file stand.
“The only collateral I have is my name.”
Jace watched him visibly recoil.
“Has Ms. Ashton agreed to allow you to take over the mortgage?”
Jace shook his head.
“Does she even know you’re here?”
Again he shook his head.
“I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to help you, Jason. Besides having no collateral and no agreement from the owner to sell, currently you’re unemployed, I assume. The bank requires at least that you have a job in order for me to approve a loan. I’m afraid even filling out the paperwork will be of no use.” He looked at the packet on his desk.
“I do have a job,” Jace said.
“Where?”
“It’s at the Kendall.”
“You have a job at the Kendall?” The eyebrows went up.
Jace nodded.
“How long have you worked there?”
“I only got back yesterday.”
“So you begin tomorrow?” Kurt asked.
“Yes, tomorrow.”
“That’s not going to be long enough. For a mortgage, which you don’t qualify for, we need several pieces of paperwork, including your last three check stubs. I’m sorry Jace.”
“I have those. I worked in South America.”
“Good. What did you do there?”
“I’m an engineer. I worked on a water pipeline.”
“Do you own any property?”
Jace shook his head.
Kurt frowned. “I can give you the paperwork. It will tell you what we require, but without a willingness to sell from Ms. Ashton, it’s likely a waste of time.”
Jace stood up. “Thanks anyway,” he said. Jace knew it would be a problem getting money, but he had to try. His son’s well-being was at stake. He shook hands with Kurt and left.
Out on the street, Jace went to his car and got in. He didn’t start the engine. He sat thinking, wanting to come up with something he could do to get his house back. Kurt had said he was a Kendall and a Kendall should own the property that had been in his family since the Civil War. With the way he’d been treated, sometimes even he wondered why the house meant so much to him. It shouldn’t. But it did.
When he left years ago, angry at the world and everything in it, he wanted nothing but to get as far from the Kendall as he could. But running away didn’t take the place out of him. He missed it, missed the horses and the riding. He missed the familiarity of it, even the safety. While his father and brother weren’t model parent and sibling, he had enough distractions to ignore their influence on him. And he did what he liked.
Yet when he was in South America he longed for the Kendall. He told himself Ari was the reason for his return and that was the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Jace had been stumbling around the world, trying to forget, but it was useless. He missed home, wanted to go back. Ari was only the catalyst he used to make the decision.
And now he was here. And everything was different. He was back, but he wasn’t home. He was still the stable boy, trying to win over the new lady of the manor.
* * *
SHELDON PULLED THE door of his beach bungalow closed. He was headed to the dock to complete a day’s work. He squinted at the bright sunshine. Then he heard the laughter. He knew it was in his mind because it was Laura’s laugh, her sound. He thought of the photo of her in a frame next to his bed. Her picture was the only thing he’d kept from the Kendall.
She was gone now. Sheldon wanted to remember her only as she’d been in the photo, smiling, dressed in a beautiful gown and standing on the staircase at the Kendall. Their lives were tangled, twined together like the never-ending root system of the common mangrove tree.
After he and Laura married, Jason took off. Neither he nor Laura spoke of him. It became a silent, wordless rule.
Sheldon always wondered why his father never thought of Jason as a son. Not wanting to risk the old man’s wrath, Sheldon hadn’t asked for a reason. Laura felt it was a sore point with Sheldon, since initially she had come to the Kendall with Jason, and Sheldon, following his father’s lead, had almost nothing to do with him, either. It’s as if he didn’t exist in their world. But that world had disappeared.
Sheldon went back to work. He bent down and scraped. The barnacles fell off the hull and onto the tarp he’d placed on the wharf. He thought of Laura. She’d been the light of his life. Everything he did and thought revolved around her. He’d been a better man with Laura.
After Laura died, Sheldon had no fight left in him. He couldn’t do anything, couldn’t concentrate on anything, especially the Kendall. When he came out of his grief enough to notice the farm, things had fallen apart. He didn’t know how much time had gone by exactly. It was too late when he tried to save the place. He knew it wouldn’t work anyway. He wasn’t a good manager. He wasn’t his father. And he no longer had Laura to help him. The farm had been failing for years, but he’d hidden the information from Laura. If he’d told her maybe they could have saved the place, but his life was built on bad decisions.
And treating Jason as if he didn’t belong and wasn’t part of the family was one of them.
“Mr. Kendall,” a familiar voice spoke to him.
Sheldon looked up. “Good morning,” he said. Audrey Thompson stood in front of him. She was a small woman, slightly overweight. He was fifty-one and he estimated she, too, was probably in her early fifties. She spoke to him daily when she walked along the marina. It was part of her exercise program she told him. Audrey was raising her grandson. Her daughter, a single mom, died after her car was struck by a drunk driver when the child was six. He was nine now.
“You’re out in the heat, I see,” Sheldon said.
“The North Carolina sunshine can be unforgiving. The camp bus was a little late, and I had to get to the post office. How are you this morning?”
She asked the same question every day he saw her, which was usually Monday through Friday. “I’m managing,” he answered her as he always did.
She waved then and kept walking. Sheldon watched her go. He was impressed with how she doted on her grandson. She was patient and caring. Sheldon had often seen them along the water. Audrey mentioned she was a schoolteacher and had the summer off, so she had the days to tell the boy about the sky, the clouds, the sea, sea creatures, the sand. Sheldon even heard her explaining how glass was made from sand. He was surprised to learn the process himself.
It was amazing the things he didn’t know and had never been interested in before. But what was more amazing was watching the way she treated her grandson with kindness and love. His father had never treated either him or Jason with the sort of care Audrey bestowed on her grandson. Sheldon had been cloistered in his father’s narrow-minded world. Sheldon was glad to see how other people lived and how they looked after one another.
When noon came, Sheldon knocked off for lunch and headed home. Along the beach were a series of cheap but cheerful bungalows that could barely be called houses, but that’s what they were for some of the lower-income families in the community. Sheldon lived in one of these cottages that he rented from a man in town. The summer was sweltering, but this past winter, when he’d arrived in Meadesville, and taken the cottage, the winds had blown in off the Atlantic and swirled around the estuary freezing his fingers and feet. He longed for his warm bed back in Maryland. But that was no longer his and would never be again. Sheldon didn’t want to see the place where he had been born and raised go to strangers. He wondered what it was like now. When he’d left the Kendall, the main house was no longer the pristine white color with black shutters