Better Than Gold

by Mary Brady

  “So does he know you love him?”

  “I tried to tell him, but he said he’d waited so long he could wait until we were sure it wasn’t the head injury talking.” She sat forward. “I could go to work today—”

  “You could not.”

  “But Mr. Wetherbee and Barbara would be there with me. You could leave and go get some sleep, which you so desperately need.”

  “I’m fine. I’m here until Lenny gets back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “WHY ARE YOU doing this, Mia? It’s Saturday night and you’ve been at it for four days.”

  The streetlight made the rain sparkle off the windows of Braven’s across the street. It was so pretty. Mia heard Monique’s words, but instead of answering, she climbed back up the ladder one more time. Every time she wanted to quit, she climbed back up one more time.

  When she came down the ladder to fill the buckets with debris, Monique shook her by the shoulder. “Please, answer me.”

  Mia looked at her friend. “Because I’m too scared to stop.”

  “You don’t eat well. You don’t sleep well. This is killing you, don’t you see?”

  “Do I give up? Do I give it all up and walk away? The walking away has to stop, why shouldn’t it be me first?”

  “Because the sun does not rise and set just because you have arranged it. Because this is a town full of people who, like it or not, are going to make up their minds the way they want to about the future of this town.” Monique’s voice rose as she spoke. “For the record, though, I hate the thought of you walking away. I missed you when you lived in Boston and Portland and I know I couldn’t stand it if you left again.”

  Mia put a hand on Monique’s heaving chest. “I’ve made you mad, sweetie. You don’t get mad. I’m so sorry.”

  “Does that mean you’ll come with me and get some dinner?”

  “Later. I just need to get a little more finished.”

  Monique’s shoulders drooped. “If you’re still here in two hours when Lenny gets off work, he’ll either help you or he’ll carry you out of here.”

  “Don’t have Lenny come. I can’t have him getting into trouble on my account. Please, promise me.”

  “But you can get into trouble on account of the town?”

  “Maybe you should leave. I need to get back to work. Please don’t send Lenny.”

  “But I’ll—”

  “Just go away, please.”

  Monique walked away and Mia immediately regretted her last words. Her friend did not deserve to be treated badly. As soon as this was all over, she’d make it up to her, somehow.

  * * *

  A COUPLE HOURS after Monique left, Mia was about ready to take a break. Eat the sandwich she had made this morning for lunch, a lunch she should have eaten hours ago. Get some water because she was really thirsty. She lowered herself down the ladder. Each muscle in her legs screamed until she got to the floor. Then she moved the heavy ladder to the next spot.

  When she checked to see how much she had left, she was not sure she had the strength to do the rest. Maybe she could leave it. No. Mr. Markham had said the first people in on Monday would be the inspectors to see what needed to be fixed before the electricians got there shortly after that. If he was to get the work done on time, she was to have held up her end, the demo.

  Just get these buckets out and emptied, she thought.

  The empty buckets seemed to weigh a ton each. The three steps up into the Roost, Mount McKinley. She needed to go home, rest, eat something before she couldn’t even stand.

  Back inside with the buckets, she decided on just one more trip up the ladder. She put the buckets down and got the small claw hammer and crowbar. As she stepped up the ladder, she lost her grip and her balance. Her heel flew out from under her and she hit the floor.

  A split second later and she knew the ladder was coming down on top of her. The only recourse she had was to duck.

  She threw her arms over her head—

  And nothing happened.

  The ladder seemed to be suspended at an impossible angle and then it actually moved back into place against the wall. In that instance her addled brain figured out she wasn’t alone.

  Slowly, afraid to look, afraid not to, she tried to focus her gaze. Daniel MacCarey stood next to the ladder.

  His dark eyes glittered in the harsh work lights, the work lights he had left behind, and for what seemed like the thousandth time since she met him, she could not breathe.

  “Daniel.” She had to force his name out with the air left in her lungs.

  He extended a hand and she shook her head. “I’d get you dirty.” She collected the hammer and pry bar and struggled up from the floor.

  “You look very sexy wielding a hammer.”

  “Oh, you are so cruel.” She knew just how she looked. Sweatband around her head, a flannel shirt so old, no one could possibly remember who the original owner was over a faded orange tank top with a juice stain between her breasts. Dust from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

  “Finished?”

  “What?”

  “Doing an ‘I look terrible’ inventory because you’re wrong.”

  She took in a short breath to try to banish the tremble her chin seemed to have adopted. He knew her so well. He was such a loss, a great loss.

  “Daniel.” She breathed again because just saying his name turned the tremble into quaking. She tried to turn away, but her feet wouldn’t move. Fatigue made her knees sag and she slumped toward the floor.

  Before she knew it, she was being lifted into the air and pulled close to Daniel’s chest. He didn’t say a word as he carried her to his car and put her into the passenger seat. Five minutes later he carried her up to her bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub with her on his lap.

  She curled up with her head down, too tired to be embarrassed. He tugged the kerchief from her head. Next her boots and socks went, followed by her jeans and flannel shirt.

  She vaguely heard him speak to her and then he slid off her tank top and sports bra followed by her panties.

  He must have turned the bathroom heater on because she didn’t feel the cold at all. When she slid into the water she felt herself falling sleep almost immediately.

  The next thing she remembered was waking up with Daniel next to her on the bed, and her kissing him and snuggling against him as she nodded off to sleep again.

  When she awoke the next time it was still dark but she was alone. She must have dreamed Daniel had been there. She wondered when those dreams of him would fade away.

  She stretched to look at the time but what she saw seemed wrong. It was nine o’clock?

  She sat up.

  Daniel was there. He came to Pirate’s Roost and kept the ladder from falling on her head. But that couldn’t be. It was almost one o’clock in the morning when he got there.

  Things were fuzzy after that. A bath. She had a bath. He was beside her in bed.

  She hurled off the covers and stood up until dizziness made her sit down again.

  She couldn’t have slept all day.

  Pulling her arms into her robe, she staggered down the stairs.

  He was standing in the moonlight in the kitchen.

  “How could you?”

  He turned toward her but he didn’t say anything.

  “How could you? I needed to finish that work before the end of today. I had to get it done. How could you?”

  “It’s done.”

  “No, I still have so much to strip and clean up to get done and I have to—”

  “It’s all done.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Did you know there was a group of men and women just waiting for you to ask them to help you? Heck
, if they hadn’t been so afraid you’d chase them away, they would have done it without waiting to be asked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mia, you can’t do it all. None of us can do it all.”

  She tore off upstairs and a couple minutes later she raced back down dressed. In the front hall, she rummaged through the key dish. No car keys.

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “I’ll drive myself.” Where were her keys? She raced to the kitchen. Sometimes she left them there. They weren’t.

  She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “No. I’ll walk.”

  “Mia, stop it.”

  She stopped and kept trying to get her arm into the sleeve of the jacket. Dull anger floated amid the confusion inside her head.

  “You do not understand,” she said through clenched teeth.

  She started for the door again and he grabbed her arm and spun her to face him.

  “You can’t do it all yourself.”

  “I need to, it needs to get done. Don’t you see? I thought this was just a restaurant, but it’s, it’s...” She pulled her arm away.

  He grabbed her again, but this time he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest.

  “Please, Daniel, please let me go.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  She nodded against his sweater and recognized it as her favorite old raggedy one and inhaled a breath of comfort. “Thank you.”

  A chuckle rumbled deeply in his chest and she looked up into his smile. “Now was that so hard?”

  A smile slipped onto her lips. “Immensely.”

  He smoothed back her hair, probably her wild hair, and dropped a quick kiss on her lips.

  She pulled away before she burst into flames. “Let’s go.”

  He made a call on the way to the car. All he said was, “We’re leaving.” Then he pretended that he had made no phone call at all when she asked what that was about. Who did he call?

  When she got into the car there was a bottle of orange juice on the seat and he didn’t pull out of her driveway until she drank it all.

  “Why do I feel as though I’m being manipulated?”

  When they arrived at Pirate’s Roost all the lights were on. She jumped out of his car and ran up to the front door.

  The place was clean. She ran into the kitchen. Not a speck of the old wallboard remained. Even the old sink had been scrubbed.

  The stairways had been sealed off with tape and plastic to keep as much of the insidious drywall dust from getting upstairs as possible. “They cleaned up there, too, and the basement.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Can we close this place up and go back to your house?”

  She turned and smiled. “What if I want to stay here?”

  “I’ll just have to make another phone call. They’ll all come here. If you just let me take you home, they will have come and done their mischief and gone away like giggling little pixies.”

  “Did they really giggle?”

  “There was one big guy with a dark beard and his wife who could not stop.”

  “I’m definitely being manipulated, but I guess home it is.”

  When they got to her house, the lights were on, but then she’d not been careful about shutting them off when she left. Smoke curled from the chimney and once inside the door the definite smell of food filled her house.

  On the counter in a bucket of ice was a bottle of white wine.

  “So you knew I’d sleep a long time and I’d wake up mad and demand to go to Pirate’s Roost. And that I’d be hungry?”

  “I think the bottle of wine and fire are just nice extras.”

  She pulled open the oven. “No way. Millie Davies’s fried chicken and Mattie Finn’s scalloped potatoes.”

  “I believe there’s a coconut cream pie in the refrigerator and a couple of salads.”

  “Mandrel’s. Don’t eat the pie.”

  “It looks like great pie.”

  “It is. Hard to stop once you start.”

  With plates full of food and glasses full of wine they sat on the floor in front of the fireplace and Mia ate the first real meal she’d had in days.

  * * *

  DANIEL WATCHED THE firelight play in Mia’s hair. They had dragged the pillows and quilts out and had nestled in front of the fireplace.

  “Thank you for refusing to take no for an answer. I don’t know how to be rescued. I don’t think I’ve ever known.”

  “Mia, there is a world of people out there who would love to do things for you, if you’d just give them a chance.”

  “It’s hard.”

  He watched the firelight play in her hair and the emotions on her face. “Tell me.”

  She swallowed. “I waited and I waited for my parents to do for me, like other kid’s parents did for them. When I was in fourth grade, I got myself up, packed my lunch and got myself to school before the sun came up so I wouldn’t miss the field trip to the museum in Portland.

  “Other kids got sandwiches and homemade cupcakes and I got whatever I could find to put in my lunch. If I didn’t get it done, it didn’t happen. Eventually, I decided it must be wrong to expect anyone to help out. And then by the time I figured out that wasn’t right, either, I couldn’t seem to change. I was afraid to change.”

  She sat there quietly for a long time, then she turned and studied him.

  “Daniel.”

  “Yes, Mia.” He wanted to take her in his arms and reassure her she was enough, she was a whole and wonderful person. He wasn’t sure he could trust himself with a hug.

  “I know I’m not the reason you need to stay clear of a relationship. I almost wish it was me. Maybe then I could dye my hair or learn to be funnier.”

  He shifted to face her. “It’s just self-preservation.”

  And he wouldn’t touch her for the same reason.

  “Monique called you. That’s why you’re here?”

  It wasn’t an accusation. It was more like the sound of nearly exhausted hope.

  He still wasn’t sure he could tell her or should tell her why he would go away again.

  “Your friend is a very forceful person. She called me and told me I had to come and stop you because you wouldn’t listen to anyone else.”

  “I love her. I made her mad. She never gets mad. That must be when she called you.”

  “Then she said I had to tell you why we can’t have a relationship. She said she didn’t care if I was an ax murderer and a vampire, I had to tell you.”

  “She said that? You don’t have to tell me, you know.”

  “She said I was killing you.”

  She breathed quietly almost as if she might break.

  “I want to tell you,” he continued.

  “You’d do that for me? You’d tell me?” Her expression was open and amazed. He broke his promise to himself and he ran a finger down the line of her jaw.

  “Are you sure you want to hear it?”

  “I can open another bottle of wine if you want more.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ve tried to talk myself out of being—um—attracted to you, but I haven’t had any luck so far. For purely selfish reasons I’d like for you to tell me, but now that we’re here, I don’t know if I can have you look at me while you tell me.”

  She turned away so she was facing the other direction, and when he reached for her, she moved back against him and he wrapped his arms around her. She waited for him to start, breathing quietly, pressing his arms into her body with her own.

  “We knew we were the happiest parents on the planet when we got pregnant.” She rubbed the back of his hand. “I wa
s well on the way to tenure. Mandy had just turned down a huge promotion at her company because it would have meant travel and she knew she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.

  “Everything in our lives was perfect. We had tried for only two months and we were pregnant, but Mandy didn’t feel well for most of the pregnancy and then Sammy was born six weeks early, but we were still blissful. We had a son.

  “It didn’t take long for any of us to grasp there was something seriously wrong with Sammy. He had a hard time taking to her breast. He didn’t even do well with the bottle, and then the doctors told us his heart was malformed. He didn’t thrive. He just seemed to be fading away in our arms. Then he started to turn blue when he cried hard. The doctors said if we could get him a little stronger they might be able to repair his heart.

  “Every day brought fear and pain for all of us. Sammy suffered the worst, test, needles, big cold machinery, unfamiliar beds and faces changing every day.

  “When he was just two and a half years old, they took him to surgery. Eighteen hours later, they came to us and told us Sammy had died during the operation. We didn’t even get to hold him when he died. He was just gone.”

  She kept very still and listened.

  “One thing they were happy to tell us is we could try to have another baby right away. They could do genetic testing to make sure the fetus wasn’t affected. By then I already knew Sammy died that terrible death because of me, because of something I carry within my genetic code.

  “If I had paid attention to what had gone on previously in my family, I would have known there was a chance of a genetic flaw. Mandy and I could have made different decisions.”

  He paused to let his breathing even out.

  “Afterwards, Mandy and I tried to hold things together. One day I came home to find her bags were packed. She said she couldn’t look at me without thinking of Sammy and she left. No matter how much I told myself our son’s death destroyed Mandy, I knew my ignorance and then my reaction was as much to blame. She was a wonderful, loving woman and I had brought her to her knees.

  “I was almost happy to see her go. Without me in her life, she would be able to find someone else. She had a chance for a complete life. She could have children with another man, healthy, happy children who would grow up to make refrigerator art and go to prom.