King Stud

by Liv Rancourt

“Past tense. You’re talking like you used to have something, you used to care.”

  “He busted me lying, and he left.” Danielle went back to wrestling with the tears. She’d had plenty of time over the last few days to scrutinize Ryan’s motivations. “He’s always been pretty clear that he didn’t want to be with another woman who played games.” She shrugged, more a gesture of defeat than anything else.

  “Patty Perfection admits a sin,” Maeve muttered.

  “What did you just say?”

  “Nothing.” Now it was Maeve’s turn to stare at the floor.

  Embarrassment, anger, and hurt converged, curdling the cocktail and pretty much ruining Danielle’s mood.

  Maeve paused for several beats, arms crossed, body stiffening. “Did you really try to keep it a secret?”

  “No.” Danielle directed all her attention to the young woman massaging her calves. She was buying time, scrambling for an out. “Except at first. With you.”

  “Oh.” Maeve sat back, hard. “Oh.”

  “It was stupid. I should have just been honest from the beginning.”

  “Shit.” Maeve stared at a foreign language soap opera playing on the big screen. She didn’t move until the woman working on her toes tapped her ankle and asked if she liked the color.

  Maeve’s pause gave Danielle plenty of time to shrink and shrivel and wither. To imagine life without Ryan. To imagine life without her best friend since high school. To get her brain around the situation’s inherent stupidity.

  “So is this where I tell you I’ll talk to him,” Maeve said, her mouth a tight line, “and then we have a Hallmark moment?”

  Righteous exasperation broke through Danielle’s normal restraint. “I haven’t asked you to do shit, Maeve. I’m doing my best to keep you out of it.”

  Maeve turned completely around, jerking her left foot away from the woman with the nail polish. “Did you just snap at me?”

  She looked crazy, with her spikey hair and wild eyes and the streak of red across the top of her foot. Danielle hunted up all the reasons Maeve was crazy, and then she started to laugh.

  Because instead of Maeve’s sins, all she came up with was a list of the things she’d lost: Grandmother, Braden, her love-affair with her job, all the work she’d done on the house. Ryan.

  Provoking Maeve was the overload, the one thing that dropped her to the very bottom. From way down there, Danielle surprised herself. Laughter came easier than tears.

  “Why yes,” she said between snickers, “I guess I did snap at you.”

  Maeve’s mouth pinched like she was constipated, and then a smile broke free. “I meant it when I called you Patty Perfection.”

  “Bite me.”

  “What. Ever.” Maeve waved her hands in apology at the woman painting her nails. “I’ll give him a call.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Just don’t tell me about the make-up sex.”

  Danielle rubbed her cheeks with her palms, equal parts relieved and despairing. “I’m not asking you to do anything, but thanks.”

  “That’s what best friends are for, I mean, that’s what family’s for.”

  Danielle lost the battle with tears.

  Maeve called at eight o’clock Tuesday morning to tell Danielle Perkins Lane would be open by noon. “Niall heard it at work,” Maeve said. “He doesn’t have your phone number, and he wanted me to pass the word.”

  Danielle was awake but hardly ready to face the day. “I’ll see if I can borrow Robert’s Prius again.”

  “Not even,” Maeve said with a bulletproof giggle. “Christopher and I will pick you up at 11:45.”

  Danielle didn’t have the energy to argue with her.

  When the black Saab pulled into the driveway, she jumped up, threw on her jacket, grabbed her bag, and hit the door. Concerns about her grandmother’s house pushed every other drama far down on the list.

  “Ready to go?” Christopher kept one hand on the steering wheel and turned his shoulders to give her a sober smile.

  She slammed her door shut in response, his friendly attention more irritating than anything else.

  He turned the engine back on and put the car in reverse.

  “Good thing I don’t have to pee,” Maeve said.

  The drive to Grandmother’s felt like it took about three hours instead of ten minutes. The heavy overcast dragged Danielle down, forcing time to move in slow motion. Evidence of the storm grew more obvious as they drove the last bit downhill on Ray Drive to Perkins Lane. Downed tree limbs had been stacked along the side of the road, pine boughs tangled with glossy rhododendron leaves in a crazy quilt of chaos. Whole trees had come down, their convex root circles tilted up, exposing the frayed edges to the harsh light and air.

  Closer to Grandmother’s house, mud had been scraped off the road, looking like black snowdrifts studded with rocks and torn shrubs. Everywhere, fluorescent orange markers showed where the City crews had been working; strips tied to branches or stakes stuck in the mud. The road was passable, but restoration would take a lot longer.

  The laurel hedge lay in catawampus piles and the continuous rain had cut mini canyons in the mud heading down to the beach. The Mini was more-or-less level, though the hood was wrinkled up like a sneer. Footprints leading to the front porch pockmarked the mud-covered lawn, and the plastic sheet Danielle had stapled over the window flapped free on one corner. Christopher slowed to a stop in front of the house, idling the engine. From there, they could see the tag on the front door.

  Orange.

  Chapter Twenty

  The ridge of mud left by the city repair crews who cleared Perkins Lane blocked the entrance to Danielle’s driveway. Since the road was about a car and a half wide, Christopher couldn’t park in the street or none of the other desperate homeowners would be able to get through. He drove a block past Grandmother’s house to a turn-out and left the Saab there.

  Faced with the actual devastation, Danielle’s meager clean-up enthusiasm got lit up by indignation. This was her house. Her house. Hers.

  Even when she sold it, she’d do it knowing she’d finished the job.

  Maeve walked partway with them, until she figured out she didn’t want to navigate the mud. “You guys go take a look,” she said, lifting a heel to let them admire her choice of footwear, “and I’ll see you when you get back to the car.”

  “Her heart’s in the right place,” Danielle said as soon as Maeve was far enough away not to hear.

  Christopher lifted one of his feet, giving Danielle a look at a shoe that hadn’t likely cost much less than Maeve’s. “So’s mine.”

  “You don’t need to come in with me.” Danielle navigated the pile of dirt and stones and broken shrubbery that blocked the end of the driveway. The air was cold and salty, and the steady breeze coming in off the ocean grabbed at her hair and her jacket.

  “It’s cool.” Christopher went right on up beside her. “I’ve got more where these came from.”

  Danielle slipped, landing hard on the edge of what looked like a broken piece of brick. Christopher stutter-stepped down the other side of the mud heap and offered her his hand.

  “That hurt,” she said. “Thanks for the assist.” Soggy denim stuck to her knee, and she half-skidded down to where Christopher stood.

  He gave her fingers a squeeze and released her, the way a friend would, and Danielle had a moment of gratitude for having met him.

  “Is everything okay over there?” Maeve yelled from the road about halfway between the house and the car.

  “All good,” Christopher called out, and Danielle waved with as much confidence as she could gather. An orange tag was better than a red one, but it still meant damage.

  “ServPro is meeting me out here in an hour or so,” Danielle said, taking careful steps through the dense mud. She’d called the local branch for the company that specialized in cleaning up after Mother Nature as soon as the road opened. “And the insurance guy should be here about the same time.”

  “I can hoo
k you up with some people, too.” Christopher followed her, the mud caking his fancy shoes. “And then you go back to L.A. in a couple of weeks, right? Want me to see if I can find someone to supervise the job for you?”

  Maeve must have said something about Ryan, but Danielle didn’t have time for embarrassment. “Probably should.” Danielle gripped the railing to half drag herself up to the front porch.

  Christopher steadied himself with a hand on her elbow. “Any chance you could get more time off work and do it yourself?”

  “You mean stay here?” Danielle brushed a stray strand of hair out of her face, leaving a smudge of dirt on her cheekbone. “I seem to be the only one who thinks I should go back to L.A.”

  He cocked his head, laughter mixed with evaluation in his eyes. “Better put it to a vote, then.”

  “Be quiet.” She glanced down toward the beach, the faint rhythm of the waves as familiar as the color of her hair or the damp cold of a January day. “I love this house and it’s kind of a bummer to see all my work wasted.” She glanced over his shoulder in Maeve’s direction. “And I do have friends here.” She licked her fingertip and made an attempt at wiping the smudge off her face. “And you know, there’s … other things.” Leaving would make the split with Ryan permanent.

  They had to shove on the front door to force it open, the bottom edge scraping over mud and debris. The smell in the house was a powerful mix of soil and mold, and something scary in the kitchen.

  “As much as it hurts me to give up a commission,” Christopher said, “I can see you living here.”

  Danielle assessed the living room, with its carpet of mud and moisture stains at least knee-high up the walls. “Right.”

  “I mean, when the ServPro guys are done.”

  Danielle gave him a tired smile and planted her fists on her hips. “Think I should start at the top and go down, or the bottom and go up?”

  Christopher rifled through his wallet and handed her a card. “Either way, call my friend Nicky. He and his guys can be out here tomorrow with a backhoe to clear the mud out of your front yard.”

  Danielle didn’t watch Christopher plow back through the mud. She was too busy taking stock of the damage to the house.

  Ryan got lucky. His boss sent him out on a job in suburban Bellevue to deal with a nice-looking Mid-Century Modern house with an original floor plan constructed around the “warren of rooms” concept. The main floor was a series of interconnecting boxes, and the new homeowner wanted to open it up, creating a single family/dining/kitchen area.

  The walls had to come down.

  When he arrived on Tuesday morning, Ryan left his toolbox in the truck and brought out his sledgehammer. After a whole lot of wall destruction, he’d almost reached a place where he could talk to people without taking their heads off. The laborer who’d been assigned to help him with clean-up had skipped out at lunch. He claimed to have a headache, but Ryan was pretty sure the guy was just tired of dealing with his surly ass.

  Despite the cold, raw day and the thermostat set at about sixty, sweat poured down Ryan’s back and around his face. He took a break about two o’clock, setting his sledgehammer against one of a pair of king studs that framed a doorway between rooms. They stood like lonely sentinels in the field of debris. Because they were weight-bearing, he’d need to reinforce the cross beam before he could knock them down.

  He grabbed a piece of scratch paper and the stub of a flat carpenter’s pencil to make some notes for the next day. The process was interrupted when his cell phone rang.

  It was Maeve.

  He came this close to letting it go to voicemail, but in case she was calling to tell him one of his parents was in the hospital or his brother had been shot on the job, he answered.

  “Ryan.”

  Maeve had her shut up and listen voice on. Awesome.

  “Maeve.”

  “We fucked up.”

  He bit back a snarky comment. The fastest way through this was to let her have her say and hang up. “Yeah?”

  “I…” She paused, as if she was having trouble getting the words out.

  It threw him off, so he kept his own mouth shut.

  “You and Danielle had a thing.”

  She didn’t make it a question, and he didn’t give her an answer.

  “And Danielle knew I didn’t want to hear the details.”

  He knocked his knuckles gently against the stud, stifling the pain and sadness that tried to ambush him. “I wonder why.”

  “Shut up, already. I said we fucked up.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slow to keep himself from smacking something. “So…”

  “So her grandmother’s house is covered in mud, and she’s stuck with her crazy uncle, and, and, and…” Maeve’s voice hitched to a stop.

  Ryan almost dropped the phone. This side of Maeve almost never came out to play.

  “And she needs your help,” she said, pausing to give him time to anticipate her big finish, “for more than just the house.”

  A punch to the gut would have hurt less. He stared at the piles of broken sheetrock and stacks of used baseboard he’d planned to take to the dump before he knocked off for the night. “So I should drop everything and come running?”

  “I don’t know about the running part, but could you call her?” Maeve’s voice took on its usual aura of sarcasm. Ryan almost felt reassured by the change.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, damned sure he’d think about very little else. Having Maeve’s permission didn’t change the fact that Dani lied about him.

  But it sure changed something.

  Danielle had a Come-To-Jesus moment while she waited for the guys from ServPro to show up. She checked the power – it was out – checked the basement – there was a puddle of water in one corner – and considered her options. She could get on an airplane on February 2nd, prepared to fight her way back to the top of Sharon’s heap.

  Or she could stay in Seattle and finish what she’d come here to do.

  Both choices required commitment. Both choices required hard work. Neither gave her any guarantees.

  And Ryan didn’t figure into her consideration.

  At all.

  Sure.

  A high overcast gave the day a silvery sheen, like the underside of the scallop shells washed up on the beach. Between phone calls, Danielle tried to picture herself walking back into the NICU, but she couldn’t see it. If she’d been less strung out she might have gotten the joke. On New Year’s Day, when Uncle Jonathan suggested her mother wanted Danielle to stay in the house, she’d shot him down. Now here she was, actually considering it.

  Would she be making a decision to please her mother? Braden? Anybody else?

  Not really.

  The restoration team showed up about an hour after Christopher and Maeve left. A matched set of half a dozen men in blue coveralls with ServPro embroidered on the back cleared the mound of debris that blocked the driveway and backed their shiny white van up close to the house.

  Their ringleader was distinguishable by his salt ‘n’ pepper goatee. He came over and introduced himself while his partners unloaded a pile of equipment.

  “So first I’ll take a quick look around,” Mr. Goatee said, “then give the boys their assignments.”

  Danielle grabbed a pencil so she could take notes while he inspected things. “The upstairs is in okay shape, but there’s a puddle of water in one corner of the basement.”

  Mr. Goatee stuffed his hands in the slash pockets on the hips of his coverall. “Lights still out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tried the plumbing?”

  “Not yet, but I’ve got an electrician and a plumber coming out tomorrow.”

  “Good job.” He took an exaggerated sniff. “Our other truck will drop off a Sani-Can out front, and I’ll put a guy on cleaning out your fridge.”

  “Oh, I can do that,” Danielle said, though now that he called her attention to it, the aroma of spoiled food was
pretty overwhelming.

  Mr. Goatee rubbed his chin. “Nah, we’ll do it. You can show the guys how to get down to the basement so they can set up some fans.”

  A loud rumble started up outside, making Danielle twitch.

  “Generator,” Mr. Goatee said.

  Someone knocked on the front door and Danielle left the ServPro team to their work. She spent an hour with a nice man from her Grandmother’s insurance company. The details of rolling the policy over to Danielle were sort of blurry, though having her in-house lawyer-slash-uncle on speed dial certainly helped.

  In between giving the insurance agent a tour and signing paperwork, Danielle kept track of the living room progress. The workmen hauled out the mud, rocks, torn up shrubbery, and shattered glass from the window. Underneath, the hardwood floor was buckled and warped, the finish bubbling up like blistered skin.

  After seeing the insurance guy out, Danielle caught up with Mr. Goatee.

  “We’re gonna have to pull all that up,” he said, gesturing to the floor.

  “Looks like.”

  “The molding, too.”

  He said it like it was no big deal, but Danielle jerked like someone had stabbed her. “What?”

  “See how the wallboards are wet, almost up to knee level? They gotta come down, and the trim will come with them.”

  But Ryan said the original trim made his dick hard. Danielle exhaled hard through her nose, ending with a harsh hiccup where the tears tried to break through. Such a stupid thing to cry over. “What about the built-ins around the fireplace.”

  “Them too. The bottom of ‘ems all warped out.”

  “Oh.”

  Danielle stood in the middle of the living room, dimly aware of the workmen moving around her. With a dual-fisted effort, she grabbed hold of her attitude and stuffed the sadness away for another time. “Yeah, well, you gotta do what you gotta do, I guess.”

  “We’ll put up new stuff.” Mr. Goatee patted her shoulder awkwardly.

  It just won’t be the same.

  “I could do it.” A familiar baritone spoke from the doorway, a voice that came with dimples, biceps, and a killer sense of humor.