Chapter 1

The rain came down angrily, pelting my worn Mazda 3 with the tears that remained bottled up within me. Mom was gone, taken by cancer two months ago, leaving Dad and me to cope with her absence. I guess the only positive part of her illness was that it developed slowly, giving her family a chance to bond and grieve with her prior to her passing. That still didn’t make it easy to say goodbye, particularly when faced with a day like today: spring, fresh, life-giving rain blessing the earth.

She had always loved these days, which is why I was sitting in my car, trying to contain my emotions. Thankfully I had gotten all of the groceries packed into the back seat and storage area by the time the first drops made their presence felt.

I miss you Mom, and so does Dad.

It was only a matter of minutes before the deluge passed, softening into a more placid Seattle drizzle. The car started easily, the defrost setting clearing the windows of the condensation that had formed while I sat quietly reminiscing.

The drive home took all of ten minutes; the unloading of the car considerably less time than that. It was almost 5:30 pm, meaning that I either got dinner for the two of us going in the next fifteen minutes, or we would be ordering pizza again. I seriously considered that for a minute, but since the funeral we had been single-handedly keeping the Domino’s within delivery distance of our house open. It was time for a fresh start.

Five minutes on the internet and I had a menu I could use with the ingredients I had purchased. Shake-n-Bake pork chops, garlic mashed potatoes with a packet of easy-make gravy, salad in a bag and frozen peas were easy enough to whip up. I was getting better at cooking, but unless I got some lessons I’d never be able to equal the meals that Mom used to put together when she was well.

I heard the diesel engine from Dad’s work truck long before he pulled into the driveway. Dad’s an architect design/builder, and he always buys Ford F350 diesel work trucks. When I was younger, the sound of that truck coming up the hill to our house used to excite me. It meant that he would play catch with me, set up a net and let me try to put the puck past him, or spend some time with me on some other father-son activity. Since the onset of Mom’s illness it just meant he was home.

Dad walked through the back door and into the mud room, pausing a moment as he took off his work boots. I saw him take a deep breath, inhaling the odors of the results of my less than spectacular culinary skills. A brief look of pain crossed his face, only to be wiped away by an expression of resolve. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Smells good Tim.” I think he was trying to tell me that he was glad it wasn’t pizza again.

I looked back at him from the stove where I was trying to will the peas to come to a boil. “Don’t bullshit me Dad. I know it’s not like we were used to, but it was the best I could do.”

He walked over to where I stood and embraced my shoulders with one arm; the dad hug. “That’s not what I meant. Let’s talk after dinner – it’s time for us to get our heads out of our asses and figure out what’s next.”

Dinner passed quietly for both of us. Back when times were good, in other words, before Mom died, there’d be laughter and good natured ribbing between all of us as we talked about the day and significant upcoming events in our lives. That had gradually faded during the last year and apparently neither Dad nor I knew how to bring it back.

Tonight, we finished eating, taking a few minutes to clear the table and wash the dishes; like dinner, this was mostly accomplished in silence. When we were done, Dad went to the fridge, grabbed a couple of beers and with a come along wave beckoned me to join him in the family room. He looked around for coasters; that was something Mom had drilled into each of us. I could still hear her, “Tim, James! Do not put that bottle/can/glass down on bare furniture without a coaster under it.”

Our family room was a comfortable place to sit. Mom had made sure that it was an inviting space, not overpowered by Dad’s 60” flat screen LCD TV and Bose sound system. There were two Lazy-boy leather recliners which were placed at the perfect angle to the TV (think Sheldon’s spot from BBT) and in the sweet spot for the sound system, just so the viewer could experience the crunch of pads when the Seahawks put a hurt on the opposing team. Mom had allowed that even while filling the rest of the room with couches and other chairs for visitors and guests to enjoy. She had a sense of space in her decorating scheme, making the room seem smaller than it was and more intimate than it otherwise would have been.

Dad took one of the recliners, placing the two bottles on coasters on the small table between the chairs. “Have a beer with me Tim.”

That was something new – we had never had a beer together. Dad wasn’t all that fastidious about the law when it came to certain things. I had been driving since I was ten, although never on the road. He had only allowed me behind the wheel at job sites when he needed a gopher. Still, at sixteen, I was below Dad’s acceptable drinking age, regardless of how he felt about the law.

He saw me looking at him and gave a little chuckle. “Yeah, it feels weird to me too. This isn’t your typical father-son type talk so I thought if you had a beer with me, we could discuss this like men. I’ll take it back.”

He was reaching for it when my hand shot out and grabbed the bottle around its neck, bringing it quickly to my lips. I think the beer was half drunk when I heard a belly laugh emerge from a man who had been too serious for humor for over a year. He settled back into his recliner and took a matching pull on his own brewski.

“Just take it a little slower, Tim. It has to last you for our entire conversation.”

I grinned at that, glad that the ice was somewhat broken. Dad turned a once-again-serious gaze toward me. “I need to apologize to you. I haven’t been much of a dad this last year and particularly the last three months. I was so focused on losing my best friend and wife that I completely overlooked the fact that you were losing your mother and part of the family that you had known your entire life.” He looked me in the eyes, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t here for you like I should have been.”

There were tears welling up in both our eyes, but darn it, we were men so they remained unshed. Just in case though, I got up and grabbed a box of tissues from another table and brought them back, handing it off to Dad after taking some for myself. There were a few minutes of sipping on brew, throat clearing and nostril chuffing before either of us wanted to break the silence.

“Dad, it’s ok, I understand. You have nothing to be sorry for.”

He put the bottle to his lips and held it there for a time in order to cover what may have been an emotional response. I didn’t know; I was looking at my lap.

“Thanks Tim.” That came out in a burdened voice. He cleared his throat a few times before he could speak again, “Not just for your forgiveness, but for the way you’ve stepped up around here with the grocery shopping, meals, laundry and other things I haven’t been ready to do.”

I simply nodded, knowing what he meant. He was still sleeping in the guest room, unable to return to the master suite and the empty bed which awaited him there. So it wasn’t all that big a deal for me to take over the things that Mom used to do when she was able. I did it to keep both my and Dad’s minds off things.

His beer was done, but the bottle kept rising to his lips periodically. “Before she died, your mother made me promise to tell you this story.” He sat back in his chair and looked toward the TV on the wall, seeing phantom images from his past, “I was eighteen when my dad kicked me out of the house.” I looked at him quizzically, wondering what that had to do with this evening. We didn’t talk about Dad’s family. Shoot, we lived a continent away from them and I had never met them, so I was justifiably baffled at the turn the conversation had taken. He must have caught my look since he smiled.

“Don’t worry, this will all make sense.” He paused as if to gather himself for the reveal. “My dad is a contractor, sort of like me. I worked for him all through high school. The summer I graduated, he had me running one of his crews. I liked the work, but we had always built to someone else’s plans and I had ideas of my own. I wanted to bring something extra to his company, so I decided to go to school for my Architectural degree. Without his knowledge, I applied for college and was accepted. I figured I’d go to school, graduate, get on with an architectural firm while I passed the ARE and was licensed. After that I would come back and work with your grandpa.”

The empty beer bottle lifted off from and returned to the coaster.

“I wanted to make my dad proud and bring back a skill-set that his company needed. So, late that summer, I finally told him that I was quitting in order to attend school across the country from us, but I never got the chance to tell him what for. Things got heated, and he threw me out of the house that night. That was the last time we spoke to each other. I crashed with some of my friends for a few days before I came to Seattle for college. Before I left, your grandma let me back into the house to get my things, but only when your grandpa wasn’t there. She and I talked, and I told her what I was doing and where I was going. She urged me to tell your grandpa, but he had passed his stubborn streak to me, and there was no way I was going to be the one to back down.”

I got up and took Dad’s empty away from him, went to the kitchen and came back with a new one.

“Thanks.” He took a sip and sat there remembering, “Your grandma is a wise woman and wouldn’t get between us. As far as I know, she still hasn’t told him to this day.”

I glanced across at him and caught Dad staring blankly at his bottle, “Your mom knew all of this and she made me promise that you would have a chance to get to know your other grandma and grandpa. That’s why we’re talking tonight.”

Dad looked at me with as serious an expression as I had ever seen on his face, “Tim, I was stupid and let pride dictate my response to my dad. When he threw me out, I determined that I would do what I intended and come back someday to rub his nose in it. That was pride talking, and it’s taken me almost twenty-five years to get to the place where I can swallow it. The most tragic part is that it also took your mother dying for me to be ready to reconcile with my parents.”

He stopped abruptly, the expression on his face that of a fish out of water, his mouth opening and closing. He got up abruptly, grabbing the empty bottle for recycling. As he left the family room, he spotted the remote and tossed it to me, “See if you can find something we can watch.”

That’s Dad for you, parceling out the real meaningful stories a little at a time.

We left it at that for the evening, settling down to watch some TV before going to bed. Dad didn’t bring up our conversation again until a week later. This time he found me in my bedroom finishing up some homework. He came in and sat down on my bed.

“Tim, there was a lot I wanted to tell you last week, but I just couldn’t say it. I promised Jennifer,” that was Mom’s name, “that we would have this talk sometime in the first year after she was gone, and I need to do this before I lose my nerve.”

“I’ll be honest with you, I’m miserable here. Everywhere I go in this town, something reminds me of your mother. I come home, and her touch is on everything in the house. I go out and I see places where we made memories. I can’t keep doing this.”

He got up and paced around my room, well, between the bed and the door. I just watched him, too choked up to say anything because that was exactly how I was feeling. On the way to drop off my independent study materials at school, I had to pass Mom’s former dance studio. It was the place I had spent many a rainy day and most of my after-school hours when I was younger, learning all the formal dances and being drafted as a warm body to fill the arms of Mom’s students: pre-teenager to octogenarian.

Then there was the park, the grocery store, the mall, the house, the backyard ... well, I think you get the picture. I was feeling like Dad, and all I wanted was to make a clean break of it.

He sat back down on the bed, turning to face me.

“I know, Dad, I feel the same way.”

“I was thinking, Tim, how about if we got away? Move away I mean. You’d have to leave all your friends and this wonderful weather,” that last was said with more than a hint of sarcasm, “but we could leave and start over, just the two of us. I know it’s a lot to ask...” His voice trailed off and he sat quietly for a moment. “Never mind, this was a bad idea and I shouldn’t have put this on you.”

My hand tightened on his forearm as he got up to leave, forcibly keeping him perched on the edge of the bed. “No Dad, it’s not a bad idea, it’s a good idea!”

For the first time in over a year, I was excited about something and that was all it took for me to unburden myself to Dad. I told him about having to pass the dance studio, walking to the park and all the thousand little things that reminded me of Mom. I mentioned that it wouldn’t be too much of an issue leaving friends behind since I was in an accelerated learning program that was set up with individual instruction. I only met with my teachers once a week. I hadn’t been at the high school for classes since the beginning of my freshman year. I further reminded him that because I was in this program, I was working for him on job sites in the afternoons. The friendships I had in elementary and middle school hadn’t survived the separation of accelerated learning, working for Dad and my withdrawal during Mom’s illness.

We ended up talking for a couple of hours that afternoon. It turns out that Dad had been winding down the construction projects he had been taking on. There were no new ones in the pipe and of the open projects, there were only three left. Two of those were nearing completion while the last one was only waiting on the punch list. He had walked through that house the previous week and written down all the various little items that needed to be perfected before he could sign off on the work that his guys and the subs had done.

“So, did you have anywhere in mind?” I was betting myself that we would be moving back to his hometown or somewhere there about. It made sense, given the scope of topics we had been discussing recently.

Dad looked apprehensive, “What if we took a few trips over the next month to see if there’s anywhere we would like to put down roots? You put together a list and I’ll do the same and we can talk about this on Sunday after church.”

Today was Friday, I would have two days to sit down and figure out what I wanted in a home.

I didn’t get a whole lot of research done on Saturday. Dad needed a gopher for the house with the punch list, and I spent half the day in an old pickup running back and forth to our suppliers, fixing things our subs hadn’t gotten exactly right (not that many), and generally cleaning up the yard. This was one of Dad’s premier homes, built on spec, and everything needed to be as perfect as we could make it. Then too, there were odd bits of scrap and cement left over from the various pours and construction on the site and some had gotten mixed in with the landscaping, ending up under trees and bushes. I had a five gallon bucket in which I was collecting all the remaining detritus, dumping the debris in a couple of 55 gallon garbage bins in the back of the pickup. It was dirty work which I had just completed, and I was sitting on the open tailgate grabbing some water prior to closing up and heading back to the construction dumpsters.

“Hello?” A shiver went down my spine at the sound of the sexiest voice I had ever heard. “Is this the house that McKenzie Construction is building?” That had to be a southern drawl; sometimes when Dad was tired, the same accent would come through.

I couldn’t help it, I almost responded with sarcasm. After all, we had signs up everywhere, and all of our vehicles had McKenzie Construction painted on the doors and tailgates. I would have, except that I took down all the signs today, and I was using the pickup Dad had bought from one of his buddies; the one that still had the faint outline of Hart Bros. Custom Building on the doors where the decals had been peeled away. I restrained my initial urge.

“Yes Ma’am, it is. Can I help you?”

She came up the as yet unfinished and bumpy drive and I got my first look at her. The entire package matched the voice. The woman was tall. In heels, she came close to my 6 feet. She looked to be late 30’s or early 40’s, and very well maintained. She wasn’t dressed for a construction site though. Her three inch heels had to be difficult for walking given the uneven surface on which she approached. She was wearing business attire: white blouse, navy jacket and matching pencil skirt, set off with a string of pearls loosely coiled several times around her creamy alabaster neck.

I kept my gaze flowing north to where I could get a good look at her face. The eyes captivated me, being a dark blue bordering on violet. Her aquiline nose added character to beautiful features and set there comfortably, just above full red lips. Mid-length dirty blonde hair framed that face in an elegant fashion. She caught sight of me and her burgeoning smile faded slightly.

“I certainly hope you can.” That soft accent was making it difficult for me to concentrate on what she was saying. “I was referred here by a real estate agent and told that if I could catch ‘Tim’, the foreman on site today, I might be able to walk through the property.”

That brought me back to reality. We’d had problems in the past with people wanting to get a look at Dad’s houses before we were ready to show them. It was usually only things like trash left on site or dirt tracked into the house, but sometimes people tried to rip off the high-end fixtures and appliances that had been recently installed. It was enough that we had gotten security and started to take a cautious approach when showing it to potential clients outside of open houses. She had said the magic words though – Aunt June was the only real estate agent with whom we listed the properties. She was Mom’s younger and only sibling and had been handling Dad’s business since she had graduated from college and gotten her license. Still, it never hurt to check things out.

I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the southern belle standing in front of me. “Let me check on something and I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

I turned and walked far enough away that I could make a call in private. The phone rang twice before it was picked up. “Aunt June, what are you doing in the office today?”

“Hey Stinker. Just finishing up some paperwork for your dad. What’s up?”

I explained to her that there was a woman at the spec house wanting to take a look and that she said June had sent her to me. I could hear the frown in her voice as she answered, “Tim, the only person I sent to you was a guy around 6’1”, 210 pounds and built like a football player.”

“Thanks, I’ll take care of it.”

I headed back to my truck where the mystery belle stood. “Ma’am, I don’t know what game you’re playing, but the real estate office says they didn’t send you. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

At my words, there was a look of confusion on her face, coupled with slight annoyance. My hand gently but firmly grasped her left elbow and I began to maneuver her down the drive to where her car presumably was parked. The house was set back from the road, with a turn and a rise in the drive hiding the road from view; this was why I had heard her before I had seen her. It was also why I hadn’t seen the linebacker waiting by the Lincoln Town Car. When he saw his charge being escorted down the drive toward him, his demeanor turned from bored to protective. He took several quick steps in our direction, only halting at the sound of my visitor’s voice.