Sand Castles (14 page)

"Someone likes you, Zack," Zina teased.

With wary interest, Zack watched Cassie knead her black-and-white paws into his thin, worn jeans. Out came her claws with every push, hooking in his denim on the return pull. Her purr was ridiculous; she sounded like a diesel idling in a garage.

"Yowch, that hurts," he said as the cat really got into it. He lifted her up while at the same time trying to disengage her claws from his clothing. It was an exasperating business, but after a couple of tries, he got himself free of her and put her down on the rag rug.

She jumped back up on the sofa and butted her head against his wrist, demanding—apparently—that he return her feelings for him.

"No dice," he said, lifting her up and putting her on the floor again.

Back onto the sofa she jumped.

"What the hell is the matter with this cat?" he asked, bewildered, as she tried to get past his arm onto his lap again.

"I don't know; she hasn't been like that with anyone else," his sister said. "Did you roll around in catnip before you came here?"

Zack pursed his
li
ps. "Gee, let me think. Now that you ask, gosh, I suppose I did, right after I batted that ball of yarn around."

"Oh, Zack," Zina said with a trembly smile.

Another tear rolled out.

He winced at seeing her start to lose it again. "I know, Zee; I know." He'd said it so many times to her over the years, but this time he meant it in so many different ways. He
did
know; more than he'd ever be able to say.

"I was so sure, this time," she said, blowing her nose yet again and tossing the tissue onto the pile on the floor next to her rocker. "How can two men look so much alike?"

"It's uncanny," Zack said with a feigned sense of wonder. "From a distance you'd swear it was him. But up close—well, there's just no way. This guy's voice was higher-pitched, he had a
Rhode Island
accent, and of course, the eyes. This guy's were as blue as the
Caribbean Sea
."

Blue eyes,
he reminded himself.
Remember. Blue eyes.

He wasn't so good at calling up eye color. If Zina hadn't run through a checklist of features after he swore to her earlier that the man he'd seen was not Jimmy Hayward, he'd never have had the blue-eye inspiration.

"It was nice of him to talk to you, anyway," Zina said. "He must get pestered all the time by people. For money, I mean."

If only she knew. "I have no doubt."

"Well, I guess it's life back to
... normal," she said, coming up with a the barest shadow of that trembly smile. There weren't many left in her for the night, that was certain.

"You look pretty tired, kid," he said sympathetically. His sister's pale, blond beauty was the porcelain-perfect kind that suffered, especially around the eyes, from stress and lack of sleep. "I'm going to get out and let you—finally—get a good night's rest."

He looked down at the cat, who for some unfathomable reason had curled up on his lap and was still purring, if more quietly. He disliked the creature intensely for putting him in a position of having to disturb her serenity. Conniving little feline.

"Okay, lady, this is it; no more Mr. Nice Guy." He lifted his thighs a little to nudge her off, but she seemed to hunker down harder. He lifted higher, and then higher still. It didn't faze her at all.

"Okay, I mean it. Off." He didn't want to remove her and set her therapy back or anything; he just wanted her to go away on her own. "Come on," he pleaded.
"Off."

Zina broke into laughter that was a pleasure to hear; Zack hadn't heard anything so merry from her in weeks.

"You may as well adopt her, Zack; she's already adopted you."

"Yeah, right," he said, lifting himself on his palms and shaping himself into a slide. If he had to resort to gravity, so be it.

"No, I'm serious.
Take
her. Some cats bond fiercely, and Cassie
looks like
one of them. She'll love you for life, if you let her. Think how wonderful it would be to have her curled up by the woodstove in your shop as you work. Can't you just picture it?"

In fact, Zack could not. All he could picture was himself, alone, with a CD playing in the background, as he honed his wood into objects of beauty. It had always been that way. He had never had to worry about locking some cat in or out, and he was not about to start now.

Cassie had given up trying to cling to his lap; she jumped off, obviously disgusted with him, and went off to lick her face clean of his scent.

So much, he mused, for the lifetime bond. He stood up and stretched and said, "I'd better haul myself off to bed.

I've got to get up and drive back down to
Providence
tomorrow."

"
Providence
! Why?"

Okay; here goes.
"You remember that
E
a
st S
ide
client I told you about? The one with the set of Chippendale chairs that need restoring? She's a little on the eccentric side and won't let the chairs off the premises. I'll be driving back and forth for a while—maybe I'll even take her up on her offer to stay in an old chauffeur's quarters above the garage; half of it's a workshop. Most of the repair involves hand-carving, so I can work anywhere. The money's good, so what do I care?"

Zina bought it completely. "That's great; maybe she'll get you other commissions. She could be your best connection yet!"

"We'll see. Well, I've got a pile of mail to wade through—ah, hell, that reminds me," he said, and he launched himself blithely into the next whopper. "I got a notice that a registered letter is waiting for me at the post office; I wasn't home when they tried to deliver it."

"Do you want me to pick it up for you?"

Whoops. "Nope; I'm the one who has to sign," he said quickly.

"Maybe you're being called to jury duty again," Zina surmised as she walked him to her door.

"Nah. This sounded like a law firm. Smith, Reston, and Upton. I remember it sounded like Smith and Wesson."

He was developing into quite the accomplished liar. His voice sounded casual, and he was able to maintain eye contact with his sister as he winked and said lightly, "I just hope someone's not trying to sue me."

"Don't even joke about something like that," she scolded. "People can lose everything they own in lawsuits!"

Looking chastened, he put his arms around her in a good-night hug. "Sorry I didn't bring you the news you wanted, Zee," he told her softly.

"Don't be sorry," she said. "No one can deliver bad news better than you." After a forlorn giggle, she said, "That didn't come out right, did it?"

"I think it did," he said.

It had come out exactly right.

****

They nailed the last rafter in place under a blistering sun. Zack peeled off his sweatband and wrung it dry over the side of the house, then wrapped the near-useless thing around his head again. He remembered yet another reason why he'd gotten out of the construction business: contractors worked closer to the ozone hole than most.

"Okay, let's get that plywood up here," Pete said. "They're talkin' rain tomorrow and the rest of the week; I want to get the roof on before then."

Pete scrambled down the ladder as nimbly as any monkey, with Zack not far behind. At the base, Zack turned and nearly knocked down Wendy Hodene, who had been waiting with a giant yellow plastic mug in her hand.

"It's hot
out
," she said
simply
,
handing it
to him with a smile.

Ice. Lemonade. Heaven. Zack nodded brusquely and said, "Thanks. Thanks a lot." He slugged down half of it on the spot and tried not to notice that she was wearing short shorts and a skimpy tank top. She didn't fill out the tank top with anything like excitement, but she did have great legs. She wasn't tall or by any stretch voluptuous; so why did it strike him that she might be a regular handful in bed?

Hey. Hey. What gives with that?

Zack tried to turn away from his thoughts and from her, but he was enjoying the short shorts a little too much to be noble. He found himself
tracking her movements as she went around with a big pitcher, refilling their mugs.

When the pitcher was empty she asked, "Should I make more?"

Pete, jerk, said, "We're
good
," which resulted in her taking her pitcher and going inside. Zack walked around to the side of the house and topped off the mug from a spigot, and then drank down the icy, still-citrusy water, aware that for the rest of his life he would probably associate lemonade with great legs.

"Okay," said Pete, first to put down his plastic stein. "Plywood."

Zack had worked in construction projects (one of them municipal) where moving a few sheets of plywood would have required a forklift, a crane, and an afternoon. Not so this crew. They threw a lasso around a couple of sheets at a time and slid them up the ladder, with one man pushing and another one pulling. More sweat but no noise; that was fine with Zack, who was used to the serene quiet that came from working with hand
tools in his shop.

His shop. What shop? It seemed like years since he'd been there. He missed it, missed the artistry of shaping wood into smooth, sinuous curves. It was so night-and-day different from the crudity of slapping plywood into the shape of a roof.

What was he doing there, anyway? He'd asked himself the question a hundred times in recent days. He happened to be perched on the ridgepole of the three-story addition and muscling a sheet of plywood into place when the answer to his question came into view on the front sidewalk: Wendy looked up, waved, and, still in her short shorts, got into her car and drove off.

Her. That's why he was there. To hold a nailgun to her throat in front of her so-called husband. Even in the dripping heat of the afternoon sun, Zack felt his face burn a little hotter at the thought that if Wendy knew the reason, she'd regard him with the same fear and loathing as she
would a snake that dropped out of a tree in front of her.

He pictured her face with her open, friendly smile and her sparkling eyes, and he thought,
She deserves better than to be married to Jim and to be shadowed by me. In another world, during some other time ... well, she deserves better, that's all.

Morose and ill at ease, he returned with a vengeance to the job at hand. By the time the crew knocked off, his mood had become downright bitter, which did not go unnoticed by Pete, who figured that Zack had a bug up because he'd been made to work an hour past quitting time.

Zack was on the receiving end of a humiliating lecture about improving his attitude when Pete's cell phone rang. Zack leaned against the fender of his truck, folded his arms across his chest, and waited for Pete to finish the call and finish the lecture so that he could hightail it back to his sister in Hopeville and tell her more lies.

What a gloriously adven
turous life for a thirty-seven-
year old man in his prime.

"Okay, we'll get right on it," said Pete, and he hung up.

He said to Zack, "That was Wendy. She's having a problem with the plumbing. Toilet's backed up and she can't get a plumber. What do you know about toilets?"

"Enough."

"Here's the thing," Pete explained, suddenly sheepish. "I'm in the middle of a bowling tournament. I've got less than an hour to get to the hall, but first I gotta go home, get showered
... it would help if you could go to her house and check it out for me. It's probably something simple like she flushed somethin' down that she shouldn't. You know women."

Zack was already running an hour late; even the simplest fix would eat up another hour. In the meantime he was concerned about Zina and how she was handling the false discovery he'd related to her. Tonight his plan was to counter the depressing lie with a much more cheerful one: she might be abandoned, but she was about to be rich.

But he was still smarting from Pete's ill-founded lecture, and besides, it might be a good way to rattle Jim's cage, so Zack said, "Let me make a phone call first, and then I'll go over there."

"Great. I
have a spare wax ring in the tru
ck; let me get it for you."

Zack nearly forgot to ask, "What's the address?"

Pete told him and added, "I owe you one, Zack."

Zack put in a call to Zina as he drove the short distance to
Barrington
, but he got her blasted answering machine. Conceivably she was working late at the quilting shop. Conceivably. He reminded himself that she was forever juggling her hours between the shop and the shelter, but he hated the surge of alarm that went racing through his veins anyway. If anything ever happened to her
... if she ever did anything reckless because of the
lie
that he and he alone had set in motion
...
.