was struggling to control his expression. “Hello,” he finally said, stepping back.
She took off her sunglasses and perched them atop her head as she gave him a friendly nod.
Lisa strolled inside, seeming not to notice the tension between the other two.
“Gemma and I were on the way to the birthing center so she can show me around, but I knew you were expecting me to stop by this morning.” Lisa looked over the foyer as she set her binder and briefcase by the door. “Okay if I take some pictures?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but strolled away, drawn into the once-magnificent home and toward the dining room. “Kitchens and bathrooms,” she called over her shoulder. “That’s what sells houses. Kitchens and bathrooms.” She disappeared around the corner.
Gemma and Nathan stood awkwardly for a moment before she pointed to his hand. “How is the cut this morning?”
“Better. It’ll heal.”
Since that topic of conversation had gone nowhere, she looked around at the nearly empty living room. A huge, clean rectangle of hardwood floor was bordered with scuffed dirt where a rug had obviously been rolled up and taken away.
“Looks like you’re clearing things out.”
“Yes. I sold all the furniture to a secondhand store over in Toncaville. Now I’m dealing with the smaller items—and the dirt.” He bent slightly to dust off the knees of the faded jeans he wore with an old blue T-shirt and battered sneakers. He reached up to smooth his mussed hair and came away with a cobweb. “And the spiders,” he added.
“I ran in to a bunch of those at my place, too. I didn’t mind too much until they tried to join me in the shower.”
“If I lived here, I’d have to pay rent to the spiders to even use the shower.”
She smiled, feeling an easing of the tension, and walked over to examine a grouping of family pictures on the wall. Most of them were formal family portraits, everyone looking stiff and awkward. Gemma studied the faces of Nate’s parents, both of them serious, almost grim. She could see Nate reflected in each of their faces, but staring at his father, she wondered what was on the man’s mind. Was he even then siphoning money from an institution that was so vital to the community where he lived? She had no answer, so she turned her attention to the other photos. A few were snapshots of Nathan as a small boy, alone, or with an older girl. In one photo, he appeared to be about two and she held him on her hip with one arm and tickled him with her other hand. It was a happy, spontaneous contrast to the other pictures, but somehow it made her sad.
Gemma frowned, trying to pinpoint the reason for her sudden melancholy. “That was your sister, Mandy, wasn’t it? I remember that she was very beautiful, and—”
“And she died when I was twelve.” Nathan stepped forward and took the picture from the wall. He pulled a rag from his back pocket, wiped the picture clean and then placed it inside an open box on the floor.
“I know. I’m very sorry. I remember she used to come to our place and hang out with my mother.”
Nate frowned at her. “What? When?”
Gemma paused to think. “It must have been during her senior year in high school. You and I were in second grade. I remember seeing her and my mom out in the garden, and sometimes working in the kitchen. I think Mom taught her to bake bread.”
Nate didn’t respond but stood looking down at the photo he’d placed in the box.
“Is something wrong, Nate?”
“No. No. It’s ancient history now.”
Lisa called to him from the kitchen and he left Gemma standing where she was, gazing at the family pictures and thinking that even ancient history never really disappeared.
* * *
NATE STOOD BY the picture window in the living room and watched as Gemma and Lisa headed toward Lisa’s sporty little car. As they climbed in, Lisa said something that had Gemma throwing back her head and laughing as she tugged open the door and dropped into the seat. He tucked his hands into his back pockets and let his shoulders relax as he watched the curve of her neck and the way her ponytail bounced.
Gemma was everything this house wasn’t—warm, inviting, happy. Somehow, having her here, if even for a short time, had made the place even more depressing.
As they drove away, he turned back to the living room, his gaze going to the wall of family pictures—although, in his mind, family hardly described the people who had lived in this house, especially after Mandy’s death. He and his parents had been like three separate planets, each in their own orbit, never touching, rarely interacting. The Smiths had been the exact opposite of the Whitmires, whom he had often seen together in town—a tight, happy little unit of three. He remembered watching them with longing, wanting what they had, knowing he would never have it.
Mandy must have wanted the same thing. He hadn’t known she was close to the Whitmires. It ate at his gut to know she’d had a whole life, areas of interest he hadn’t known about, but he’d only been a kid, so how could he have known? He wondered if his parents knew. Maybe, judging by the frequent negative comments his mother had made about the “hippie crazies.”
Nate shook his head, pulling himself back from the past, where he’d been too often since returning home. Whatever happened now, it was up to him to create it. He had a huge job before him and it would be helped along by selling this mausoleum. Who knew? Maybe it would be purchased by a happy family with parents who didn’t mind how much noise a kid made running up the stairs, or building some crazy construction in the backyard.
Cheered by the thought, he turned toward the staircase and the last of the stored items he needed to sort through. There were a few sealed boxes in his mother’s closet that he would have to look at someday. They probably contained nothing more than old business papers, but maybe there was some family history that might actually spark a sense of family in him. He snorted aloud, marveling at his need to be proud of people he’d made a point of not obsessing over.
He would finish this task, have the place cleaned and painted, then sell it and move on with his life.
* * *
“I DON’T KNOW why I let you talk me into this,” Gemma groused as Carly Joslin took another bump in the road at warp speed. Her truck was headed back to Reston and the organizational meeting for the reopening of the hospital.
“I’m wondering the same thing,” Lisa added, looking from one best friend to the other.
The three of them were crowded into the front seat of Carly’s truck, as they’d been so many times before.
“Oh, come on,” Carly answered, taking her eyes off the road to tilt her head and grin at Gemma, who was hanging on to the door handle for all she was worth. “It’s like old times—taking my dad’s truck, although now it’s my truck, driving to Toncaville for lunch—”
“Dragging you out of antique and junk shops,” Lisa broke in.
“Arriving back late, getting in trouble,” Gemma added.
“Only we won’t be getting in trouble this time. We’re no longer crazy teenage girls...”
“We’re crazy thirty-two-year-old women, and at least two of us should know better than to go anywhere with you on the day the county is doing brush and bulky-trash pickup,” Lisa said.
Gemma glanced over her shoulder at the “treasures” Carly had already collected along the highway and placed in the truck bed. Twice a year, May and November, the county sent big dump trucks around to collect yard clippings to be ground into mulch, and items too large to fit into trash bins. People put out a wide assortment of throwaway items, which Carly would gleefully collect and repurpose—or “upcycle,” as she called it. She hauled it all home, stored it in the barn and garage and worked her way through it until the next brush and bulky pickup.