by H M Shepherd
“All right,” he finally answered. “Try to call, tell her I’ll be there.”
Ellie was silent for a long time, until they turned in to their own driveway. Before she opened her door and hopped out, he thought he heard her murmur, “Thank you.”
AUGUST
THE HOUSE was coming along nicely, and save for a couple of the bathrooms and some professional-grade equipment for the kitchen, nearly everything was furnished and stocked. Ellie had taken to spending more time there than in her own home, though she claimed it was only because Nick had faster internet than they did. Truth be told, she enjoyed spending time with Nick. An adult who could talk to a teenager without being condescending was a rare find.
Maggie, who had thrown herself across Ellie’s knees and gone to sleep, huffed a little bit and moved her legs as if she was chasing something. Ellie smiled. A rare find, and with the added bonus of a wonderfully affectionate dog, even if Ellie did bump down to second place in Maggie’s heart whenever Nick was around.
She wondered what she was going to tell her friends when she started school next month and they asked what she’d done on her vacation. It would make an excellent first essay for her composition class: “How I Spent My Summer in an Empty House, Watching My Uncle Try Desperately to Flirt with the Super-Hot Owner.” Riveting.
“Ellie?” Nick called from somewhere near the front of the house. She hollered back, and he came into the kitchen, looking around for her.
“Down here!” she said, raising her hand and waving it. She’d been petting Maggie as the dog lounged in the large square of light the sun cast through the back door and onto the braided rug under the table. She had fully intended to leave before Maggie decided she’d be more comfortable on her lap. Ellie had managed to scoot back just enough to lean against the wall and leave room for her laptop, but otherwise hadn’t moved an inch. After all, she wouldn’t want to make the dog uncomfortable. “I’m stuck.” Maggie, however, had heard Nick as well. She quickly shot up and ran to him, stumbling as she turned to follow him around the table back to Ellie anyway.
“I can see that,” Nick answered dryly. “Is your uncle here yet?”
“Nope.” She finally paused, looked up from her game, and let out a low whistle. Nick had apparently spent the morning getting his hair cut and had it combed back, save for one curl on the side of his temple that refused to comply. He was wearing a suit, or at least narrow black dress pants and a black waistcoat over a white collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The jacket itself was draped across one arm. “Good morning, Atticus Finch!” To Kill a Mockingbird was one of her summer reading assignments; she’d watched the movie intending to skip the book, but it had made such an impression that she was considering reading it anyway.
“Please, I did Atticus Finch one year for Halloween. I’m a pair of glasses and a pocket watch short.”
“You did Atticus Finch, or—”
“That was an entirely different Halloween, and we are not discussing it.”
“Just how many of you dressed as Atticus?”
“It was law school. No one was particularly creative. Anyway,” he changed the subject, holding up two ties for her to see. “Red or blue?”
Ellie took one quick look and pointed at the red one. “Where are you going all dressed up?”
“I agreed to handle one last case for the firm I used to work for, so I’m going to Philly for a couple of days.”
“Man, I wish I was going.”
“What, to court?”
“No, Philly. I used to live there, remember?” She stood up, grimacing at the feeling of pins and needles in her legs, before taking a seat at the table.
Nick joined her a moment later, trying to tie his tie without letting the dog snag the end of it. “You mentioned it a while ago, I think. Maybe we can go there sometime before school starts.” He’d probably meant it as an offhand comment, but Ellie beamed as though he’d made a definite promise.
Sam finally came in then, and Ellie half-listened as Nick told him about a photographer who would be coming by while he was gone. Sam, she noticed, didn’t seem to be listening any better; his eyes were focused on Nick’s outfit instead, specifically on the red tie she’d helped him choose.
“I take it back,” she interrupted. “You’re not Atticus Finch. You’re Michael Corleone.”
Nick blinked at her and turned to Sam. “What in the hell are you letting her watch The Godfather for?”
Sam shrugged. “She likes old movies.”
They began to bicker about appropriate material for her age level, and Ellie sat quietly and scratched Maggie behind the ears. A small tendril of something resembling happiness began to coil in her chest.
THE PHOTOGRAPHER came by early in the afternoon the day after Nick left. Sam answered his door to find a small woman weighed down by several bags full of equipment. “Good morning! You’re Sam Hildebrandt?”
He nodded.
“I’m Diana. Nick Caratelli told me to come by and see you about letting me into his house?”
“I was on my way over myself to do some work. Would it be okay if we’re there at the same time?”
“What will you be doing?”
“Not much upstairs, mostly cleaning up the kitchen. Then I’ll be installing storage units in the basement.”
“That should be fine! I really just need to get to the bedrooms and common areas, maybe some shots outside too. Is it all right if I leave my car in your driveway?”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he reassured her. He took some of her bags and began to lead her across to the bed-and-breakfast. “By the way, my niece has Nick’s dog out for a walk, but she should be back soon. If she’s in your way, just let me know.”
“Actually, I was thinking I should get some shots with actual people. Not inside—no one wants to be reminded that dozens of other people have been in their hotel bed—but I think some outdoor shots of a girl and her dog would look really nice. Bucolic, even. Tourists like that kind of stuff.”
“Is this all for marketing, then?” Nick had probably explained it to Sam when he was telling him about the photographer in the first place, but Sam had been so distracted by that red tie and how easy it would have been to wrap it around his hand to pull Nick in for a kiss.
They hadn’t spoken about that night, and Sam had no idea what Nick expected of him or wanted him to do. The point had been moot so far—with work schedules and Ellie’s nigh-constant presence, there had been no opportunity for a repeat performance. If there was any benefit to be found in this, it was that it had given Sam enough time to come to terms with the fact that he wanted that repeat badly. He just had no idea how to go about asking for it, let alone asking for the more G-rated, domestic fantasies swarming in his head. He wanted to wake up with Nick and make him coffee, take him on long drives through the countryside, and cook dinner together with him. He had even caught himself making plans for a future with Nick as a permanent fixture, until reality intruded once more and he remembered why it could never happen.
He unlocked the front door for Diana and offered to help her with any setup or staging she needed to do. She told him it wasn’t necessary, so he went downstairs to the basement instead. It was the only area where Nick had compromised on his no-cheap-furniture rule. There needed to be an abundance of storage space, including a pantry, a linen closet, and a place to keep cleaning supplies. Sam had the freedom to arrange things as he saw fit, so he got to work assembling the various flat packs full of cabinetry.
He finished the last one (and could proudly say that he’d only thrown the Allen wrench across the room twice in the process) when Ellie yelled down for him to come look at her photos. He took a minute to push the cabinet into place, looked around and appraised his work, and figured he’d come back down for the piles of plastic and foam later; the trash bags were upstairs anyway. Picking a splinter out of his palm, he went to find Ellie and Diana, who were sitting in the living room.
“
Your niece is quite the model,” Diana told him cheerfully, turning her laptop around so Sam could see. In the photo, Ellie was in the back of the property just where the woods began, holding a stick high above Maggie’s head. With the little dog jumping up to grab it and Ellie twisting away from her, it almost looked like they were dancing. The sun managed to catch Ellie’s tightly curled hair and show off the red tones underneath the brown, and her blue eyes, even all scrunched up with a smile, seemed lit from within. It was a beautiful picture, and Sam had to admit that Diana was excellent at her job.
“We’ll just need to get a parent’s signature before we can use any of this for advertising, if that’s okay,” said Diana. Ellie looked at Sam.
“I’m her guardian. I can sign.” He sent Ellie off to find a pen.
“By the way,” she said, rummaging through her bag. “If I leave these here, will you make sure Nick gets them?” She held up a few glossy rental magazines, all for locations in Allegheny County. “He asked for me to grab a few for him when I came out here.”
Sam froze a bit as he processed the information. “He’s moving?”
“I think so, maybe. He didn’t say that exactly, but he sounded a little homesick when I talked to him on the phone. We went to Duquesne together, you know?” She began packing away what was left of her equipment. “I was surprised to hear from him, honestly. We fell out of touch after graduation. I’d heard he’d gone to UPenn for law school, but I never imagined he’d stay out there. From what I remember, he always planned to end up back in Pittsburgh.”
“I see,” Sam mumbled. “He never mentioned it.” But then, he wouldn’t have, would he? What explanation did Nick owe him when it came to future plans? As long as he stuck around until Ellie was safely back in school, he wasn’t obligated to discuss anything at all with Sam about where he intended to go or what he intended to do.
Either he didn’t look nearly as distraught as he felt or Diana was tactful enough to just ignore it. “I’ll leave a hard copy of my bill here too. Please let him know it’s all there?”
“Of course. Would you like me to help you to your car?”
DESPITE THE mind-bending amount of time it took just to escape the interstate, Nick found himself enjoying his drive home. It was fascinating the way the city melted so smoothly into the suburbs, and the suburbs into the small towns, but the small towns just ended abruptly without warning and disappeared into farmland that stretched back to the hills and forests on the horizon. Every time he came this way, he tried to pay attention and find the exact point where the rows of houses stopped and the rows of corn and wheat took over, but he managed to zone out and miss it. It was like being hypnotized.
His phone rang in his bag for the fifth time since he’d left the highway. Once again he ignored it, assuming it was someone at the office trying to bother him about something that needn’t be worried about yet. Trial preparation and opening statements had gone beautifully, and absolutely nothing had to be done until it was time for the prosecution to begin calling witnesses. Honestly, he fully expected that both defendants would beg to settle the second their passenger was put on the stand, where the jury would hear about the damage caused to her pregnancy and how she’d delivered her son a month premature all because of an accident caused by a driver who’d been speeding being hit by another driver running a red light.
He was almost home anyway, and even if it turned out to be something truly dire, like one of their experts dropping dead, it didn’t need to be addressed right this very second. But then his phone stopped ringing and started again a second later, and he became worried in spite of himself.
He found a produce stand with a small parking lot and pulled off there. The owner was present and looking at him expectantly, so Nick took out his wallet and his phone and went to look at the fruit. At the same time, he fumbled to unlock his phone and found that all of his missed calls had been from Sam.
Without looking closely, he picked up a random package of blueberries, paid for it, and returned to his car before calling Sam back.
He answered up before the first ring finished. “Nick?”
“Sorry, I was driving. Is everything okay?”
“No, I—Ellie took off. She said she’d be getting a ride home today from a coworker, but she never came back. I have no idea where she went, and I’m running out of places to look.”
“What happened?”
He could hear Sam balk at the question and sigh reluctantly. “Her mother wants to terminate her parental rights and have me adopt Ellie formally. Dropped this right on us day before yesterday when we went to visit, but apparently she’s been sitting on the idea for at least a month.” Sam sounded angry. Nick didn’t even think it was possible for him to get angry in the first place, much less express it. “I thought Ellie was okay. She cried a bit, went on a walk for a few hours, and came back acting like nothing was wrong. I don’t know…. I can’t think where else to look for her,” he repeated.
“I might. Keep looking, okay? If I’m right I’ll call you soon.” He put the key in the ignition and started the car, buckling his seat belt to stop the alarm from beeping at him. “I have to go. I have a call to make.”
“Thank you.”
They hung up, and Nick scrolled through his contacts for a number he should have deleted ages ago. If there had been anyone, absolutely anyone else he could have asked… but he needed someone to confirm his theory before he drove all the way back to the city and wasted time he might not have, and she was the only one he could think of to do it. “Pick up. Pick up, pick up, pick up,” he chanted as the phone continued to ring.
“Hello?” Olivia finally answered.
“Liv? It’s Nick. I need help with an emergency,” he said quickly, shifting his car into reverse.
“What do you need?” she asked automatically, and he remembered how much he’d always appreciated her sensibility. A lesser woman would have hung up if her ex-fiancé had called out of the blue asking for favors, but Olivia had never seen the need for theatrics.
“How fast can you get to Logan Square?”
FINDING PARKING in Center City was, as always, a bitch. Nick quit looking after a half an hour, pulled into a too-expensive garage a good twenty blocks west of where he needed to be, and crawled around the floor of his car until he found a stray transit token. From there he caught the first bus that would take him toward the Parkway and sent a text to Olivia to let her know he was on his way.
He received a reply less than a minute later: At Peddler Coffee, meet us here.
Fortunately the bus route passed a few streets over from the café, so Nick hopped off at the closest stop and walked as quickly as he could, weaving through the crowds. He sent a text to update Sam, letting him know that Olivia was still with Ellie and that he’d be with her soon.
When he got to the café, he spotted Olivia’s bright red hair instantly. Her back was mostly to him, and he could see her hand a packet of tissues to Ellie, who looked as though she’d been through at least three of them already. As soon as she saw Nick, she started crying again.
“I’m sorry!” she sobbed before he even had an opportunity to speak. A few other people turned around in their chairs to look at them, some even glaring at Nick. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I just needed to—”
Nick placed a hand on her shoulder and she stopped babbling, though her eyes were still fixed on the table in front of her as she continued to cry. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m not here to lecture you. I’m just here to get you home. Sam’s worrying himself sick.”
“He probably hates me! He’ll never forgive me for this. I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, you scared the hell out of him. But he just wants you to come home now.”
She calmed down a bit at that and nodded blearily. “Can I go wash up first?”
“Of course,” Olivia said before Nick could answer. She passed Ellie a ten-dollar bill as well. “When you’re done, get yourself some juice or something for th
e road.”
As Ellie went over to the restrooms, Nick looked down at Olivia reproachfully. “You do realize that we have almost a two-hour drive ahead of us?”
“Just stop at a Wawa and get gas. I’m sure you’ll need it, and the bathrooms will be clean. That, and she’s not a toddler. Sit,” she said, indicating Ellie’s empty seat and pushing over one of the two iced coffees she had in front of her.
He took the coffee reluctantly. “Did she give you any problems?”
Olivia shook her head, then stopped with a small laugh. “Well, some. You weren’t kidding about her being suspicious. I had to show her the text you sent me with her picture, and even then she wanted to see proof I was who I said.” As she spoke, Olivia scrolled through the open apps on her phone and pulled up a photo from her gallery. It was a selfie she had taken of them at a Christmas party a few years back; they were wearing garish green sweaters, each one with half a reindeer spewing Christmas cookies out of both ends. “She said she believed me because the only way I’d have evidence of you in something so heinous would be if we were dating.”
“I still can’t believe we only got second place with that.” Nick sighed and began toying with the napkin dispenser on the table. “And I can’t believe you kept that.”
“You didn’t?” she asked quietly.
Nick had, in a fit of pique, deleted every trace of Olivia from all of his devices about a week after they’d broken up. Upon waking up the next morning, he panicked but was relieved to discover that most of his photos had been automatically backed up online anyway. Still, he left them there and didn’t bother to redownload anything. Getting her number back had been trickier—he’d had to text his sisters, who had only handed it over after extracting promises that it was only for emergencies. No emergencies had come up, at least not until he’d had to send Olivia to look for a teenage girl who had run away to the fountain at Logan Square.
