It puffs my ego up a bit to think about it, actually. I’m tougher than he is. I’m tougher than most people when I put my mind to it. I survived a dead rat and a mouse attack, and that’s not nothing.
Not sure you could handle it, I say back, smiling at the image I have playing in my head. Maybe I should let him come over here, make him get his hands dirty. That’ll teach him to screw me over. Maybe I could even orchestrate a situation where he’d be standing under that hole in the ceiling when a whole pack of mice fell out. I giggle when I picture a tiny mouse running up his pant leg and biting him where the sun don’t shine.
Yes, I’m feeling positively evil right now, and I don’t care. Evil feels good. It matches the blackness that’s swallowing my heart.
Pretty sure I could. He says. Give me the address.
I shrug. Fine. He wants to get dirty and covered in mouse poop, who am I to stop him? I will gladly watch him destroy his manicure. After typing out the address, I wait for his reply. This is going to be a beautiful disaster I can’t wait to witness.
See you in an hour.
I drop my phone into my purse and turn my ignition halfway so I can listen to some tunes. In sixty minutes, I’m going to be serving up a nice big platter of hot, steaming revenge. My day is finally turning around. Oooohhh yeah, baby. It’s all coasting downhill from here.
Chapter Seven
SOMEONE TAPPING ON MY WINDOW wakes me from a catnap I fell into waiting for Robinson to arrive. All I can see is a red and blue flannel shirt, a puffy goosedown vest, and jeans. Did a subcontractor see me sitting here and stop to offer help? That would be eerily convenient. Maybe the universe has seen fit to give me a helping hand instead of a smackdown for a change.
I sit up, glancing in my rearview mirror as I move to open my window. There’s a black BMW there, the same car that Robinson drives. There’s no truck in sight.
When the man bends down and his face shows up in the window, my heart lurches. I can’t quite justify my earlier thoughts with what I’m seeing now.
Erp. Does. Not. Compute.
It’s a sub-contractor body with Robinson’s stupid head on it — same perfectly coiffed hair, same annoyingly straight and blindingly white teeth, same nose with a bump on it, and same chiseled good looks that had me drooling after him for way too long.
I scowl at him as he smiles at me.
“Sleeping on the job?” he asks, winking.
I scowl harder. “Ha, ha. Stop winking at me. Hasn’t anyone told you it’s weird to wink at women? Next thing you know, you’ll be adding the word Ladies to the ends of your sentences.”
He frowns at me, confused. “What?”
I roll my window up and shove the door open, hoping to catch him in the knees with it. He jumps out of the way, just in time.
“You know. Adding Ladies to your sentences. ‘How’s it going, ladies?’, ‘Can I get you a drink, ladies?’, ‘What’s your sign, ladies?’” I stand outside my door with my arms folded across my chest for warmth.
“I was always told that asking a woman her sign is passé these days. What’s your sign by the way?”
I look away so I don’t start smiling at his goofy face. Of course that’s what he wants. He thinks he can joke his way past his treachery.
When I know I won’t accidentally smile, I look at him again. “My sign is stop. It’s a stop sign, Robinson. I thought you were here to help.”
“I am.” He goes back to his car and opens the trunk. “What exactly do you need help with aside from that porch, the front steps, the bannisters, and the landscaping?”
Front steps? What’s wrong with the front steps? I turn around real casual-like, as if I just mean to go into the house, but I eye the stairs carefully. Okay, so some of the boards look a little sad. They could stand being replaced. But that’s not an emergency situation, is it?
Robinson quickly catches up with me and meets me at the bottom of the first step. He leans over with a big sledgehammer and drops it on the middle of the second step. It goes right through the wood and buries itself halfway up to the handle.
“What the hell, Robinson!” I turn and glare at him. “You just put a hole in my front steps! You call that helping?” My hands go to my hips. “Would you like to bash in a few of my windows while you’re at it?”
He looks at them and nods slightly. “Might be better to keep them in one piece. It’ll make them easier to pull out.”
“Pull out? Why would I want to pull them out? They’re fine.”
He shrugs. “I figured since you bought it and planned on living in it for a while you’d want double glazing.” He looks at me, waiting for an answer.
Double glazing? What the hell is double glazing? Is that a type of paint?
“You don’t know what double glazing is, do you?” He starts to smile again.
“Of course I know what double glazing is.” I shove past him, skipping over the second step.
“So what is it, then?” he asks, coming up behind me. We stop at the front door.
“Don’t worry about the windows. I have that covered. I need your help with something else.” I want to kick myself after the words are out of my mouth. I don’t need his help. I don’t even want his help.
“Okay, what’s that?”
“It’s inside the house.”
He gestures at the front door. “After you.”
It pisses me off that he looks so comfortable in those clothes. Since when is Robinson a handy guy? I’ve been in his office when he’s had crews putting up shelves, for God’s sake.
I gesture at his flannel. “You have the clothes of a contractor, but how do I know you actually know what you’re doing?” I turn around without waiting for his answer and step inside, trying not to flinch at the pile of garbage just inside the entrance. I hate that having him so physically close makes me nervous. I hate him, so why can’t I control my pulse? It must be my anger that’s making me so jittery. Yeah. I’m going to go with that explanation.
He merely glances at the trash before turning his attention to the living room. “My father was a general contractor. I started following him around on jobs when I was just a kid. Paid my way through college and law school on my construction wages.” He moves into the living room and stops in the middle, looking up at the hole in the ceiling.
I’m standing in the foyer, staring at him. “You worked in construction?” I can’t see it. He gets a manicure every week. He wears cufflinks. His shoes get shined daily.
He shrugs. “A little.” His attention is on the hole. “You probably have rats up there.”
“Mice, actually.”
He looks at me. “You saw one?”
My smile comes out crooked. “One actually fell on my head.”
He takes a quick step to the side. Finally, he’s acting more like the Robinson I know, and I can stop entertaining the idea that an alien has taken over his body and transported him over here in a BMW spaceship.
He looks around the room and then toward the kitchen. “Looks like you have your work cut out for you in here.” His gaze shifts to me. “Do you know what you’re going to do yourself and what you’re going to hire out?”
I shrug. “I guess I originally planned to do everything myself. Until that mouse fell on my head.”
Robinson laughs, bending backwards in his enthusiasm for it.
My smile disappears.
When he notices, his humor peters out. “Oh, wait. You were serious?”
I hiss out an annoyed breath and go into the kitchen, staring at the spot where I saw that rat. I almost imagine I’ll find another one in the same place, as if the little guy I swept across the room is actually a zombie rat and he’s going to drag himself back over to his final resting place. I shudder with the idea of reanimated rats. Live ones are bad. Dead ones are bad. Zombie ones? Breaking bad.
I lift my chin, determined not to be cowed into surrendering. “I’ll have you know that I bought all the materials today to do that drywall repair, but
after finding a dead rat and being attacked by a mouse, I decided to take a little break. You texted me on my break, that’s it.”
“Caught you at weak moment?” he asks, being way too perceptive for my liking.
“No.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Jana, we need to talk.”
I tilt my shoulder down to escape his touch and move forward into the connected dining room. “I have nothing to say, and I can’t imagine that you do either.”
“Oh, I do, believe me.” He follows me into the dining room, so I go to the far side of it, looking out the bay window to the ramshackle backyard. What a mess it is. What a mess I am. With Robinson so close, I’m way too jittery. He always could turn my equilibrium upside down and inside out.
“Please, just hear me out.” He sounds sad. Enough so, that I’m tempted to turn around. But I don’t, because I’ll go weak when I need to be strong.
“I really don’t care to hear it. Honestly, whatever you say, it’s not going to change my feelings or my mind.”
“I’d like to try.”
I shrug, waiting for the inevitable attempt on his part to erase the un-erasable, horrible thing he’s done.
Chapter Eight
“YOU STANDING OVER THERE AND me over here in this musty dining room isn’t ideal, but I guess it’s the best you’re going to give me,” Robinson says.
I look over my shoulder. “What were you expecting? A candlelit dinner?” That sounds so much like a date I’ve dreamed a thousand times of having with him, I nearly cringe. But then I control myself by turning around and facing out the windows again. I absolutely hate the fact that I can’t be in the same room with him and not think about one of the many times I dreamed of having him as my own. I wasted so many years drooling over him. All I can say is thank God I never made my feelings known to him or anyone else. Talk about humiliating. At least now I can walk away with my head held high and not with my tail between my legs.
“No, not a candlelit dinner, but maybe a couple chairs would have been nice.” He sighs. “I understand why you’re angry with me, I really do.”
I laugh bitterly. “That only makes it worse.”
“Worse? How so?”
I have to turn around and talk to him now. With that simple admission, he’s made me even angrier than before, which I would have thought impossible five seconds ago.
“You understand why I’m angry, and yet you did what you did anyway? That tells me exactly how little you care about me or my feelings.” I can’t stop this confessional freight train from rolling down the tracks; now that my mouth is open, I can’t seem to shut it. “Do you have any idea how that feels for me? To know that this person, who I … admired very much, who I thought was practically a member of my family, completely disregarded my feelings, what was best for me and for someone who I love very much, and just did something completely thoughtless and short-sighted and stupid?” I shake my head at his expressionless face. “No, of course you don’t. I don’t know why I expected you to care about anything. You don’t have the necessary equipment.”
“Equipment?”
“A heart.”
“Come on, now, aren’t you being a little harsh?”
“Harsh? Harsh?!” I step closer, so very tempted to hit him over the head with something big and heavy. “How could you possibly be this dense? You consider it harsh when a woman tells you that you made a mistake taking a child out of her home, out of her arms, and putting that child with a drug addict?” I laugh again. “Man, if you think that was harsh, you haven’t heard anything yet.”
He holds up his hands in front of him like two stop signs. “Let’s dial this down a notch or two so we can work it out. We’re not going to get anywhere with you this angry.”
“Dial it down. You want me to dial it down?” My body is like a pressure cooker right now, and I’ve reach maximum temperature. I’m about to explode with all the righteous anger that’s been building in me for months.
“Maybe just… dial it back?” he says, taking a step to the side.
My eyes follow him and my head swivels slowly on my neck. “So you’re telling me to chill out, is that it?” At this point I’m wondering if I’ll be able to get that sledgehammer out of my step so I can use it on his car.
He shakes his head, looking worried. “No, that’s not what I meant. You’re an emotional person, and of course you’re going to react emotionally to the things that happen to you.”
“Ya think?” I follow him as he backs up into the living room.
“But you need to keep those emotions in perspective. Send them out in the right direction.”
“That direction being…?” I tilt my head at him, my voice very calm. Deadly so.
He gives me a weak smile. “Not aimed at me.”
I stop walking, shaking my head at him.
“What?” he asks. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I smile, very sad now. Angry-sad. I used to idolize him; he could do no wrong. And yet now, he can do no right. I can’t believe I was so blind for so long. “I’m thinking that I used to believe you were so smart, but now I realize you’re nothing of the sort.”
His head backs up, his chin moving toward his neck. “That’s not very nice.”
I shrug. “It’s a fact. That a man could be so highly educated and yet so clueless, leads me to the conclusion that you are missing something very important in your makeup.”
He’s starting to look pissed now, which makes me happy. Finally, his mood is matching his inner self.
“What’s that? Or should I even ask?”
“It’s a clue, Robinson. That’s what you’re missing. You don’t have a single clue.”
He laughs, but it’s not the happy kind. “You’re telling me I need to get a clue? What is this? 1998?” He looks over his shoulder at the front door. “Did I just enter the Twilight Zone and not realize it.”
“Yeah, Jerk. You entered the Twilight Zone, but it wasn’t today. It was the day you made the decision to take Cassie from me. From her happy home. From the place where she was safe, and happy, and with the person who could provide structure and stability for her.” The tears have started and they’re not going to stop. But since Robinson doesn’t have a clue, and probably hasn’t since even before 1998, I need to just let him know in no uncertain terms what a horrible lawyer and person he is.
“Did you ever stop to think about Cassie in all this?” I ask. “The fact that she lost her mother, that her father’s first reaction to her birth was to reject her? The fact that I was the only person willing and able to care for her? And that I didn’t just care for her, I loved her. I loved her like her own mother would have, had she not been killed in that accident. And you took her away and gave her to my brother. Jeremy. The pothead alcoholic who was incidentally also doing crystal meth. But you knew that, I’m sure. James told you everything. But for some crazy reason, you decided a meth addict and his wack-a-doodle artist girlfriend, who he’d just met by the way, were better parents for Cassie than me. Than me, Robinson.” I’m sobbing now, but the words need to be said. I’m not going to stop until they’re all out there. His face is falling the more I say and inside I want to sing with glee. Let him feel the pain he’s brought me; even just a smidgen of it would bring him to his knees.
“You’ve known me since I was practically a baby. You know who I am. You know I loved her, that I still love her with all my heart. After it became clear Jeremy wasn’t interested, I let myself fall in love with her, like a mother does when she sees her baby for the first time after her birth.” I jab myself in the chest. “I was that person. I was that mother. And I know I had Laura’s blessing. She came to me, you know. She told me I was doing a good job. And Cassie loved me like I was her mother.” I want to pull my hair out I’m so frustrated just telling my story. “I was the only mother she ever knew, Robinson! You took her away from her second mother after she had already been taken away from her birth mother once before by a drunk drive
r! That makes you worse! You did it knowingly. Willingly. At least that drunk driver was under the influence of something when he did it.”
He walks toward me, but I hold my hand out to stop him. “Don’t come over here. Don’t even come near me. I hate you so much, I’ll probably scratch your eyes out.”
“But it’s not me,” he says, speaking in a soft, caring voice, or so he’d have me believe. “I didn’t make the decision.”
“How can you even say that?!” I scream. “You’re the one who did all the legal work! James left it up to you and you made that decision for all of us!” My voice breaks. “For me, for Cassie…”
Robinson is shaking his head. “No, I didn’t. The law made the decision. I merely carried out what any other lawyer that Jeremy hired would have.”
“Bullshit.” I swipe at my tears angrily, pissed I have to be here breaking down in front of this jerk, devastated to be feeling these emotions of abandonment and loss all over again.
“Won’t you just hear me out? Just give me five minutes to let me explain?”
I shake my head and point to the door. “No. I’m done listening to you. I’ve already given you more than you deserve. Way more. Don’t ever talk to me again. Leave.”
His expression goes dark. “You’re being really stubborn right now, Jana, and that’s not like you.”
I stride toward him and push him toward the door. “You don’t know anything about me, Robinson.”
He moves along with my insistence, but he doesn’t stop talking all the way to the front door. “I’ve known you for most of your life. You’re open and willing to listen. You’re not this closed off, angry person, Jana. You’re not.”
I shove him out onto the porch and grab the door, facing him with tears slashing down my face. “I am now, Robinson. Thanks to you.” The pain of that admission breaks my heart all over again. I’ve changed. I’ve lost the real me and the only thing left is this angry shell of a woman whose arms are empty where they once held a beautiful baby girl.