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“Preppy stuff.”
“Yeah. I guess I wanted to do somethin’ different.”
Dosomething different, he’d said, notwear something different.She didn’t want to read between the lines too much, but in her experience, sometimes the changes people made to their appearance often broadcasted that there was turmoil happening in their brains, too. That had happened with Leah when she’d cut off all her hair at fourteen. She’d said it was fun, cute, and stylish, but the truth was that she was trying to distance herself from their mother’s death. Mom had her stroke in a salon as Leah had been entering her second hour under a hairdryer. It had taken Leah three years to be able to admit why she’d really done it. It had taken her five years tocareabout her appearance after that, and even at twenty-nine, she still couldn’t step into a salon.
“Do you still want to do something different?” Valerie asked.
Kevin shrugged. “Something folks don’t pay much attention to. Get less criticism that way.”
Ah.She was beginning to understand young Mr. Dowd.
“Hey, Val?” Carine held up her phone and pointed to an e-mail message on the screen. “One of the clients had a question about whether it was possible to swap locations of the laundry room and the powder room in the model they’re looking at. It’s the house called the Hydrangea. Do you know off the top of your head?”
Valerie cringed. “That might have been one of the units that those were interchangeable in, but I don’t want to rely on memory. Let me go look.”
“Don’t let me interrupt your meal. It could probably wait a few minutes.” Carine winced. “They’ll just call me every five minutes until I have an answer.”
“Let’s get them off your back, then. Come on.” Valerie gathered up her notebook and food bag and swiped a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea from the tray at the end of the tailgate.
“You work too much, Val,” Frank said.
“I worklessnow than I did six weeks ago, remember? Besides, if I worked the hours prescribed by my profession, at least half the people in it would accuse me of not workingenough.”
“You work more than anyone in the field I’ve ever met, and I’ve been in construction long enough to have terrorized probablydozensof architects, designers, and project managers.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”
“And probably not even then. I bet you’ll be one of those restless haints whose spirit’ll rise up out of her grave to get just one more thing done before the Heavenly Father decides to slam the pearly gates closed on your stalling ass.”
“I’m not stalling. I’m producing.”
Frank took a swig of his Mountain Dew and nodded sardonically. “Uh-huh.”
“Oh, ignore him.” Carine got Valerie moving toward the office.
“I swear, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t in this gig,” Valerie said.
“Yep. It’s because you have a uterus and life-giving tits.”
Valerie’s gut churned. “God, I explained that to Tim last month.”
“How’d that go over?”
“I think he understood it on a rudimentary level, but he can’t possibly empathize. That’s probably impossible for him.”
Inside the office, Valerie dropped everything on her desk and woke up her computer. Carine did the same at her desk, flopped into her seat, then kicked off her shoes. “Ugh, not wearing those tonight.”
“I doubt anyone would care much about your choice of shoes unless they’re a foot fetishist.”
“You know, I like a lot of kinky things, but having people love on my feet just isn’t something that’ll ever float my boat.”
Boat. Ugh. Pretty much anything folks around her said could remind her of Tim. Valerie rolled her eyes and pulled up house specs.
At that very moment, Valerie’s grandmother was on a boat—a cruise boat. Valerie had talked her into taking a fourteen-day trans-Atlantic cruise that ended in Dover, England. Her flight home was thanks to Tim’s largesse. That ticket hadn’t been a drop in the bucket, and Valerie couldn’t see using it for herself. It would have been too much like admitting it was something she wanted. And she did want to travel someplace other than from one job site to the next.
And not alone, either.
She didn’t see how she could fit it all into her schedule in the next couple of years with her career being up in the air.
