know that I’m dating my Judo instructor. If I don’t put up a good enough fight, he’ll find you and finish you off.”
“Carl?”
Her eyes narrowed. “How’d you know that?”
“Your neighbor is—” I pictured the gleam in the Tushy Tickler’s eyes as she pretended to spray herself with the hose, tossing her hair and wiggling her shoulders as beads of water dripped onto her chest “—friendly.”
“Is that what you kids are calling it these days?”
Maxine took me on a tour of the house, and I fell in love. At least that’s what I assumed the strange fluttering in my heart might be. That, or breakfast wasn’t agreeing with me.
The place was falling apart. The hardwood floors needed replacing. The cabinets in the kitchen begged for updates. The stairs leading to the second floor were locked in an epic battle with the porch step over who delivered their lines with more gusto.
After a valiant skirmish with the front door, Maxine finally gave up without locking the deadbolt. “It’ll be wide open when we come back, but it’s not worth the fight.”
“That’ll be the first thing I fix, then.”
“If I hire you.” She tried to look fierce, but I was growing on her.
“Right, right. If you hire me,” I replied with as much deference as I could manage and we started on our trek through the jungle in the backyard.
“The guesthouse was my husband’s studio before he passed. He was always getting these crazy ideas. Never could sit still. He got it in his head that he needed to learn to paint. He was a terrible artist, but amazing with a hammer and nails, as you can see.” She pushed open the door to the guesthouse, a squat one-story building that proved Maxine’s point.
“He built this for our son, who spends a lot of time overseas and needed a place to stay when he’s stateside, which is pretty much never, hence it becoming George’s studio. There’s a bathroom and kitchenette hiding behind those boxes.” She waved her hand from the doorway, her feet firmly planted outside. “I couldn’t bear to throw his things away, so I just tossed it all in here.”
As we finished our tour, she grilled me on the basics.
Age? Thirty-one.
Experience? I apprenticed with a contractor a few years after high school.
Current employer? None.
Why did I want to move into a stranger’s house and work for free? It’s complicated.
My answers earned me a scathing look and I fully expected Maxine to show me the door…once she’d finished wrestling it open, anyway. She led me back to the front of the house, where said door had swung wide. “You know I’m going to need more than ‘it’s complicated’ before I feel comfortable letting you move into my home.”
“I hoped my charm and charisma would make up for the holes in my resume.” The blank years in my employment would be hard to explain, because A.) the story was unbelievable and B.) telling it put my brother’s privacy at risk.
“Where you convicted?”
I shook my head. “My record’s clean as a whistle.”
“I never did understand that saying.” Maxine grimaced. “Seems to me, there’s nothing clean about a whistle.”
She was onto something there, but before I could agree, she hurried on.
“Know this, Joe Channing. I adore this house. I raised my children in this house. I had a wonderful life with my husband in this house. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still hear him laughing and no matter how much fun I have with Carl, I will never stop missing my George. I’m ashamed I let our home fall to pieces the way I have because every memory of our time together lives here with me. I’m opinionated. I’m hard to please. I don’t like to spend money and will fight you over every cent but if you can overlook all that, then I can overlook a complicated past.”
“When you put it that way, I think I’d rather eat one of your cookies than take the job.”
Maxine snorted a laugh and folded her arms over her chest.
I held up a hand. “Kidding. I’m kidding. I’m the last person to judge anyone for being hard-headed. I’d be honored to restore your house to its former glory.”
Maxine cocked her head, those sharp brown eyes narrowing as she peered into my soul. After an awkward minute, she gave a decisive nod. “Come on in, then. We’ll draw up a contract and hammer out the details.”
“Are you really dating your Judo instructor?” I asked as we