The Restoration of Celia Fairchild - Marie Bostwick Page 0,78
the bane of my existence. He never approved anything on the first go-round and had that smirking sort of face that, according to Lorne, was begging for a punch.
I didn’t disagree with him but a man on probation couldn’t afford to get involved in fisticuffs and I couldn’t afford to lose my contractor. That was why I’d started making sure that I was standing by when the inspector came around, so I could step between him and Lorne if the need arose.
“I’m just doing my job,” Brett said, and looked in my direction. “You should be happy that I’m looking out for your interests. Nobody’s going to let you adopt a baby if your house isn’t safe, are they, Miss Fairchild?”
I stared at him for a second, processing what he’d just said. “How do you know I’m trying to adopt a baby?” Though Brett showed up to make my life miserable a couple of times a week, I’d never shared anything about my personal life or the reasons behind the renovation with him. I popped my eyebrows at Lorne, wondering if he’d said anything, but Lorne shook his head.
“Who told you about that?” I asked.
The odious inspector swallowed and his ping-pong ball–sized Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Uh. Not sure.” He looked down, suddenly deeply intent on his clipboard. “Somebody must have said something sometime, I guess. People are always talking. You know how it is.” He ripped a copy of the red-marked inspection report off his clipboard, smirking as he handed it to Lorne. “Y’all have a nice day now. See you next time.”
“How long will it take to redo them?” I asked Lorne after Brett got in his car.
“Couple of hours,” Lorne said. “I don’t have to rebuild the whole thing, just pry up and replace those treads.”
“Okay, so. Could be worse, right?”
I smiled, but Lorne was not in the mood to be encouraged. He hooked a thumb in his belt, lip curling as he watched Brett’s car drive off.
“Celia,” he muttered, “the minute I finish my probation, I’m going to find that guy and clock him.” He made a fist and mimed a short, sharp punch.
“I’ll help you. The minute you finish probation. And how long is that? About eight months?”
Lorne grinned. “Something like that.”
“Right. Well, in the meantime, maybe we’d just better get back to work.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lorne touched his fingertips to his forehead and snapped a small salute before picking up his claw hammer. “Whatever you say, boss.”
I’D GOTTEN SO used to the ring of hammers and the whine of saws that they were almost white noise to me by now and I barely heard them. But the previous night’s overindulgence had left me with a pounding headache that got worse with every swing of Lorne’s hammer.
I was not having a good morning.
Storming the castle to invite Happy to the crafting club had been a mistake. After she answered the door, a simple “thanks but no thanks” would have sufficed. Instead, Happy got mad, told Pris to get inside, and the rest of us to clear off her property and never come back, me in particular.
So much for a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
In retrospect, I could almost see her point. It was late and she was already in bed. The bell rang (several times) and Happy opened the door to find a clutch of semi-inebriated women, her own daughter among them, babbling on about some scathingly brilliant but not particularly well-defined idea for a crafting club and insisting that she had to take part in it.
It was the in-person equivalent of drunk dialing and definitely not our best idea. But why be so nasty? If the same thing had happened to me, I’d have thought it was funny. Happy had no sense of humor, so maybe it was just as well that she wouldn’t be joining the group. But I felt bad for Pris. “I worry about that child,” Felicia said when we left. So did I.
Losing a parent is terrible at any age, but Pris was so young when her father died. In a sense, she lost her mother too. From what Pris said, I understood that Happy was never the same after that. On top of everything else, they’d torn up stakes and moved to Charleston. Yes, Pris went off to college soon after, but still, it couldn’t have been easy. Yet until the wine had loosened her tongue, she’d never really talked to me about her father’s death.