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“Too late,” Keith informed her tersely.
He was making it difficult for her to get her point across, but she pushed on. “I smugly put him in his place—or so I thought.” Her voice became more serious as she continued. “I also thought there was all the time in the world to resolve these differences between us when I was good and ready to.”
Kenzie took a breath. She and her father had had more than their share of differences, but she’d loved him, and it still hurt to think about him no longer being part of her life.
“My father died before that happened. To this day, I really regret not mending those fences. And I regret not getting off my high horse and just declaring those differences we had to be meaningless water under the bridge.” She looked up into Keith’s eyes. “So I know firsthand what it’s like to have someone die on you before you have a chance to make up.”
“I had no intentions of making up,” he informed Kenzie.
Kenzie shook her head. “You say that now, but you don’t really mean it.”
“Look—”
Kenzie wasn’t about to back down from her position. She was certain that she was right and he was in a state of stubborn denial.
“No one but the Tasmanian Devil wants to live in a state of perpetual warfare.” She looked past Keith’s shoulder toward the casket. “I’d like to pay my last respects to your mother.”
That really didn’t make any sense to him. “Why would you possibly want to look at the earthly remains of Dorothy O’Connell?”
Moving into the room, Kenzie gazed down at the woman and then at Keith before turning back to the deceased again. “I’m looking at more than that.”
“An estate sale with a side order of philosophy,” Keith said sarcastically. “Does that come as a package deal, or am I required to pay extra for it?”
“You know,” she said in a tone that was devoid of judgment and composed solely of concern, “you might do a lot better getting along with yourself if you just dropped the attitude—and the ‘philosophy,’ as you call it, is free. As for our business arrangement, I only get a percentage of the total sales once they’re final,” she pointed out. “That’s written in the contract I brought with me,” she told him before he had a chance to ask about it.
Circumventing him, Kenzie went straight to the casket for a closer look at his mother. “She was always a pretty lady,” she observed softly. Her mouth curved a little as she added, “She looks so young.”
He shrugged, telling himself he didn’t care about his mother, about any of it. “That was her goal.”
His retort was cynical. Kenzie raised her eyes to his. When had his soul become so tortured? she couldn’t help thinking.
“Everyone deals with grief in their own way.” Her comment had him eyeing her quizzically. “I heard you talking to her,” she told him, thinking it was best not to elaborate any further right now.
“Of course you did,” he responded. She could tell he struggled to curb his annoyance.
She watched his expression as she said, “I was just trying to help.”
“You want to help?” he retorted. “Don’t eavesdrop. Don’t follow me. Just sell the damn things in the house. That’s all I need or want from you.”
He needed more than that, Kenzie couldn’t help thinking, even if he didn’t consciously realize it. But for now, she pretended to go along with his instructions and nodded her head.
“I still have to go over some of the inventory with you.”
He’d hired her at the agent’s suggestion so he wouldn’t have to deal with any of that. Now she seemed determined to pull him in to do exactly what he didn’t want to do.
“Why?”
“So I can put a proper price on the items,” she replied innocently. She had more of a motive than that—she wanted to help him deal with his feelings and the past—but saying so would only accomplish the exact opposite.
“Isn’t that up to you?” he asked. “You’re supposed to be the one with the expertise in vintage clutter.”
He was hiding behind insults, but she had an idea that wasn’t how he felt about it, not really, not deep down.
“I’d need you to point out the items that have more sentimental value for you—”
Keith immediately cut her short. “Well, that’s easy enough. There aren’t any.”
The house was filled with clothes, photographs and other things. It seemed impossible to her that he didn’t have at least a few favorite items amid the rest.
“None?” she asked.
His answer was firm. “None.”
Kenzie studied him for a long moment. “I don’t believe you.”
“Believe me or not. I really don’t care what you believe. All I want from you is to deal with the facts as they exist.”
When it came to battles, Kenzie had learned that picking the time and place gave her some advantage. For now she acquiesced. “If you say so.”
His eyes narrowed. “I say so.”
His voice was firm, but Keith didn’t believe what she’d just said for an instant. This woman didn’t strike him as the type to withdraw suddenly like that. Even after only a couple of hours, she seemed a bit more of a fighter than that. If he were to put a bet on it, he’d say the woman was a great example of sneak attacks and most likely was the human personification of guerrilla warfare.
Kenzie pressed on in her own fashion. “I’d still take it as a favor if you would give me some sort of a bottom-line price on some of the things I found in your mother’s closet.”
Keith grunted something unintelligible in response as they left the funeral home. He had no desire to go through the things in his mother’s closet.
Kenzie turned toward him once they were outside in the parking lot and asked, completely out of the blue, “When’s the funeral?”
There was nothing boring about this woman, Keith thought. “In three days. My mother, according to Mrs. Anderson and confirmed by the funeral director, left very specific instructions as to what she wanted. She thought three days would give all her friends enough time to say goodbye.” He was reiterating what the director had told him.
It was obvious to Kenzie that he did not appreciate the time frame. Stepping over to the side, she tried to put what he seemed to view as an ordeal in a more flattering light.
“That was very thoughtful of her.”
He, apparently, didn’t see it that way.
“Or vain,” Keith countered. “Think what it says for her to believe she has enough friends that they would fill up three days of a calendar. I don’t know of anyone short of a Hollywood celebrity who could have that sort of a following.”
What had made him so bitter? Kenzie wondered. There had to be something else at work here, not just an estrangement between a mother and her son. Had Amy’s death been the trigger?
“Oh, I don’t know,” she told him. “I’d like to think that people who touch other people’s lives on a regular basis might get that kind of a send-off when their time comes. Your mother obviously meant a lot to many people.”
Keith studied her for a moment before turning away and going to his car.
This woman his agent had recommended was definitely a Pollyanna type, he thought disparagingly. Just his luck. The last person he wanted in his life right now was Pollyanna.
He made an attempt to set her straight, admittedly more for his sake than hers. There was just so much cheerfulness and optimism he could put up with listening to, and he was past his limit.
“People aren’t nearly as nice as you seem to think they are,” he told her.
“And,” Kenzie interjected, “they’re not nearly as evil, self-centered and hot-tempered as you seem to think they are.” The look she gave him said they were at a stalemate and for now, she was willing to let it go at that.
“Better safe than sorry,” he pointed out.
She pressed her lips together, aware that since he was the client and she was in essence working for him, she should just drop this.
And she did.
For about five seconds.
“Being safe is highly overrated,” she told him.
Kenzie paused for a moment, back to debating whether or not to reveal who she was. Initially, she’d decided not to mention it, but as things began to progress, she’d gotten more and more tempted to let him in on the truth.
She decided to begin slowly and see where this went. “You know, it’s okay for you to grieve. People will understand.”
“What they won’t understand is not grieving,” he pointed out, then shrugged as he added, “But, well, you can’t show what you don’t feel, right?”
“I don’t believe that,” she told him quietly. His comment didn’t jibe with what she knew about him, or had once known, at any rate.
Keith was about to tell her that he didn’t care what she believed or didn’t believe. But he never got the chance, because she went on to say with more conviction than he felt she should exhibit, “Your mother was a very special lady.”
Keith sorely disliked people preaching on things they couldn’t possibly have any idea about. “And you came to this conclusion how?” he demanded. “By standing and looking at her for a total of, oh, about sixty seconds?”
“No, it was a lot longer than that.”
There was contempt in his eyes. “Maybe you’d better learn how to tell time.”
Okay, now she had to tell him the rest of it, Kenzie decided. The moment she’d recognized him and realized who he was, she’d wavered on whether or not to tell him right off the bat. But he’d been so removed, so distant, she’d decided there was no point in saying anything. He might even be suspicious why she’d bring this into their dealings. But now she didn’t see how she could avoid it.
“I don’t have any trouble telling time,” she informed him.
Keith ushered her impatiently over to the far edge of the sidewalk, away from the funeral home’s entrance. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
She took a breath before beginning, then plunged in. She began with the most obvious line. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
“Remember you?” Keith repeated, confused. Okay, something familiar about her had been nagging at him, but she had no way of knowing that. “You came to my door this afternoon, saying that my agent sent you. I admit I’m out of my depth here, but my memory’s not exactly Swiss cheese. I remember you from this afternoon.”
She made no comment on his response. Instead, she went straight to the part he needed to hear. “We went to school together.”
His eyes narrowed as he focused on her face. “‘We’ as in you and I?” he questioned suspiciously.
She nodded, then added, “And Amy.”
Kenzie watched as her client’s face darkened. She could tell that he thought she was making this up. That for some perverse reason, she was using his sister to get him to trust her or open up to her.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
“I don’t remember you,” he told her in a low, somber and dismissive voice. He meant for it to terminate the conversation before it went any further.
But it didn’t.
“I was in Amy’s homeroom and a few of her classes. We were friendly.” She could see that he still didn’t believe her—most likely because he still didn’t recognize her. In an odd way, she took that as a compliment. It had taken her a long while to learn how to play up her assets, how to style her hair and perform all the other small tricks that it took to make a silk purse out of what had been, in her opinion, a sow’s ear.
Taking out her phone, Kenzie began to flip through something on the bottom of her screen.
“Are you planning on calling someone to back you up?” Keith asked.
“No, I thought this might jar your memory a little—not that we exchanged more than about five or six words in high school.” It had been the classic scenario. “You were the sophisticated senior at the time, and I was the klutzy sophomore.”
What she was flipping through were the photographs on her phone. Most of that space was devoted to the merchandise she had acquired and was attempting to sell in her store.
But in addition to those photographs, she also had a good many photographs of her family. And she had made it a point to have one photograph of herself in that collection. The photograph captured the way she looked back in high school. She kept it to remind her never to allow herself just to coast along. Appearance, success and everything in between required constant work.
Settling for a status quo eventually led to failure.
“This was me in high school.” Turning her phone around, she held it up for his perusal. “Now do you remember me?”
He’d only meant to glance at it and dismiss what she was saying. But the second he looked down at the screen on her phone, a memory began to stir within the recesses of his mind.
The distant memory that been elusively playing hide-and-seek with his brain was back again. He stared at the photo for a handful of minutes—and then the light bulb went off in his head. Stunned, he looked at her in disbelief.
“You’re Clumsy Mac.”
The wince was automatic. She hadn’t heard that name in years and would have thought she had risen above reacting to it.
Obviously not.
“Not the most flattering nickname, but yes,” Kenzie admitted, “I was called that.”
Taking the phone from her, Keith stared at the screen, then looked back at her before looking down at the photograph again.
There was only one word that was applicable here. “Wow.”
Kenzie’s generous mouth curved. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He hardly heard what she said. He was having a great deal of trouble believing that Clumsy Mac and the woman standing before him were one and the same person. He asked the obvious.
“Did you have surgery done?”
She tried not to pay attention to the fact that his question could be taken as an insult. She sensed he hadn’t meant it that way, which was all that counted.
“Actually, no. This is the result of a good hair stylist and learning how to use makeup.”
“Learning?” he echoed. “I think you graduated,” he murmured, looking back at the person captured on her mobile phone.
The difference between that teenager and the woman standing in front of him was like night and day—and, in his opinion, nothing short of a miracle.
