. Just wait here for a minute.”
As she went outside, Malaika’s phone rang and she left us, too, to step out on the porch and take the call.
Across the kitchen table, my grandmother’s eyes met mine. “If I know Sharon Sullivan,” she said, “she didn’t walk out of that meeting without saying something hurtful.”
I still had the scorch marks, but I lied. “It wasn’t bad.”
My grandmother just looked at me. By now, I knew what that look meant.
“What is it that I do?” I asked her. “What’s my tell?”
“If I let you know that, I’ll never know when you’re not telling the truth, will I?” After a brief smile, she asked me straight out, “What did Sharon say?”
I shared the least of the insults. “Just, in essence, that I don’t belong here.”
“Well, what does she know? Her family only moved here in the seventies. Your family’s lived on this same shoreline for eight generations. You remember that, my dear. You’re not just a Van Hoek, you’re a Boudreau, like me. Our ancestors came here with nothing, not even a chicken to put in their pot. Or a pot, for that matter,” she said. “But they dug in, they worked hard, they put down roots, little by little. Held on to each other. Possessions and land, anybody can take those away from you—they knew this, being Acadians. But family . . .” Her voice dropped off wistfully. “If you have your family, you have everything.”
I knew who she was thinking of, specifically. I knew she thought about my father every day.
Gently, I said to her, “Why don’t you write him a letter, and tell him that?”
I watched her think it through. “Maybe I will.”
And then Rachel was back. “Ready?”
“Don’t dump my grandmother into the bay,” was my final request.
“If they do,” said my grandmother, “I’ve got my life jacket.”
Rachel reached over and lightly touched Niels’s chair as she was leaving. “Bye, Dad. See you later.”
Left alone at the table, still wrapped in the love and the friendship and warmth that had been in that room, I looked over at Niels’s chair, too, and I smiled. “Yes, I know,” I said. “Better, right?”
No answer came, but the side door swung open. Malaika leaned in. “Get your shoes,” she said.
“Why? Where are we going?”
“Road trip.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“I hate surprises.”
With a smile she promised me, “You’ll like this one.”
? ? ?
The carriage house stood at the edge of the road, framed by trees and the green of a park at one side, with the millpond behind, and beyond that, the steep, mounded rise of the bluffs. It was built as a simple block, two stories high, its bottom level dominated by the twin arched double-doors of old white-painted wood that hung a little crooked on their rustic iron hinges. Next to them a square window and quaint, glass-paned entry door made it look more like a welcoming home, as did the shingle-sided upper storey with its larger, white-framed windows underneath a sloping roof. Someone had painted it a rich barn red that stood out warmly next to the old stone of its foundations.
“This is it,” Malaika said, as we pulled in and parked. “This is the one.”
“The one what?”
She looked satisfied. “The perfect Sam house.” Seeing that I looked confused, she explained: “You get to know what kind of place your client’s looking for. The things they like, the things they don’t. When Sam first came to live here, I sat down with him and we went over everything he wanted and I found a house that fit all that. And what did he do? Fixed it up and flipped it. Not his perfect house, that’s what he said.” She imitated Sam’s voice: “?‘It’s just not my perfect house, Mal.’?”
We got out. She carried on, “So I said, fine, I’m up to this. Let’s find the man his perfect house. But every single one—it’s fix and flip, that’s what he does with them. I ask him what he’s missing, what he’s looking for, and he just says, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ Like that’s helpful.”
She did such a good job imitating Sam I couldn’t help but smile. “But isn’t it to your advantage, profit-wise, to have him keep on buying homes and flipping them?”
“My profits aren’t the point. Now it’s the challenge. It’s like hunting a damn unicorn. And baby,” she addressed the house directly, “I have got you now.”
It was unique. I’d seen some carriage houses, but I’d never seen one done like this, or in this kind of setting. “Can I look around?”
She opened the front door and told me, “Be my guest.”
The door hung slightly crooked on its hinges. Sam could fix that, though. Or even hang a different door, in keeping with his grandmother’s insistence that it never hurt to walk through new doors now and then, to see where you end up.
I felt that promise of discovery as I stepped across the threshold.