Sunset Beach(22)

“I was working,” Brice said. “Building a law practice.”

“So you could take Kayson and Kyler skiing in Breckenridge, and buy Joan a boob job,” Drue said.

“You can’t resist taking cheap shots at me, can you?” he asked.

“Not when you make it so incredibly easy.”

She walked into the kitchen and stashed the beer in the fridge.

He turned to look at her. “So, do you want some help or would you prefer to keep laying your guilt trip on me? Your call.”

Drue sighed. Bickering with Brice would get her nowhere. He was never going to understand her feelings of abandonment, so maybe it was time for her to let it go. “Okay, sure. I could use some help.”



* * *



By five o’clock, they’d managed to pull up all the carpet in both bedrooms and haul it out to the trash.

“It’s beer-thirty,” Brice announced, reaching into the fridge. He popped the bottle cap on the countertop and handed her an ice-cold bottle.

She took a long swig, burped and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“God, that tastes good. And I don’t even really like beer,” Drue said. “Thanks. I was beginning to get pretty overwhelmed.”

Brice took a long swig from his own bottle. “I should have hired a cleaning crew to come in before you moved in. So that’s on me.”

She shrugged and looked around the kitchen; the linoleum floor was still damp from her degreasing effort and the chipped Formica countertops newly shone. “I still can’t really believe the place is mine. I think of all the Saturday mornings right here in this kitchen, with Nonni fixing pancakes, and Papi making his Cuban coffee…”

“I remember Alberto’s coffee. It was like drinking mud,” Brice said. A faraway expression came over his face as he looked around.

“You know, your mom and I lived here for a while.”

“Really? When was that?”

“Mid-seventies. After I got back from Vietnam. I was on the police force, and Sherri was working for a real estate outfit. Alberto hadn’t retired yet and they were just using this as a weekend place, so he rented it to us for peanuts. It was all we could afford.”

He sighed. “We had some good times in this place.”

Before Drue could ask him when things had changed, a faint chirping noise began emanating from his jeans. “Uh-oh.” He pulled out his cell phone. “I gotta get home and get showered. Promised Wendy I’d take her out to dinner tonight.”

“Dinner last night, brunch earlier, dinner out tonight? Does she know how to cook?”

“That’s not fair,” Brice said, his amiable mood gone. “Why all the hostility toward Wendy?”

“Ask her.”

“It seems to me that you’re the one with the attitude,” Brice said. “She’s gone out of her way to be nice to you.”

“Riiiighhhht,” Drue said, swabbing at the sink with a sponge to avoid meeting the hurt look on his face. “Just forget I said anything. Bad joke.”

He drained the rest of his beer and threw the bottle into the trash. “Drue? If you and Wendy are going to continue to work together, you two need to call a truce with this bullshit. Whatever happened all those years ago, it’s all in the past. Time to get over yourself and move on.”

She set her half-finished beer on the countertop. “Great advice in theory. Maybe you should suggest the same thing to her.”

He sighed and threw his hands in the air. “I give up. I’ll see you Monday.”





9


After Brice left, she resumed cleaning. A late afternoon squall brought heavy rain and a welcome drop in the temperature. When she went into the kitchen she noticed a puddle of water on her newly cleaned floor.

Drue looked up at the ceiling. A large wet blotch the size of a dinner plate had formed in the plaster, and as she stared at it, another drop of water fell on her forehead.

Another roof leak! She sighed heavily and walked into the narrow hallway, reaching up for the cord that dangled from the ceiling and yanking, hard, until the pull-down attic stairs unfolded with a loud squeak from rust and disuse. She went back to the kitchen and fetched the heavy flashlight she’d unearthed from Papi’s shed, switching it on to make sure that the new batteries she’d installed were working.

As she climbed the ladder she felt a growing sense of dread. She’d never liked dark places. She’d never lived in any other place in Florida that even had an attic. Or a basement. The attic at Coquina Cottage she knew only from her grandfather’s occasional forays, when he’d climb up to set and retrieve rat traps, prompted only by Nonni’s insistence that she’d heard ominous scratching sounds in the kitchen coming from overhead.

“Okay, rats,” she called loudly, right before she reached the top rung of the ladder. “I’m coming up, so you better get gone.”

She listened carefully, ready to beat a hasty retreat at the first suspicious squeak. But all she heard was the steady, ominous drip of water coming from the roof. She popped her head through the attic floor and swung the flashlight in a wide arc. The attic was almost unbearably hot, and dank-smelling.

The first thing the flashlight revealed was a faded blue plastic child’s wading pool. “What the hell?” she muttered. But when she looked overhead, she realized the pool’s purpose. Somebody, maybe the last tenant, had decided to utilize the pool as a catch basin for earlier roof leaks. The pool held maybe a half-inch of murky brown water, and another pool of rain had begun to puddle on the rough wooden floor an inch away. A new leak. And a new headache for the new homeowner.