A Mother in the Making

If he hadn’t been in floods of tears, he would probably have been aroused. Oh, yeah, he could still smell her on his skin! He lifted a forearm to his nose. Yes. A wholesome, intriguingly different sort of smell, like oatmeal and fresh wood shavings and peach.

“Get a grip, Officer Davey!” he muttered out loud.

He stood up and began to pace and breathe, then wondered if she’d be able to hear him going back and forth like a caged beast. She already thought he was a little scary, with his raw wound and hair-trigger emotions. He couldn’t stay here like this when he’d only come up to change his shirt. She deserved some further explanation as to why he was so messed up, even if a heart-to-heart was the last thing he felt like.

He rummaged in a drawer for another old T-shirt suitable for painting in, but his damned eyes were still stinging and what the hell were all his old shirts doing way in the back of the drawer, anyhow, when usually they were the only ones he could find when he looked for a new one?

He let out a string of curse words—which never helped as much as he expected, he’d noticed—dived into the shirt and braced himself for going back down the stairs.

Carmen heard Jack’s footsteps overhead, making the old floorboards creak. He returned after a couple of minutes, wearing a fresh T-shirt.

Old, but fresh.

Very old, smelling of lemon detergent.

She could see the contours of his muscles clearly through the thin cotton fabric. Around his thick biceps, the edges of the shirt were frayed. Despite his wounded chest, he was dressed for hard work, and she had an instinct that he needed it. He was the kind of man who hammered out his pain far more often than he cried over it.

She handed him the water. He still looked emotional, like he was struggling, and she blurted out, “I’m sorry, if you’ve had bad news, or if you need more time, or an appointment with the police counselor you mentioned. If this isn’t a good day to start, I can wait until Cormack is better. He just has the flu.”

“I had a phone call. Would have been okay without that.”

“You mean you would have bottled up your emotions a little longer?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a strategy, I guess,” she murmured, and waited.

She didn’t want to push him on this, but maybe it would be better if he spilled a little more. Better for both of them. She hated the idea of everything hanging in the air, since it was obvious he planned to work on the house today, also.

They would be alone together for hours.

“It wasn’t bad news, it was good news, when my ex called just now.” He dropped into a kitchen chair and rubbed his wounded side again, then said abruptly, “Might as well tell you so you know, because he’ll probably be around when you’re here. I’m getting part-time custody of my son, Ryan, without having to go to court over it, after six months of battles. I wasn’t expecting it. I’m really happy.”

“Yeah, really happy, and that’s why you were crying,” Carmen drawled, before giving herself a chance to rethink the words. Some people considered her too blunt, but she had no time—literally no time, on a busy day—for playing games.

“You can cry when you’re happy, you know,” he retorted with a little spirit, “even when you’re a guy.” He paused for a moment and took several gulps of water, before more words came spilling out. “See, this whole shooting thing… It was a woman, only in her twenties. She shot me. She was crazy on ice—crystal meth—completely off her face. Don’t ever touch that stuff, it’s a terrible drug.”

“I wouldn’t,” Carmen said, but she was thinking of Kate.

Kate wouldn’t be that stupid, would she? As usual, she felt like a parent instead of an older sister, angry and worried and helpless about what to do with a rebellious teen.

“Then my partner shot her and she died,” Jack Davey said.

“Oh, no…”

“He had no choice. There was no other way to get her under control and stop her shooting more. He wasn’t aiming to kill, but the light was bad, and she was moving crazy all over the place. It was… People think it’s all in a day’s work for a cop, shooting and killing, but it’s not.”

“I’m sure it isn’t!” She couldn’t begin to imagine.

“No matter what the situation and how much you had no choice, it’s still something you live with for the rest of your life. The woman had a kid.”

“Oh, no…”

“Maybe it’s a blessing. The kid’s with her aunt and uncle now, and I was told they’re decent people, so maybe she’ll have a better life now that her mother is gone. But still.”

“When did it happen?”

“Ten days ago.”

“Ten days!” No wonder he was raw, physically and emotionally.

“Sheesh, listen to me!” he said. “I’m sorry. You signed on for my kitchen not my therapy.”

“It’s okay.”

“Like the counselor said. We’ve both been told we’ll have some strange responses to things for a while, my partner and I.” He paused for a big, slow breath. “Including babbling to strangers.” The corner of his mouth twitched wryly.

Carmen could only nod. “It sounds—”

Like a nightmare.

He cut her off. “Yeah. It was.”

She got his don’t-want-to-talk-about-it-anymore message loud and clear. “Seriously, I can start tomorrow.”

He thought about it for a moment, then said slowly, “No, please stay and get started now. I’d like the company, to be honest. The house is spooking me, on my own.”

“I like a guy who can admit he’s scared of ghosts,” she said, and scored a laugh, which brought his whole face to life. He had the most natural, joyous laugh she’d heard from a man in a while, complete with the blink-and-you-miss-it grin he’d given a couple of minutes ago.

“You got that right!” he said frankly. “Never have been scared of ’em before. I’ve been in this place three months, but it’s only since the shooting that I’ve felt—” He broke off and swore under his breath. “Don’t know why I have to keep talking about it.”

“We won’t, then. It’s a nice house,” she said quickly.

“You mean it was, about eighty years ago.”

“It will be again, with some work. You’re having more done than just the kitchen and the half bath, right?” She wanted to draw him out and distract him.

“Hoping to do a lot of it myself. The floors and the painting.” As he talked about the renovation, he began to sound as if he was treading easier ground. He didn’t look so tightly locked in embarrassment and stress. “It was my uncle’s place, but he didn’t live here, kept it as a rental. He left it to me when he died last year. How about some coffee, and we’ll take a tour, if you’d like to see the whole place?”

Carmen saw that he sincerely wanted the distraction, the change of pace and the caffeine and said, “Yes and yes, to coffee and the tour. I’d love to see the whole house. But I’m sorry about your uncle.”

“I know. He was a good guy. But he was eighty, and he’d been ill awhile.” Again he seemed uncomfortable about sharing this with a stranger. She’d really got him on a bad day. The ongoing impulse to comfort him with her touch came as an irritation.

Been there, done that today. Had the embarrassment thick in the air to prove it.

And anyhow, haven’t you done enough of that kind of thing in your life, Carmen O’Brien, with Dad and Melanie and Joe and Kate, and even Cormack on a bad day? All that family, needing hugs and needing you. Why go looking for more of it, just at a time where, if only Kate would settle down and find herself, you might be free?

Definitely, she wasn’t going to act as Jack Davey’s shoulder to cry on again today. Or, hopefully, ever.

“Want me to make the coffee?” she offered heading through the open doorway in the direction of the fridge. “Through here?”

“No, I know where I’ve put everything in this mess,” he answered, and followed her.

Most of the kitchen equipment had been moved into this adjoining sunroom and piled at random. The room looked as if it had once been an open porch but had been enclosed a long time ago. Even though it was a mess now, it would be a beautiful room if it had some work. Pull up the ugly indoor-outdoor carpeting, polish the floorboards…

Were there hardwood boards under here?

Carmen discreetly slid the toe of her running shoe beneath a curled-up edge of orangey-brown carpet to take a look. She loved the whole process of renovating an old house, even though she and Cormack did mostly kitchens and bathrooms. She could just imagine this room with fresh paint, comfortable furnishings, syrup-colored floorboards….

“Yeah, I took a look and it seems to be in great condition,” Jack Davey said, following her downward gaze to the floor.

She hadn’t been discreet enough, apparently. Felt a little shamefaced as she admitted, “I love checking out the possibilities. Cormack says I act as if every house we work on is the one I’m going to raise my kids in.”

“Yeah? How many do you have?” He found the coffee jar and filters, went back into the kitchen to fill the glass pot.

“Oh, kids? None. Theoretical kids, he means.” She wasn’t convinced she wanted kids of her own, actually, after she and Cormack had pretty much raised the younger three O’Brien siblings these past ten years and more. Not that her client needed to know any of that.

But maybe he’d caught something in her tone. He gave her a sideways glance and said, “Right,” and the subject was closed.

He made the coffee and they drank it and munched on a Danish pastry each as they toured the sprawling house. It definitely needed work. The basement was cluttered with junk, and the dust lay thick. The washing machine down there looked like a model from the sixties. They both poked around, finding traces of damp along the north wall.

“I might have to get some new drainage in place outside.” Jack bent and ran his fingers across the puckered, powdery whitewash down near floor level.

Carmen took a closer look, also, and for a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder, propping their hands on their knees as they examined the problem. “The place might just need airing out. Or you might be right and it could need more major treatment.”

She was enjoying this. It reminded her of the way she and Cormack worked together, very practical and relaxed with each other. A heck of a lot easier than standing in Jack Davey’s kitchen feeling him sob in her arms.

Hmm. Too relaxed, maybe.

Suddenly she felt a little self-conscious, as if she’d been standing too close. He smelled good, and that wasn’t the kind of thing you should notice about a client a half hour after you first met him.

“But look at the windows,” Jack said, moving away. He’d stopped favoring his injured left side now that it was hurting less, and he walked with more athletic grace than she would have expected from a lawman. He was springy on his feet, and energetic, which Carmen liked because she was energetic, too. “They’re a good size. When they’re clean they’ll let in a lot of light, and I’ll clear out the junk, paint the floor.”

They went back up the rickety basement stairs. The fireplace in the living room had been closed off and replaced with an ugly gas heater, the floors needed sanding and varnishing, and you could spend three months painting the place inside and out and not have it done, but the ceilings were high and there was some great original detail. Marble and Flemish tile around the fireplace, real plaster cornices and moldings, stained and beveled glass panels beside the front door, hand carving on the hardwood newel post at the foot of the stairs.

“Want to see outside before we go upstairs?” Jack said.

“Is there much land?”

“About three-fourths of an acre. Like the house, it’s a mess.”

They went through a side door and around into the rear yard, where dew still lay on the untidy grass. Walking next to Jack, Carmen couldn’t help taking sideways looks a couple of times. To see if he was still okay. To see what that strong, hard body really looked like, because having a man fall into her arms two minutes after she met him meant that so far she had a more vivid impression about the way he felt and smelled and sounded than about the way he looked.

Both times she found him looking back at her. A little wary, a little curious at the same time. As if he needed to check out what she really looked like, too, because he only knew about how she felt and smelled. The first time this happened, they both looked away fast. The second time, out beyond the shadow of the house, the looks held for half a second too long.

He cleared his throat. “So this is the yard.” It came out a little too breezy and cheerful.

“Oh, right, great,” she answered, as if she hadn’t recognized that this was a yard until he said it.

When she looked closer, she saw that it was more than a yard, it was a garden. An overgrown and half-forgotten garden, but a garden all the same. She saw rosebushes that had gone unpruned for years and a stand of fruit trees that was almost an orchard. Winter-deadened weeds, creepers and sumac camouflaged an area of stone paving with a hand-chiseled birdbath at the center of it.

“It’ll take work,” Jack said, as if warning her.

“Yeah, I noticed,” she drawled. “Are you a gardener?”

“Never have been, but when I look at this and think about the possibilities, I want to learn.”

The property backed onto what was almost a cliff. Facing south, it rose forty or fifty feet, made of chunky, solid rock that was covered in a tangle of growth. In the April sun, the fresh lime-green of new leaves had begun to appear.

“This is natural, this rock face?” Carmen asked.

“That’s right.”

“And is that a train track up on top?”

“It’s not used anymore. I climbed all the way up here one day. There are pockets of good soil in lots of places.”

He paced in front of the rock face, his keenness for the project translating into energetic movement and an animated face. His eyes weren’t red-rimmed anymore, and he’d begun to forget their awkward start with each other. So had Carmen. Her relief was like the April sun. Getting stronger. Warming her.

“It wouldn’t be too hard to clear out this jungle and turn it into a rock garden, with creepers and flowers,” he went on. “The main yard is through that hedge, to the side of the house. There are a couple of real nice trees you can see. That huge pine and the sycamore. The property goes through to this other road, here.” He pointed.

A side road led to a development of new houses on a hillside, big pseudomansions made of cheap materials with no style. In Carmen’s mind, even in its current dilapidated state, there was no contest between Jack’s old place and those new ones. She’d take the old house every time.

“It’s great,” she said. “I love it. One of those times I wish C & C Renovations did the whole package, not just kitchens and bathrooms.” She leaned a hand on the cool rock, closed her eyes and turned her face to the early-spring sun to absorb its rising warmth, but then she sensed how closely Jack Davey was watching her and opened her eyes to return the look.

Different from their last looks at each other. Curious, this time.

“Can I ask the obvious question now?” he said. He leaned against the rock and she thought the patch of sun would probably do his aching body some good, as well as his traumatized soul.

“Which question is that?” she asked.

“The one I’m having trouble putting into words without sounding…oh, crass, I guess.”

Okay. She knew.

“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a renovation business like this?”

“That’s the one. Sorry.”

“Yeah. Don’t go all macho and chauvinistic on me, okay?” she blurted out.

“I’m trying not to. But it is a little unusual. Does everyone hit you with it?”

“Or they hit my brother with it. They wonder if I’m going to pull my weight. But then we point out that we work on a contract basis, not by the hour, so if my dainty hand is too feeble to lift a hammer, it costs us, not the client.”

“Which doesn’t tell me why you went into it in the first place.”

“Family reasons, mostly.” He wouldn’t want the details. She found herself giving too many of them, anyhow. For some reason, he seemed easy to talk to. “We needed a business where Cormack could use his building skills and I could train with him while we worked. We didn’t have a lot of capital to invest. There was no money for more education. We had to be able to get off the ground fast. It was tough at first. We had small jobs, with a lot of gaps between them. But then we started getting good references from the work we’d done, and now we sometimes have to turn clients away.”

Although she’d summarized extensively, she wished she’d been briefer. He wasn’t the only one spilling too much information and too much emotion this morning.

“And you like hammering?” He seemed to be mentally contrasting this unlikely personality trait with the traits in other women he’d known, and he wasn’t getting a match.

Curvy girl bits. Hammering. Dangly earrings. Toolbox with pry bar.

She liked hammering?

Shouldn’t she prefer to be shoe shopping at the mall?

“I like knowing how to do it right,” she said, deciding to trust him with the truth. “There’s a satisfaction in getting the rhythm and hitting the sweet spot, feeling the nail go in like a knife through butter. And I like creating a kitchen or a bathroom that works, as well as looking good. If you want, you can call that the feminine touch. For some clients, it’s one of C & C’s selling points. That I have a woman’s eye for where to put the utensil drawer and the hooks for the pot holders.”

He laughed. “I didn’t even know the second half of C & C was female when I talked to your brother.”

“Yeah, that can work pretty well for us, too,” she drawled deliberately.

They looked away from each other again.

“Want to go back in and see upstairs?”

“Maybe you’ll want C & C to tackle the upstairs bathroom next, so I should take a look.” At this stage, they were only contracted to do the kitchen and half-bath downstairs.

He led the way back inside and up to the master bedroom, where his T-shirt drawer hung open with a mess of fabric spilling out. The sight reminded them both of how he’d greeted her an hour ago and what had happened next. He went to shut it, but an awkwardness had come back into the atmosphere now, and the rest of his tour was sketchy and brief.

“We should both probably do some work if we’re going to get much done this morning,” he said.

“Yes, or I’ll have to answer to Cormack as soon as he’s better. I’m not expecting you to help, though, seriously.”

“That’s okay. Got a project of my own.”

Turned out he was preparing to paint the sunroom today, keeping the horrible carpet in place to protect the floor. They arrived back in the kitchen, and with misgivings, she watched him climb a stepladder and start scraping the ceiling. “Are you fit enough for that, Jack? Your chest, I mean.”

“I’ll stop if it starts hurting. You’re right, though, I couldn’t help you pull out those old cabinets, judging from how much it seemed to tear me up, coming too fast down the stairs.”

Carmen had begun working on the cabinets with a pry bar. They weren’t original to the house and weren’t worth saving. The green laminated particle board had swollen out of shape in numerous places, and it was ugly and cheap to begin with.

“Rob should be here sometime this morning to help with the heavy work,” she said. Several nails screeched as the pry bar pulled a strip of wood loose. She added without thinking, “But I’m not as much of a girl as I look.”

From his position on the stepladder, Jack Davey twisted around and looked at her, long and slow. “What’s wrong with being a girl?” he said, his gray eyes teasing and thoughtful and steady at the same time, and that was the moment Carmen first began to understand that she could be in real trouble, that Jack Davey knew it, and that he could be in trouble, too.

The twisting motion on the stepladder had not been a good idea, Jack soon realized. The surgically repaired mess under his left rib cage burned again. Carmen saw him wince and heard the hitch in his breathing.

“Don’t say it,” he warned. “You’re right. I’m going to call the doctor, see if he can squeeze me into his appointment hours to check this out. It keeps happening, and it probably shouldn’t.”

“Are you supposed to be driving yet?”

“No. Wanna call me a cab?”

“I was going to offer to be the cab.”

“That works, too, if you don’t mind doing it.”

“I’m getting the impression today’s going to be slow for C & C Renovations.”

“Add the extra time into your invoice.” He looked down at his chest. “I’d better change my shirt. Again.”

The receptionist at Dr. Seeger’s put him through to the doctor himself, who sounded concerned. “You’re right. I should take a look. You’re not doing anything stupid, are you?”

“Maybe I’d better not answer that. What would you say, just hypothetically, if I told you I was doing paint preparation in my sunroom?”

The doctor sighed down the phone. “Didn’t we go over this in the hospital?”

“You said nothing strenuous. I’m right-handed, and the shot went in on the left. When the pain first tweaked this morning, all I was doing was coming down the stairs a little too fast.”

“I’ll fit you in as soon as you get here.”

They took the C & C pickup truck. Jack liked the way Carmen drove. She was a little sassy at the wheel, delivering sarcastic one-liners to any idiots on the road, but with a thread of humor in the mix that toned it down. She had the windows shut, too, so no one would hear.

“I hope your eyebrows get painted on crooked, lady!” she yelled at a woman who was applying her makeup at the traffic lights and who clearly found the process far more interesting than checking the color of the lights. “Green means go, honey, green means go, say it after me,” she chanted, until the vehicle in front finally moved. Then she turned to Jack. “Tell me to shut up if you hate this,” she said. “Cormack often does. Even though he knows it helps my sanity.”

“You need help with your sanity?”

She shrugged and grinned, and her red earrings swung against her tanned neck. “Life gets complicated. I’m the go-to girl in the O’Brien family and my baby sister is being a pain in the butt right now—she’s just turned eighteen. Helps to yell at idiots in traffic instead of yelling at her.”

“I can relate to that,” he said, thinking of Terri and her new husband, and the ice junkie with the crazy gun. “Sometimes you need to off-load stuff onto someone safe.”

“Yeah,” she said quietly, as if she’d understood his thoughts. “Um, are you going to ask the doctor about that, too? I mean, about…”

“Crying on your shoulder?” He raked his teeth over his lower lip, a little scared that even just saying the words might bring those hair-trigger emotions bubbling back up.

“Yep. That.” She glanced across at him, must have seen the way his face had gone tight. She added lightly, “Not that your tears have ruined my gorgeous silk blouse or anything.” She fingered her plain cotton T-shirt.

The humor helped. “I’ll buy you a new one in gold satin,” he promised. “You want C & C Renovations embroidered on the pocket, like on that one?”

“Seriously, though…”

“How about if we’re not?” he said quickly. “Serious, I mean. I’ll ask the doctor. He knows I’m seeing the counselor and taking time off.”

“Okay. Just wanted to check.”

“Well, thanks, but I think I have a handle on this.”

She made a tricky lane change in silence, then asked, “And your partner, how’s he doing?”

“He took a vacation with his wife to Bermuda. She’s great. Down to earth. Says she’s planning to come home pregnant. Her dad’s a cop, too. Russ’ll be okay.”

“He didn’t get shot.”

“The getting shot is the least of it. It’s the shooting someone else that breaks you up.”

“I can imagine.”