Homebody

5

Doors

Back when Don was a housebuilder, the best part of the job was the beginning. Standing there on a wooded lot with insects droning and birds flitting and treerats scampering up the trunks, he saw the slope of the land, the way it would look in lawn and garden, and where the house would crown the lot. He imagined the plan of the house, where he might put a cellar that opened to ground level in the back yard, or how a deep porch might be especially nice on a hot afternoon. He saw the roof rising among the trees—he always saved the best of the trees, because that kept a house from looking naked and newborn. A brand-new house had to look established, had to look as though it had roots deep into the ground. People couldn't feel right about moving into a place that looked like it just came to rest there and might blow off again in a year or two, the next bad storm. Tall old trees gave that feeling of stability even on a house finished just the day before.

Once building began, then the peace of the woods was broken, the dirt torn up and flung into the air as a fine dust that clogged everything. The naked frame showed its origin as cut trees—almost obscene to put them up among the living timbers, as if to cow them into submission by showing them what could happen to trees that didn't cooperate. Even when the house was nearly done and Don got his own hands deep in the finish carpentry, the pleasure of working with the wood and of watching it all take shape under his hands, that still wasn't as much of a joy as standing there on the building lot imagining the house inside his head.

Kind of like getting married. Kind of like watching your child make your wife's belly swell. Imagining, wondering, building the finished family in your dreams.

Don didn't build new houses anymore. At first he had no choice. The lawyers' fees ate up his business, his home, every asset he owned except the little bit of insurance that paid for his daughter's funeral. He found a wreck of a property that was worth less with the house on it than it was as bare land. A couple of friends lent him the closing costs and the token down payment and Don moved into the place, a ramshackle four-room farmstead out near Madison, and began to work on it. Three months later it was transformed into what the realtor called "a spic-and-span charmer of a cottage in the woods," and after repaying his friends and the bank and the unbelievably patient credit manager at Lowe's, Don walked away from the place with nine thousand dollars in capital. Three thousand a month. Except it wasn't income, it was another down payment and the expenses involved in fixing up the next place.

Now he had enough that he could build new houses again. He could put Lark Homes back in business if he wanted to. There were people who still left messages for him, passed word along that they weren't going to build their dream house until Don Lark could build it for them, that's the kind of reputation he had. Once Don even went and stood on a building lot, a lovely hill in a development tucked away in an ell of a cemetery so it would always be surrounded by forest. But standing there, he saw nothing at all. Oh, he saw the flies, the birds, the squirrels. He even saw the slope of the land, the drainage. His eye picked out the peripheral trees that would be worth saving, and how the driveway would have to go.

What he couldn't see was the house. He couldn't imagine the future anymore. That part of him had been cut out and buried with his daughter. If the truest dream of your life could be taken away from you and then killed, what were all these houses for? Didn't people know better?

It wasn't Don's job to tell them. But he didn't have to build their houses, either.

So he stayed with the old houses. Abandoned, weathered, derelict houses, or rundown rentals that no one had cared about. Houses that spoke of dead dreams. It was a language Don could understand. And what he did in those houses was not build—someone else had already done that—but rather eke a little more life out of the old place. Make the aging timbers hold another life or group of lives for some brief span of time. Not ready for the boneyard yet.

Now he was starting yet another house, the most ambitious project so far. A house that had been built as a mansion. A house thick with old dreams cut up into tatty little nightmares and finally put to sleep and now his job was to wake the place up again.

The Bellamy house was solid. Jay Placer saw it too, but maybe he hadn't worked with enough old houses to understand how remarkable this one really was. Built in the 1870s, and yet there was no bowing or sagging anywhere. That was more than a matter of good workmanship. This house was a testament to the meticulous care of the original builder. The foundation had been deeply and properly laid. The backfill had been porous and the cellar had stayed dry. Therefore there was no settling. The sill rested on masonry high enough out of the ground that no rot had set in even after more than a century. The walls were solidly tied together and made of the finest tempered wood, and even the roof showed no sign of sagging. Many new homes showed carelessness in the building and it was obvious to Don that most houses being built today would be lucky to be standing fifty years from now. But this one had been built to stand until... until what? Forever.

If other people had Don's eye for quality, there's no chance this house would have been available at the price; no way would it have been left abandoned for so long. But what other people saw was the shabby face of the house, the seedy yard, the boarded-up windows, the smell of cheap old carpeting and thick-laid dust. It would take a year and thousands of dollars to get the place back into livable shape again. Other people had neither the time nor the money for it. But Don had nothing but time, and it wasn't half so expensive when you did the work yourself. As long as you knew how to do it.

No doubt about it, the Bellamy house had once been a beauty and it would be a beauty again a year from now. It would go on the market as the leaves were turning. Don would see to it that it looked like a dream of the lost American past. Everybody walking into it would feel like they had come home at last. Everybody but Don himself. To him this place would feel no more or less like home than any other. Walking into it now, the bad smell of it, the dust, the squalor, did not make him shy away; walking out of it a year from now, with gleaming floors and walls and ceilings, with his beautiful finish work everywhere and the autumn-shaded sunlight dancing through the windows, it would not make him yearn to stay. It was a job, and he would live here because he didn't want to waste money paying rent when he already owned a roof and walls that would be good enough.

Not tonight it wouldn't, of course. There was the little matter of the closing, and then the hooking up of water and power. But in a few days he'd move in and sleep where he worked. Better than the back of the truck.

If Cindy Claybourne had known that, would she have given him the time of day? Maybe. Some women were drawn to a little bit of wildness, even in a middle-aged man. Trouble was, most women didn't know how to interpret the wildness of men. Don had seen it even in high school. How the brutal guys who thought of women as an easier way to jerk off always seemed to have a pretty girl close at hand. What were these women thinking? He finally came to understand it in a biology class in college, before his dad's death took him out of school and put him in the house-building business. These women weren't looking for danger, they were looking for the alpha male. They were looking for the guy who would subdue the other males, rule the pack. The man with initiative, drive, a will to power. The trouble was, civilized men didn't express their drive the same way the brutes did, and a lot of women never caught on to that. They saw the masculine display, the casual violence, and thought they were seeing just what the estrous female wanted. What they got was only another baboon. While the real men, the kind who built things that lasted, who cared for those under their protection, those men often had to search long and hard for a woman who would value them.

Don thought he had found one. It wasn't until four years into their marriage that he suspected she was having an affair. Only the lover wasn't a man, it was coke, and when she couldn't get that, it was booze. She far preferred what she got from drug dealers and bartenders to what Don had to offer. She called it "having a good time."

Women who were attracted to wildness didn't interest Don. In fact, it had been a good number of years since Don had been attracted to any woman at all. Well, that wasn't strictly speaking true. He noticed them, all right, the way he noticed Cindy Claybourne, how she kept sizing him up, how her smile got extra warm when she spoke to him, how she hung on his words even when he knew perfectly well that what he was saying was empty and boring or so filled with the jargon of his profession that she didn't understand a bit of it. He noticed women, but when he thought of actually trying to see one alone, talk to her, start establishing a relationship, it just made him tired. Sad and tired and a little bit angry even though he knew that not all women were unreliable child-stealing chimps.

Besides, what Cindy Claybourne saw as wild-ness in Don wasn't vigor and violence at all. There was no man-of-the-woods in Don, no wind-blown hair on the bike or in the convertible. Don was a minivan kind of guy, a child-safety-seat-toting list-following husband-who-always-says-we-instead-of-I kind of guy who just happened to be living out of the back of a pickup truck because noticing a minivan or a child safety seat or an actual lived-in family house made him lose control of his emotions all over again and so he stayed away from things like that. He was wild the way a mistreated dog becomes wild, not because it loves freedom, but because it has lost trust.

Don imagined asking Cindy Claybourne: Do you really want to get involved with a man like me? And she would say, Oh, yes! because women said things like that, but when she got to know him she'd end up saying, Oh no! What have I done!

So Don would spare Cindy and himself the time and expense of several dinners out and a feeble attempt at dancing at the Palomino Club or whatever they might do to simulate fun. He would sign off on the purchase and never see her again unless maybe this time he decided to list the house with a realty. And yet, despite this decision, Don found himself thinking of her off and on as he worked on securing the doors.

A guy who lives in a truck can't be sure that his cordless power tools will be charged when he needs them, so Don always did his lockset work with a manual auger. Since he wasn't going to keep these doors, he had no compunction about ignoring the old lockset and installing a new deadbolt higher than any builder would ever put one. Why shouldn't he? He was the only one who would use these locks—when it came time to sell the house, there'd be brand-new doors. Don was tall; for him the deadbolt was no higher than the normally placed lock would be for a woman of, say, Cindy Claybourne's height.

And thinking of Cindy Claybourne's height made Don think about just how tall she was compared to him. The crown of her head couldn't be any higher than Don's shoulder, which meant that he'd really have to bend down to kiss her and... damn!

He put together the deadbolt on the front door, lined up the strikeplate, screwed it in, tested it. Lock, unlock. The key moved smoothly. The door felt solid.

As he stepped off the porch to walk around to the back yard, he saw someone peer at him from a window in the carriagehouse next door. What he was doing on the front porch had to be the most interesting thing that had happened on this block in a while. With the house and yard abandoned for so long, everybody would be grateful to see him working on it—happened every time, and Don didn't mind the waves, the smiles, even the greetings and the "about time" comments. He just hoped nobody got too neighborly and decided that what Don needed was conversation while he tried to work. He didn't like explaining himself to people.

That had always been one of the nice things about working with houses. The guys you worked with were pretty serious about the job. Men in suits, they were usually shmoozers, talking sports, networking, couldn't leave you alone until they figured you out. But the contractors and workmen, they looked to see how you did your job and if you did it right, they respected you, and if you paid them on time and stuck to your schedule, they even liked working for you. The ones who worked in groups, they could go to Cook-Out together for lunch and they knew each other's wives or at least knew about them. But as the general contractor, Don wasn't really part of that. His free time was for his family, for his handful of friends, for his own thoughts.

Like the Duke Power guy when he showed up. No shmoozing, just a little weather talk and then he's looking at the line in. Underground, that's good. Not a very heavy line, that's not good. Then down into the cellar to the fuse box, saying no more than was needed. Don led the way down with his big flashlight, but of course the Duke Power guy had his own light and pinpointed exactly the things that Don had noticed. The ancient knob-and-tube wiring was clearly visible among the floor joists overhead, and the thirty-amp fuse box was a joke.

"Good thing this house wasn't occupied," said the Duke Power guy. "Somebody runs a hair dryer, the place goes up in flames."

"I won't be running any power through the old lines."

"Good. You want a hundred amps?"

"Already got the panel box I need. I'll put it up when you tell me where."

For the first time, the Duke Power guy showed some pleasure. Almost a smile. Probably wasn't used to people doing part of the work. Or maybe he expected Don to do it wrong and it amused him. But Don wouldn't do it wrong, and it would save him work, so it didn't matter what he thought, and the best thing was, he didn't say what he thought, just kept it to himself and that was right. He went right on and asked the next question. "Might as well run the line in through the same hole, as long as you got no need for the old cable."

And Don answered him. "Good enough for me."

By the time the cable was ready to hook in, Don had the panel box up and the old fuse box out of the way. When the guy started to attach the cable Don stepped back out of the way.

"Ain't hot yet," said the guy.

"And my gun ain't loaded," said Don.

That earned him a grin. "I guess that means you don't need the lecture about having a qualified electrician do all your wiring and shut off all the power before you touch this box."

"You can read me my rights, officer, but I've been through it all before."

The Duke Power guy shook his head and chuckled.

Before he turned on the juice, he watched Don attach a single white electric cable to one of the breakers. Didn't say a word while Don did it, which was high praise among workmen. Afterward he nodded down toward the other end of the coiled cable, which Don had attached to a junction box with a quadruple outlet.

"Hundred feet?" asked the Duke Power guy.

"Hundred and fifty," said Don. "I won't tell you how many extension cords I'll be running off this thing."

"Good thing, cause I don't want to know."

"It'll be code before the inspection." In other words, I won't let you get in trouble for hooking me up with the wiring in this condition.

"I seen one of these jobs once," said the Duke Power guy. "Lath and plaster walls. Hope you ain't planning on saving the original plaster."

"I believe in drywall," said Don. "I'm renovating, not restoring."

"Have fun." And that was it. The Duke Power guy got him to sign off on the job and he was gone. Guys in suits would have done lunch and exchanged business cards and promised each other a golf game.

The cable trailing behind him, Don carried the junction box up the stairs to the ground floor. The basement access was in the apartment on the north side, by far the nicest of the units the house had been cut up into. The stairs led into the biggest kitchen, with a massive table that might have been the finest piece of furniture left in the house, if not for all the initials carved in it. Then there were two bedrooms off the narrow hall that led to the parlor in front—again, the largest of the parlors in the house. Don set down the junction box in that room, plugged a six-outlet power strip into it, and then plugged a worklight into that. He flipped it on and the room was filled with a harsh white light. The words from Genesis passed through his mind as they always did at such a time. Only it was Duke Power, not God, who said Let there be light. God didn't bother much with light and dark anymore, Don figured. It had been a seven-day contract with no warranty. He finished a day early, collected his bonus, and walked away clean to let somebody else live with what he'd made. That's how Don looked at God, at least for these last few years.

Now that he had light, it was time to divide the firmament. Actually that was his dad's old joke, to call furniture "firmament". "Word doesn't have any other meaning that anybody knows of," he used to say, "so I can assign it to any meaning I want." So it was furniture that Don moved, pulling it all up against the outside walls of the north parlor so it was out of the way. The cheap and filthy wall-to-wall carpet wasn't worth saving, so Don had no qualms about taking his utility knife to it and baring all of the floor that didn't have furniture piled on it. The floor underneath was what he expected—a badly beaten-up hard-wood floor so solid and well made that it couldn't be replaced today at any cost. This place had been built right.

He rolled up the huge piece of old carpet and carried it outside and laid it on the grass next to the curb. Then he backed the truck up onto the lawn so he wouldn't have to carry his tools so far. It took him about a dozen trips to get all the sacks and boxes of hardware in. He plugged in the cordless tools to freshen the charge.

Three things were left in the back of the truck—the garbage can, the workbench, and his cot. The cot had to be last and the workbench was the heaviest thing, so he pulled out the huge Rubbermaid garbage can he had bought that morning and carried it around the outside of the house.

He picked a spot near the back door. The really massive pile of trash would be established at the front curb where he had left the carpet, of course, but he had to have a place to throw leftover food and any dead animals he might find in the house; whatever would rot needed to be in a can with a lid.

It was a hot afternoon, and all the carrying and walking had given him a light sweat. It felt good. So did the shade of the house and the tall looming hedge that cooled and scented the air and made the carriagehouse next door invisible. And at the end of the tall part of the hedge, there stood an old woman leaning on a rake, her white hair done up in a ragged bun that left strands wisping around her head like a halo, her face creased and cracked from a hundred suntans. A neighbor. And from the bright eagerness of her eyes, a talker. It was starting. But Don was raised right. He smiled and said hey.

"Hey yourself, young man," said the old woman. "Y'all fixin' up the old Bellamy house or tearin' it down?" Her accent was pure hillbilly, all Rs and twang.

"House ain't ready to die yet," said Don.

At once the old woman called out to somebody invisible behind the high hedge. "You was right, Miz Judy, the landlord's gonna make this poor feller fix up the Bellamy house!" She turned back to Don. "I hope you don't think a couple of locks on the doors are going to make you safe. Strange people go in and out of that house. It's a nasty place!"

What was she doing, trying to scare him into going away? That made no sense. The neighbors should be glad somebody was trying to fix it up.

An old black woman now emerged from behind the hedge, leaning so deeply into her cane that Don wondered if she even had a hip. This must be Miz Judy.

"I'll bet you four bits, Miz Evvie, four bits says he's bought the place hisself."

So the white woman was Miz Evvie. But of course those were names they called each other. Don knew better than to call them by name until he was given the right name to call.

"Don't be silly," said the white woman. "People with money never do the work theirself."

Don hated to take sides. He remembered the story of the Trojan War in high school and how it all started because poor Paris got himself trapped into judging which goddess was most beautiful. Never get in the middle of arguments between women, that was the main theme of Homer, as far as Don ever cared—it was the only lesson that seemed to apply to the real world. These two old bats weren't exactly Athena and Aphrodite—or was it Diana? Didn't matter, it wasn't going to be a beauty contest. Don was the only one with the answer to their bet and while he didn't expect a war to start, he had a feeling that he was about to get himself roped into a lot of unwelcome conversations later. Oh well, couldn't be helped. His mother would come back and haunt him if he wasn't polite to old ladies.

Directing himself to Miz Evvie, Don shook his head sadly and said, "You made yourself a bad bet, ma'am. I own the place, or I will as soon as we close."

Evvie turned to Judy and pounded the rake into the grass a couple of times. "Damn all! Damn upon damn!"

At which Miz Judy seemed to take great offense. "Don't you go swearin' at me like some cheap hillbilly whore!"

"Gladys told you, didn't she!" said Evvie. "You're a cheater!"

"I never said Gladys didn't tell me, now, did I?"

"It ain't sportin' to bet on a sure thing!"

"I don't know what you mean by sportin'," murmured Miz Judy. "I'm having fun!"

They were so caught up in their argument that they seemed to have forgotten all about Don. Maybe they wouldn't be such bad neighbors after all—not if they did all their talking to each other. Don touched his forehead in farewell and made his way back to the pickup.

The Black & Decker Workmate wasn't all that heavy, really. He routinely carried loads of lumber or masonry much heavier and more awkward. What made it weigh so much was that he carried with it all the days and weeks and months of work that lay ahead. Sometimes that bench seemed like his best friend; he knew just how to use it, how it held things for him. And, like a best friend, sometimes he hated looking at it so bad he wanted to throw it out a window. Carrying it in meant the job was really going to happen and it made him tired.

He brought it into the north parlor and set it up in the middle of the room where the overhead light would shine down over his left shoulder as he worked. He leaned on the bench and surveyed his new quarters. The jumble of furniture would be gone in a day or so. The room was the largest space he'd had to work in since he started doing old houses. The bare floor brought the warmth of wood to the room. Out the front window he could see the carpet lying between the sidewalk and the street and it looked like progress to him.

The door leading to the entry hall stood ajar but because of a slight angle in the hanging it had creaked half shut every time he passed through it, so it still blocked his view of the front door. That was going to be a constant annoyance, having to open and close that door or walk around it all the time. So Don took out a screwdriver and popped the pins out of the cheap hinges. It was a sure thing this door wasn't part of the original house—no doubt this space had been an arch when the house was first built, and the door was installed only when the place was cut up into apartments. As soon as the door was off the hinges the place looked better. The space flowed better.

Don carried the door out to the sidewalk and laid it down on the carpet. Before, it had been just a carpet lying by the street. Now, with a door lying on it, it had become a junkpile. On another street the neighbors might have objected, but here it meant that somebody was taking trash out of the derelict house. That had to be a welcome sight to the neighbors.

He was about to go back in when a Sable pulled up at the curb right in front of the new junkpile. It was Cindy Claybourne. She got out of the car in a smooth motion that Don found attractive precisely because it did not seem designed to make men watch her do it. It was more like she'd been bounced out of the car and hit the ground walking.

"I'm glad I caught you here!" she said. "Hard to get in touch with somebody who's got no phone."

"Not really," said Don. "I'll be here, mostly."

"That's what I thought." She glanced at the door and the roll of carpet. "Already clearing things out?"

"Just my workspace," he said. "I don't do the hauling. Cheaper to have it done and get the junk out of my way."

"Well, I'm sure you can guess why I came by."

"Closing set?"

"Since there's no bank involved and you're willing to trust the last title search, there was no reason for delay. Our lawyer fit you in tomorrow morning at nine, if that's a good time."

"Fine with me."

"I mean, if that's too early..."

"I'm up at dawn most days," he said. "Don't like wasting daylight."

"Oh, right," she said. "I guess it'll be a while before they get the power hooked up."

"Duke Power came today," said Don. "But I'm not using the house wiring so I still need daylight."

She nodded. Their business was done, but she was lingering. And truth to tell, he wasn't all that eager for her to go. She kept looking at the house, not at him, and so he said the obvious thing. "Want to go inside?"

"I don't want to interrupt you if you're busy."

"Done all I'm going to do today." Which wasn't true, exactly, so he corrected himself. "Except do a tour of the bathrooms, see which fixtures look to be usable maybe."

She grinned. "Can I come along on the tour?"

"Not exactly what most women look forward to on their first date," said Don. Then he wondered what she'd make of his joke. And then he wondered whether he was joking after all.

"Don't fool yourself," she answered him. "Since women clean ninety percent of the bathrooms in America, we are endlessly fascinated with how the fixtures are working."

Don thought of how he had insisted that he was going to clean all the bathrooms in the house because no wife of his was going to have to kneel down and clean up any spots where maybe he splashed when he was peeing, but then one day he caught his wife down on her knees scrubbing the bathroom he had cleaned the night before. After that he gave up and left the job to her and just tried to aim straight. He figured it wasn't that his wife liked doing the job, it's that she felt like no man could be trusted to do it right. Never mind that Don was the meticulous one in the family. Must be a woman thing.

He didn't speak of any of this to Cindy, though. Nothing more pathetic than a divorced man who can't stop talking about his ex-wife. Or was he a widower? When your ex-wife dies, does that count? Only if you still loved her, Don decided. Only if you grieved. And he was still too angry with her for that. The one he grieved for was his baby. Why didn't they have a word for a father who'd lost his child?

All this reflection only took a moment or two, but he realized that the hesitation had been obvious to Cindy and she was beginning to laugh off her request and excuse herself.

"No, no," he said. "I'll be glad to take you on the grand tour of the plumbing."

She searched his face for a moment. He knew what she was looking for—some sign of interest on his part, some reassurance that his hesitation was not because he didn't want to spend time with her. He had no idea what that sign would be or whether he gave it. He just turned toward the house and said "Come on" and when he got to the porch she was right behind him so whatever she was looking for she must have found it.

Each of the downstairs apartments had its own bathroom, but the tubs were sludgy and filthy and the sinks had the streaking and wear that spoke of constant leaks. He'd leave the water off in those bathrooms, except maybe for the toilet in the north apartment, which would be the one most convenient to his workspace. He showed Cindy how there was no warping or staining of the floor around the toilet, so it wasn't a leaker. "I'll probably have to replace all the rubber parts in the tank, but that's no big deal."

She nodded, but he could see that she didn't much care for the brown gunk that lined the dry bowl up to the old waterline.

"That's not what you think," said Don. He pulled a rag out of his pocket and wiped it away. Didn't even take much rubbing. "I think it's a kind of mildew or something that grew when they left the water standing here for a few years." He tossed the rag on the floor.

"I don't envy you your job," she said. "It looks to be hard and sweaty and unpleasant."

"Wouldn't trade for yours, either," he said. "Having to be nice to people all day."

She laughed. "That just shows you don't know me."

"What, you aren't nice?"

"I'm legendary in my office as a real estate terrorist."

Don was puzzled. How could she stay in business if people didn't like her?

"No, no, don't get the wrong idea," she said. "I'm always cheerful and polite. But when it matters I say what I think—cheerfully and politely."

"And you're in sales?"

"It doesn't require any skills," she said.

"Hardest skills of all."

"You think?"

"I work in wood, I know what I'm getting. I can see the grain, I can see the knots."

"People aren't much different," she said with a shrug.

"Harder to read."

"Easier to bend."

Cramped together in that bathroom, neither of them willing to lean against anything because it was so dirty, they were so close together Don could feel her breath against his shirt, against his face, could smell her, a light perfume but behind that, her, a little musky maybe, but the womanliness of her almost hurt, it took him so much by surprise. He hadn't been this close to a woman in a long time. And not just any woman, either. He liked her.

"You bending me?" he asked.

She smiled. "You feeling bent?"

He knew it as if he was in a play and the script said They kiss. Now was the time for him to bend over—not that far, really—and kiss her. He even knew how it would feel, lips brushing lips, mouths melting softly against each other, not passionate but warm and sweet.

"Better check upstairs to see if that bathroom has a usable shower," he said.

He could hardly believe he said it. But in fact, while he was standing there looking at her and wanting to kiss her, his mind had raced ahead: I can't hold this woman close to me, I'm dirty and sweaty and I need a bath, she'll be disgusted. And then he thought: Even if the water got hooked up right now, there's probably not a shower I could use here. And so he blurted out the next thought and the moment passed.

But it was a real moment, he could see that from the amused little crinkle in her eyes. "Sounds like you care about keeping clean, Mr. Lark," she said.

"Live in a truck long enough, a shower is like a miracle," he said.

She laughed. "A miracle with a drainhole." Then she brushed past him and led the way out of the tight hot bathroom.

Upstairs, the three apartments were smaller than the downstairs ones, and they all shared a bathroom. Even when the house was first cut up into apartments it would have been an old-fashioned, cheap arrangement. By the time the house went vacant, it must have been hard to find anybody willing to put up with sharing. The bathroom was at the end of the hall, right at the back of the house.

Don guessed that originally the back stairs had been there, narrower than the wide front staircase, and when the bathrooms were put in that staircase was taken out and the plumbing was run up through the space where it had been. Modern people needed toilets and showers a lot more than they needed a stairway for the kids to get down to the kitchen without being seen by guests in the front room. So the back stairs wouldn't be restored.

This shower still had a curtain hanging in it, spotted with ancient mildew but not disgusting. And the tub was pretty clean, not even as dusty as he would have expected. No sign of leaks in the tub; he'd be able to use it as soon as the water was hooked up and he replaced the rusted shower-head.

"This where you're going to put the Jacuzzi?" asked Cindy.

"No, I'm going to keep it simple up here. I'm making the back of the south apartment into the master suite and the fancy stuff goes there."

He didn't even have to squat down to look at the toilet. A big crack in the bowl and serious waterstains around the base of it were all the information he needed.

"Toilet doesn't look good?" she said.

"It ain't a toilet anymore," said Don.

"What is it?"

"Sculpture."

She laughed. "I can see it on a pedestal downtown in the Arts Center."

He liked her laugh. He wanted to listen to it again. He wanted to see if that moment would come again, when he'd actually want to be close to a woman, when the memory of his wife would disappear and he could see Cindy Claybourne as herself. "Listen," he said, "you want to meet sometime, not in a bathroom?"

"I don't know, I was just thinking that you bring a special je ne sais quoi to the discussion of plumbing fixtures."

"OK, how about dinner in a place with really nice sinks?"

"The bathrooms at Southern Lights really have character," said Cindy.

Don had taken his wife there the first time they went out to eat after the baby was born. He didn't think he could go there without picturing that baby seat on the floor beside their table, the little face in repose, breathing softly as she slept. He quickly ran down the list of restaurants that he had gone to with clients but not with his family.

"Cafe Pasta," Don said. "Art Deco."

"I'll go there, but only if you promise to share the sausage appetizer with me so both of us have garlic breath."

Again she stood in front of him, looking up at him, smiling, and this time he seized the moment, reached up and touched her cheek, bent down and kissed her lightly, so lightly it was almost not a kiss, more of a caress of her lips with his. And then again, just a little more lingering, lips still dry. And a third time, his hand now around her waist, her mouth pressing upward into his, warm and moist. They parted and looked at each other, not smiling now. "I was just thinking that there's more than one way for us both to have the same breath," said Don.

"Who's bending who, that's what I'd like to know," said Cindy.

"Bet you say that to all your clients."

"After we close tomorrow, you're not a client," she said. "In fact you never were—you were a customer."

"So what will I be when we go to Cafe Pasta?"

"A gentleman friend," she said.

He liked the sound of it.

"When?" she asked.

"I'm not the one with an appointment book," said Don.

"Tomorrow night?" she asked.

"Shower won't be running by then."

"Come over and use mine," she said.

That startled him. It sounded like a come-on, and not for anything he thought of as romance. "No," he said, perhaps too sharply. "Thanks, but let's just make it Friday, OK?"

"If it's Friday we'll have to make a reservation."

"You're the one with a phone."

"Glad to do it," she said. She led the way out into the upstairs hall, and as she preceded him down the stairs, she said, "By the way, my offer to let you use my shower—that's all it was. I'm not that kind of girl."

"Good thing," he said, "cause I'm not that kind of guy."

"I know," she said. As if she liked that about him. Maybe she wasn't looking for the alpha baboon after all.

At the front door she stopped and held up a hand. "Don't walk me to my car," she said. "I'd just want you to kiss me again and we wouldn't want to give the neighbors anything to talk about."

"Fine," he said. "See you in the morning."

"Come by my office and we can drive to the closing together. The lawyer's on Greene Street downtown and it's hard enough to find one parking place, let alone two."

"Eight forty-five," said Don.

"Nice doing business with you," she said with a grin. Then she bounded down the stairs and walked across the lawn. He stood in the open doorway and watched her all the way to the car, watched as she got in, started it up, and drove away. And then just stood there a while longer in the open door.