her parents rented rooms, she named the place that. Please don’t tell me you were thinking of changing it. That’s one area we’d have to fight about,” she said.
“No, I kind of like the image of peace that it brings,” he answered.
Tucker hadn’t figured on being comfortable in the house, or that he and Jolene would hit it off. He’d thought he’d plug into the electricity and live in his trailer, but now he was entertaining notions of moving all the way indoors. He shut his eyes and brought up a visual of Melanie.
What do you think, darlin’?
It’s been time to leave the trailer for a long, long time. Her voice was loud and clear in his head.
When he opened them, Jolene was watching Sassy pick her way up the stairs, one at a time. “She’s never been in a two-story house?”
“Nope. Only step she has had to deal with is the one to get inside my trailer,” he answered. “So back to those washstands. You didn’t state an opinion.”
She threw up her palms. “Hey, you’re the one with the money.”
“But you are my partner, so we’re going to share things, right?”
“I never thought something like this would even be possible. I know you paid a lot for your half, but you really need to tell me what our budget is, Tucker. I’m willing to take a small salary out of what we bring in and put the rest of the profits toward paying you back, but I need to know. As it stands, it’s pulling in a low six-figure gross a year, before taxes, insurance, and utilities. Like you said, we’re partners.”
Tucker’s eyebrows drew down into a solid dark line. He didn’t want to tell her how much money the insurance company had given him when Melanie died, but she was right. They were partners. He did a rough estimate of what it would take to put the bathrooms in and to do some cosmetic work on the downstairs and added several thousand dollars to that. It wouldn’t deplete the money in the savings account by any means, but it was a rough budget.
He quoted her the amount, and she gasped. “Good Lord, did you rob a bank? Why are you working odd jobs?”
He shrugged. “Even when I was on the Dallas police force, I flipped houses, so I had a nice nest egg, but there was insurance money after my wife was killed in a car accident.” It pained him still to think of profiting from her death. He drew out his tape measure and figured the size of the armoire. That kept his hands busy while he regained his composure and swallowed the lump in his throat. “We’ve got the finances to do this job right. Now, if we take this thing out, it’ll give us quite a bit more room. Washstands could be an old sideboard or buffet—they’d fit in. But they couldn’t be much bigger than what’s up there in the first room we’ll start working on,” he said. “Anyway, I thought maybe you could do some lookin’ around to see what you could find.”
“I’ll check in with Lucy and Flossie,” she answered and then abruptly changed the subject. “Were you even in this house before tonight?”
“Nope, but . . .” The story about Melanie’s senior tea was his private memory, and he cherished it too much to share. “I’ve remodeled a lot of these old places, and I kind of figured it looked the same.” He straightened up and started down the stairs. “Lucy and Flossie sound like what you’d name kittens.”
“There’s also Dotty, but she doesn’t have an antique shop. Those are their nicknames.” Jolene followed him.
That evening was the longest one-on-one visit Tucker had spent with anyone in a long time. It usually took about an hour to work up a rough estimate for a job, and most of the time that involved a guy, not a woman. The walls had begun to close in on him. His chest tightened. “I’m going out to my trailer now.” He laid his yellow pad on one of the four round tables in the dining room, twisting his torso as if to release a breath.
“Aunt Sugar left two sets of keys. Yours is on the foyer table. See you tomorrow. When it’s just us, breakfast is at seven. But for guests, it’s on the bar from six thirty to nine.”
He grabbed his coat. “I’ll be here.”
He picked up the keys and hurried outside into the