I still thought about Wes a lot. It had been about two weeks now, and we hadn’t talked. The first few days afterwards he tried to call me on my cell phone, but when I saw his number pop up on the screen I just slid it aside, letting it ring, and eventually turned it off entirely. I knew what he’d think: we’d just been friends, after all, and we’d always talked about Becky and Jason before, so why not now? I didn’t know the answer to this, just as I didn’t know why it had bothered me so much to see him with Becky. She’d come back to him, just like Jason had come back to me, and I knew he was probably happy about that. I should have been happy, too, but I just wasn’t.
Occasionally I heard from Kristy, who had in this interim gone from smitten with Baxter to positively lovesick. “Oh, Macy,” she’d sigh in my ear, sounding so wistful and happy I could have hated her, if I hadn’t thought she so deserved it. “He’s just extraordinary. Truly extraordinary.”
I kept waiting for her to bring up Becky, and her and Wes being back together, but she never did, knowing, probably, that it was a sore subject. She did, however, say that Wes had been asking about me, and she wondered if something had happened between us. “Is that what he said?” I asked her.
“No,” she’d replied, switching the phone to her other ear. “It’s Wes. He never says anything.”
Once he had, I thought. Once he’d said a lot, to me. “It’s nothing,” I told her. “We just, you know, don’t have that much in common.” And maybe this was true, after all.
It was a Friday, which was supposed to be a good thing. For me, though, and the concrete guy in my mother’s office, things were just going from bad to worse.
“. . . and I will not be paying any overtime for a job that was guaranteed to be done over a week ago!” I could hear my mother say. This was the fourth meeting she’d had with a subcontractor today, and they’d all gone pretty much the same way. As in, not well.
“The weather,” the concrete guy inside said, “was—”
“The weather,” my mother shot back, interrupting him, “is something that you, as a professional who deals with it as a factor in all jobs, should take into consideration when submitting a bid for work. This is summer. It rains!”
My mother’s voice, so brittle and shrill these days, sent a chill down my spine. I could only imagine how the concrete guy felt.
There was a bit more back and forth, and then their voices dropped, which meant this meeting was almost over. Sure enough, a second later the door opened, and the concrete guy, heavyset and irritated-looking, mumbled past my desk and slammed out of the office, the windows rattling in his wake.
My phone buzzed, and I picked it up. “Macy,” my mother said. She sounded exhausted. “Could you bring me a water, please?”
I reached into the small fridge beside my desk to get one, then pushed out my chair and walked to her door. For once, my mother was not on the phone or staring at the computer screen. Instead, she was sitting back in her desk chair, looking out the window at the sign across the street advertising the townhouses. There was a truck parked in front of it, so you could see only the last part: AVAILABLE AUGUST 8TH. SIGN UP FOR YOURS NOW!
I twisted the cap off the water, then slid it across the desk to her. I watched her take a sip, closing her eyes, then said, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, automatically, unthinkingly. “It’s always like this at the end of a project. It was like this with the houses, and the apartments. It doesn’t matter if it’s fifty million-dollar townhouses or one spec house. Everything always gets crazy at the end. You just have to keep going, regardless of how awful it gets. So that’s what I do.” She sipped at her water again. “Even on days like this, when I’m sure it’s going to kill me.”
“Mom,” I said. “Don’t even say that.”
She smiled again, a tired smile, the only smile I ever saw from her lately. “It’s just an expression,” she said, but I still felt uneasy. “I’m fine.”
For the rest of the afternoon, I busied myself with the gala guest list. At four forty-five, I sat back in my chair, grateful I only had fourteen minutes and counting before I got to escape. Then, though, two things happened. The phone rang, and my sister walked in.
“Wildflower Ridge Sales,” I said, waving at her as she shut the door behind her and walked up to my desk.
“Meez Queensh pleeze es Raffka,” the voice on the other end said. Rathka, besides having an accent that made him almost completely incomprehensible, always seemed to talk with his mouth pressed right up to the receiver.
“Right, hold please.” I hit the button, then looked up at Caroline, who was standing in front of me, hands clasped together, her face expectant. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
She took a breath to answer, but then my mother opened her office door, sticking her head out. “Is line one for me?” she asked, then saw my sister. “Caroline, hello. When did you get here?”
My sister looked at her, then back at me. Clearly, she was working up to something. She took in another breath, smiled, then said, “It’s done.”
There was a second or two of silence as my mother and I processed this. On the phone in front of me, the red light was blinking.
“It’s done,” my mother repeated slowly.
Caroline was still looking at us, expectant.
“The beach house,” I said finally. “Right?”