Patrick glanced at me, frowning, then turned to Riley. "Are we not paying you enough?"
"I was filling in for a buddy, and I just like it," he shrugged. "But if you're looking to unload some cash, I won't stop you."
"And what about you, Sammy?" Shannon asked.
I glared at her, waiting for her to realize she stood me up at Commonwealth, didn't return my calls, and ignored every single one of my fucking texts this weekend. She went right on typing and sipping her coffee.
"My weekend was sensational, Shannon. I went to six different music festivals in four states, got drunk at the Feast of St. Anthony, passed out in Cambridge, and almost died in a goddamn elevator crash. Where the fuck were you on Friday and why the fuck weren't you answering your phone?"
No one moved for a full minute, and then Riley said, "Did you get to the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass show? I heard that was good this year."
"Is that a metaphor for something? Or are you talking about an actual elevator?" Patrick asked.
"Yeah. What do you mean, you almost died?" Matt said.
"The power went out in the Back Bay, and I was trapped in an elevator at the Comm Ave. property for eight hours," I said.
"The same elevator that slammed into the basement of that building?" Matt asked. "The one I read about, with the massive system failure compounded by the outage?"
"Same fucking one," I said. "So I'd love to know, Shannon. How was your weekend?"
"Did you go somewhere?" Patrick asked her. "You didn't mention anything…I thought you were staying in town."
"That's because I don't need you to approve my weekend plans, Patrick," she said. "I don't have to tell you where I'm going, or what I'm doing, or who I'm with."
"But it would be good if you tell me, so I don't wait around at a property and get stuck in a fucking elevator," I replied.
"Jesus Christ, Sam, I'm sorry! I lost track of things, okay? I'm sorry." She slammed her coffee cup down and crossed her arms over her chest. "I went away with some friends, and I forgot about the appointment at Comm Ave., and—"
"The only person you spend time with who isn't presently accounted for in this room is my wife," Matt said. "And she was with me, on the Cape."
I turned to Matt. "Do you ever get tired of saying it with that sanctimonious tone? 'My wife'?"
He shot me a smug grin. "Never."
"But you're okay, yeah?" Riley asked. He pointed to the yellowing bruise on my face. "Is this from the elevator or blacking out in Cambridge?"
"Elevator," I said.
Waking up in Tiel's apartment left its marks, but they weren't bruises.
"Why didn't you call one of us?" Andy asked, angling her pen at Riley, Patrick, and Matt.
I lifted a shoulder and mumbled a response into my coffee cup.
"All right," Patrick murmured. "Let's get back on track here. Sam's alive. Shannon can't manage her appointments. Moving on."
We reviewed the active projects, as well as the ones we were considering. I didn't mention the Commonwealth property; I wasn't convinced I wanted to see the inside of that building ever again.
"Sam…" Shannon held up her hand while she paged through her notebook. "I can't go with you to the ASNE event in November."
The Architectural Society of New England's annual banquet didn't matter to me, and if Shannon hadn't insisted that I attend and personally collect my awards each year, I wouldn't go. But she claimed it was great networking—even though none of those people agreed with our approach to preservation—and she made a point of attending, and befriending everyone in the room.
"And where will you be?" I asked.
She continued turning the pages, stopping occasionally to rearrange the sticky notes and mark reminders on her daily checklists, and murmured, "It's personal. If you need me to find someone to go and hold your hand, I will, but don't pout over it."
I snapped my laptop shut and stood, sending the chair careening into the brick wall behind me. "You're being a dick, Shannon," I called as I stormed down the stairs.
They'd talk; they always did. Either it was my outbursts or my obsessive tendencies or my whoring, but regardless of the topic, they'd hide the sharp objects and nominate someone to check on me.
Back in the comfort of my office, I set out my projects for the day. After an hour of hectic, unfocused work, I was prepared to storm into Shannon's office and put my issues on the table.
I was halfway down the stairs when my phone chimed. I'd snapped a picture of Tiel reclining on the grass this past weekend, and seeing it on my screen had me stopping mid-step.
"Hello?"
"Hey," she said. "There's an AC/DC cover band performing tonight. They're acoustic, and I think there's a banjo involved, but I hear good things. You should come with me."
I laughed and hustled down the stairs, bypassing Shannon's floor and heading outside, onto Derne Street. "Should I?"
"Yes, you should. You need more banjo in your life. In fact, the shortage of banjo in your life is a rather dire situation."
I hiked to the top of the street and watched the Beacon Hill traffic. I didn't have a creative reason to decline the invitation, and I was struggling to concoct one. I was comfortable being the guy with the booked calendar, but it dawned on me that Tiel didn't give a damn about any of my bullshit posturing.
"All right, Sunshine, but I need to put my head down and get some shit done."
"Wise decision. I'll text you the address," she said.
I jogged down the street and up to my office, closed the door, and dug into my projects with newfound urgency. Hours passed without my notice as I plowed through designs, emails, client calls, and some scheduling conversations with my preferred contractors.
A knock sounded at my door, and I pulled my glasses down my nose before looking up from my drafting program. Shannon stood outside and dangled a bottle of pale yellow juice between her fingers.
"I come bearing gifts," she said. "You have to be hungry."
Glancing at the clock, I realized it was nearly four in the afternoon, and I'd been working on this design straight through since eleven. I was hungry.
I nodded and stood, stretching to work the kinks out of my neck and back. She was careful to shut the door quietly, knowing I hated the way everyone else slammed everything around here.
Did they not remember the hell we went through to restore this building? Or the shit we took from Angus when we bought it? This brownstone was a labor of love, one that owned actual blood, sweat, and tears from each of us. The least we could do was handle the doors with a bit more care. I wasn't going to be the one repairing those hinges.
"I wanted to apologize about Friday. There's nothing else I can say other than I'm sorry." She set the bottle on my desk along with a bag of raw pistachios, and sat. "Carrots, honey, lemon, and celery. Andy said you were loving all things carrot."
Andy was my partner in juice crimes. She was the only one who appreciated a decent cold-pressed juice in this office, and she often spoiled me with some of her homemade creations.
One glance at the label on the bottle and I knew Shannon dropped at least ten dollars on this juice. She probably sent her assistant, Tom, to get it from the Kendall Square café, but it was the thought that counted.
"Thank you," I said. A glance at my glucose monitor showed I was damn close to setting off the low blood sugar alarms, so I dug into the juice first. "I was going to stop for lunch soon."
"You can't be skipping meals. I'm going to have Tom start placing a lunch order for you every day. You're going to get yourself sick," she said.
I hadn't been taking care of myself, not the way I should. But Shannon didn't need to know that.
"Save the nutrition lecture for another day, Shannon."
"Fine." She paused, took a breath, and continued on. "I'm sorry about the ASNE event. It's the only event I'll miss this season."
I thought about her comment while I plowed through a handful of pistachios, and realized it was ridiculo
us for my big sister to escort me to these events.
"Actually, skip them all," I said. "I'm sure you have better things to do."
For as long as I could remember, she had been the ranking female figure in my life. I could dump my problems on her and she'd sort them out, gathering them and placing them in an order that made sense. I'd spend all day winding up issues in my head, letting them build and strengthen until they were little cyclones, and she'd walk every single one of them back.
My role was equally well-established. I helped her select reasonable clothing—her taste was atrocious, and left to her own devices, she'd wander the streets in cable knit ponchos and purple culottes—and managed her online dating profiles. We ate brunch together most Sundays, then spent the afternoon hitting open houses throughout the city.
My siblings claimed Shannon coddled me, and that I disproportionately sided with her in business, but we shared a bond they'd never understand. We were both exiled, refugees from our own father.
He detested all of us, but Shannon and I took the lion's share of his wrath.
Angus kicked her out before she finished high school. He invented reasons to hate her, but most of all, it was because she was our mother in every way possible, and he was set on destroying every memory. It was easier to tear Shannon down than live with the reminder of Mom. He did the same thing to Erin, but he also liked beating the shit out of her.
He evicted me the summer before college. He was convinced of my homosexuality—despite my earnest efforts at losing my virginity to a woman—and wouldn't tolerate that kind of sin any longer. He clung to the gay piece as the focal point of my expulsion, but in all reality, he abhorred everything about me.
For nearly a decade, Shannon and I learned to live with his torment and abuse, shielding each other from the worst. But over the summer, things started changing.
She seemed distant and distracted, and became aggressively defensive when I called her on it. We'd never kept much of anything from each other, but now we were relative strangers.
She peered at me, her expression turning sour. "Is this about Angus?"
"What? No. No, this has nothing to do with him, and if it's the same to you, I'd rather we not continue bringing him up."
That fucker was good and dead, and we needed to stop resurrecting his memory every twenty minutes.
"That sounds like it's definitely about Angus."
"Shan, stop trying to psychoanalyze everything I say. I have a shit ton of designs to finish today, and I need to get my ass on the treadmill tonight, and then I'm going out. Thank you for lunch, but unless there's something else, we're finished with this conversation."
She tapped her finger to her lips and sat quietly while I emptied the bag of pistachios and drained the juice. She was probably watching to confirm that I was, in fact, eating.
"There's one more thing. Something I hope will make you happy."
There was that word again: happy. But Shannon couldn't give me happiness any more than she could trap lightning in a jar.
She grabbed the framed snapshot from my desk, the one from the Boston Marathon finish line two years ago. She was in the middle, her red hair tucked under a Walsh Associates baseball cap, with Patrick and Matt on one side, and Riley and me on the other. Arms linked over shoulders, we leaned together, smiling. We looked completely typical, and from that image alone, no one would know we were tainted by neglect, abuse, and loss.
But…maybe it was possible to feel as lighthearted as we looked.
"Am I supposed to guess, or are you planning to say something?" I asked.
"It's a good thing you're cute, Sam. Otherwise I'd slap you upside the head for this shitty attitude." She shook her head, replaced the frame, and flipped open her tablet. "I renewed your driver's license for you. It will show up in a week or two. Oh, and I adjusted the automatic order for your replacement parts. When I went through the supplies at your place last week, it seemed like you were running low on infusion sets and insulin cartridges, but had enough skin preps and test strips for an eternity. Just let me know if you want more or less, or something different."
I brushed the pistachio shells into my waste basket and stared at her. "Where were you this weekend?"
"I went away with friends." Shannon could negotiate the spots off a Dalmatian but she couldn't tell bold-faced lies, and the red tint creeping across her cheeks gave it all away.
"Where?" I asked.
She threaded a lock of hair between her fingers and studied it, avoiding my eyes. "Nantucket. I took the ferry from Woods Hole on Friday."
"Who did you go with? What did you do?"
She shrugged and continued inspecting her hair. "Simone and Danielle, and it was a regular girls' weekend. Beach, brunch, booze. What else would we do?"
I waited, watching while a hot blush consumed her cheeks and neck. She didn't do girls' weekends with her law school friends, and she hated listening to Simone humble-bragging about the high-profile divorces she handled. "Why aren't you sunburned?"
"Sunscreen," she answered simply, but it was a bullshit answer. Shannon's skin was incredibly fair, and she couldn't go to the beach or pool without collecting a thick patch of freckles and some painful burns.
"Why don't you cut the shit," I said. "What is the purpose of this exercise, Shan? Does it not seem ridiculous that you're keeping something from me? From all of us? And you do notice that you're making a bigger deal out of it by lying about going to Nantucket, right?"
"Since you have a busy afternoon, I'd rather get down to the reason I came in here," she said. "We were approached last month by a real estate agent who was representing a very private client. Since the agent was absurdly vague about her client's interests, Patrick and I decided not to engage."
"Okay," I said, annoyed that she was deflecting again. I went to the small refrigerator behind my desk to refill my water glass, and offered some to Shannon.
"No, thanks. The agent came back, saying the client really, really wanted to work with us. It seems the client saw the Boston Globe spread on the future of green restoration." She gestured to where the freshly framed newspaper feature showcasing one of my projects leaned against the wall, waiting to be hung. "And the client insisted on working with you."
"I don't have much free time, Shannon," I said. I slid my four-page call sheet filled with requests for consultation across the desk. "And no offense, but I don't have a lot of patience for dealing with agents."
Shannon wore a lot of hats around here, and licensed real estate agent was one of them. She was also our legal counsel and chief financial officer, and while she spoke the language fluently, she was the only non-architect in the bunch. She seemed to like that form of schizophrenia.
"Well, it gets better." She toggled through a few screens on her tablet, then turned it toward me. "Turns out the client is Eddie Turlan, from The Vials." She pointed to a picture of the punk band popular in the eighties. "He and his wife are huge environmentalists now, and they want a complete green rehab and restore, and they want a big publicity splash, too. They purchased this brownstone in the South End." She swiped through another screen and zoomed in on the location. "It was built in 1899, and until the Turlans bought it, the property had been owned by the same family. It was renovated in the twenties, and then again in the sixties, but it hasn't been touched since then. In fact, it's been vacant since the late eighties."
She switched the map to street view, and I stared at the red brick house. This property saw three centuries with a common lineage, and everything about it screamed virgin canvas. There'd be shag carpets and vinyl wallpaper to remove, and probably some room-flow dynamics to resolve, but it didn't bear the weight of changing hands, and that was a rare delight.
"They want you to design it, and they offered to go well beyond your standard fees." She toggled to another screen, and handed the tablet to me. "Here's the most recent communication from the agent."
I skimmed the email, noting the budget the Turlans were comfo
rtable with—it was astronomical—and some of their design preferences, and handed it back to Shannon. "I still don't have time."
Shannon nodded, and the devious grin on her face told me she already cooked up a plan. "You could make time if Riley moved off Matt's projects and started working with you." I began to protest, and she held up her hand. "I think you've argued with me enough today. Just listen. He's come a long, long way in the past eight months, and you have to admit that."
I sighed, knowing she was right.
He still couldn't zip his pants with any regularity, but he could be trusted to manage a couple of projects.
"I was also thinking this could be a phenomenal opportunity to partner with the roof garden girl," she said. "If there's ever been a property that needs a roof garden, it's this one."
I reached for the tablet, and paged back to the aerial map. Again, Shannon was right. Even with a quick glance, it was obvious this property would be perfect for all my favorite green features and my favorite sustainable landscape architect.
"What's the timeline with all this?" I asked.
Shannon nodded, her fingers drumming against the arms of the chair. It reminded me of Tiel and her non-stop fidgeting. Somehow, Tiel's noise was nothing like the noise my siblings created.
"They'd like to know as soon as possible. They close on the property in forty-five days or so, and want to start construction immediately. I promised them we'd follow up by Friday."
I ran my hand over my desk, savoring the applewood's gorgeous grain. I came across the felled tree while camping in Vermont last fall. I didn't know what I'd do with it at the time, but it gradually took shape while I worked it in my shop. This desk, the attic conference table, and most of the furniture in the Walsh Associates office came from my workshop at one point or another.
"I'll call Magnolia and find out whether she has any flexibility in her schedule," I said. She'd been bugging me to involve her in a project start to finish, to better understand the entire lifespan of a restoration rather than the narrow elements where she was typically involved. I respected her commitment to continuously learning and improving, and this property seemed like a good opportunity. It also meant I'd be able to think through problems with her, and she was amazing in those situations. She asked all the right questions and poked holes in my theories, and I loved that. "I need Riley freed up in the next couple of weeks, and I want the blueprints pulled from City Hall by noon tomorrow. Get your errand boy, Tom, on that one."
The Walsh Brothers Page 61
