Sheila’d started her business accounting course mid-August, and two months in was enjoying it more than she’d expected. The plan was for Sheila to do the day-to-day accounts for Garber Contracting, the company that was once my father’s, and which I now ran. She could even do it from home, which would allow Sally Diehl, our “office girl,” to focus more on general office management, returning phone calls, hounding suppliers, fielding customer inquiries. There usually wasn’t time for Sally to do the accounting, which meant I was bringing it home at night, sitting at my desk until midnight. But with work drying up, I didn’t know how this was all going to shake down.
“And now, with the fire—”
“Enough,” Sheila said.
“Sheila, one of my goddamn houses burned down. Please don’t tell me everything’s going to be fine.”
She sat up in bed and crossed her arms across her breasts. “I’m not going to let you get all negative on me. This is what you do.”
“I’m just telling you how it is.”
“And I’m going to tell you how it will be,” she said. “We will be okay. Because this is what we do. You and I. We get through things. We find a way.” She looked away for a moment, like there was something she wanted to say but wasn’t sure how to say it. Finally, she said, “I have ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“Ideas to help us. To get us through the rough patches.”
I stood there, my arms open, waiting.
“You’re so busy, so wrapped up in your own problems—and I’m not saying that they aren’t big problems—that you haven’t even noticed.”
“Noticed what?” I asked.
She shook her head and smiled. “I got Kelly new outfits for school.”
“Okay.”
“Nice ones.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What are you getting at?”
“I’ve made some money.”
I thought I already knew that. Sheila had her part-time job at Hardware Depot—about twenty hours a week—working the checkout. They’d recently installed these new self-checkout stations people couldn’t figure out, so there was still work there for Sheila until they did. And since the early summer, Sheila had been helping our next-door neighbor—Joan Mueller—with her own books for a business she was running from her home. Joan’s husband, Ely, had been killed on that oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland when it blew up about a year back. She’d been getting jerked around by the oil company on her settlement, and in the meantime had started running a daycare operation. Every morning four or five preschoolers got dropped off at her door. And on school days when Sheila was working, Kelly went to Joan’s until one of us got home. Sheila had helped Joan organize a bookkeeping system to keep track of what everyone owed and had paid. Joan loved kids, but could barely finger count.
“I know you’ve been making some money,” I said. “Joan, and the store. Everything helps.”
“Those two jobs together don’t keep us in Hamburger Helper. I’m talking about better money than that.”
My eyebrows went up. Then I got worried. “Tell me you’re not taking money from Fiona.” Her mother. “You know how I feel about that.”
She looked insulted. “Jesus, Glen, you know I would never—”
“I’m just saying. I’d rather you were a drug dealer than taking money from your mother.”
She blinked, threw back the covers abruptly, got out of bed, and stalked into the bathroom. The door closed firmly behind her.
“Aw, come on,” I said.
By the time we reached the kitchen, I didn’t think she was angry with me anymore. I’d apologized twice, and tried to coax from Sheila details of what her idea was to bring more money into the house.
“We can talk about it tonight,” she said.
We hadn’t washed the dishes from the night before. There were a couple of coffee cups, my scotch glass, and Sheila’s wine goblet, with a dark red residue at the bottom, sitting in the sink. I lifted the goblet onto the counter, worried the stem might break if other things got tossed into the sink alongside it.
The wineglass made me think of Sheila’s friends.
“You seeing Ann for lunch or anything?” I asked.
“No.”
“I thought you had something set up.”
“Maybe later this week. Belinda and Ann and me might get together, although every time we do that I have to get a cab home and my head hurts for a week. Anyway, I think Ann’s got some physical or something today, an insurance thing.”
“She okay?”
“She’s fine.” A pause. “More or less.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. I think there’s some kind of tension there, between her and Darren. And between Belinda and George, for that matter.”
“What’s going on?”
“Who knows,” she said.
“So then, what are you doing today? You don’t have a shift today, right? If I can slip away, you want to get lunch? I was thinking something fancy, like that guy who sells hot dogs by the park.”
“I’ve got my course tonight,” she said. “Some errands to run, and I might visit Mom.” She shot me a look. “Not to ask her for money.”
“Okay.” I decided to ask nothing further. She’d tell me when she was ready.
Kelly walked into the room at the tail end of the conversation. “What’s for breakfast?”
“You want cereal, cereal, or cereal?” Sheila asked.
Kelly appeared to ponder her choices. “I’ll take cereal,” she said, and sat at the table.
At our house, breakfast wasn’t a sit-down family meal like dinner. Actually, dinner often wasn’t, either, especially when I got held up at a construction site, or Sheila was at work, or heading off to her class. But we at least tried to make that a family event. Breakfast was a lost cause, however. I had my toast and coffee standing, usually flattening the morning Register on the countertop and scanning the headlines as I turned the pages. Sheila was spooning in fruit and yogurt at the same time as Kelly shoveled in her Cheerios, trying to get them into herself before any of them had a chance to get soggy.
Between spoonfuls she asked, “Why would anyone go to school at night when they’re grown up and don’t have to go?”
“When I finish this course,” Sheila told her, “I’ll be able to help your father more, and that helps the family, and that helps you.”
“How does that help me?” she wanted to know.
I stepped in. “Because if my company is run well, it makes more money, and that helps you.”
“So you can buy me more stuff?”
“Not necessarily.”
Kelly took a gulp of orange juice. “I’d never go to school at night. Or summer. You’d have to kill me to get me to go to summer school.”
“If you get really good marks, that won’t happen,” I said, a hint of warning in my voice. We’d already had a call from her teacher that she wasn’t completing all her homework.
Kelly had nothing to say to that and concentrated on her cereal. On the way out the door, she gave her mother a hug, but all I got was a wave. Sheila caught me noticing the perceived slight and said, “It’s because you’re a meanie.”
I called the house from work mid-morning.
“Hey,” Sheila said.
“You’re home. I didn’t know whether I’d catch you or not.”
“Still here. What’s up?”
“Sally’s dad.”
“What?”
“She was calling home from the office and when he didn’t answer she took off. I just called to see how he was and he’s gone.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh jeez. How old was he?”
“Seventy-nine, I think. He was in his late fifties when he had Sally.” Sheila knew the history. The man had married a woman twenty years younger than he was, and still managed to outlive her. She’d died of an aneurysm a decade ago.
“What happened to him?”<
br />
“Don’t know. I mean, he had diabetes, he’d been having heart trouble. Could have been a heart attack.”
“We need to do something for her.”
“I offered to drop by but she said she’s got a lot to deal with right now. Funeral’ll probably be in a couple of days. We can talk about it when you get back from Bridgeport.” Where Sheila took her class.
“We’ll do something. We’ve always been there for her.” I could almost picture Sheila shaking her head. “Look,” she said, “I’m heading out. I’ll leave you and Kelly lasagna, okay? Joan’s expecting her after school today and—”
“I got it. Thanks.”
“For what?”
“Not giving up. Not letting things get you down.”
“Just doing the best I can,” she said.
“I love you. I know I can be a pain in the ass, but I love you.”
“Ditto.”
It was after ten. Sheila should have been home by now.
I tried her cell for the second time in ten minutes. After six rings it went to voicemail. “Hi. This is Sheila. I’m either on the phone, away from it, or too scared to answer because I’m in traffic, so please leave a message.” Then the beep.
“Hey, me again,” I said. “You’re freaking me out. Call me.”
I put the cordless receiver back onto its stand and leaned up against the kitchen counter, folded my arms. As she’d promised, Sheila had left two servings of lasagna in the fridge, for Kelly and me, each hermetically sealed under plastic wrap. I’d heated Kelly’s in the microwave when we got home, and she’d come back looking for seconds, but I couldn’t find a baking dish with any more in it. I might as well have offered her mine, which a few hours later still sat on the counter. I wasn’t hungry.
I was rattled. Running out of work. The fire. Sally’s dad.
And even if I’d managed to recover my appetite late in the evening, the fact that Sheila still wasn’t home had put me on edge.
Her class, which was held at the Bridgeport Business College, had ended more than an hour and a half ago, and it was only a thirty-minute drive home. Which made her an hour late. Not that long, really. There were any number of explanations.
She could have stayed after class to have a coffee with someone. That had happened a couple of times. Maybe the traffic was bad on the turnpike. All you needed was someone with a flat tire on the shoulder to slow everything down. An accident would stop everything dead.
That didn’t explain her not answering her cell, though. She’d been known to forget to turn it back on after class was over, but when that happened it went to voicemail right away. But the phone was ringing. Maybe it was tucked so far down in her purse she couldn’t hear it.
I wondered whether she’d decided to go to Darien to see her mother and not made it back out to Bridgeport in time for her class. Reluctantly, I made the call.
“Hello?”
“Fiona, it’s Glen.”
In the background, I heard someone whisper, “Who is it, love?” Fiona’s husband, Marcus. Technically speaking, Sheila’s stepfather, but Fiona had remarried long after Sheila had left home and settled into a life with me.
“Yes?” she said.
I told her Sheila was late getting back from Bridgeport, and I wondered if maybe her daughter had gotten held up at her place.
“Sheila didn’t come see me today,” Fiona said. “I certainly wasn’t expecting her. She never said anything about coming over.”
That struck me as odd. When Sheila mentioned maybe going to see Fiona, I’d figured she’d already bounced the idea off her.
“Is there a problem, Glen?” Fiona asked icily. There wasn’t worry in her voice so much as suspicion. As if Sheila’s staying out late had more to do with me than it did with her.
“No, everything’s fine,” I said. “Go back to bed.”
I heard soft steps coming down from the second floor. Kelly, not yet in her pajamas, wandered into the kitchen. She looked at the still-wrapped lasagna on the counter and asked, “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
“Hands off,” I said, thinking maybe I’d get my appetite back once Sheila was home. I glanced at the wall clock. Quarter past ten. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Because you haven’t told me to go yet,” she said.
“What have you been doing?”
“Computer.”
“Go to bed,” I said.
“It was homework,” she said.
“Look at me.”
“In the beginning it was,” she said defensively. “And when I got it done, I was talking to my friends.” She stuck out her lower lip and blew away some blonde curls that were falling over her eyes. “Why isn’t Mom home?”
“Her thing must have run late,” I said. “I’ll send her up to give you a kiss when she gets home.”
“If I’m asleep, how will I know if I get it?”
“She’ll tell you in the morning.”
Kelly eyed me with suspicion. “So I might never get a kiss, but you guys would say I did.”
“You figured it out,” I said. “It’s a scam we’ve been running.”
“Whatever.” She turned, shuffled out of the kitchen, and padded back upstairs.
I picked up the receiver and tried Sheila’s cell again. When her greeting cut in, I muttered “Shit” before it started recording and hit the off button.
I went down the stairs to my basement office. The walls were wood-paneled, giving the place a dark, oppressive feel. And the mountains of paper on the desk only added to the gloominess. For years I’d been intending to either redo this room—get rid of the paneling and go for drywall painted off-white so it wouldn’t feel so small, for starters—or put an addition onto the back of the house with lots of windows and a skylight. But as is often the case with people whose work is building and renovating houses, it’s your own place that never gets done.
I dropped myself into the chair behind the desk and shuffled some papers around. Bills from various suppliers, plans for the new kitchen we were doing in a house up in Derby, some notes about a freestanding double garage we were building for a guy in Devon who wanted a place to park his two vintage Corvettes.
There was also a very preliminary report from the Milford Fire Department about what may have caused the house we’d been building for Arnett and Leanne Wilson on Shelter Cove Road to burn down a week ago. I scanned down to the end and read, for possibly the hundredth time, Indications are fire originated in area of electrical panel.
It was a two-story, three-bedroom, built on the site of a postwar bungalow that a strong easterly wind could have knocked down if we hadn’t taken a wrecking ball to it first. The fire had started just before one p.m. The house had been framed and sided, the roof was up, electrical was done, and the plumbing was getting roughed in. Doug Pinder, my assistant manager, and I were using the recently installed outlets to run a couple of table saws. Ken Wang, our Chinese guy with the Southern accent—his parents emigrated from Beijing to Kentucky when he was an infant, and we still cracked up whenever he said “y’all”—and Stewart Minden, our newbie from Ottawa who was living with relatives in Stratford for a few months, were upstairs sorting out where fixtures were going to go in the main bathroom.
Doug smelled the smoke first. Then we saw it, drifting up from the basement.
I shouted upstairs to Ken and Stewart to get the hell out. They came bounding down the carpetless stairs and flew out the front door with Doug.
Then I did something very, very stupid.
I ran out to my truck, grabbed a fire extinguisher from behind the driver’s seat, and ran back into the house. Halfway down the steps to the basement, the smoke became so thick I couldn’t see. I got to the bottom step, running my hand along the makeshift two-by-four banister to guide me there, and thought if I started spraying blindly from the extinguisher, I’d hit the source of the fire and save the place.
Really dumb.
I immediately started to cough and my eyes
began to sting. When I turned to retreat back up the stairs, I couldn’t find them. I stuck out my free hand and swept it from side to side, looking for the railing.
I hit something softer than wood. An arm.
“Come on, you stupid son of a bitch,” Doug growled, grabbing hold of me. He was on the bottom step, and pulled me toward it.
We came out the front door together, coughing and hacking, as the first fire truck was coming around the corner. Minutes after that, the place was fully engulfed.
“Don’t tell Sheila I went in,” I said to Doug, still wheezing. “She’d kill me.”
“And so she should, Glenny,” Doug said.
Other than the foundation, there wasn’t much left of the place once the fire was out. Everything was with the insurance company now, and if they didn’t come through, the thousands it would cost to rebuild would be coming out of my pocket. Little wonder I’d been staring at the ceiling for hours in the dead of night.
I’d never been hit with anything like this before. It hadn’t just scared me, losing a project to fire. It had shaken my confidence. If I was about anything, it was getting things right, doing a quality job.
“Shit happens,” Doug had said. “We pick ourselves up and move on.”
I wasn’t feeling that philosophical. And it wasn’t Doug’s name on the side of the truck.
I thought maybe I should eat something, so I slid my plate of lasagna into the microwave. I sat down at the kitchen table and picked away at it. The inside was still cold, but I couldn’t be bothered to put it back in. Lasagna was one of Sheila’s specialties, and if it weren’t for the fact that I had so much on my mind, I would have been devouring it, even cold. Whenever she made it in her browny-orange baking pan—Sheila would say it was “persimmon”—there was always enough for two or three meals, so we’d be having lasagna again in a couple of nights, maybe even for Saturday lunch. That was okay with me.
I ate less than half, rewrapped it, and put the plate in the fridge. Kelly was under her covers, her bedside light on, when I peeked into her room. She’d been reading a Wimpy Kid book.
“Lights out, sweetheart.”