Fixer-Upper

by Linda Seed

  “Oh. I know something about investments. What is it? Maybe I can help.”

  But Martina didn’t want to tell him, because she wanted this thing to belong to her alone. The fact that he was so wealthy—and the fact that his previous girlfriends had been interested in him mainly for his money—made Martina careful about what she said to him regarding anything financial. She didn’t want to seem as though she were angling for his help. And she didn’t want that help, in any case. Part of the appeal of the Hall property was that it would be her own thing, her own project from start to finish. Telling him about it seemed like it could go wrong in more than one way.

  So she’d put him off. “Just an investment.” She toyed with the crumbs from a scone. “I don’t even know if it’s going to work out, so …”

  She’d left it at that, hoping he wouldn’t press for details.

  He didn’t push her for more at the time, but now, at home alone, with no one to tell him what might be considered line-crossing, he decided to look into it.

  Of course Martina’s financial life was none of his business. But what if she hadn’t been telling the truth about wanting to make an investment? What if she was having money trouble? If so, he could help. He, better than anyone, could come to her aid if she needed it. And why shouldn’t he? They were seeing each other now. No, they hadn’t slept together yet, and it was true they didn’t have any kind of commitment, but he cared about her. Why wouldn’t he want to help?

  He started by asking around to see who Martina might be doing business with—and, therefore, to whom she might owe money.

  In a town as small as Cambria, it was easy enough to get information about somebody who lived there. Gossip flew, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.

  It was a little harder for Chris, being a relative newcomer. But that didn’t mean it was impossible. He chatted with people at the grocery store and at the post office. He dropped Martina’s name during a visit to the gem and mineral show at the Veteran’s Hall. He stepped into the historical museum on Burton Drive and mentioned that Martina was working on his kitchen renovation. Had anyone there worked with her on their own homes?

  At first, he didn’t come up with anything. Then, finally, he spoke to a Realtor who’d sold a home to someone who had hired Martina to get the tired old cottage into shape.

  Chris had run into the Realtor at Cambria Coffee as they both sipped from their to-go cups on the patio on a cool weekday morning.

  “Do you know her well, then?” Chris had asked, trying to keep his manner casual.

  “No, not really. But you know who you should talk to? Riley Whittaker. She’s a Realtor in my office. She met with Martina a couple of weeks ago about some property that’s on the MLS.”

  Now they were getting somewhere.

  Chris contacted Riley Whittaker, who, to her credit, was a little cagey about it when Chris started to feel her out on her business with Martina.

  But Chris got past that by dangling the prospect of a big payday in front of the Realtor.

  “Martina’s a friend,” he told her. “She told me about the property you showed her. I might be interested in buying some investment property myself, and she said I should give you a call.”

  Riley Whittaker had lit up as though some perfect combination of levers and buttons had been pushed.

  “Oh, that’s marvelous,” she’d said. “Just marvelous. I have some wonderful properties I can show you.”

  He’d had to tour three of them before getting Riley to spill the information he was after.

  “When you see Martina, tell her if she’s looking for an investment, she can do much better than the Maxwell Hall property. I mean, yes, it’s a good location and the history is intriguing, but it’s going to take so much money to rehab it, I hardly think it’s worth it.”

  It had taken two minutes with Google to learn exactly what, and where, the Maxwell Hall property was.

  If Chris had been more self-aware, he might have seen that what he’d done was a violation of Martina’s privacy. And he was exactly self-aware enough that the thought did occur to him.

  But if someone you cared about needed help with something and was too proud to ask for it, was it wrong to do what had to be done to help her anyway? Later, when she found out what he was up to, wouldn’t the outcome mean more to her than how it was achieved?

  “I need you guys to get out of here on Saturday night,” Martina told her sisters. “I want to invite Chris over.” It was only Thursday afternoon—surely that would give them enough time to make plans.

  “You’re going to have sex,” Sofia said.

  Patrick had just come home from the college and was making himself a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. “Ah … that’s too much information,” he said.

  “I never said I’m having sex. I didn’t say sex.”

  “But that’s what you’re thinking,” Benny said.

  “Nooo.” Martina was aware the way she’d drawn out the word made it sound as though she were lying. And she wasn’t lying—not exactly. She definitely wasn’t planning to have sex with Chris, but would there be any harm in letting the batter get to second or even third base? Martina liked second base. Even if they just lingered on first for a while, that could be fun. It all depended on the skill of the shortstop and the power of the bat.…

  “She’s going to have sex,” Benny said to Sofia.

  Patrick picked up his glass of iced tea and headed toward his room, muttering, “Really, really too much information.”

  “Okay,” Sofia said. “We can think of somewhere to go. Do you need us to be out all night?”

  All night seemed a little extreme, given that she didn’t know whether the game would go into extra innings. Plus, what if it did? Chris was an adult, and so was she. He could do the walk of shame out the front door in the morning. It wouldn’t be unprecedented.

  “No,” she told Sofia—this time just a regular no, not an elongated one. “Just stay out late, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t you go to his place?” Benny was rooting around in the refrigerator for a can of soda. “What’s he got over there, ten thousand square feet? Ooh! I heard he’s got an observatory. You could do it next to the big telescope.” She grinned in a way that suggested the telescope reference was a double entendre.

  “He does have an observatory, yes,” Martina said. “And I want to invite him here because he’s never been here before, and it’s a step.”

  Benny propped a hand on her hip. “Yeah, it is. I get that. Okay. I’ll go to a late movie or something.”

  “Thank you. All of you, I mean it. Thanks.”

  “You’re taking a step,” Sofia said. “That’s really great. Good for you, Martina.”

  Benny scowled. “I wish I could take a step with someone. While you’re here getting action, I’m going to be getting intimate with a giant tub of buttered popcorn.” Benny considered that. “Actually, I’ve had worse relationships.”

  21

  Martina invited Chris over for dinner, and he showed up looking handsome in a dark sweater and a pair of jeans that perfectly fit his ass. Martina had never had a pair of jeans that fit her ass quite that well, and she mused that it was probably the difference between the three hundred dollar pair Chris was wearing and the Levi’s she usually wore, which she picked up for six bucks at the resale store.

  He kissed her when she opened the door—they’d reached the point in their relationship when a hello kiss was normal and expected—and she invited him inside and out of the light rain that had left scattered drops in his hair.

  They dispensed with the small talk about his day, hers, and the way the food smelled, and she showed him around the house. This part was important, whether he realized it or not. This was her parents’ house. It was as close as he would ever come to meeting them.

  “The house used to be a brothel,” she told him as she led him through the living room and kitchen, the laundry room and the remodeled bathrooms. “See this part h
ere? This is the new construction, where two of the original log cabins were joined together. Each one was only about a thousand square feet, but with the two of them together, plus the addition, it’s about twenty-eight hundred—enough room for my sisters and me.”

  He looked around with interest. “A thousand square feet? That’s smaller than I would have guessed for a brothel.”

  “Well … I suppose it was a lot different than what you see in the movies.”

  The Happy Hill neighborhood where Martina lived had gotten its name from the whorehouses that had dotted the area when Cambria had been a mining town. The miners might have been happy here, but Martina doubted the same could be said for the women who’d lived in these cabins. She thought of them sometimes as she lay in bed at night, wondering about their lives.

  That was the thing about old houses. They weren’t just structures, just walls and roofs and floors and ceilings. They were stories. They were pieces of people’s lives.

  “So, your parents remodeled this place?” He peered into a small bathroom that artfully combined the rustic feel of the original cabin with modern luxury and convenience. “I’m impressed.”

  “They didn’t do the labor themselves, of course, but the design was all theirs,” she told him. “It took them years to get it the way they wanted it. But in the end, it was just right. Every doorknob, every shelf, every piece of furniture was just the way they imagined it.”

  I am not going to cry, she reminded herself. She’d cried enough in the years following their deaths to fill a swimming pool. She was done crying.

  “And you and your sisters inherited it,” he said.

  Martina recognized that for what it was—an artful way to bring the conversation around to what she’d never talked about with him: her parents’ deaths.

  “Yes. We did. We discussed whether just one of us should live here—whether one of us should buy out the others. But in the end, none of us wanted to be the one to give it up. Being here, in their place, together—I think it helped all of us get through … through losing them.”

  Damn it. I wasn’t going to cry. She wiped at her eyes and let out a shaky laugh. If she made light of her emotions, maybe this wouldn’t be so awkward.

  She finished the tour, took him back to the kitchen, and poured him a glass of wine.

  “So,” she concluded, “having Bianca and TJ buy my share of the house is a big step for me. But it’s time.”

  For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to ask. And then he did.

  “Martina, how did they die?” His voice was soft, as though he could somehow ease the pain of the question or its answer.

  Martina lifted the lid from the pot she had simmering on the stove and stirred, using the task as an excuse not to look at him as she talked. “She died of cancer. It was very sudden—she got the diagnosis, and then she was dead a few weeks later, before we could even process what was happening. Then my father had an accident right afterward. He drove his car into a tree.”

  She didn’t have to explain what was obvious: it might not have been an accident. Who could know what Aldo had been thinking in the moments before the impact that had ended his life? Maybe he’d fallen asleep, exhausted by grief.

  And maybe he hadn’t.

  That was too much to contemplate, so she chose not to. She stirred the fragrant contents of the pot, replaced the lid, and changed the subject. They talked about his car project until dinner was ready.

  But they both knew what neither of them said: It hadn’t only been a step to invite him here, it had also been a step to tell him what she’d just told him. She was letting him into her life. He’d gotten past her emotional gatekeeper.

  They both needed to see what he would do now that he was inside the gates.

  Chris didn’t tell Martina what he’d found out about her and the Maxwell Hall property. If she’d wanted him to know, she’d have told him. He knew he’d crossed a line in poking around for the information on his own, and he knew enough to keep his mouth shut about it.

  He’d only been interested in helping her, but she might not see it that way.

  Plus, something was happening here that was both precious and fragile: she was letting him in. She’d opened up not only her home but a big part of her emotional life to him, and he didn’t want to say anything to make her sorry she’d done it.

  Instead, he ate the dinner she’d made—a fragrant Italian stew of tomatoes, onions, garlic, white beans, and vegetables—and simply reveled in her.

  Martina wasn’t just lovely, though she was that. She wasn’t just interesting to talk to, though she was that also. There was some combination of qualities in her—qualities he couldn’t quite define—that made her utterly fascinating.

  Sitting across from her, he thought he could spend hours observing the way her hair fell against her shoulders or the way she moved, the way her body existed in the world. He found himself thinking about her skin at the oddest times, when he should have been giving his focus to other things. He especially liked the hollow at the base of her throat and that fine bone structure, the way the delicate construction of her wrists made her seem both fragile and miraculous.

  Knowing tonight might lead to something more than the few kisses they’d shared made him feel addled, crazy. He did and said the right things, but inside, he marveled that the civilizations of the world had been built and maintained by people who had, at the same time, been driven to distraction by wanting each other. It was amazing anything ever got done.

  He was so focused on his need for her he barely noticed that she’d shifted the conversation away from her parents and onto his own.

  “ … your mother?”

  He only heard the last part of what she’d said. “I’m sorry. You were saying …?”

  “I asked if you’re close to your mother.” Martina eyed him over the rim of her wineglass.

  He smiled, just slightly—a smile that wasn’t a smile. “That depends on what you mean by close.”

  Martina tilted her head, looking at him. “Well, tell me what you mean by it, and we’ll go from there.”

  His mother. God. There was a topic fraught with difficulty and peril. He’d managed to get through his entire relationship with Alexis without ever acknowledging he had a mother. As far as she’d been concerned, he might have hatched; he might have emerged fully formed from a beam of light.

  “My mother is … problematic.” That was understating the issue.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  To his surprise, he found he did want to. He didn’t want to go into the whole shitshow of it—that was for his therapist, if he ever got off his ass and hired one—but he wanted to tell her the basic outline of it. He wanted to get it out there.

  “My mother has a drinking problem. A bad one. I try to avoid exposing myself to that as much as possible. I call her regularly to make sure she’s okay. I send her money. But …” The but encompassed all of the many things he wished for his relationship with his mother that would never come to pass. An entire world of unfulfilled longing lived in that one word.

  “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.” Martina gazed at him with sympathy that could also be interpreted as pity. He wanted one, but he didn’t want the other. “Did she drink while you were growing up?”

  “Yes. She did. That might have been tolerable—something I could navigate—if I’d had a sober parent around to buffer things. But my father left when I was four. I haven’t seen him since. I’ve heard from him, though.” He let out a grim laugh. “When PlayDate hit it big and my name started turning up in the news, he called asking for money.”

  “Oh, no.” Martina reached out and put her hand on top of his on the table. “That’s awful.”

  “I gave it to him.”

  That last bit—how he’d given his father the money he’d asked for—was a constant source of shame. How could he be so desperate for his father’s love that he was willing to buy it? But he ha
d been, God help him. He’d been exactly that desperate. It hadn’t worked. His father had disappeared again once he’d gotten the money and only got in touch when he needed more.

  “It’s something we have in common, then,” Martina said. “We both lost our parents. It just happened differently for me than it did for you.”

  She got up from her chair, went to him, and sat in his lap, her arms around his neck. Then she kissed him. She tasted of red wine and some light, flowery perfume.

  He was so grateful for the kiss he let himself forget everything else but this.

  He didn’t need anything else but this.

  Martina hadn’t known whether she would sleep with him. Eventually, yes, but she hadn’t known whether it would happen tonight. She’d told herself waiting would be wise.

  But the next moment, she was taking him by the hand and leading him toward her bedroom.

  Was it because he was hurt and she thought she could fix him? Maybe. That’s what she did, after all—she took broken things, things that had been neglected, and made them fresh and new again.

  She knew better than to try to fix a man. Hadn’t her mother told her when she was a teenager—hadn’t she told all of them—it was a losing game to try to change someone into the person you wanted them to be?

  It had been good advice, no doubt. But right now, she didn’t want to think about what was smart and what wasn’t. She just wanted to connect with him. They had this thing in common, this awful, painful thing, and if that common bond could lead to something pleasurable, something beautiful, then why shouldn’t it?

  They went into her room and locked the door in case someone came home earlier than expected. Then she turned to him and pulled the sweater off over his head.

  He didn’t have the cut physique and six-pack abs of a movie hero. But his body was lean and tanned and somehow vulnerable, as though it had been waiting for her—for some better thing—all this time.