by Peggy Jaeger
Before driving off, I waved at him. He didn’t wave back. That notion about snuggling up against him went the way of the dinosaur as I drove home.
Chapter 8
The sixth sneeze in less than a minute blew from me like a nor’easter roaring along the shoreline.
“God bless you,” Frayne said.
Again.
If I had my dates correct, Nanny had filled these storage units more than fifteen years ago and, from the layers of dust covering everything jam-packed into them, hadn’t come back one time since the locks were secured.
All three units were side by side, making it easy to go from one to the other. The storage facility was located on the outskirts of town and covered twenty acres of county-owned land. Nanny had the forethought to rent units housed inside the facility and not facing the outside elements. I was thankful we weren’t relegated to years of dust and frigid temperatures while we dug through them.
I’d run home after meeting with my client and changed from work clothes into sweat pants that had seen me through four years of college, then law school, and one of Danny’s old army sweatshirts. If I was going to get dirty, I wanted it to be in comfortable, washable clothes. I checked on George, who was a little doggy-confused about why I was home in the middle of the morning. A few minutes spent loving on him, and then I left.
Frayne was waiting for me at the storage facility when I pulled up.
“We should have brought filtration masks with us,” I said. “This dust could be filled with mold spores.”
I’d had some foresight on the dirt situation and had packed various rags and multipurpose cleaning solution in addition to Danny’s Swiss Army knife to slice open any taped boxes.
We’d unlocked the first two units for convenience. No one was going to be visiting any of the other lockers on a wicked cold January Tuesday, and I was confident we’d have free rein of the hallway to pull items out and strew them along the space for inspection. When I rolled the unlocked door up to the ceiling, I’d sneezed a series of rapid tornado blasts from the cyclone of stale air and dust clouds spiraling up from a decade-plus of confinement. I’d learned my lesson with the first unit, and when I unlocked the second, I covered my mouth and nose with a clean rag.
By mutual agreement, Frayne and I decided to split up and each take a locker to determine if there was any order to their storage.
After two minutes in mine, I knew there wasn’t.
“Found anything yet?” Frayne called.
I lifted another huge plastic container filled with Christmas ornaments—the eighth one so far—and yelled back, “Nope. You?”
“No. I’ve got dozens of bags of what look like formal dresses, like for a wedding, though.”
“Those are probably Nanny’s concert clothes.”
I grabbed another box, this one labeled Travel. After slicing the masking tape with Danny’s knife, I found it filled with concert programs from all over Europe. The dates were mixed, but most were from the 1940s and 50s.
“Concert clothes?”
I jumped and dropped the pamphlet I held in my hand. Frayne stood right behind me. He was holding a garment bag, and through the unzipped opening, several beaded gowns in various shades of red, Nanny’s signature color, peeped through. Despite being a flaming redhead—or because of it, I never knew which—she wore the vibrant color when she performed, while the rest of the company was garbed in the traditional mix of black and white.
“Jesus. You should wear a bell.”
One corner of his mouth tilted upward.
“My grandmother was a professional concert pianist and traveled the world with various symphonies. Those”—I nodded to the bag in his hand—“are some of the gowns she wore when she played.”
“She must have led some life.”
I lifted the box of concert programs. “She did. This is filled with programs from some of the places she performed.”
He reached out for it, and I stepped around a pile of plastic containers to hand it to him.
He was dressed, like me, for comfort and cleaning. A pair of ratty, torn-at-the-knees faded jeans cupped his butt and made me want to do the same and covered his long legs. A Dartmouth College sweatshirt with holes in the elbows kept him warm on top. He hadn’t shaved today, and the mix of gray, white, and peppery-black stubble over his jaw and cheeks made me want to drag my fingers across it. I don’t think he’d showered, either, because his hair was even more of a riot than usual. It needed a good brushing, in addition to a trim. Reading glasses were perched halfway down his nose as he regarded me over the top of the rims. Today, his eyes were clear and focused, the pain haunting them, hidden.
He was such a mix of adorable and sexy, I wanted to fold him into my arms, hold him close, and squeeze his enticing ass.
Because the urge to do it was overpowering, I turned back to work after handing him the box.
“I don’t think there’s a concert hall in Europe she hasn’t played.” He rifled through the programs.
“She’s been to Asia three times, too.” I popped open another plastic container. “Criminy. How many Christmas decorations does one person need? This is the ninth box I’ve opened.”
“I’ve got a few ornament boxes in my unit as well. They look…ancient.”
His gaze drifted to the mound of boxes still in the middle and back of the unit and shook his head. I tried to move a large garment container from the top of an old wooden hope chest, but it was awkwardly shaped and heavy, not to mention covered in dust. I started rapid-fire sneezing again and would have dropped the box if Frayne hadn’t reached out and grabbed it—and me.
Like an off switch had been flicked, I stopped sneezing. My eyes were watery and my nose was threatening to dribble as I stared up at him. I could imagine how pathetic and unattractive I must have looked.
His clothes and hair were dust-streaked, and tiny particles were stuck to the prickly hairs on his face. A tingle of acute awareness shot through me, and for a moment I simply lost my breath. It had been long, too long, since I’d experienced anything remotely resembling arousal, and I needed a few seconds to make sure I didn’t give into my thoughts and jump him.
Why Mac Frayne, a man who I seriously thought only tolerated me because I could help him with something, should be the one my long-dormant and now-screaming hormones were zeroing in on, was baffling.
“You okay?” His voice was low and deep as he peered over his glasses at me. His brows grooved under the wild fringe of hair falling across his forehead, and my hands did that tingly thing again, wanting to reach up and push it back.
“Y-yes. Sorry. The box was heavier than it looked.” I took a subtle step backward, and he let go of my arm.
When he appeared convinced I was surefooted, he grabbed the box with both hands and then reached for a rag to wipe the dust.
“There’s a label on this. It’s pretty faded.” He adjusted his glasses and examined it closer. “I think it says Wedding: # 1. The word number is a hash tag. Is this your grandmother’s wedding dress from her first marriage, do you think?”
While he’d been busy with the label, I’d moved back to the hope chest and lifted the top.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing. Why?”
“You gasped.”
“Oh. I was surprised, that’s all. This trunk is filled with stuff from my wedding. I didn’t even know Nanny had these things. Let me see that box.”
He held it up for me.
“That’s not my grandmother’s wedding dress; it’s mine.”
“You’ve been married more than once?”
“What? Oh, no. No.” I lifted out a framed wedding picture of Danny and me. After a quick glance, I put it down on a container. “My grandmother refers to us by numerical order. I’m the oldest grandchild so she calls me Number One, ergo, the label. Colleen, unfortunately is Number Two, a name she still despises to this day but really hated when we were kids. Maureen is four.”
“What happened to three?”
“That was Eileen, Mo’s twin. The one who died.”
While I rummaged through the chest, Frayne went silent. When I turned, he was staring at my wedding photo.
“You look very young in this picture.”
“We were both eighteen. Graduated from high school a month before. He left for boot camp a week after the wedding.”
Frayne placed the picture back down on the container. His brows were kissing again. “Why does your grandmother call you and your sisters by numbers? It’s…odd, to say the least.”
“The very least,” I quipped. “It’s a long-standing feud with my mother. Nanny hated she’d given us all similar names because she wanted to play up our Irish roots. Nanny thought it made us all seem clichéd and sounded kooky.”
“Cathleen, Colleen, Eileen, and Maureen.”
“Yeah. It’s pretty obnoxious sounding when the names are all said in a row. Nanny started calling us by number as a way to annoy my mother. It worked, but it also made our lives miserable when we were kids, especially Colleen. To this day, she’s still scarred.”
“You’re all adults now. Why does she still refer to you that way?”
I shrugged, a tiny dust cloud wafting from my shoulders with the movement. “Habit, more than anything, I think.” I opened a scrapbook I found sitting in the chest. It was filled with photographs of my engagement party, my wedding shower, the ceremony. “God, we were young,” I said as I turned the pages. “I’ve never even seen some of these.”
“I would think this is an example of the items your grandmother didn’t want thrown away. Those kinds of memories are precious.”
What did old photographs mean to me now? It wasn’t like Danny and I were going to be sitting by a fireside one day, regaling our grandchildren about our younger lives. We’d had no children, therefore grandchildren couldn’t be considered. End of story. Here I was, thirty-nine years old, no husband, no kids, no prospects of either anywhere in my future. I’d done everything I was supposed to do in life, everything my parents pushed me to do and expected me to. Gotten married, became a lawyer, planned a future. Danny had wanted kids as much as I had. Until he’d decided he didn’t.
A ball of anger started to swell within me as the memory of the last time he was home on leave jumped to the front of my mind. The hurtful words, the accusations, the lies, the truth finally rearing its head.
As quick as the anger grew, it died.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up from the scrapbook. He’d slung his glasses into the neckline of his sweatshirt and moved closer to me, concern filling his eyes.
Was I?
“I’m fine.” I snapped the book closed. “Look, this trip down memory lane isn’t getting us any closer to finding Robert’s things. Help me move this chest out of the way. I want to get to the back wall.”
I don’t think he believed me, but he didn’t argue.
When we’d moved the chest into the hallway, an entire new row of boxes and plastic containers appeared.
“I’m gonna scream if those are filled with more holiday decorations.”
A ghost of a grin crossed Frayne’s sexy mouth. “I’m going back next door to rummage. Call out if you find anything promising.”
“You, too.”
An hour later, after opening more boxes and containers, the only thing worthwhile I’d uncovered were some publicity shots of Nanny from her touring days, remarkably preserved, their color still brilliant.
She’d been a looker, for sure. Tumbles of curly, flame-shot hair framed a perfect face of porcelain skin and periwinkle eyes. As an homage to the times, a scarlet slash of red covered her lips, and her cheeks were the color of ripe cherries. It was no wonder she’d taken four trips down the matrimonial aisle. Even at ninety-three, she was still a beautiful woman who looked twenty years younger in any light.
“Found them,” Frayne called from the third unit. After moving everything in the second locker out into the hallway with no luck, he’d opened and started on the last one.
“They were right in the front of the pack.” He came into the hallway, a box under each arm. “I wish we’d started in this unit. I saw six or seven others along the back wall. There may be even more. This locker is the most jammed of all.”
It was impossible not to smile at him. He looked like a kid on Christmas morning who’d found precisely what he’d asked Santa for waiting for him under the tree. He was covered in even more dust, his glasses cloudy with it. I was surprised he could even see through the lenses.
Maureen is the sister with some serious cleaning OCD, but there was no way I could let this go. I reached up and pulled his glasses off his nose. To say the move surprised him was an understatement. Armed with my cleaner, I squirted the lenses and then buffed them dry with a rag. After holding them up to the hallway light to ensure they were now clear, I slid them back on his face, ensuring they were snug around his ears. “Better?”
The lopsided grin he gave me was almost my undoing. “Much. Thanks.”
His eyes were huge behind the glasses, and I understood why he wore them the way he did, perched on the tip of his nose. I must have looked distorted and gigantic as he peered at me through the magnification. The brilliant blue of his irises was stark and clear, the sorrowful cast to them, gone.
In truth, I could have stood there for hours staring at them.
“I’ll go grab some of the boxes,” I said.
Together, we were able to unload fifteen bankers boxes and four huge plastic containers labeled, simply, Robert.
“There’s a lot more here than your grandmother remembered,” Frayne said, prying open a container. “This is going to take a while to go through.”
“Well, we don’t have to do it here.” I pinched my upper lip between my fingers and thought for a moment. “This stuff is, for all intents and purposes, property of the historical society now.”
“Do you want to move it there?”
“No. Not until I know what we’re dealing with. Since I’m the one charged with maintaining the personal archives while Leigh is out, and this stuff definitely falls under that purview, I think we’d be better served carting it all back to my house and then sorting through it.”
“I want to help you go through all this,” he said, opening another container.
“Don’t worry.” I tossed him a side eye. “You’re elected to help since you’re the one who discovered stuff was missing. I don’t relish going through all this by myself. And getting some of the other society members involved would be more trouble than I care to deal with.”
“Why?”
I rolled my eyes and wiped my hands across my sweat pants. “Most of them have a my-way-or-the-highway mentality. While it isn’t necessarily bad, when it comes to organizing and decision-making, they each have a different opinion of how things should be done, and I’d spend 99 percent of my time refereeing arguments rather than getting anything accomplished.”
A tiny grin started at the corner of his mouth and then grew like wild fire across dry grass, engulfing his entire face in mere seconds.
“What?” I asked, enchanted.
“I witnessed that for myself after you left the luncheon. A few of the gents got into a shouting match. I don’t even know what it was about, but all of a sudden voices were raised and faces turned red. One guy, I think Ollie?”
“Olaf.”
“Yeah. Him. He stood up, rammed the table with the flat of his hand, and I thought poor Mrs. Johnson was gonna have a stroke.”
“Probably because she thought he might have done some damage to the antique furniture. She’s very protective of it. Did that end the argument?”
“Not even close. It was…entertaining, to say the least.”
“That’s one word for it.” I shook my head and looked around. The hallway was stacked with boxes, containers, furniture, two bikes, and at least eight tall garment bags. “Since you’ve found what we set out to find, we need t
o put all this stuff back. I’ll come out here some other time with my sisters, and we can go through all Nanny’s personal stuff.”
“You don’t want to take any of it now?” He lifted my wedding picture and the scrapbook I’d left on top of the hope chest.
“No. I need a plan, garbage bags, and my sisters to do this any justice. Not to mention face masks to protect us from the dust. Let’s get it all back in, and then we can load both our cars with Robert’s stuff, okay?”
“If you’re sure.”
I was.
Getting all the crap back into the storage units was easier than taking it out had been. At least I had an idea of what was in store for me when I could get back here.
After dividing the boxes and containers and cramming them into our two cars, Frayne followed me back to my house.
****
When Danny was home on leave the year after I received my law degree, we decided the time had come to get a house of our own. We’d been renting a tiny one-bedroom apartment in town, and since I was now working for my father, we knew having our own property would be beneficial in more ways than one. We toured a few houses in and outside of town and decided on a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouse resembling the home I’d grown up in, something Nanny was quick to point out. When Danny was deployed again, I spent the long lonely months fixing up the house. I became an expert in fuses, electrical wiring, sheetrock, and paint.
Somewhere along the way, the house became more mine than ours; everything in it from the paint colors to the furniture, and even the layouts of the rooms, were all my own choice. When Danny came home on leave, he’d rarely notice any of the cosmetic improvements I’d made, even in the master bedroom, where’d we’d spend the majority of our time when he wasn’t hanging out at the Love Shack—our town bar—with his high school friends, drinking and telling war stories.
Now, with my husband gone, the house had turned from my home to my refuge and safety zone. I never had guests over who weren’t family, and George was the most stable and committed relationship I’d ever had with a male of the species, including my husband.
