Daughter of Ashes Page 4

  I reached for a napkin. Using the company pen Caitlyn had left behind on the table I scrawled down my cell phone number. ‘Here’s my cell. Give me a call when you have a better idea of how I might be able to help.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Fran folded the napkin into carefully creased halves, quarters then eights before tucking it into the coin section of her wallet. ‘Have you moved in yet?’ she asked as I pushed my chair back, indicating we were ready to go.

  ‘Not yet – we just took possession today, but Paul and I plan to return next week to meet with some local contractors, although we don’t have anyone lined up just yet.’

  ‘I’ll check my calendar and get back to you, then.’ As the three of us stood around the table, Fran reached out and touched my hand. ‘It will be just like old times, Hannah.’

  Gawd, I hope not, I thought. In spite of my misgivings, I said, ‘I’ll look forward to hearing from you,’ wondering as I heard myself semi-volunteering if working for the woman once again would drive me as crazy the second time around as it had the first.

  Fran walked with us to the door of the restaurant. ‘Remember to call Dwight Heberling. And tell him I gave you his name. You won’t be sorry.’

  FIVE

  ‘Oh, call it by some better name …’

  Thomas Moore, Ballads and Songs, 1841

  In the end it was my granddaughter, Chloe, age twelve, who inadvertently started the friendly family argument that led her to win, almost by default, our unofficial ‘Name This Cottage’ contest. Shortly after we bought Legal Ease, Emily telephoned to set up a time when she could drive over with the grandchildren to check out our new place. I could tell from her tone of voice, however, that the trip was primarily to reassure herself that her parents hadn’t totally lost their minds.

  Fortunately, we hadn’t. She was as bewitched by Legal Ease as we were.

  ‘Spending my inheritance, I see,’ Emily commented with a grin as we gazed out the living-room window together watching Canada geese circle overhead, honking.

  ‘That is our devious plan,’ replied her father.

  Leading the flock, the head goose, wings spread wide, glided to a landing in the marshland on the opposite bank of the creek. ‘Splashdown,’ Emily whispered as the rest of the flock followed suit.

  ‘You are going to rename it, aren’t you?’ Emily asked as we watched the geese settle down and begin rooting through the marshland, feasting on eel grass and spartina. ‘Legal Ease is so totally groan-worthy.’

  ‘All suggestions welcome,’ I said.

  ‘Your aunt Ruth suggested Looney Dunes,’ Paul told her.

  Emily moaned. ‘Figures.’

  Chloe, who had been observing the geese with interest, suddenly piped up, ‘Where am I gonna sleep, Grandma?’

  ‘There are two bedrooms upstairs,’ I told her. ‘Why don’t you run upstairs and pick one?’

  When Chloe reappeared a few minutes later – ‘I like the yellow bedroom, Grandma’ – she found us in the kitchen, putting groceries away, still trying out names. ‘You could name it Fawlty Towers,’ Emily was suggesting when her daughter entered the room.

  I snapped her playfully with a dishtowel. ‘You’re as bad as your father. If we don’t come up with something soon he swears he’s going to name it Base-2.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘And they say mathematicians don’t have a sense of humor.’

  Chloe poked me with a chubby finger. ‘I think you should call it Pooh Corner, Grandma.’

  Timmy screamed with laughter and punched his older brother in the arm. ‘Poo! Poo! Grandma’s house is poo!’

  Jake scowled in a brother-what-brother? sort of way. ‘You’re stupid.’

  ‘Poo!’ Timmy hooted, punctuating the word with a second well-aimed punch.

  Jake consulted the referee. ‘Mommy, make him stop hitting me!’

  ‘Poopyhead!’ Timmy said.

  ‘No, you’re a poopyhead!’ Jake countered.

  In time-honored tradition, Emily ignored her sons, turning to me instead. ‘Honestly, Mother, sometimes I’m at my wit’s end.’

  Wit’s End. I considered the name thoughtfully, then discarded it, too. ‘A little potty humor never hurt anyone,’ I pointed out. ‘Look, boys,’ I said, leaning down to speak at their level. ‘Your grandfather is out in the shed. Go find him and ask him to take you to see the crab pots.’

  After the children had scampered away with Chloe in the lead, I said to Emily, ‘Back in the day, you were fascinated with the word “tush.” You’d even make up songs about it.’ I paused for a moment, remembering. ‘“The wheels on the tush go poop, poop, poop …”’ I sang after I was sure the children were out of earshot.

  Emily laughed. ‘Well, it made sense to me at the time,’ she said. ‘Why else would they call that roll hanging on the bathroom wall tushy paper?’

  I laughed, too, then added, ‘After “tush” it was “booger.” I thought you’d never outgrow the booger phase.’

  ‘That must have been high-larious.’ She gave me a quick hug. ‘The bullshit I put you through, Mom. I’m so sorry.’

  I don’t think I ever loved my daughter more than at that moment, standing in my new kitchen holding a can of baked beans in one hand, a package of string cheese in the other, tendrils of her fine blonde hair curling softly over her cheeks and forehead. Emily had been responsible for a number of my prematurely gray hairs. Following her graduation with honors from Bryn Mawr College, she’d shocked us by eloping with a college dropout named Daniel (please call me Dante) Shemansky. After a quickie wedding at a chapel in Las Vegas, they’d become dedicated Phish Heads, following the popular rock band all around the southwest before settling down in Colorado where Dante trained as a masseuse and Emily worked in a bookstore.

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ I quoted after a moment, thinking about the posh spa they now owned and operated on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay near Annapolis. Spa Paradiso had recently been featured in SpaLife Magazine. Mr and Mrs Shemansky wouldn’t be depending on handouts from us to keep their growing family afloat.

  ‘Is Chloe reading Winnie the Pooh?’ I asked, wondering what prompted my granddaughter to make the Pooh Corner suggestion.

  ‘That was ages ago, Mom, but recently she’s been listening to a collection of tunes we downloaded to Timmy’s Kindle Fire. Remember that song, “The House at Pooh Corner?”’

  ‘Kenny Loggins,’ I said. ‘Popular in the early seventies.’ I hummed the first line of the ballad to demonstrate that my mind, although aging, was a veritable steel trap. ‘They knew how to write songs back then,’ I mused. ‘Girls, fast cars, heartbreak, momma said, hey, a twangy bit of guitar. Sadly, no more. I don’t know what to make of what I hear on the radio these days, Emily. Lady Gaga I can take, but Miley Cyrus? Eminem? And that dreadful rapper – what’s his name?’ The memory was so horrible that I waved it away.

  Emily paused, her arm half in half out of the refrigerator. ‘Did you and Dad have a song?’

  I looked straight into her astonishing blue eyes, so like my late mother’s. ‘Oh, yes. It’s “Your Song” by Elton John. He still sings it at every concert.’

  Emily launched into the oh-so-familiar tune.

  ‘That one, yes,’ I confirmed, joining in on the word ‘funny.’ At the beginning of the second verse I cut her off at the word ‘no’, my hand raised like a conductor. ‘Drumroll, please!’

  Emily waited, one eyebrow raised.

  ‘We shall name this cottage Our Song. I have spoken.’

  ‘Perfect!’ my daughter said, grinning.

  ‘What’s perfect?’ my husband asked, coming in through the kitchen door.

  ‘Where are the kids?’ Emily asked, sounding alarmed.

  ‘Not to worry, Em. I’ve set them up with the garden hose and some old rags. They’re washing the kayak.’ He wrapped me in his arms from behind and rested his chin on the top of my head.

  ‘Emily suggested we name the cottage Our Song after, well, ‘Our Song’. I hope you don’t mind …�
�� I sang.

  I felt his chin move. ‘I like it. Very much.’ He spun me around by my shoulders, took my right hand in his left. Slightly stooped, with his cheek pressed to mine, my husband waltzed me from stove to refrigerator to kitchen sink singing in his gravelly baritone about how wonderful life was with me in his world.

  At the kitchen table, he twirled me under his arm and executed a perfect dip, pressing me back against the tablecloth and planting a kiss on my exposed neck.

  ‘Mom!’ Emily cried, sounding exasperated and breaking the spell.

  I glanced at my daughter over Paul’s shoulder. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re sitting on the grapes.’

  SIX

  ‘I’ve often wish’d that I had clear, For life, six hundred pounds a year; A handsome house to lodge a friend, A river at my garden’s end, A terrace walk, and half a rood Of land set out to plant a wood.’

  Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, Book II, Satire VI

  On the first long weekend we spent at Our Song, every day was a treasure hunt. While Paul worked out back in the shed, evaluating the rusting tools and deteriorating equipment that Julianna Quinn’s late husband had left behind, I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor in front of a spacious cabinet, sorting through her pots and pans.

  ‘Chattels,’ the contract called them. I had to look it up: ‘An item of property other than real estate,’ the dictionary explained.

  Fortunately for us, when it came to chattels, Julianna had had good taste. I now owned a complete set of All-Clad stainless-steel cookware, for example. At one hundred and fifty dollars upwards for a saucepan – not including the lid – All-Clad was a luxury I could never manage to afford at home, even with a twenty-percent-off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond. Now I was cradling a three-quart steamer to my breast and chanting, You’re mine, all mine!

  I’d nested the smaller frying pan into the larger one and was sorting lids, trying them on the saucepans for size, when I heard tires crunch on the gravel outside. I reached up, grabbed the edge of the kitchen counter and pulled myself to my feet, my knees popping. ‘After forty it’s patch, patch, patch,’ I muttered to myself, quoting the embroidery on a decorative pillow I’d also inherited from Julianna.

  I leaned over the sink, flipped the curtain aside and peered out the kitchen window. A white Ford pickup with a toolbox in the bed had pulled up out front. By the time I’d reached the side door, opened it and called out, ‘Paul! Someone’s here!’ the truck’s driver was already through the gate and standing at our front door, reaching for the knocker.

  ‘You must be Dwight Heberling,’ I said stupidly when I opened the door, since Heberling & Son, Construction was painted on the door of his pickup in red block letters at least three inches high.

  As I spoke, a younger man roared up behind the pickup on a black Harley chopper. He braked hard and dismounted, then engaged the kickstand.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Heberling whipped his ball cap off to reveal a sensible graying buzz cut, tucked the cap under his arm and extended his hand. He nodded in the direction of the motorcycle. ‘And that there is my son, Rusty.’

  Rusty removed his helmet and hooked the strap over one of the handlebars. I guessed immediately where he’d gotten his nickname. His copper hair was drawn back behind his ears and fastened at the nape of his neck in a neat ponytail. He wore a Beatles T-shirt belted into a pair of faded jeans that fit him like a second skin. When he lifted the toolbox out of the Ford, his biceps flexed like an ad on TV for exercise equipment – the ‘after’ view, not the ‘before’ – and his pecs rippled impressively all the way from John to Ringo.

  Paul suddenly materialized at my shoulder, wiping grease off his hands with a paper towel. ‘I was just tinkering with an outboard,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute.’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ I said, opening the screen door wide. ‘Please excuse the mess. We’re still getting settled.’

  Starting in the entrance hall, Paul and I toured the house with Heberling, trailing like bridesmaids after the contractor and his son – who was tapping notes into his iPhone.

  Dwight blessed the kitchen plumbing – ‘New, I’d say. Last couple of years anyway’ – but the plumbing in the bathroom was a different story. ‘Copper,’ he tsk-tsked, and pointed to the cabinet under the sink. ‘Well water in these parts is acidic. See those green spots? Pinhole leaks in the making. Pinholes can cost you big time if they let go.’

  Dwight lifted the flush tank lid on the toilet and invited us to look in. ‘See those blue-green deposits? Sure sign your copper pipes are corroding.’

  As his father explained about pH and extolled the virtues of upflow calcite neutralizers and soda ash feeders, Rusty bent at the waist to photograph the offending pipes. I must have been observing this manoeuver appreciatively because Paul jostled my elbow, bringing me instantly back to a discussion of the merits of PCV piping.

  Our Song had no basement, so the breaker box had been installed in the utility room. Since the utility room was a new addition, I was hopeful Julianna Quinn’s contractor had rewired the rest of the cottage at the same time. As we clustered around the electrical panel awaiting Heberling’s verdict, he peered at the circuit breakers, studied the hand-lettered breaker guide on the inside of the panel door and to my great relief grunted his approval.

  The living-room fireplace, however, was another matter. Dwight stood in front of it for a long time, poking experimentally at the stones with a screwdriver. He knelt and peered up the chimney, grabbed hold of the damper handle and tugged. ‘Stuck, dammit. Probably hasn’t been properly cleaned in years.’ He jiggled the handle more vigorously and it suddenly gave up the fight. Before Dwight could pull his arm away a cloud of soot descended and covered his arm.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said, just hmmmm, not something you want to hear from either a doctor or a contractor. ‘Let’s look at it from the outside, then,’ he said, leading the way. ‘Got a ladder?’

  I reviewed my mental list of chattels, came up blank on ‘ladder’ and turned to Paul. ‘Do we have one?’

  ‘I’ll check the shed.’ A few minutes later he stuck his head out the door of the shed and called for Rusty to help him lug an extension ladder over to the side of the house. While we waited below, with Rusty steadying the ladder, Dwight climbed and poked at the chimney at various points on the way up with the screwdriver he pulled out of his back pocket. More hmmmms. He examined the roof while we waited below with me trying to convert every ‘hmmmm,’ ‘what-the-heck,’ and click of the tongue into dollars and cents.

  When he’d finished and returned to ground level, wiping his hands clean on his khakis, I asked, ‘How old is the house, do you think?’

  Dwight paused, considering. ‘See those windows?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Six over six. That puts ’em before 1884 when the railroad came and they were able to bring in larger panes of glass. The gambrel roof was popular in this area between around 1730 and 1770,’ he continued, ‘but it’s the chimney that tells the tale,’ he said, patting the bricks almost affectionately.

  ‘How’s that?’ I wondered.

  ‘Around 1770 they began building semi-outside chimneys, like yours. See how it’s sunk half into the brick end of the house?’

  I did.

  ‘So even if I didn’t know that the main part of the house has been around since Josiah Hazlett first settled here in the 1750s, I could date the place to sometime shortly after 1770.’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said, impressed with his knowledge.

  ‘So, what’s the verdict?’ Paul asked after a moment, cutting to the chase. ‘On the renovations, I mean?’

  Dwight considered Paul soberly. ‘Got any coffee?’

  ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Decaf?’

  ‘High octane if you got it.’

  ‘French roast OK?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  Rusty had just rejoined us after putting the ladder away. ‘How about you, Rusty?’

  ‘Diet Coke,
if you’ve got one.’

  Back in the kitchen, I fired up the Keurig, laid out a selection of K-cups and managed to locate a cold Sprite, with which Rusty seemed content. After the coffee brewed, we settled around the kitchen table to discuss the work.

  While Dwight ticked off the tasks that needed to be done, Rusty tapped notes into his iPhone using both thumbs. ‘I’ll be back to you in a couple of days with a written estimate,’ Dwight concluded at last.

  ‘No particular rush,’ Paul assured him. ‘We can manage for the time being, but the sooner you can get started the happier you’ll make my wife.’

  ‘I won’t take long.’ Dwight stood, pulled the ball cap out of his back pocket and, using both hands, adjusted it on his head. ‘I heard you made a bid on the Matthews’ place.’

  ‘It fell through,’ Paul said simply as we walked the contractor and his son to the door.

  Dwight grunted. ‘Not surprised about that, considering the agency you’ve been dealing with.’

  ‘Oh, Caitlyn Dymond’s been a pleasure to work with,’ I was quick to point out. ‘It’s that other woman, Kendall Barfield, who I’d like to strangle.’

  Dwight laughed out loud. ‘You’d be standing at the end of a long, long line.’

  ‘It sounds like you know her pretty well, Mr Heberling.’

  ‘Could say that. Used to be married to the woman.’

  ‘Gosh, sorry,’ I mumbled. Open mouth, insert foot, as my mother used to say.

  ‘No need, ma’am. When it was all said and done, I didn’t like Kendall all that much, either. Best thing to come out of that relationship was Dwight junior here.’

  The tips of Dwight junior’s ears flushed as red as his hair. I’d been wondering if the young man was intellectually challenged until he addressed me directly for the first time and drove all misapprehension away. ‘Just so you know, Mrs Ives, you’ve gotta watch out for Mom. She’s a card-carrying bitch.’

  SEVEN

  ‘Delicta maiorum immeritus lues’ – Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.