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“Mr. Donnelly, we’re ready.”
Despite the lack of enthusiasm from Hope’s friend Ava, the talk went as well or better than Josh had hoped. The kids had some great and outlandish ideas. And Josh seemed to have made a friend in Hope’s non-friend, Owen. The little boy latched on to him to the point of asking if he wanted to sit next to him at his desk for the second job presentation of the afternoon. With Hope’s permission, he did.
“Class, let’s thank Ms. Foster and Mr. Donnelly for talking to us today,” the teacher said when the other speaker had finished her presentation.
“Thank you, Ms. Foster and Mr. Donnelly,” the classed chimed.
A bell rang.
“That means the buses are here,” Hope said.
“Everyone get your things together and line up,” Mrs. Bradshaw said.
She led the queue of third graders to the main door while Jared and Hope headed to the office to sign out. Owen trailed behind them.
Josh stopped. “Owen, don’t you need to get on your bus?”
“No, I wait for my mom in the office. She’s a teacher’s aide. Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.” Josh hoped he wouldn’t regret his hasty agreement.
“You know a lot about go-carts. Have you ever made a Pinewood Derby racer?”
“No, I haven’t. I wasn’t a Boy Scout. But my nephew made one.”
“I want to make one, but Mom doesn’t know anything about building things.” Owen stared at his feet. “And my dad’s at Dannemora. We moved here so it’s not so far to drive to visit him.”
Josh swallowed the lump in his throat. The maximum security Clinton Correctional Facility. Although his father had never been in more than the county jail for a few days, Josh could certainly relate to an absent father.
“With all the stuff you know, we could make a winner.”
He squatted to Owen’s level. “I can’t make any promises, but who’s your Scout leader?”
“Mr. Hazard.”
“I know Mr. Hazard. I’ll talk with him and see what I can do, okay?”
A smile lit Owen’s face. “Okay!”
“I’ll have to have your mother’s permission to help you.”
“You can wait with me now and talk to her today.”
Josh stood. “No, I want to talk to Mr. Hazard first.”
“All right.” Owen took a seat in the office, and Josh signed Hope and him out.
“Bye,” Owen said as they left. “See you tomorrow, Hope.”
“Bye, Owen.” Hope’s goodbye sounded friendly enough. If it hadn’t, he would have had to have a talk with her, which wouldn’t be in sync with the fun-brother persona he cultivated. Hope’s situation as the new kid last school year hadn’t been a lot different from Owen’s.
“Can we build something, too?” she asked as he made sure she had the seat belt buckled across her booster seat correctly.
“What do you want to build?” If he didn’t watch it, he’d have so many projects going he’d have to take a leave of absence from his real job to do them all.
“A castle in the backyard at my house.”
“I’ll need to talk with Jared and Becca about that one.”
“All right, but I’m sure it will be okay.”
Josh wasn’t as sure. “I missed lunch. What do you say to an ice cream sundae at the diner while I get a burger and fries?”
“I say yes. Becca and Jared only let us get cones.”
Score one for big brother Josh. Since he didn’t plan on having any kids of his own, didn’t have it in him to be a husband and father, he figured it was his place to spoil Hope and Jared and Becca’s family and any kids Connor and Natalie might have.
Hope caught him up on everything third grade while he ate his late lunch.
“Be sure to talk to Jared,” Hope said when he walked her into the house.
“Talk to me about what?” Jared asked, walking in behind them.
“Tell him, Josh.” Hope scampered off to the other room.
“Hope asked me to build her a castle in your backyard. I assume she means a playhouse castle.”
“Better check that. With Hope, you never know. She could mean a full-scale stone-wall moat-surrounded castle.”
Josh laughed.
“I don’t see a problem. I’ll talk with Becca, and you can work the details out with our little sister.”
“I have something else I want to talk with you about.”
“My loan to Tessa? It’s the same as the loans I’ve made to other local businesses. It has nothing to do with whatever you two have going on.”
Jared, too? “Friends. We’re friends. And that’s not what I wanted to talk with you about. It’s her loan, her business. What I want to talk to you about is a little boy in Hope’s class, Owen. He sounds like a good candidate for your motocross school program. His mom’s a teacher’s aide at the school, and he said his dad is at Dannemora.”
Jared whistled.
“After my talk, the little guy asked me if I’d help him build a car for the Pinewood Derby.”
“Are you going to?”
“Probably, after I talk with Ted Hazard, his Cub Scout Leader, and Owen’s mother.”
“Your job, Tessa’s renovation, Hope’s castle, this kid’s Scout project and your volunteer fire department commitment. Think you might be spreading yourself a little thin?”
Josh stared at his older brother. “I can handle it.”
Jared might have the money to throw around to help people, but he didn’t have an exclusive on giving.
Chapter Three (#ulink_e78435a8-4f0f-5b8c-abff-f41f2471c9db)
The apartment was in worse shape than Tessa had expected. It looked like she had a good couple of hours’ work clearing junk out before she even got to scrubbing off the years’ worth of grime on everything. At least the appliances were in good condition, or they should be. Her grandmother had bought them from Jared and Becca last fall when they’d remodeled their kitchen, with the thought she might rent out the apartment.
She opened a box blocking the way from the kitchen to the living room. A combination of dust and mold tickled her nose. “Achoo!”
“God bless you.”
Tessa spun around. “Josh, what are you doing here?”
“I had to pick up a few things at the grocery store, so I thought I’d swing by and see my new place.” He weaved his way around the boxes and crates into the living room and peered into the bedroom. “Not much room for my furniture.”
“Funny. When Grandma and Grandpa had the attic in the house insulated and sealed off to cut their heating costs, they moved everything that had been in the attic up here.”
Josh stood in the middle of the living room, the top of his head almost touching the swag light that dangled from a hook in the ceiling. “It has potential.”
Tessa followed his gaze around the place. “You’ve been reading real estate ads again. Looking for another house to flip?”
“Not this summer, not with the work you want me to do on the theater. And Hope asked me to build her a castle in Jared’s backyard.”
“A castle?”
“A playhouse that looks like a castle—I checked. We’re still working out the details. And...” He hesitated. “With my degree almost finished, I’m hoping to have a project manager position with GreenSpaces lined up somewhere else by the end of the year.”
Although Tessa knew Josh’s ambitions, the thought that he could be leaving the area in a few months knocked the wind out of her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t see anything coming along before we get the theater work done.”
She sucked in a breath. “It’s not that.”
“Then what?”
Was the man that thick? “I’ve gotten used to having you around, irritating as you can be, especially since almost everyone else I know is coupled off now.”
He walked across the room and tugged a piece of old wallpaper that was curling down from the ceiling. “You don’t have to stay around here.” Josh pulled the wallpaper off in a long strip. “Say the word, and I’ll put out feelers for any civil engineering jobs with GreenSpaces, or elsewhere. I’m always looking.”
“Yeah, I know.” She pushed a couple of strands of hair that had fallen from her topknot out of her face. It shouldn’t bother her that he didn’t say he’d miss her when he left. But it did.
“Want me to stick around...”
Yes.
“And give you a hand here this afternoon?”
Tessa laid her finger along the side of her face as if she was thinking deeply. “I could use your brawn to move stuff out to the Dumpster behind the theater.”
“Ah, saving my brains for the paid project.”
“Right. I wouldn’t want to use them all up before I got my money’s worth.”
“Ha! There’s not enough money in the US Mint to buy all my smarts. Where do you want me to start?”
She tapped her foot against the box she’d been opening when Josh arrived. “This box can go downstairs for the Dumpster. It says ‘for library sale,’ but I don’t know what year. The books smell moldy. I’m sure no one would want them.”
“Are they old? Maybe you could find collectors online looking to buy some of them.”
Tessa usually appreciated Josh’s creative ways of making a few extra dollars, but not today. The musty stale air of the apartment was giving her a headache, and everything Josh said or did bugged her.
Josh strode over and lifted the box. “Whew. Cancel that thought. I’ll take this downstairs, out in the fresh air. You can open some windows. There’s a nice breeze that will blow some of the smell out of here. We’ll regroup when I come back.”
She watched him heave the box to his shoulder and head back out. Regroup. Yeah, that’s what she needed to do. She’d become too dependent on her friendship with Josh. It was enabling her to hang back and not try to establish other friendships.
Josh burst back into the apartment a couple of minutes later. “I’m back. Point me in the direction of the next thing you want trashed.”
Several hours and countless boxes later, the natural light in the apartment was growing too dim to continue working. They’d stashed the things worth keeping in the crawl space storage area that ran behind one wall of the living room. Tessa didn’t have a clue why they hadn’t been put there in the first place. The rest was in the Majestic’s Dumpster.
Tessa tossed her cleaning cloth on the kitchen counter. “We’d better call it a night before it gets too dark to find our way out. I’ll call the power company tomorrow and have the electricity turned on.”
“No, I’ll put it in my name. I didn’t expect the free rent agreement to include utilities, and...” He grinned, emphasizing the smudge of dirt on his cheek. “The contract doesn’t include them.”
“Since when are you such a stickler for rules?”
“Since my getting paid depends on your financial success. Don’t want to cut into your seed money.”
Her chest tightened. He didn’t have faith in her. And if he, her best friend, didn’t, who would?
“Hey, lose the long face. I’m teasing. If you have an extra key you can give me before I leave, I’ll stop by after work tomorrow and see if I can open those two windows that are painted shut.”
But tomorrow was the first Monday of the month, the evening Josh usually came over with pizza or Chinese to view promotion clips of upcoming movies so she could choose what to order. A hollow grew inside her. This was Josh. Of course, business would come before fun—and friendship?
She dug in her jeans pocket for her key ring. “Right here.” Tessa wound the key off the ring.
He took the key. “I can’t give you much other help finishing the cleanup here until next weekend. But don’t worry about having the place ready for me to move in on Thursday. Connor said it would be fine for me to stay at the parsonage while he and Natalie are away.”
“Sounds good.”
“Then pack up whatever you’re taking with you, and I’ll drop you at the house.”
“No, you go ahead. I’ll walk. I need some time out in the fresh air to clear my head of the smell of Mr. Clean.” And of other things, like the fear that our business partnership isn’t the brilliant idea I thought it was.
* * *
Tessa pressed the latch to the front door of the house, only to find it locked. She’d forgotten that Grandma was going to dinner and then a musical prayer concert at the Camp Sonrise Conference Center Auditorium with Josh’s grandparents and Marie Delacroix. After she unlocked the door and let herself in, she dropped into the closest chair. Maybe Josh was right. Maybe the theater was a lost cause, and she should start looking for an engineering job. Opportunities here were slim, though, and she hated to leave her grandmother alone.
She pushed herself out of the chair to see what she could rummage up for supper. Her grandmother’s words about Mrs. Delacroix inviting her to share her house ran through her mind. Grandma wasn’t alone. Her roots were here. She had friends here. Grandma didn’t need Tessa living with her any more than her parents needed her at the mission in Lesotho or, self-pity crept in, Josh needed her presence in his life. He couldn’t seem to be with her lately without telling her about how he was out of here as soon as he found the right job opportunity or that she should look for an engineering job somewhere else.
