A Roof Over Their Heads

by M. K. Stelmack

  “Yes, about ten minutes west.”

  Brenda groaned softly. “Oh, Alexi. This is not good.”

  Yes, it was. It was. It just didn’t look that way. Stay confident, she ordered herself. “I told you that I needed to get out of that house for Matt’s sake. He bolted every single week. The house was toxic for him.”

  “Given time—”

  “I gave it almost a year! It was only getting worse.”

  “But a move? Not just to another house but another community? What will be the effect of that, Alexi?”

  A question she’d asked herself a million times and every time she’d consoled herself with the answer she now gave Brenda. “Since the day I promised him we were moving, he hasn’t run off. That was two months ago. I had to keep my end of the bargain. And he hasn’t run off here, either.” Alexi wasn’t about to tell her Matt was out of sight and off the property right now.

  “But, Alexi, this triggers new questions. How will you manage your business from a new location?”

  “Nothing changes. It’s a home-based business. I still have my own website. I’m still on Etsy. That doesn’t change. It’s business as usual.”

  “And how is business, Alexi?”

  “It’s business as usual, Brenda. I was paid last week and I’m expecting payment on two more orders today, as a matter of fact.” Which was the truth. The other truth was that they’d barely cover the minimum payment on her credit card.

  Brenda’s sigh felt like a puff of cold air in Alexi’s ear. “I hope things go well for you. I really do. However, the consequence of your change is that we will have to reopen parts of Matt’s file. Likely do a new home study.”

  What? No one could see this wreck of a house. Alexi pressed her fingers to her temple, forgetting that her head bruise was there. She bit back a squeak of pain. “When?”

  “I’m not sure. You’re out of my territory. I will send the paperwork to the Red Deer office, and a new caseworker will be assigned. Today’s Monday, so...perhaps as early as next week.”

  There was no way this place would be in shape by then. She drove her fingers into her hair, bunching it so hard it hurt. “Listen, Brenda. This is the thing. The house here is still being renovated. There’s a—a—man working on it even as we speak but if the new social worker sees it like this right now, without knowing who I am, it won’t look good. Is there any way you can delay the transfer?”

  There was a loud thud from the kitchen. Alexi whirled to see—nothing. Then Seth rose from where she guessed the sink was. She wondered how much he’d overheard. Her voice had risen, and now there was silence on Brenda’s end. Alexi was about to ask if she was still there when the woman who had guided her and Richard through three adoptions, was taking her through the last stages with Matt, who had championed their cause time and time again, who knew Alexi’s life story and hadn’t judged, finally spoke. “I can’t stop what will happen. And I’m telling you now this process is only going to get worse. The office up there has some good people but there are others—others who might not be as sympathetic.”

  “What do you mean, not as sympathetic?”

  “I mean that there are people,” Brenda spoke slowly in a clear effort to be diplomatic, “who are more concerned about filling in the paperwork and putting in the hours than the lives they are affecting.”

  Great, all Alexi needed. A caseworker who wouldn’t listen.

  “I have no control over who will be assigned your file. But, as you know,” Brenda went on, “I have a heavy workload and transferring your file may take longer than I originally anticipated.”

  Alexi breathed out. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Brenda said. “I am doing this for the sake of your family. And for Richard. To be honest, I don’t know if he would’ve approved, Alexi.”

  As soon as the call ended, Alexi opened her phone photo of Richard. All she could see was Richard’s smile and open face. “I was right, wasn’t I?” she whispered.

  All he did was smile at her. It was all he’d done for the past year.

  The door opened and out came Seth. “Sink’s in,” he said with his usual verbosity.

  “Thanks.” Would there ever come a time when she wouldn’t have to say that to him?

  “All it does is drain. You can’t run water into it yet. There’s a plug.”

  “It’s an improvement. Thank you. Now you can get back to your real job.”

  He grunted, whether in agreement or not she wasn’t sure. “You okay?”

  He’d overheard. She smiled. “No worries. Just sorting details out with the caseworker. Comes with the territory.”

  He frowned and pointed to her head. “I meant that.”

  “Oh! Ah. Yes. It’s fine. Thanks for asking.” Honestly, he must think her touched in the head.

  “See you’re still limping. You got ice for that?”

  When had he noticed? “No point. It would melt anyway. Remember? No freezer.”

  “That’ll change soon. Connie will be back Wednesday.”

  In two days. If they could survive that long.

  “She’ll take over. Bring in the trades.” Seth spoke with a kind of grim optimism, the kind she knew all too well, the kind that believed the burning house could be saved with enough buckets of water. Then again, what else could he say? What else could she say?

  “Oh, good,” she said casually, as if what he said was a given. She glanced at the kids who were screaming at each other in excitement and fear, the way kids playing do.

  Seth was looking at them, too. Frowning, probably thinking the worst if she was on the line with child protection. She made herself say, “I’m adopting Matt. That’s why I was talking to the caseworker.”

  “Where is he?”

  He was frowning, not because of who the kids were but because one was not there. That was touching, except for how he’d immediately zeroed in on Matt. “I sent him off to Mac’s to get himself a treat. His wages,” she joked. “He said he’d asked you if you wanted something and you said no.”

  Seth didn’t smile back. “He didn’t say he was doing it alone. Does he know where to go?”

  “He knows. I trust him.” Please, Matt, don’t let me down.

  As if he heard her, the gate swung open and in walked Matt. He carried a tray of three medium slushies and one large one. In the other tray was a large one and an extra-large one. So much for any change.

  The kids spotted Matt and rushed him, at the same time Matt spotted Seth on the back deck. “Hey, Seth Greene! I got you a slushie.” He clutched the tray with the largest slushie while his siblings tore the other from his grasp.

  “You guys get the medium ones, I get the large one,” he advised them in no uncertain terms as he snatched his. “Because I worked the hardest,” he added, shutting down Bryn before there was an argument.

  Matt mounted the stairs to Seth. “Here’s yours. I didn’t know which flavors you like so I got a little of them all.” He held out a monster-sized slush of rainbow colors and handed Alexi a mostly orange one. “I know you said you didn’t want anything but it didn’t seem right.”

  Alexi took it and thanked him. Seth looked set to refuse and Alexi held her breath. Part of her wanted him to blow Matt off to stop any attachment from developing. The rest of her didn’t want Matt to face one more rejection.

  Seth must’ve looked too long into Matt’s puppy eyes because he took the drink so enormous his own large hand was stretched to grip it. “Thanks. You shouldn’t have.”

  He wasn’t a very good liar, and he seemed to know it because he straightened and tried again. “I appreciate you thinking of me.”

  The mighty Seth Greene had twice thanked a child for something he didn’t want.

  “No worries. We really appreciate all that you’re doing for us here,” her far-too-mature son
said. Yet again, pride and sadness twisted in her heart.

  Not thinking, she took a long, restorative slurp on her slushie...and got instant brain freeze.

  Seth gave Matt a long look. “Glad to be of help, Matt.” He took an extended slurp on his rainbow drink. From his sudden grimace, Alexi knew that he, too, had contracted her present condition.

  Matt grinned at them. “Pretty good, eh?”

  Seth eyed his ten-inch-high drink. “You betcha.”

  He slid Alexi a secretive look that conveyed his real thoughts on the matter, and she quickly clamped her lips around the straw to hide her smile. Oh, boy. Mr. Grumpy had made her and her kid happy within seconds. Alexi could only imagine what effect he’d have if he actually tried.

  Not that she wanted him to.

  * * *

  ABOUT SUPPERTIME THE next day, Seth and Ben were up on their ninth roof in four hours, preparing an estimate, when Ben dropped the news that Connie was back in town. “She was working tables at lunch.”

  Seth looked up from his phone calculator. Back a day early. “Did she say if she called Alexi? Her tenant?”

  Ben stepped to the overhang with his tape measure and pulled out a good length, his back to Seth. “No. It never came up.”

  After a lifetime of friendship, Seth detected tension in Ben’s voice. Why did the man keep beating himself up? Spirit Lake was small, but not so small that he had to eat where his ex-girlfriend worked.

  “She’s doing the dinner shift, too,” Ben said over his shoulder.

  Which was his way of telling Seth where she could be found without encouraging him to go there. Neither of them had brought up the issue of Connie since the ball game, and Ben already seemed of two minds about telling him she was back in town. So after Seth passed the estimate to the owner, who agreed unhappily to the underlined number on the bottom, he told Ben only that he was calling it a day, and they agreed to meet at the crack of dawn, as per every day lately.

  Seth made straight for Smooth Sailing. Connie was behind the bar at the taps. She looked up with a customer-friendly grin, which vanished at the sight of him. She returned to leveling off a sleeve of beer she carried to a guy in a work shirt and a baseball cap on the other side of the bar. He glanced from his idle interest in a poker game on the wall-mounted television to notice his drink and Connie’s chest.

  It must burn Ben to see other guys take their peeks. Seth wouldn’t like it happening to his girlfriend. If he had one. Not that he was interested in having one, anyway. It was enough trouble helping out a random single mom.

  Seth swung onto a stool beside the taps. “Hey, what do I have to do to get a little service around here?” Seth said loud enough so Connie couldn’t pretend she didn’t hear.

  Her back to him, he knew from the way the guy’s face split into a sudden grin that Connie had pulled a funny face. She turned and moseyed real slow over to him.

  “You’re here to nag me about the house, aren’t you?” She pulled out a pricey foreign beer from a fridge under the bar. She popped off the top and set it square in front of him before he could stop her.

  “I’m not getting that. I want whatever’s on tap.”

  “You have to order something so it might as well be something that comes with a bigger tip.”

  “I can give you a tip, if that’s what you want. Like how to keep a happy tenant. You been over to see Alexi yet?”

  “Not likely. I’m into conflict avoidance.”

  “Well, I’m not.” Seth picked up the beer and read the label. A Scottish beer. He took a swig. It was actually not half bad, not that he was going to tell her that.

  She turned away but he called after her, “She’s living in a house that has no floor, Connie. No running water in the kitchen. Only one bathroom with a toilet and sink that work and that’s because I fixed them. She has four kids. Don’t you have any common decency?”

  The guy had perked up, and the two office girls at the far end were tracking her, too. Connie spun and stomped back.

  “I didn’t ask you to go over there and fix it!” she hissed, her hands fisted into her hips.

  “You didn’t ask anyone to fix it. You let her move in, knowing what it was like.”

  “I tried to call her. It’s not my fault.”

  “Yes, Connie. It. Is. How about you fix your house?” He took another pull on his beer. This really was good stuff.

  “Yeah, my house, not yours, so butt out.”

  “You’re incredible. Did you know your tenant is on the verge of suing you because of the condition?”

  “Let her sue me. Renovations take longer than I thought. I’ll just sue the contractors and she’ll never get anywhere.”

  She strode off to serve a new customer, her smile wide and fake. He should finish his beer and let it go. Where had helping others ever got him?

  Yet, as soon as Connie was within normal speaking range again, he couldn’t stop himself. “Why do you bring trouble onto yourself, Con? Why couldn’t you have just left things the way they were?”

  Connie’s eyes flashed. “Because it was old and ugly and nothing, nothing about it had changed. I tried to live there. I lasted four days. You’ve no idea how much I hate the house.”

  “I’ve got a good idea,” Seth said.

  “Mom gave me the place to get back at me.”

  Seth stared. “How can you possibly think that? She wanted you to have a roof over your head.”

  “Because she knew I didn’t have the brains to get one for myself!”

  Where did she get off with that attitude? “Maybe she was right.”

  His sister sucked in her breath. He did, too. They looked away from each other, at different spots on the bar counter. He had overstepped the line. No small part of his frustration with Connie over the years came from the fact that she wasn’t dumb. She was brighter than him or Mel or most everyone he knew. But she wasted it. In her earlier years on drugs, alcohol and bad boys. Now mostly on bad boys. It was no use telling her how intelligent she was. She wouldn’t believe him.

  “That was uncalled for,” he said softly.

  She snorted. “Doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. Spent most of my life depending on others. Too dumb for school, too smart for the streets. Always doing some job that doesn’t get me ahead.”

  Just as he figured, she didn’t believe him. “You make enough money.”

  “You know what it takes to live? The bare minimum?”

  He thought of Alexi with four kids. “I bet your tenant does.”

  Connie narrowed her eyes. “From what Mel tells me, you’re going way beyond the call of duty with this one. How many times you’ve been over there to fix her pipes? Something you’re not telling me?”

  In his mind popped an image of Alexi’s lips suctioned around the slushie straw, then spreading into a secret smile with him. One of those commonplace moments an intimate couple shared.

  Nope, nothing to say.

  “Point is, you own the house. You have a responsibility to keep it in working order. There are laws against renting a place that doesn’t have running water, Connie.”

  She picked up a dish towel and began to buff the counter. “Look, I don’t have the money to fix it. I bought the flooring and the countertop. It’s all stacked in the basement. The fridge, oven, microwave are on order. I thought I could do it with some help but it didn’t happen.” She lifted her hand, palm out, as if testifying. “I tried, okay? I’m not keeping on with something there’s no way I can do. So I tell you what. You fix it up, and you can have the rent money for the next six months. She can even write the check out in your name.”

  Exactly what he expected. Sticking him with her mess. “I don’t need the money. I’m up to my eyeballs with roofing jobs. The storm has meant we’re the busiest ever. I don’t have time.”

  Connie tossed the towel aside. “
Then I guess she’s out of luck.”

  Seth stood. “You really are a piece of work, you know? Don’t you care about anybody except yourself?”

  “Caring for myself takes all I got.”

  In that second, Seth envied Connie. She could walk away from her messes, not at all weighed down by any sense of responsibility. “Why do I bother with you when all you ever are is ungrateful and irresponsible?”

  Connie leaned in. “You bother, big brother, because you’re a class-A jerk who thinks he’s above everyone else when all you are is a man with a hammer on somebody else’s roof.”

  With that, she fixed him with her widest smile, one that didn’t look the least bit fake to him, scooped up a menu and strolled over to the man who’d long lost interest in poker and looked ready to take a gamble on Connie.

  Seth paid for his beer with a twenty and left without asking for change.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHEN ALEXI SPOTTED Seth rounding the corner of the house into the backyard, she didn’t know whether to hustle him away for Matt’s sake or latch on to him for all their sakes. All four kids were there, Matt and Bryn having invented a game with the rebar and binder twine they’d found under the back deck. Matt had the hammer from Richard’s toolbox and was building what looked from her view at the kitchen window like a very complicated cat’s cradle. Bryn immediately launched into an explanation of the game to Seth, while Matt stopped pounding and regarded Seth with the same shy wondering look he’d reserved for Richard.

  She came out onto the deck in time to hear Matt say to Bryn, “He’s an adult. Maybe he doesn’t want to play a kids’ game.”

  “But he plays baseball. That’s a kids’ game.”

  “But he plays it with adults, so it’s an adult game.”

  “Dad played kids’ games with us and he was an adult.”

  Bryn, too, wanted a piece of Seth Greene. Loneliness. Here was a man in their backyard, exactly where a father hung out. Except the difference was that if Bryn got too attached it wouldn’t result in him being taken from her.

  Seth, for his part, began to sidle away from the boys toward her. “Hey, guys, I need to talk to your mom. I’ll catch up with you all in a bit.”