Hope on the Inside

by Marie Bostwick

  Maybe his prediction had finally come true? If so, it really had been a good day, for both of them. Hope took the groceries out of the trunk and carried them to the house, humming a happy tune.

  But that was before Hope opened the door, sniffed the air, and felt her stomach clench like a fist.

  Rosemary.

  Chapter 2

  Rick Carpenter stood six-four and weighed 220 pounds. He had deep blue eyes, short gray hair that matched his full gray beard, and shoulders so muscular that it was hard to find shirts to fit him. He had played for the Old Boars, the senior division of the Portland Rugby Club, into his early fifties. Even now, at age fifty-eight, he looked like he could kick the butts of guys half his age.

  Rugby is a little like football but much rougher. Players eschew helmets and pads and consider injuries a badge of honor. Rick inherited his love of the game from his dad, an Irish dockworker turned welder who emigrated at the age of twenty with a chip on his shoulder and ninety dollars in his pocket and died from complications of an industrial accident when Rick was just fourteen.

  His deceased father loomed large in his life. Rick was the stubborn son of a stubborn man, a man whose boyhood had been cut short and who had pulled himself up by the bootstraps, as his dad had done before him.

  But the influence of Rick’s mother, Ruth, was also strongly in evidence. Ruth showed him he could be smart as well as tough. She instilled in him a reverence for education and a belief that hard work would not go unrewarded. And when Rick’s hair-trigger temper started getting him into fights at school, Ruth taught him to bake.

  It was just what he needed.

  Whereas other men might handle anxiety by pounding a speed bag at the gym or heading to the nearest bar in search of a drink and a fistfight, Rick vented his pent-up emotions by pounding his frustrations into a mound of warm bread dough.

  In addition to life lessons, Ruth passed all her baking secrets and recipes on to her only son. Rosemary olive loaf, however, was Rick’s own creation, something he baked only sporadically.

  When Rick got home that day, around noon, he’d gone directly into the kitchen, practically tearing off his jacket and tie before putting an apron on over his dress shirt. He went directly to work, furiously chopping olives and rosemary before mixing it into the sticky dough, kneading it a good fifteen minutes.

  By then, he’d calmed down enough to be able to think. After washing his hands and pouring a neat scotch, he sat down and did exactly that for the two hours it took the bread to rise. By the time he’d punched down the dough, kneaded it a second time, he had formulated a plan and felt much better.

  The only thing he had to do now was deal with Hope. She’d be upset at first, like he’d been, but Hope was nothing if not sensible. And optimistic. Once she got past the emotional part, she’d realize that nothing had changed.

  He just had to break the news gently.

  “Hey,” Rick said, giving her a peck on the cheek before lifting the hot loaves from the baking pans to a cooling rack. “Got home early and thought I’d surprise you. Don’t they smell great?”

  He bent down and took a deep, appreciative sniff of the hot bread before lifting his head. In spite of his explanation, Hope still looked surprised.

  No, he thought, not surprised—concerned. Her expression matched the one she wore whenever they watched one of those spy movies that he loved and she tolerated, as though she wanted to put her hands to her face and peek through her fingers. She was carrying a grocery bag in one arm and clutching the neck of a wine bottle in her hand.

  “Looks like a good vintage,” he said, nodding toward the bottle. “Doesn’t even have a screw top.”

  “What’s wrong?” Hope asked, ignoring his grin.

  “Nothing.”

  Hope shook her head. “Something’s happened. What is it? Something with the kids? Did McKenzie call?”

  “Nobody called,” he said, opening a drawer and searching for a corkscrew. “And nothing’s wrong. Why would you think that?”

  “You only make rosemary olive bread when something’s gone wrong and you’re trying to break it to me gently.”

  Hope looked toward the cooling rack and stabbed the air with an accusatory gesture, like a character in a courtroom drama who’s been asked to identify the culprit.

  “That is bread for making the best of a bad situation,” she said.

  “Hope, it’s only bread. Nothing’s wrong. Really.” Rick twisted the metal coil into the cork, avoiding her eyes.

  “There is—” He paused. “A situation. But it’s not bad,” he said quickly as he took two wineglasses from the cabinet. “In fact, it’s good. I’m retiring.”

  “What?” Hope’s jaw went slack. She stood there for a moment, staring incredulously. “Retiring? What are you talking about? You’re only fifty-eight years old. You love being an engineer!”

  Rick tipped the bottle and poured wine into the first glass, watching the purplish liquid climb toward the rim. He did love being an engineer. And he’d worked harder than anyone he knew in order to become one.

  When they first married, Hope was still teaching, supporting them both so he could go to school full-time. Then the twins came. For seven years, Rick worked construction during the day, all day, studied and went to class nights and weekends. When he finally finished, Hope, Hazel, Rory and Reed, two-year-old McKenzie, who already had him wrapped around her little finger, and his mother were all there to see him receive his diploma. Ruth said it was the proudest moment of her life.

  Rick’s proudest day came two weeks later, when he threw away his worn-out work boots, putting on a brand-new suit for his first day of work as an engineer. His second-proudest day was every one after that, every day he spent working.

  He did love being an engineer.

  He loved taking a project from plan to completion, solving problems before they occurred, working in a team, visiting the jobsite, seeing foundations poured, scaffolds rise, and buildings climb, floor after floor, until they really did scrape the sky. He loved putting his stamp on the city of his birth, seeing his imprint on Portland’s skyline.

  And now he was retiring? No wonder Hope didn’t believe his story. The doubt in her voice made him angry, because it made him doubt himself.

  “You mean . . .” She hesitated a moment. “You mean they fired you?”

  “No,” he said, and handed her some wine, his movement so abrupt that a little of the liquid splashed over the rim. “They did not fire me. They offered an early retirement package to me and a few of the other senior engineers.”

  He poured another glass for himself and took a long draught. “And I thought, after twenty-eight years, what the hell? So I decided to take it.”

  Hope’s eyes flashed, sparking with that blue flame he knew so well and usually found attractive. But not tonight.

  “You decided?” she snapped. “Without even discussing it with me? Haven’t we talked about this?”

  They had, more than once. The last time was when Hope came home from a sisters’ weekend with Hazel and found a brand-new SUV parked in the driveway. The argument that ensued was heated. They kept the car, but later, when they were in bed, Rick swore it would never happen again.

  “We had a deal! You said you wouldn’t make any big decisions without—”

  “I didn’t decide! They decided for me! All right?” Rick roared, the fury and frustration in his face and voice silencing her. “They decided! Are you happy now?”

  Hope stood silent. Rick knocked back his wine, gulping it down without tasting it, trying to swallow back the catch in his throat.

  “These people are vultures,” he said, when he felt he could trust his voice. “They don’t have any loyalty, don’t care about the years I spent building the company. They gave me two options, retire early with severance or wait to be fired.” He put down his glass. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  The anger in Hope’s eyes melted. She laid her hand over his.

  “Bab
e, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, his throat still tight. “Glad to be out of there. It’s been miserable since the buyout.”

  “It has,” Hope agreed. “You’ve practically been killing yourself.”

  “Yeah. Well. Not anymore.”

  He topped up his glass and tilted it in her direction. Hope touched the rim of her glass to his, returning his smile. Somehow Rick felt renewed. And forgiven.

  “What would you say to Christmas in Hawaii?” he asked.

  “Hawaii?” Hope said, laughing a little. “This doesn’t seem like quite the time for a vacation, does it?”

  “It’s the perfect time. McKenzie and Zach are planning to spend Christmas with his parents. Rory and Reed will both be too wrapped up with work to make it out here this year, but we can bring Liam along. He’d love it. Wouldn’t you rather spend Christmas under a palm tree than pining for your absent fledglings? The timing is ideal. You’ll have a break from school, and for the first time in forever, my calendar is totally open.”

  Hope smiled. “A real vacation? No interruptions or e-mails? No calls from the office? Very tempting. What about Hazel? We can’t desert her over the holiday.”

  “Tell her to come along,” Rick said. “The more the merrier. We’ll bring Mom too. I’ll look for a condo we can rent, someplace we can stretch out a little.”

  “Well . . . okay. Let’s do it,” Hope said, her face splitting into a grin, but only briefly. “Assuming you haven’t found another job by then.”

  She sipped her wine.

  “You’re not really planning on retiring. Are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Rick took a serrated knife from the block and sliced into one of the loaves. The crumb was tender, but the crust was crisp, cracking under the pressure of his knife and releasing a rich, mouthwatering perfume of rosemary and olives into the air. He cut off two slices, smiling at a job well done.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have a plan. I’m going to spend the next few weeks working on the house, knocking off the stuff that’s been on my honey-do list for the last couple of years. Thought I’d start replacing the roof on the sunporch.”

  “Really?” Hope said, her face lighting up.

  The number of years she’d been asking him to get to that was closer to five than two.

  “Really. Then we’ll fly to Maui for an amazing Christmas before I come home and start sending out résumés.”

  “But,” Hope said slowly, “are you sure you want to wait that long?”

  Rick took a stick of butter from the refrigerator and started slathering it onto the hot bread.

  “Nobody will be hiring until January. I might as well take a little time off while I can.” He handed her a piece of the bread, still warm and dripping with butter. Hope took it, sniffed it, but didn’t taste it.

  “Honey. We’re fine,” he said, seeing the wheels turn behind her eyes.

  The two of them had grown up poor and stayed poor for a long time. Pinching pennies was a hard habit to break, harder for Hope than Rick. He wished she’d worry about money a little less and trust him a little more.

  “Really. The package they offered me is pretty decent. Not lavish but not bad. It won’t take long for me to find another job; you’ll see. After all, who was the brilliant man who led the team on the bridge repair? And the waterfront reclamation project? Who engineered half the buildings in downtown Portland?”

  “Let me think . . .” Hope said, giving him a lopsided smile. “Was it you?”

  “Damn straight it was.”

  Hope laughed and bit into the bread. Rick did the same and groaned with pleasure. It was delicious, the best he’d ever made. This seemed like a harbinger of good things to come.

  “I’ll find a new job by Valentine’s Day—St. Patrick’s at the latest,” Rick declared. “Then we’ll bank the severance. Or maybe pay off the second mortgage we had to take out for Liam’s tuition.”

  Hope’s eyes widened a bit. “Do you really think we could? That’d be wonderful, wouldn’t it?”

  He nodded, thinking how beautiful she was and what a good team they made. He was nothing when they met, a part-time student and full-time drywall contractor. He’d made a full-court press to win her, giving her the hard sell, explaining that someday he would become the kind of man she deserved.

  With Hope by his side, it had happened. They had a beautiful home, beautiful family, beautiful life. Rick took care of the finances and Hope took care of the house, and him, and the kids, and pretty much everybody who crossed her path, mothering every kid in a six-block radius. Rick was proud of her and the life they’d built.

  Sure, they had their moments. Hope could be feisty when she felt like it and stubborn as hell when she dug her feet in, but so could he. That was part of the attraction. It gave him the chance to win her over, again and again. Not a bad way to spend a marriage.

  “You know something?” Rick said. “I think this is going to turn out to be a good thing. I was getting too complacent in my job, too settled. It’ll be good to get out there and do something fresh, take a few risks, work with new people. And financially speaking, by the time everything shakes out, we’re actually going to pick up yardage.”

  Rick laid his arm over Hope’s shoulders, kissed the top of her head. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said. “You’ll see.”

  Chapter 3

  A year and a half later, everything was fine.

  They weren’t homeless or hungry. They had their children and health, which, as Hope often reminded herself, was what mattered. In the big picture, everything was fine. But it was also different. Everything was different.

  Hope was angry about it. But not for the reasons you might think.

  At first, things were actually pretty terrific. Rick spent weeks before Christmas replacing the porch roof and refinishing the dining room floor. When they first bought the house, they tackled those kinds of projects together. But as his responsibilities at the office increased, Rick had less time for home repair.

  That was all right. Hope understood.

  When the kids were young, she always felt she and Rick were on the same team and working toward the same goal—building a strong, secure family. She didn’t earn a paycheck, but she worked just as hard as Rick did and had even longer hours. And she took her job very seriously.

  Realizing what a strong influence friends could be, Hope set out to make their house the house, the place every kid in the neighborhood wanted to be. She scheduled playdates, and field trips, and game nights. She was the den mother, room mother, troop leader, and bus chaperone. She threw sleepovers, and campouts, and parties.

  When McKenzie and her little friends reached those self-conscious, self-absorbed preteen years, Hope started organizing pageants for neighborhood girls. They competed and won crowns for titles such as Miss Community Service and Little Miss Bookworm. Hope wanted them to understand that having good hair is meaningless if there’s not a good mind underneath it.

  Hope’s parties were legendary. The neighborhood kids had such a great time that they didn’t even realize they were learning things. She organized pirate parades, leprechaun hunts, Greek mythology costume parties, Christmas caroling, and a backyard production of The Little Engine That Could. Her favorite was the Bastille Day party she threw when the twins were eleven. With Hope’s help, the boys baked chocolate croissants and built guillotines out of foil and Popsicle sticks. That party truly cemented Hope’s reputation as the fun mom on the block. After that, every kid in the neighborhood wanted to hang out at the Carpenter home, which meant Hope always knew where her kids were and what they were doing.

  Hope and Rick approached the job of child-rearing much the way their parents had, dividing the work along traditional gender-specific lines. Hope understood it wasn’t the only good way to raise a family, but it worked for them.

  Rory, the older twin, was a doctor. Reed was a professor. McKenzie worked as an IT profes
sional for the State of Washington doing things with computers that Hope couldn’t begin to understand. Liam, the baby, attended the prestigious UCLA film school. Hope was sure he would win an Oscar before his thirtieth birthday.

  Whenever Hope looked at her children, she thought, Yeah, we did good.

  On that first Monday after Rick’s forced retirement, Hope came home from work and discovered that Rick had torn the shingles off the porch roof. He’d also made dinner—roast chicken, salad, and homemade Parmesan rolls. That was a lovely evening. Rick was so talkative, excited about the possibility of a new career challenge. It reminded Hope of the conversations they’d had in the old days, when they were both bursting with optimism and plans for the future.

  For a while, everything went according to plan.

  Their Hawaiian Christmas was truly the trip of a lifetime. When they got home, Rick turned the dining room, with its newly refinished wood floor, into his “Career Change Command Center” and started sending out résumés.

  That’s when the plan started to fall apart.

  Hope didn’t blame Rick. He sent out scores of résumés, went to dozens of networking luncheons with former colleagues, and applied for every job posting that even vaguely matched his skills. For seven months, Rick made looking for work his full-time job. Nobody could have tried harder.

  Then Ruth died. She caught pneumonia and was gone in a week.

  At first, it seemed like Rick was taking it pretty well, especially considering how close he’d been to his mother. Yes, Hope caught him crying more than once, but why shouldn’t he? Hope cried too. Ruth had been a wonderful mother-in-law and grandmother. They all missed her and it had happened so quickly. Still, all things considered, Rick seemed okay.

  Then something changed.

  Rick spent less time in his Command Center and more time in the kitchen baking and eating loaf after loaf of bread. When he wasn’t doing that, he sat in the ratty recliner he saved from Ruth’s apartment and watched the Food Channel.