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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“She made her choice,” Tim said flatly to Heidi the following week. He flicked on the controls of the yacht-in-progress to test the electronics so the painting and upholstery crews got in to do their part. “She took the West Coast job. There’s nothing else I can do. She’s a grown woman with her own life. There’s nothing I could give her that would be incentive enough to keep her here.”
Heidi leaned into the doorway and worked her jaw side-to-side.
“Don’t give me that scolding look. I’m in a shitty enough mood as it is.”
“I wasreallylooking forward to having that office baby.”
“We could always get a puppy.”
“Not the same thing and you know it.”
Tim shrugged and laced his fingers behind his head, staring through the window at a couple of members of his staff putting together machinery at one of the worktables.
“I feel awful for you,” Heidi said in a soft voice, gentle enough to be a lullaby. “I really do, Tim. I wanted things to work for you.”
“That makes two of us.”
“You gonna keep trying? With someone else, I mean.”
He shrugged again. “If it happens, it happens. I’m not gonna go looking for it. I don’t even want to think right now, truth be told. I guess the same way you had your mind set on that office baby, I had convinced myself that everything was going to shake out the way I wanted. But, alas, you can’t dom your way through real life.”
A knock on the hull on the boat made Heidi look outside and down. “Hi, Kevin.”
“Are you taking me to work, or…”
“Is Frank not picking you up today?”
“I mean, I figured if you wanted to, or…Dad…”
Heidi turned back to Tim and raised an eyebrow.
Tim raised one as well. He couldn’t remember the last time Kevin had actually volunteered to be in the same space as him.
“I mean, you don’t have to,” Kevin said. “It might be my last day on probation so I could start carpooling with the other guys. I figured you could buy me a jug of coffee. I’m broke.”
“Ahh, always a rub,” Heidi said.
Tim rolled his eyes. “You can have all the coffee you want, Kevin. You don’t need to endure the thirty-minute drive with a parent to get it.”
Silence.
Heidi looked down at Kevin, and then back to Tim. She made acome ongesture, so he got up and followed her down the temporary staircase to the factory floor.
Kevin, dressed for the day in faded jeans, work boots, and a bleached-out baseball cap, stuffed his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“You ride in the backseat,” Tim said. “I’m not riding in the back of my own truck.”
Heidi draped an arm around Kevin’s shoulders and got him moving. “I could tell you some stories about being in the back of your father’s truck.”
“Heidi,” he warned.
“What? I was talking about that time at the beach when we all piled in and had that bonfire.
“Oh.”
Kevin made a sound of disgust but kept on walking.
