by Nancy Martin
“Better?”
“No, just different.”
But Rose’s words, spoken to ease whatever turmoil was in Susannah’s mind, didn’t smooth the expression of anxiety from her granddaughter’s face. Instead, Susannah seemed to withdraw even further.
Rose leaned across the table and touched Susannah’s hand. “Suzie, what’s wrong? Did Joe say something to hurt your feelings?”
“No, he just...well, he’s made me question the way I do things, I guess. He was pretty pushy about it, in fact.”
“You mustn’t hold his pushiness against him,” Rose said with a laugh. “Remember, he is from the city—Chicago, to be exact.”
“And he was married? He chased his wife away, I suppose.”
“No, not at all. Joe’s a widower,” Rose explained, watching Susannah’s expression change from frustration to interest. “His wife died of cancer, I believe, after a long, hard struggle. He doesn’t seem to be bitter about it, but I’m sure his wife’s death was very difficult.”
Susannah swallowed hard. “I see. I think I’m starting to understand why he said some of the things he did to me.”
“Suzie, are you all right? Did he really upset you? Is there something I can do?”
Susannah smiled uncertainly. “Of course not, Granny Rose. I’m just... Oh, maybe I’ve been working too hard lately. I’m a little touchy and burned-out. Maybe I was too sensitive.”
“And now I’m causing you to miss your vacation.”
“Don’t say that!” Susannah squeezed Rose’s hand back. “I’m not going to miss it. I’m just postponing it for a while. I want to hear what Dr. Phelps has to say about you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me! I’m a tough old bird!”
“I have a right to be concerned, though. I love you, Granny Rose. I don’t want to see you get run down—especially not before Christmas. I know how much you enjoy the holidays.”
“I’m fine!”
“But you work so hard at this time of year. It worries me to think you’ll soon be slaving to get ready for your annual party.”
The week before Christmas, Rose always baked cookies, decorated her house for the holidays and opened her doors for an evening of singing and socializing. At one time, she used to bring out a birthday cake at eight o’clock—since the party was always held on Susannah’s birthday. But as a teenager Susannah had refused to celebrate her birthday that way, so the party became a Christmas affair.
“I won’t knock myself out,” Rose promised.
“Will you let me help? I can do a lot before I leave for my trip.”
“Why, that would be very nice, dear. We could decorate and do some baking.”
“My favorite things.” Susannah smiled. “So that’s settled. Now, have you phoned Dr. Phelps yet?”
“Yes,” said Rose, surprising her granddaughter with the truth. “I called just before you got here. I have an appointment at ten.” Rose checked her watch. “In fifteen minutes.”
“Wonderful! I’m glad he’s going to see you so promptly. I’ll take you.”
“Don’t be silly, dear. His office is a few blocks away. I can walk.”
“Well, then, I’ll come along.”
Rose took a deep breath and said, “I’d rather see my doctor in private, Susannah. Do you mind?”
By the expression of surprise on Susannah’s face, Rose could see that her granddaughter did mind. Obviously, she wanted to hear a prognosis from the horse’s mouth. But she covered her dismay and said, “No, I don’t mind. I understand completely. But surely there’s something I can do. I’d like to be useful.”
“Well,” Rose said firmly, “there is one errand you could run for me.”
Susannah smiled. “Name it.”
“Go over to Joe Santori’s house and tell him I’d like the other repairs on my house to begin immediately.”
Susannah’s blue eyes popped wide. But...but shouldn’t you wait for an estimate from another contractor?“
“No need for that! I know Joe and his work, and he’s the man for the job. My mind is made up.”
Susannah was definitely flustered as she said, “But what if he can’t squeeze you into his schedule? Maybe he’s too busy for—”
“Oh, he’ll find the time for me, I’m sure. He said so last night. Will you go see him?”
“Well...”
“Ask him if he could start on the kitchen first and save the boring things for later—the roof or whatever. I wonder if it’s possible to have some of the kitchen work finished before my party? I’d really like to have a new counter and sink before then.”
“It’s starting to sound expensive.”
“What’s money for? That sink should have been replaced years ago. And wouldn’t you like to see the kitchen looking new for my party?”
“Yes, of course,” Susannah said faintly.
“And you can help, Suzie. I might as well choose some new wallpaper and such. You’re such a whiz at that! Between you and Joe, I’m sure my kitchen will look wonderful in no time! Tell him I’d like him to start right away.”
Susannah looked stricken for an instant, but she recovered. “No matter how good Joe is, he won’t get all that done before your Christmas do. But all right. I’ll go see him, Granny Rose.”
“Fine.”
Rose hopped up and grabbed her coat before Susannah could think of an excuse to avoid speaking to Joe again. She gave Susannah Joe’s correct address and made certain that her granddaughter knew exactly how to get there. Then, with cheery goodbyes for everyone in the diner, Rose went off to her doctor’s appointment.
With Rose gone, Susannah sat for several minutes, ostensibly to finish her coffee. Actually, she was working up the courage to go looking for Joe Santori. She finally paid Marge for their breakfasts on her way out the door. A chorus of goodbyes rang out as Susannah left the diner, making her feel as if she’d been warmly welcomed back to Tyler. She waved to everyone and set off down the street.
Determined to settle things with the exasperatingly attractive and annoyingly bossy Mr. Santori as quickly as possible, she walked briskly to Joe’s house, a mere three blocks from the diner. The sun sparkled brightly on the snow-covered lawns of Tyler, looking very pretty. The whole town was just as delightful as it always was. She had to dart out of the way of a gigantic snowplow when she crossed Main Street, but the driver of the plow tooted his horn and waved to her in a friendly way. Susannah waved back.
When she arrived at the Santori residence, Susannah realized she knew the house. It had been the home of her second-grade teacher, Miss Sternburg, who’d unfortunately let the place go to rack and ruin in her later years. Susannah was glad to see that Joe had rescued the structure. It was a charming Victorian house—not nearly as large as Susannah’s grandmother’s, but every bit as picturesque, with gingerbread trim, a pretty side porch with a rose trellis, a picket fence draped with Christmas lights and a separate garage attached to the house by a covered walkway overgrown with grapevines. The house was yellow with white trim, and the mailbox at the front gate had been built to match the shape and configuration of the garage. Over the garage door was a sign that read simply, Santori Construction.
Looking at that quaint yellow house—so obviously a labor of love—gave Susannah pause. It was the house of a man who cared about little things. He cared about his house, his neighbors, his grape arbor, his roses. Obviously, he even cared about little old ladies who lived a few blocks away.
Susannah’s courage almost failed her. Maybe Joe was right. Maybe she needed to butt in where her grandmother’s health was concerned and damn the consequences. Perhaps Joe’s experience with his wife’s illness had led him to the conclusion that not interfering was far worse than hurting someone’s feelings.
Torn, Susannah almost turned around and walked away. But as she hesitated on the sidewalk, who should come around the corner at that moment but Lars, the newspaper boy.
He spotted Susannah and gave her a big, loopy grin. �
�Hi, Miss Atkins!”
“Good morning again, Lars.”
“What are you doing here? Looking for Mr. Santori?”
“Well, yes.”
“Have you seen Gina yet?”
“Gina? Oh, his daughter. No, I haven’t.”
Lars looked disappointed. “Oh. I was hoping she’d be around this morning. Sometimes she’s having breakfast when I bring the paper. I like to wave at her through the window. That’s their breakfast room right there. Through that big window.” Lars pointed a long, bony finger toward the large picture window at the front of the Victorian turret. “Once Gina opened the window and gave me an English muffin. It was a little burned around the edges, but I didn’t mind.”
“She’s a friend of yours?” Susannah asked, amused by Lars’s loquaciousness with a celebrity.
Lars sighed. “I wish she was. But most of the time Gina doesn’t know I exist.”
I should be so lucky with another member of the Santori family, Susannah thought. “Well, I’m sure that will change eventually.”
Shaking his head, Lars said, “I don’t know. Gina can be real tough sometimes. She’s the star of the girls’ basketball team, you know. Last game, she broke another girl’s nose. It was an accident, of course—I guess basketball can get kinda rough under the hoops—but that nose was broken in two places. She’s something.”
Susannah had walked with Lars up the sidewalk and the porch steps. As they reached the front door, it was suddenly yanked open from within. A slim, dark-haired girl stood inside, looking belligerent.
“It’s about time you got here,” she said to Lars. “Where’s the paper? I want to check the hockey scores.”
“The paper’s r-right here, Gina,” said Lars, eagerly digging one out of his bag. “There’s a sale at Gates Department Store, and a Kevin Costner movie is playing at the theater in Belton.”
With sarcasm, Gina said, “Great. Too bad I hate shopping almost as much as I hate Kevin Costner.” She snatched the newspaper out of the boy’s hand.
“Yeah,” Lars said faintly. “Too bad.”
He shuffled off the porch, head drooping, and soon disappeared around the corner.
Susannah turned back to Gina. “Lars seems like a nice boy.”
Gina shrugged. “I’m not into boys. Can I help you?”
Susannah maintained her smile in the face of the girl’s blunt behavior. “My name is Susannah Atkins. I was wondering if your father is—”
Gina snapped her fingers. “The lady on television!” Her eyes widened as she recognized a celebrity standing on her front porch. “Oh, Susannah!”
Susannah smiled politely. “Yes, I’m Susannah Atkins, all right.”
“I hate that show,” Gina said with only the slightest trace of apology—a characteristic Susannah recognized she shared with her opinionated father. The girl leaned her shoulder against the open door and folded her arms over her chest, saying, “It’s all girl junk. I think it’s demeaning to women.”
“It’s a household-hints program,” Susannah shot back at once. “I don’t decide who actually performs the things I discuss on my show, do I?”
“I—I guess not.”
“So it’s only demeaning to women if you assume cooking and cleaning and making a home is solely women’s work. I’m not the one who decides which member of the family ought to do the car repairs and who ought to do the laundry. That’s up to my viewers.”
“I see,” said Gina, blinking and standing up straight.
“Now,” said Susannah. “Is your father at home?”
“He’s not, I’m sorry,” Gina replied, remembering her manners at last and suddenly behaving like a girl who was accustomed to helping run her father’s business. “Sometimes he works on Saturday mornings. After he got back from Mrs. Atkins’s house, he went over to an auction in Bonneville to buy some salvage stuff—some old porch railings, I think. Are you the one he’s buying them for?”
“No, I’m not. I have some other business to discuss with him.”
“I’ll take a message,” Gina said. “Will you come inside while I write everything down?”
The girl stood aside, giving Susannah a glimpse of the cozy interior—a living room with overstuffed furniture and a jumble of books and magazines on the coffee table. Susannah quailed at the thought of setting foot in Joe’s house. Already, she felt like an intruder in his life. And besides, there were some things best said in person.
“No,” she said to Gina, backing down the first porch step. “I’ll catch up with him later.”
“I’ll be glad to tell him anything,” Gina offered.
“Thanks. I’m sure you do a good job for your father. But I’d rather talk to him face-to-face.”
Gina shrugged, looking at Susannah curiously. “Have it your way.”
Susannah went down the porch steps, feeling both relieved and frustrated. She’d been almost happy to avoid a confrontation with him, but a part of her wished she could have another chance with Joe. After all, his heart was in the right place. Once she’d screwed up her courage to confront him, she hated leaving without speaking to the man. But she had no choice.
Queerly churned up inside, Susannah walked back to the square and decided to do a little shopping to calm her nerves while waiting for Rose to finish with her doctor’s appointment.
Shopping was better than tranquilizers.
Gates Department Store had always been the place to shop in Tyler. When Susannah was growing up, the establishment had been a child’s adventure, with its three floors of merchandise, a quiet luncheonette in the basement and two brass elevators to whisk customers throughout the store. The display windows brought gawkers from far and wide with their beautiful and sometimes extravagant tableaux of merchandise. Ellie Gates, the founder and owner, had been an eccentric single woman with a flair for the dramatic and artistic. In her youth, Susannah had greatly admired the indomitable woman.
The lunch specialty on Saturdays had included a scoop of chocolate ice cream with colored sprinkles, a detail that was still surprisingly vivid in Susannah’s memory. At Gates, Tyler citizens could buy a spool of thread, a pair of shoes, a toaster or even a parakeet, and the loyalty of the shoppers had prevented the development of a giant shopping mall that would have spoiled the surrounding countryside.
Susannah tried on a pair of pearl earrings, admired the selection of handbags and bought one for Rose for Christmas. Eventually she also bought herself a red sweater she didn’t need—particularly if she intended to leave Tyler shortly for the Caribbean. The friendly clerk chatted as she wrapped the sweater and processed Susannah’s credit card by running the papers through the store’s old-fashioned pneumatic tubes.
Deciding to forgo the chocolate ice cream with sprinkles because the last thing she needed was a sugar-induced depression, Susannah walked back to Dr. Phelps’s office.
“Oh, hi, Susannah. Your grandmother left about fifteen minutes ago,” the receptionist, Anna Kelsey, told her.
“Where did she go? Is she all right?”
“She seemed fine to me. I think she was heading home.”
Susannah thanked the woman and walked back to her grandmother’s house along the snow-dusted sidewalks.
She froze on the corner when she noticed Joe Santori’s truck parked at the curb in front of her grandmother’s house.
“Now what?” she mumbled to herself, startled to find herself trembling all over.
She mounted the porch steps and let herself into the large house. “Granny Rose?”
No answer. With exasperation, Susannah wondered if her grandmother had intentionally left her alone to deal with Joe.
Susannah softly closed the door behind her and kicked off her boots. She cleared her throat and called unsteadily, “Anybody here?”
“I’d rather not be,” rumbled Joe’s voice from the kitchen.
Susannah followed the sound and entered the kitchen with trepidation.
She found Joe—or the lower half of him, an
yway—lying on the kitchen floor wedged under the sink, while a pool of water puddled around his body. His long legs lay diagonally across the wet linoleum, with one boot braced against a kitchen chair. Water dripped from his jeans.
“What in the world are you doing?”
“Working on the sink,” Joe replied from deep inside the cabinet. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Swimming,” Susannah replied.
“There’s always a comedian in every crowd,” Joe grumbled, dropping a wrench onto the floor with a splash. “Is that you, Miss Suzie?”
Folding her coat over another kitchen chair and placing her Gates bag on the table, Susannah said, “It is. And I’ve been looking all over town for you.”
“How flattering,” said Joe from beneath the sink. “You missed me, huh?”
Susannah was glad he couldn’t see her blush. “No.” She leaned down and tried to peer into the darkness of the cabinet. “I was supposed to tell you that my grandmother wants you to fix up her kitchen before the party next week, but I see you got the message.”
“Mrs. A. flagged me down on the street.”
“Where is she now?”
Joe began to ease his way out from under the sink. His voice was a little breathless as he inched backward. “I dropped her at the drugstore, and then she was going to pick up some fabric for a quilt. She said she’d be home soon.”
“Should she be walking?”
“Maybe not,” Joe said. “But I had no luck convincing her that I could be her taxi.”
A moment later, Joe emerged gingerly from underneath the sink, shaking his grease-stained hands to shed some of the water he’d collected. His hair looked curlier than ever, and possibly because it was Saturday, he hadn’t shaved. The resulting growth of beard, even more noticeable now than earlier, gave Joe a tough, piratelike air. And Susannah had always had a soft spot for pirates.
Hastily, she banished that thought from her mind. “I was supposed to hire you for this job,” she said primly. “What are you doing, exactly?”
Joe gestured with his thumb. “This old sink leaks. I figure I better check the pipes before I put in a new one or start replacing the counter.”
