Blueprints: A Novel (8 page)

“I don’t know.” She struggled for the right words. “It makes me seem weak. Worn.”

“No way. It shows you’re tough. You do jobs most men couldn’t handle. That’s a war wound, sweetheart.”

“War wound,” she echoed, doubtful.

He bit into his sandwich, chewed, swallowed. “You’re just sensitive because it’s your birthday.”

“No, I’m not. I’m fine with my birthday. I like my life.”

“Well, Mike’s a good guy. I asked him to be on call for you while I’m gone, and since everyone knows how self-sufficient you are, I had to give him a reason.”

“You couldn’t lie?” she asked meekly.

He didn’t respond. No, Dean couldn’t lie. It was alternately his best and worst feature. Whether she liked it or not, she always knew where he stood.

One consistently good thing, though. He was comfortable with silence and didn’t fill it when he had nothing to say, which she appreciated just then. She was feeling lethargic, no doubt a by-product of heat and surgery. Halfway through her sandwich, she couldn’t take another bite.

After finishing his, he stood and pointed at the half she had left. “Can I wrap it?”

When she nodded, he stacked their plates and took them back to the kitchen. A short time later, he returned and handed her a mini scone. He was eating a second, with a third in his hand, when another van pulled up. Scratching the stubble on his jaw, Dean shot her an
uh-oh
look before trotting down the steps and meeting the deliveryman on the walk. The arrangement was huge. Back on the porch, he lowered it so that Caroline could remove the card.
“Happy Birthday,”
she read aloud.
“You’re the best.”
She smiled. “That’s sweet. It’s from Brian and Claire.”

Brows raised in question, he hitched the vase toward the table.

“Living room,” she suggested. The screen door slapped behind him. When she heard his flip-flops returning, she called, “Want to play Scrabble?”

“Nah.” He came through the door. “You always beat me. And I have to leave.” The door slapped shut.

She had another idea. “Jamie brought over the uncut tape. Want to watch?”

He shook his head to that, too. “I’m on vacation.” His eyes grew shrewd. “Uh-uh, Caro. Don’t work today. I know you love Facebook, but MacAfee has a paid staffer to monitor that. Marketing isn’t your job.”

“Right,” she admitted. “It’s Roy’s.”

“And doing it under his nose is part of the pleasure.”

She had to laugh. “I like you, Dean. You get it.” She was thinking what a good friend he was when she felt a sudden pang. “Oh boy. I’m so out of it. How did it go in Portland?”

He had been there yesterday. Given the demands of lead time in construction, planning for the spring
Gut It!
had to be under way even before the fall season taped. They had decided to renovate and enlarge a coastal cottage in Cape Elizabeth, and while Jamie only had partial designs done, Dean had enough to start interviewing local subs. “I was able to get a few leads, but it’s hard to find women. We could bring up our own, but it’s a trickle-down thing. Get someone local and they have local connections, which is a help when weather puts us behind schedule and we have to scramble. Besides, local people add flavor.”

“Flavor” meant local accents, and Caroline had to agree. Most of the subs they used talked Boston, but Maine was unique. “It’ll be a fun project,” she said. “Very different from the one we’re doing this fall.” That one involved a small historical home that had been bought by empty nesters wanting to downsize. Jamie had no sooner finished a redesign of the house than two of the couple’s sons decided to return home to live, so the gut-and-rebuild of a carriage house entered the mix. The last-minute change had caused mild panic, not to mention doubling Dean’s work, but it made the project far more interesting.

Mildly disgruntled, Dean folded his arms. “I’m still not sure why the Millers want their kids in a separate house.”

“You’re confusing how much you wish you could be near Renny with the fact that most adult parents need a little space from their kids.” Renny was fourteen and increasingly involved in a life far removed from Dean’s. In Maryland for the last three years, the boy had embraced a new family, new friends, new school. Dean knew football; the boy was into lacrosse. Their Lego days together were gone. From what Dean could see, the boy’s free-time pal was now his iPad.

Caroline felt his frustration, but she also understood this client. “The Millers are at a different place. And I hear what they’re saying. I love Jamie, but I don’t want her living with me, not after those last few years before she finally moved out. Her stuff was everywhere. Books, keys, hair ties, large purses, Sharpies, electronics, half-filled bottles of water—you name it, all in plain sight. Her bedroom was always neat, which is rare for a child, but common space in my house? Fair game. It was like she had to mark her territory each time she came home from school.”

Dean’s eyes remained dark. “Wouldn’t it just have been easier for the Millers to buy a bigger house?”

“Then where would that leave us? I
like
this project.” But she knew what he was thinking. “You wait. When Renny is older, he’ll visit. You’ll see.”

“Not the same.”

She understood that. Dean had clung to a bad marriage for the sake of his son. He went to Maryland often, but he was a spectator in his son’s life. So no, it wasn’t the same. And no amount of smooth talk from Caroline about things changing with time could help.

Again she pushed at the pieces of hair on her neck. They hadn’t stayed put. Her left hand did a lousy job.

“I should brush your hair before I go,” Dean muttered. “It’s a rat’s nest up there.”

“Thanks a lot,” she drawled.

“Hey. I’m just kidding. You look beautiful.”

The compliment was unexpected. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but along with surprise came an odd pleasure.

Seeming done with melancholy, Dean took a breath and pushed off from the rail. “Too bad you don’t like fishing. You could come with me.”

She was thinking that in another life she might when a bark came from the truck. She should have guessed Champ was in the cab from the way Dean had parked in the shade and lowered the windows. He knew not to bring the dog inside. A German shepherd, Champ had traumatized her cats enough times that they made themselves scarce at the first sniff of Dean. He did love that dog.

“Poor guy. Who’s watching him while you’re gone?”

“A neighbor. They have a shepherd, too. Champ’ll be fine.”

“Spoken wistfully.”

“Well, he’s my pal, like you.” Leaning in, he put his soap-clean stubble to her cheek and his mouth to her ear. “There’s a quart of yogurt in the freezer.”

She drew in a fast breath. “Moose Tracks?”

“Um-hmm.”

“My
favorite
.”

She could feel his smile against her cheek. “I think I knew that.” Straightening, he backed away and started down the steps. “Consider it a peace offering. I bought the country house.”

Caroline was so taken off guard that she was a minute following. Then, “Oh no. No, no, no.”

“Done,” he said as his long legs ate up the walk.

She sat forward and called, “That place is in the middle of nowhere. It has water problems, zoning problems,
access
problems,
and
”—she raised her voice when he didn’t stop—“it’s so infested with carpenter ants that you’d be best burning the thing to the ground. You don’t want that place, Dean! There’s no way you can make it salable, and isn’t that the
point
?”

But he was already in his truck, and once the engine turned over, her shouting was pointless. As he drove off, she grabbed her phone. It took her longer than usual to type, what with holding the phone steady against her bandaged right hand as she worked with her left. She had to delete numerous times until the letters made sense, and then it was simply
Big mistake
.

Thank you, Mom,
he wrote back.
Be good while I’m gone
.

five

When noon came without word from Claire Howe, Jamie left a second message, as well as one for Brian Levitt. The fact that neither picked up or called back said they were avoiding her, which made her insane. Her fear was that the more time passed, the more word of the hosting switch would spread at the studio, and the more Caroline would be hurt when she learned it herself. At its extreme, Jamie’s fear had someone at the station leaking word to a columnist at
The Boston Globe
and the whole world reading a blurb in tomorrow’s paper.

She made it through her lunch meeting intact, though when she arrived at the site of the bank construction, she immediately knew something was wrong. What had looked fine on paper lacked the element of welcome that the bank wanted for its branch, which meant Jamie had to rework the plans. It was no big deal and could be easily fixed, but she hated getting things wrong.

She needed Brad,
definitely
needed Brad. By the time she crossed the back patio to the bench where he sat, she was feeling the heat. The air was thick, and she was desperate enough for support to set aside the issue of his knowing about the host change before she did. But when he opened with “Hey, TV star,” she was not happy.

“Okay,” she warned, “now’s the time when I need you to say you’re just kidding with that, because you know I don’t want to do this yet, and you also know Caroline is still the best one for the job.”

His gray eyes held steady behind his glasses, his voice quiet and smooth. “What I know is that you’ll be a great host. The more I think about it, the more excited I get.”

It went downhill from there. She rebutted his arguments; he counter-rebutted hers. And when she finally asked, “What about Mom?” he said, “She had her turn, now it’s yours.”

His confidence in her was as sweet as his loyalty. But there was a larger picture here, a more personal one, a picture of Caroline heartbroken at being ousted on account of age, by her daughter, no less, and he was so not understanding of that that she was beside herself.

He wouldn’t help her with Roy, or he would have done it at the get-go.

And Roy had already made his feelings clear, which meant that they would only argue, which she did not, did not, did not want to do.

Her grandfather was her last best hope.

*   *   *

Theo MacAfee was eighty-two but as sharp mentally as a man half his age. The problem was his body. Bad knees, bad hips, bad back, bad cough. Fine to say he had brought the last on himself, but as he told Jamie whenever his cough alarmed her, “We were young and stupid. What did we know?” By some miracle of fate, whatever was there hadn’t evolved into lung cancer, though there had been a melanoma scare a few years back—and it was fine to say he had invited that, too. But he first learned the trade by working construction himself, and how could he have possibly built a business in that field without spending time in the sun? Add foolhardiness to the mix, and he had been known until recently to climb a ladder in a snit and show a framer the
proper
way to mount plywood sheathing to the outside wall of a house.

He was a perfectionist, which was probably how Jamie came by the trait. He could be short-tempered when things weren’t done right, and he could be painfully blunt. Beneath his impatience, though, was a kind heart. He treated his family well.

Jamie was counting on that now.

“Got a minute?” she asked, poking her head into his office and feeling a catch inside at the sight of him. When she was a child, she had always thought him tall and imposing. She had gained perspective on that as she had grown herself, but hunched over now, he seemed frail. He didn’t smile when he saw her, but those blue eyes lit.

Theo was an older, more leathery version of Roy. He had a head of white hair that was only beginning to thin, and though his blue eyes were rheumy, they remained riveting. In his later years, finally accepting that he couldn’t be harassing electricians at a job site, he had taken to wearing a jacket and tie, and his manners had grown courtly to match. He started to rise now. Slowly.

Hoping to spare his arthritic spine, Jamie scooted around his desk and eased him back down with her hug, then leaned against the mahogany not far from his trouser leg.

His eyes were keen, his voice gravelly. “I’d congratulate you, little girl, but you look like you lost your best friend.”

“It might come to that,” Jamie said with a little huff. “So you know about the
Gut It!
switch?”

“Your father told me. He said you were on board.”

“That is not true.”

“He said you asked for the change.”

“To replace Mom? Why would I do that? Mom loves the job, and she’s great at it. This isn’t a good move, Granddad. You know it’s not.”

“No, I don’t know it’s not,” he said as he calmly put his elbows on the arms of his chair and cupped his gnarled hands, one in the other. “It sounds logical. The producers want a younger face, and yours is a winner.”

“What about age before beauty? Who always said that?”

“Your grandmother, rest her soul, but she didn’t know the television business. Neither do I, which is why I defer to your father on this. Beauty before age seems to be the way of the world today.”

Jamie was dismayed. “Is that why I’m working my tail off now, so that by the time I hit my stride, I can be laid off because I have wrinkles?” She searched her grandfather’s face, finding wrinkles in abundance. “Is anyone saying
your
face is too old and asking you to step down?”

“No,” he said with a dry quirk of his lips, “because I own the company, so I’m the one who decides, and I’m not ready to step down.”

“What if Mom isn’t either?”

“Has she said that?”

Jamie let out a frustrated breath. “No. She doesn’t know about this yet. I’m hoping to get it changed before she has to. She’ll be devastated. Think of what you’d feel if someone said you were too old to do what you do best.”

“They’d probably be right.”

“I’m serious, Granddad.”