But the desk in his office had never lied to her.She was slowly coming to believe he was honest through and through.He took payment from patients in fence posts, fresh baked bread, and even grocery bags of zucchini, for crying out loud.
Out in the middle of the yard, caught in the sweep of the sprinkler, the aluminum porch chair the boys had hauled out there earlier sat getting thoroughly soaked, and the man who’d sworn up and down he’d never move it for anybody didn’t get up to save it.
She figured that was about the most hopeful thing she’d seen in a while.A wet lawn chair.
6
By the second week of the renovation, Hank’s house had quit being a home with a doctor’s office in it and had become something nearer to a chaotic railway station with a doctor’s office tucked in the corner.
The dining room wore its new oak ceiling like a woman wearing a ball gown she’d forgotten she owned, a little stunned by it and far too good for the company.Hank was on his knees at the chimney breast, easing the repaired mantel home a few inches at a time.The twins flanked him as apprentices, armed with the tape measures he’d handed them mainly to keep their hands off the chisels.They had, by Sunny’s count, measured every surface in the house, including each other, twice.
Sunny was, by her own reluctant admission, fraying at the edges.
It wasn’t the work.She could do Hank’s accounting in her sleep, and several nights this week at her kitchen table, she was pretty sure she had.
The problem was how every hour spent on Hank’s books was an hour she owed the renovation, and every hour spent on the renovation was an hour she owed her children, and every hour she spent with her kids was an hour she should have been sleeping or doing any one of a dozen chores stacking up around her.
At nine that morning she’d had a claims adjuster from Helena on the phone, a man named Gary who spoke exclusively in insurance codes and jargon.She’d been three minutes into clawing back four hundred dollars Hank was rightly owed when Chloe achieved the summit of the exam table and announced the conquest with a piercing scream that startled Gary into silence.
Sunny had finished the call with one arm pinning a triumphant toddler to her hip and her voice never once losing the brisk, unbothered authority that finally got Gary to agree to cut a check for Hank.Then she’d hung up, set Chloe down, and discovered the child had, somewhere in the course of the call, eaten an unknown quantity of a glue stick.
Even though she now lived in the orbit of a doctor and could simply ask him if the glue was toxic, that struck her as an unreasonable luxury.Instead, she read the label twice and ended up searching the Internet until she was satisfied Chloe would live.
All four children were here this morning because somewhere in the past week, Hank had silently made it known that he didn’t mind having the kids around and found the noise and chaos rather entertaining.
The clincher was when Madison made an off-hand comment about always having wondered what it would be like to have brothers and sisters and following up with a remark that it was fun being the oldest.
All four of her kids were always here now.Natalie’s cute bungalow had become the place they bathed and slept.Hank’s house had become, without anyone deciding it, the place they mostly lived.Presley had claimed a spot on the back porch that got undisturbed sunlight for most of the day for a drawing station.She was currently rendering the half-finished dining room in colored pencil with an accuracy that would have unnerved anyone who didn’t already know what a talented artist she was.
Chloe was loose somewhere in the house, which was the natural and terrifying condition of Chloe.
There had been a version of Sunny Carter, not so many years back, who ran a household with an annual budget into seven figures, two-live-in employees, and a full-time staff of six more without breaking a sweat or, frankly, a nail.That woman had casually spent more on a single dinner party than this entire renovation would cost.
Sunny thought of that person now and with a distant, puzzled tenderness and no real wish to have her back.That woman would have fainted dead away at the sight of her children using a cheap, discarded door as a slide.This woman only made sure one child slid down the door at a time.
Madison moved through the chaos with the serene calm of a ship captain who’d privately concluded the ship was going down.She’d appointed herself keeper of Chloe and made Presley her first mate.Madi was good at it.Way too good at it for her age, in fact.Sunny watched her steer Chloe away from a bucket of joint compound by distracting her with a new activity.Madi did it with the ease of an experienced parent, and Sunny ached for whatever Madi had been through in the past as if she were her own child.
What Sunny needed before anyone painted a single wall, before she picked out a single piece of furniture, was the truth about the house.And the truth about old houses, if a town was the blessed sort that kept its paper records, would live at Town Hall.Original building permits.The 1903 plat.Maybe, if a clerk a century ago had been thorough and the damp had been merciful, the architect’s drawings.
She was not about to strip another inch off that house or add anything to it on a guess.Which meant a field trip to Town Hall.And since there existed no version of reality in which Chloe would stay behind without taking hostages, Chloe came too.
Cobbler Cove’s Town Hall occupied a two-story brick building at one end of Main Street.It had a wide front terrace that extended all the way to the sidewalk and shallow steps that led up to the front door rather grandly.
Behind the counter to one side of the entrance the clerk, who apparently also accepted utility bill payments, directed her to speak with Bonnie Watson about the town’s historical records.Sunny led Chloe to the elevator the clerk had pointed out and let Chloe push the button for the second floor.
Inside the door marked with a brass plaque engraved with the name, Mayor Lucas Shoemacher, Sunny found Bonnie.She was seated at a desk buried under the kind of orderly avalanche only she knew how to navigate.
Wow.Bonnie wasn’t kidding when she’d casually mentioned she ran the town.
The mayor’s inner office stood dark and empty beyond an open door behind Bonnie.Sunny had gathered, from the careful way the WoWS said Lucas Shoemacher’s name, that the mayor was ill and everyone in town knew it.She’d also gathered from gossip she overheard patients share with Hank that the town had basically agreed to let Bonnie run the whole place while the man in charge of Cobbler Cove faded out of it.
“Well, if it isn’t the woman who tamed Hank Steele’s shoebox!”Bonnie exclaimed, looking at her over a pair of reading glasses.Her gaze took in Chloe riding her hip like a small, disgruntled monarch.Bonnie added, “And you brought reinforcements.Hello, Little Terror.”
“Down,” Chloe announced.She’d spotted the mayor’s empty leather chair through the open office door and apparently identified it as a throne in need of an occupant.
Sunny set her down because the alternative was a public meltdown she would be unable to quell.Chloe made directly for the throne.
As Sunny darted after her, she said over her shoulder to Bonnie, “I’m so sorry.I needed something out of your records, and there was no one to leave her with, and ...”
