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Jack held up the mug he was already working on. “Everything okay?”
Coming to sit at a right angle to him, Ben pulled off his jacket and yanked at his tie. “No. You working on something important?”
“Some preliminary research looking for Corie and Cassidy. But I’m finished for now. What happened?”
Ben put down his mug and said, “This’ll probably seem like nothing to you because you’ve been dealing with life and death.”
“You deal with life and death every day,” Jack said with a grin, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, fairground parking and animal relocation, but still.” He sobered when Ben didn’t smile. “If it’s important to you, I’m happy to listen. Something with Sarah?”
Ben turned in his chair to pull a ring box out of his coat pocket and place it in the middle of the table.
“Oh, man.” Jack looked into Ben’s face and figured it out. “You proposed and she said no.”
After staring moodily into his coffee, Ben finally looked up. “She said, ‘I don’t want to have children.’”
Whoa. “Really. Why not?”
“She was a pediatric nurse before she went to work for Coast Care. Watching children die was hard...understandably. But then she lost a child she’d grown attached to, and that did it for her.”
“Grief’s a bugger.” Sarah had explained some of that to him just today, though she hadn’t told him the loss had led her to make such a decision. Poor Ben. “Takes a while to get your brain back in working order.”
Ben nodded. His voice seemed to come from far away. “I understand. Who wouldn’t? But that means I have to either live without children or live without Sarah.”
Jack said, “You know, it’s entirely possible she could change her mind a couple of years down the road.”
“I don’t know. And what if she doesn’t?”
“I guess if you can’t live with that possibility, then make sure you think it through before you go any further.”
Ben shrugged. “I’m thinking...you know...maybe it’ll somehow resolve itself.” He ran a hand over his face and groaned. “Yeah. Like that’ll happen.”
“Having kids is a tough choice for some people. If you think disease is hard on children, you should see what war does to them.”
Jack understood Sarah, he just didn’t agree with her. He wanted children—an SUV full. Yeah, kids were very vulnerable to all of life’s evils, but he’d survived a childhood at least as toxic as a horrible disease.
He’d decided in Afghanistan that the best way to save the warring world was to populate it with peaceful people who were loving and tolerant. They would become that way by being loved and tolerated themselves. He imagined all the things he’d longed for as a child... Someone to smile at him, not just once in a great while but every day. Someone to put a loving hand on him, to offer him security and comfort and love him just because he existed. He’d decided to give all that to his own children so they wouldn’t be haunted by bad memories and old fears. So that, one day, they could change the world.
All he had to do was find a woman who agreed with him.
He understood Sarah, but she was wrong.
* * *
SARAH PULLED UP in front of the Cooper Building on Saturday afternoon. The string of sunny days continued, and shoppers were wandering around downtown, determined to enjoy the weather before it turned to the usual Oregon coastal wind and rain of mid-fall and winter.
Jack stepped out of the passenger side and looked up at the two-story Italianate structure built of brick and stone. Arched windows on the second floor softened the line and empty window boxes on the first floor begged for a gardener’s touch.
He stood for a long time. Sarah looked up at his pleated brow. “You don’t like it?”
“No, I do.” He came out of his thoughts to catch her arm and lead her toward the door. “It’s just that I know this place.”
She redirected him toward the rear door. “I don’t have a key,” she said. “But the cleaning crew usually leaves it open. If you’ve lived here all your life, I’m not surprised you know it. It started out as a bank at the turn of the twentieth century, but it’s had all kinds of incarnations since then.”
“When I was a kid,” he said, opening the door for her, “it was a nightclub called Cubby’s. My mother sang here.”
Sarah stopped just inside, the large main room to their right dim and quiet. “You were allowed in?” she asked in surprise.
“Only in the back.” He turned left instead of right into a smaller, windowless room, twelve by twelve, according to the building specs she’d printed out for herself. He shone the flashlight he’d brought around the room. A built-in bookcase stood against the opposite wall. “In those days,” he said, walking in, “I used to play in this room while my mother worked. Somebody from the kitchen would bring us something to eat. I remember liking the crème brûlée.”
Sarah smiled in the dark, happy he had some good memories of that time. “Pretty sophisticated palate for a little kid.”
“No. It’s just really good custard.” He walked up to the bookcase and put a hand on it. “This was a storeroom then, but the guy who owned the place used to keep games and books in here for us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah. Corie was just a toddler, but she came when Donald wasn’t home to watch her, and there was another kid. Can’t remember his name right now. His mother played guitar. He had red hair and freckles and his front teeth were missing. I used to feel sorry for him, but he was always cheerful. He liked to play with a red Tonka dump truck Mrs. Brogan—I think she’s one of your clients—had given me. She’d filled it with cookies—I ate all of them—but he filled it with gum balls. There was a machine by the back door and for twenty-five cents in pennies, he could almost fill it.”
Sarah laughed at that picture. “Good times, huh?”
“Yeah.” He turned off the flashlight. “I’d forgotten there’d been any.”
Together, they walked through the main room. Tall windows let in the bright afternoon. Two Ionic columns flanked an arch at the back of the room that had once separated teller windows from the vault when it had been a bank, the sales floor from the cash registers when it was a clothing store and the dining area from the kitchen when it was a nightclub. The restaurant that had most recently occupied the building had put in a large kitchen at the back, on the right.
Jack looked up at the stains on the ceiling.
Sarah looked up with him. “The city assures us the roof was fixed when the restaurant was here,” she said. “They also rewired, but there’s still a problem in the room where you played. They’re not sure what happened, but the power was fried in there and still doesn’t work. Plumbing’s a little old, but functional.”
Jack glanced around at the walls that had once been a soft gold but were now dull with age. “No cracks,” he said. “That’s good.” He turned his gaze down to the pockmarked fir floor. “This flooring will be beautiful once it’s sanded and restained.”
“That’s what I thought.” She was happy with his observations so far. “Come see the kitchen.”
The walls were white and the floor and backsplash were black-and-white tiles. “It’s institutional looking,” she said, “but the appliances are big because of the restaurant, and the specs say they work.” The window looked out onto the green wall of the fabric store next door.
“Is the water on?”
“Yes.”
Jack went to the double sink and turned on the hot faucet. The pressure was strong and steam rose almost immediately.
“That’s good,” he said. “If anything, you might want to turn the water heater down a notch. There’s an elevator, as I recall.”
“Yes. At the back, just beyond the kitchen.”
The slightly musty-smelling car was small and a little rickety, but there was a new inspection sticker near the controls. Sarah and Jack stood side by side while the car rose.
* * *
JACK PUT HIS hands in his pockets. Awareness of her closed in on him, applying more pressure on his body than the rising elevator. It was difficult to see her pretty profile and the soft roundness of her and know she didn’t want children. She seemed so perfect a vessel! But he did want kids and he wasn’t a perfect prospect for fatherhood at all. He guessed everyone put limits on themselves that greatly underestimated what they were capable of.
Still, in her case it seemed a shame. And Ben had gone off to work that morning looking as though someone had hammered him into his clothes. Jack was determined not to mention her refusal of Ben’s proposal unless she brought it up.
The elevator doors parted on a big room, empty except for two men wearing ventilators, who were putting a pile of trash into black plastic bags.
“What was up here?” Jack asked.
“Living quarters for the people who owned the restaurant. They moved out in the middle of the night a couple of years ago to escape their creditors. Their furniture’s been given to Goodwill.”
Suddenly she smiled brightly. “Can’t you see this with three or four sofas, lots of comfortable chairs, craft tables to work on, a couple of televisions and earphones, and a small library in one corner?”
“The real one is right across the street.”
“True, but it might not have Crochet Monthly magazine and all the history books Vinny loves.”
It always surprised him how well she knew her clients. And how much she cared.
“I’d say if the inspection your attorney is arranging comes out well—” Jack turned slowly in a circle, looking the room over again “—this seems ideal for the seniors’ center.”
Her smile widened further. “Great! That’s what I thought. Maybe you’ll want to bid on the work if we get to move in. We’ll have to repair, do the floors, put in new light fixtures, all kinds of stuff.”
He nodded. He needed work.
In the elevator on the way down, she seemed to lose some of her sparkle. “How was Ben this morning?” she asked.
“Brokenhearted,” he replied truthfully.
Arms folded, she leaned against the wall of the car. “He told you about it?”
“Some. About children.”
“You think that’s awful?”
“Of course not. Misguided, maybe. But everybody has to do what works for them. It’s just hard to deal with when the same things don’t work for the person you love.”
She smiled faintly as the doors parted. “Thank you for understanding,” she said.
Their footsteps rang on the floor as they walked to the back door.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_93cfdf0f-a868-5ebe-9ed4-695c180edcf5)
ON MONDAY, SARAH hosted her favorite clients in the community room in the building where Jasper, her blind client, lived. She’d done a circuit of town to pick up Vinny and Margaret and they now all sat together in a large room with a wall of windows that looked out onto the ocean. A mountain ash on the back lawn had lost its bright red berries and was just beginning to turn from green to gold. There was a discernible bite in the air that said October.
She carried a plate of oatmeal-raisin bars she’d brought along from the small kitchen area to the coffee table. “I apologize for sounding like a page of an Agatha Christie novel, but I’ve gathered you all here to tell you about the talent show fund-raiser for the Cooper Building, hopefully the new home of your seniors’ center.”
Jasper, whose head was perpetually tilted in an attitude of listening, frowned in the direction of her voice.
“Talent show?” he repeated ominously. “You mean like singing and dancing?”
“Yes. Or acrobatics and juggling.” She waited for a smile from anyone. None came. “Dramatic readings,” she went on in a teasing tone. “Wild animal taming. Darts.”
“I’m good at darts,” Jasper said. He was average height and white-haired, though only in his late fifties. Then he grinned. “But one of you will have to stand in front of the bull’s-eye, talking so I can throw at the sound of your voice.”
Sarah laughed, but neither Vinny nor Margaret even cracked a smile. She had this problem with them every time they got together as a group. They liked her visits as long as she didn’t ask them to do anything outside of their comfort zones or at a time that interfered with their favorite television shows. They were happy in their apartments, at the seniors’ center and at the supermarket, but trips out of town were out, as was anything that disturbed their routines.
“Sure,” she said to Jasper. “If you give me a minute to duck first. Vinny, you played in a band on weekends before your wife died, didn’t you? Margaret sang with a traveling choir in her twenties and taught music in the school here in Beggar’s Bay. Maybe the two of you could pair up to do a song together.”
The look the two exchanged should have been accompanied by the heavy, threatening music that announced the arrival of Darth Vader.
“No,” Vinny said simply.
Sarah didn’t mind putting him on the spot. “Why not?”
“Because he knows I wouldn’t want to do it, either,” Margaret replied for him. “Vinny’s kind of...”
Sarah understood her hesitation. Vinny was difficult to describe.
“Jazzy,” she finally said. And it was no secret that they didn’t particularly like each other. Vinny was often outrageous, and Margaret tended to be stiff and formal. “My approach to music is more serious.”
“Guys.” Sarah let them see her disappointment. “I need your help. We need all of us—seniors and all of us who work with you—to support this project so that you’ll have this great place to meet. Have you been in the Cooper Building? It’s wonderful.”
“I was in it,” Vinny said, “when it was still a bank. It would be nice to have a place that was ours, a place we couldn’t be kicked out of with little warning.”
“Right. So what if you each did something individually?”
“I might be able to get some of my old band together.” Vinny picked up one of her oatmeal-raisin bars and smiled in anticipation before taking a big bite. “My drummer is still in town,” he said after a moment, “and Boseman, my guitarist, lives in Newport. I’ll bet I could get him to come down. Mmm. Delicious.”
“Excellent.” Delighted to have a positive word spoken, Sarah steered the conversation back to the general plan. “The fliers I gave you explain that all the proceeds go to your nonprofit’s bid on the building.”
Margaret looked skeptical. “Could that make us enough money? That lawyer who wants it, too, has to have more money than we do.”
“Someone on the school board knows a country-western performer whose family once owned the building.” Sarah ramped up her enthusiasm, hoping it was contagious. “That should draw a lot of people. And he’ll judge the talent show. My boss seems to think people will be happy to support something that allows their friends to stand up in public and...be brave enough to perform. Of course, you two are so good you don’t have to be brave. You’re professionals.” She touched Jasper’s arm so he’d know she was talking to him. “What do you want to do? I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with the dart thing, after all.”
Jasper rolled unseeing blue eyes at the ceiling. “Well, let’s see. I could juggle knives, leap through a ring of fire, saw a lady in half...”
“I volunteer Sarah.” Vinny passed her the plate of treats. “Have one.”
“Cute, Vinny,” Sarah said. “I’ll be working just as hard as you are, but behind the scenes. We’re here to work as a team.”
“Okay.” Vinny picked up another bar and wrapped it in a napkin. “Thank you for the treats. I’ll get in touch with my guys and see what we can do. When do I have to let you know?”
“As soon as possible. Everyone involved will rehearse together twice—once the week before and once for the dress rehearsal the Friday night before our performance. That’ll be the Saturday before Thanksgiving in the high-school auditorium. Where are you going, Vinny? Don’t you want me to drive you home?”
“No, thanks.” Vinny checked his watch, pulled on a dark blue cotton jacket, put the napkin-wrapped bar in a pocket and grinned at her. “Jasper’s driving me home.”
“Ha, ha.”
“Actually, I have a friend on the third floor and I arranged to spend a little time with him, then my son’s picking me up for dinner.” He punched Jasper in the arm, code for wanting to shake hands. “Want to come, Jazz? It’s Nick Crawford. You know him from the seniors’ bus that takes us shopping.”
Jasper shook his head. “Thanks, but I’ll stay to hear the entire plan.”
