circumstances.
“The poor kid,” Marcus said, meaning Kelly, not Emily. “It’s just one thing after another.”
“I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough what happened. It’ll be on the news, or there’ll be a death notice in the paper, a Facebook memorial, something. Kelly will probably get a text message before any of us learn a damn thing.”
“Will she still spend the day with us?” Fiona wasn’t going to let some tragedy derail a day with her granddaughter.
Fifteen minutes later Kelly bounded down the stairs, dressed and ready for an outing. Before they got into Marcus’s Caddy and drove off, however, she gave me a private hug in the kitchen. I knelt down and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“I never knew anyone else whose mother died,” she whispered. “I know Emily’s got to be really sad.”
“She will be. But she’ll be strong, like you. She’ll get through this.”
Kelly nodded, but the corners of her mouth trembled.
“You don’t have to go with them if you don’t want to,” I told her.
“No, it’s okay, Daddy. But I don’t want to live with them. I always want to come home and be with you.”
Once I had the house to myself, I made a pot of coffee. This had always been Sheila’s job, and I was still struggling to get it right-the number of spoonfuls, running the water from the tap until it was really cold. I filled a mug and went out onto the back deck. It was a cool day, but with a light jacket on it was nice out there, if somewhat bracing. I sat down, took a sip. Not nearly as good as Sheila’s, but drinkable. That was all coffee really had to be for me.
Aside from a soft breeze that was liberating the last of the fall leaves from the three oak trees in our backyard, it was oddly still out there. The world seemed, briefly, calm. The last couple of weeks had been hell, but the preceding fifteen hours had been a maelstrom. The aborted sleepover, Kelly’s tale of the overheard phone call, Fiona’s unexpected visit and unwanted school proposal. And, overshadowing everything, Ann Slocum’s death.
Christ on a cracker.
“What do you make of that, Sheila?” I said aloud, shaking my head. “What in the hell do you make of that?”
Two little girls from the same class, both losing their mothers within a couple of weeks. And while I hadn’t wanted to actively follow up on Kelly’s request that I find out what happened to Ann, I was curious just the same. Could it have been a heart attack? An aneurysm? Some crazy thing that struck her dead in a second? Had there been some kind of accident? Did she fall down the stairs? Slip in the shower and break her neck? If she’d been ill, surely Sheila would have known about it and told me? Everyone told Sheila their troubles.
Would Darren Slocum have reason to feel about his dead wife the way I did about Sheila? Would anger displace grief? Maybe it would, regardless. If Sheila had died instantly of a stroke, I might be just as enraged, but my fury would be directed elsewhere. Instead of asking Sheila what the hell she was thinking, I’d save that question for the man upstairs.
“I still don’t get it, Sheila,” I said. “How’d you pull it off? How’d you hide a drinking problem?”
There was no answer.
“I’ve got stuff to do.” I tossed the rest of my coffee onto the grass.
I decided to make good use of the day. With Kelly occupied, I could go into the office and do things that were impossible through the week. I could tidy up, replace a few saw blades, make sure no one had walked off with any of the tools. I could catch up with the voicemail, maybe even return a few calls rather than leave them all for Sally on Monday morning. Most likely all of them would be from customers wondering why their jobs weren’t moving along more quickly. There weren’t many projects that got done on time, despite our best intentions. Organizing the different trades-plumbers, tilers, electricians, just for starters-was akin to setting up dominoes. If you could get them in order and on time, everything fell into place. But it never happened that way. Supplies didn’t show when promised. People got sick. You got called back to other jobs you thought were finished.
You did the best you could.
As I was getting out of my deck chair I heard a car door slam around the front. Coming around the side, I saw a white pickup truck I recognized parked across the end of the drive. Theo’s Electric was stenciled onto the door, and Theo himself, a wiry guy in his mid-thirties who, at six feet, had about four inches on me in the height department, was sliding out from behind the wheel.
The passenger door opened a second later, and out got Sally. She was twenty-eight, with dirty-blonde hair and a body that was big-boned but not fat. She’d gone out for gymnastics and track and field back in high school, and while not quite the athlete she was then, she still ran three miles every morning and could pitch in and help unload a flatbed of two-by-fours when needed. She stood an inch taller than me, and liked to joke that if she didn’t get a decent Christmas bonus, she could take me. I didn’t like to admit she had a sporting chance.
She had a pretty face and a winning smile, and had been working for me for the better part of a decade. When she was in her early twenties, and looking for extra cash, she often babysat Kelly. But before long she’d concluded she was too old for that sort of thing, and picked up the occasional shift at Applebee’s.
She and Theo had been going together for about a year, and even though it seemed soon to me, Sally had already been talking in the office about marriage. It wasn’t my place to talk her out of it, but I’d done nothing to encourage the idea. My opinion of Theo Stamos had taken a nosedive in recent weeks, even before the fire. While he had his charms, he was famous for not showing up when he said he would, and his work was often sloppy. I hadn’t used him on a job since the fire; I was sorry I hadn’t cut him loose sooner. The so-called truck nuts-molded rubber testicles that had inexplicably become popular in the last few years-that were hanging from the pickup’s rear bumper made me want to get out a pair of tin snips and perform a castration.
“Theo,” I said. “Hi, Sally.”
“I told him we shouldn’t do this,” she said, moving quickly so she could get between Theo and me.
“This is only going to take a sec,” Theo said. He loped toward me, his arms swinging lazily at his sides. “How’s it going there, Glen?”
“Okay,” I said, noncommittally.
“Sorry to be bugging you on a Saturday, but we were in the area, and it seemed like as good a time as any.”
“As good a time as any for what?”
“I notice you haven’t been calling on me in a while.”
I nodded. “Things are slowing down, Theo.”
“I know that,” he said. “But Sally here says you’ve still got some work lined up before things fall off.” Sally winced, clearly not happy Theo was using her this way. “So it’s not like things have dried up completely. You haven’t used me since that house burned down, and that’s not fair.”
“You wired it,” I said.
“With all due respect, Glen, do you have some kind of proof that says it was my fault?”
“I haven’t found anything that says it wasn’t.”
He glanced down, kicked a pebble with the toe of his work boot, then looked at me. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said evenly. “You’ve gone and convicted me without any evidence.”
I hated to tell Theo the truth in front of his girlfriend, especially when Sally was a friend of mine, but he wasn’t making it easy for me. “That’s my prerogative,” I told him. When Theo blinked, I realized he didn’t know what I meant. While I didn’t want to hire him anymore, it wasn’t my intention to insult him, so I added, “It’s my company. I get to choose who works for me and who doesn’t.”
“That’s just not right,” he insisted. “Give me one good reason why you won’t hire me anymore.”
Sally leaned up against the truck and closed her eyes. These were things she did not want to hear. But I think she knew what was coming.
“You’re not dependable,” I told Theo. “You say you’re going to show up, and you don’t. Even aside from this fire, your work isn’t up to snuff. You cut corners.”
“You know how it is,” he said defensively. “Some jobs get backed up, you can’t get to the next one right away. And I don’t know what you’re talking about, saying my work’s not good. That’s just horseshit.”
I shook my head. “When I promise a client you’re going to be there in the morning, and then you aren’t, it reflects badly on me and the company.”
