A Mother's Homecoming(33)
When she’d staggered bleary-eyed from her bed this morning, she’d actually been looking forward to tackling Mae’s house. It might be a lengthy, complicated process, but at least there weren’t emotions and verbal land mines involved. Instead of letting herself be overwhelmed by the house as a whole, she’d tried to break down a list of individual projects.
Unfortunately very few of them could be completed in a day, and when she added up the cost of all of those projects …
Even with no major living expenses while she stayed with her relatives and Uncle Ed’s generous seed money for renovation, the expense was daunting. She’d decided around lunchtime that if she could just accomplish one tangible thing, she’d feel inspired. She’d chosen the handle on the back door, which needed to be replaced because, as she’d discovered when she’d been rinsing off some stuff in the yard, the door wouldn’t open at all from the outside. It had seemed simple enough—until she shattered the glass in the sliding door.
Now she had two small butterfly bandages across the tender flesh between her thumb and index finger and a large sheet of plastic across the gaping hole that used to be a door. Plus her list of projects had just increased by one.
She’d had disturbing visions of herself on the front page of the Mimosa Monitor, pictured wild-eyed above an article about arson.
All I wanted to do was fix the dang door handle! Is that really so much to ask? Apparently, yes. All she had to do was be patient. If today’s success was any indication, the house would be a pile of rubble by the end of the week.
“There you are!” Dawn’s friendly greeting was just below shriek decibel, and Pam struggled to smile instead of wince. “Glad to see you took me up on my offer. Just give me a few minutes. We’re shorthanded today and it’s been crazy. I need to put some stuff in the computer and sweep up.” She jerked a thumb toward the styling stations behind her.
The floor at one booth was dusted with brown hair, so short that Pam guessed the chair had been occupied by a male client getting a trim. In the next seat over was a redhead with a handful of tissues; she was sniffling about her louse of an ex-boyfriend and periodically instructing the smocked hairdresser to “lop it all off!” Judging by the pile of strawberry locks accumulating in the floor, the hairdresser was doing exactly that. Put a blonde in the third chair, and the checkerboard tile would have a new neopolitan theme.
Pressing a hand to the small of her back, Pam volunteered, “I could sweep if you want.” It would be visible progress—an easily defined and accomplished job. In other words, the opposite of everything else she’d done today.
“You sure you don’t mind?” Dawn asked.
Lowering her voice discreetly, Pam said, “I’m getting a free haircut out of the deal. Sweeping is the least I can do!”
“Okay, then.” Dawn smiled brightly and retrieved a broom from the spacious storage closet on the other side of the reception counter. “Appreciate the help. One of our girls is pregnant, and she had to go to the E.R. last night. She should be all right, but the doctor has her on bed rest for the remainder of her last trimester! Which means we’re going to be shorthanded for September homecoming, when pretty much every female student at Mimosa High School comes in for an updo and all the women over thirty come to get their gray covered before the alumni luncheon. I don’t suppose you’re a licensed cosmetologist?”
Pam laughed. “Hardly. But I wield a mean broom.” She got to work sweeping, surprised to discover that her headache receded from excruciatingly unbearable to just annoyingly painful.
Her skull had throbbed for pretty much the past twenty-four hours. Although she’d enjoyed talking to Faith far more than she’d expected, it had been difficult to spend that time with her daughter. Last night Pam had been plagued with uncharacteristic what-ifs. She’d been unable to reach Annabel and had tortured herself with not only the milestones she’d already missed in Faith’s life—first step, first loose tooth, first day of school—but also the ones still to come. Her high school graduation, her wedding day.
It hadn’t helped Pam’s conflicted emotional state that Nick had called. Checking on her seemed chivalrous, despite his surliness by the end of their conversation, and she didn’t deserve gallantry from Nick. It only served to confuse her. Considering his eventual return to hostility, maybe he was confused, too.
“Uh, did we hire someone new and no one told me?”
Pam turned to see a skinny woman in head-to-toe black emerge from a room at the far end of the salon.