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  “She just drove down this second,” Terri explained, grinning. “She’s staying with me, and tomorrow she’s seeing the house for the first time. Want to meet us?”

  Jenna smiled. “Sure. But Chris, you haven’t seen the house at all? And you let Terri buy it for you?”

  “I saw the pictures on Zillow,” I explained.

  Terri gave me a big squeeze. “We’re going to have so much fun!”

  Karen shook her head at me. “You let her talk you into this?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I really needed the change, and I was swayed by the promise of hot men.”

  “And you believed Terri?” Jenna asked, still smiling

  I smiled back. “I’ve known her along time, so I’ve learned to sift out the BS. I really just want to live somewhere I can walk to both the water and at least one bar.”

  “Well, then your new place is perfect,” Jenna said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Not yet, but I see potential.”

  Terri started introducing me to people. Sadly, none of them had name tags, and after a few minutes my brain started to short circuit.

  “I can’t remember a single person I’ve met since that short blond man. Stu.”

  She shook her head. “Stan. Okay, let’s go.”

  We went down the street to a place called Shorty’s, then went further down to Sam’s on Main. Terri got stopped right at the doorway, so I followed Jenna, who went over to the restaurant side and waved at a tall, very handsome man in conversation with a waitperson. He looked up briefly and flashed her a smile. Then he saw me, and our eyes met for just enough of a second for me to feel a smile start. Maybe Terri wasn’t so wrong about those hot men.

  I poked Jenna in the ribs. “See, sometimes Terri tells the truth.”

  Terri, coming up behind, grabbed my arm and shook her head. “He’s taken.”

  “No,” Jenna said distinctly, “he’s not.” She looked at me. “That’s Craig Ferris. He owns Sam’s now. He’s got three girls.”

  I did not see that as an obstacle at all. “Not a problem.”

  Terri glared at her and Jenna glared back. Obviously, I was missing something completely, so I blindly turned to the person next to me, with a mind to start a casual conversation. Sadly, it was a much younger man, obviously very drunk, who was trying to look down the front of my dress from his considerable height.

  Karen came to the rescue, grabbed my arm and pulled me away, waving politely at the drunk.

  “Done here,” I yelled in her ear. She nodded in agreement, tapped Terri on the shoulder, and we all walked further down Main Street.

  We finally found an outside table in front of Bogey’s. At this point, the trip was getting to me, the crowd was getting to me, the noise was absolutely getting to me, so I ordered tequila shots all around, feeling there was a certain symmetry. I’d done this the last time I was in Cape Edwards, and now that I was back…

  After the third, I felt positively giddy. I pointed to the darkness further down Main Street. “See? I’m going to be living right there. Close to everything.”

  “Including all this crowd walking past your house day and night,” Karen said. “You’ll have drunks puking on your front lawn all summer.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. “Really?” I looked around at all the people on the sidewalk. I knew that, less than a mile from here, was a large resort, complete with town homes, condos, a marina and a pier. And that people walked back there from Main Street or rode in their golf carts. All those happy revelers, drunk and singing, yelling and whooping it up, all going right past my new house…

  “It’s crazy here,” Stella said. “Summer is crazy. Maybe not as bad as Rehoboth, but it gets intense. But it’s worth it for the rest of the year.”

  I sighed. “Too late now,” I said, and took another shot.

  Jenna grinned at me. “You keep buying rounds like this, you’re going to find yourself with a lot of best friends.”

  Karen leaned over and whispered. “Make sure you stop. We don’t want another naked romp on the beach.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with an occasional naked romp on the beach,” I declared loudly, causing a few folks from neighboring tables to look over.

  Terri patted the back of my hand. “That was quite unlike you,” she said.

  I nodded. “Yes, it was.”

  “You’re usually not that…uninhibited,” she continued.

  “No, I’m not.” At least, I hadn’t been then. The new and hopefully improved Chris might very well take all her clothes off and run into the Chesapeake Bay again…but, it would still have to be in the dead of night with no one around to see.

  Jenna leaned across the table. “Does Cape Edwards bring out a whole other side of you?” Jenna asked.

  I stared at my empty shot glass and decided enough was enough. “God, I hope so.” I was actually feeling very relaxed and a bit silly. There was nothing to feel sorry or sad about. All of that was behind me, and as I looked ahead, I had no job, no responsibility…just an empty house that was not fit to live in.

  “I’m not going to be sorry about this, am I?” I begged Terri.

  She waved a hand. “Pish.”

  “Pish? Is that it? Terri, that’s not even a real word.” It may have been the tequila, but panic was setting in. That deep breath of salty air that had given me courage before was all gone, and the excitement of the drive down was melting into exhaustion, and there might be strangers puking on the front porch of my new house…

  Karen put her arm around my shoulders. “We’re with you, Chris. Don’t worry.”

  Jenna nodded from across the table. “That’s right. Whatever mess Terri got you into, we’ll help you get out.”

  Terri beamed. “See? Oh, stop worrying. Everything will be just fine.”

  So why was I not relieved?

  We made it back to Terri’s around one, and I fell into bed and was instantly asleep. Then, just three minutes later, I was rudely awakened.

  “Come on, girlfriend. We need to get some breakfast. On a regular Saturday, we’d be down having bacon and eggs with the girls at the Pharmacy, but today is special. We meet the McCann brothers at ten.” Right. Saturday breakfast with her friends was a ritual.

  “What time is it?” I mumbled.

  “Time to get up and shower. You smell like you rolled in salt and limes. Lucky for you, I love salt and limes.” God, had she always been this cheerful in the morning?

  She was cooking eggs and bacon when I finally emerged from the bathroom, hair still in a towel. She pointed with her spatula. “Sit. Toast is coming. Want to eat outside?”

  I waited until she filled my plate, then went on to the balcony. The street was already getting crowded. It was just the end of June. I could only imagine how busy things would get by July.

  “How much worse does this get?” I asked Terri when she joined me.

  She looked down into the street. “Actually, this is about it. Logistically speaking, there is only so much physical space here in Cape Edwards, and we’re about maxed out now.” She settled across from me at the wrought-iron table. “How’s your head?”

  I had to think. I felt pretty good unless I opened my eyes really wide…“Okay. I seem to drink a lot more than usual when I’m down here.”

  “Well, that’s because you’re usually on vacation. And tequila shots are the official drink of Cape Edwards. Once the idea that you live here sinks in, the urge to celebrate every night will go away. Trust me. When I first moved down here, I was looped for the first six months.”

  “But you had always vacationed here.”

  She nodded and dipped her toast in the eggs, breaking the soft yolks. “Yep. My parents brought me down every summer, so after I graduated, I just applied for every job I could find. When the post office called, I jumped at the chance. Government pension, all those days off…” She sighed. “I’ve really loved living here. And I’ve met wonderful people.” She suddenly grinned. “And now you’re here. Come on
and eat up. We have places to be.”

  When we left the condo, she checked her watch. “Okay. Let’s walk normally, and see how long it takes.” That was harder than it should have been, because it seemed that every other person we saw wanted to talk to Terri, but she brushed them off with a smile, and soon we were past Bogey’s, my little house coming up on the left.

  We walked up from the marina, further away from the bay. As we neared the house, I was again struck by how large the new construction seemed to be.

  “Am I going to be living across from a mall?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. It’s going to be beautiful. Believe me, I was at the planning board meeting, well, one of them, and it’s going to be really well done. Just four retail spaces on the ground level and condos above. I think a bank? And maybe a craft beer place? It will be an asset.”

  Craft beer? An asset for Terri, maybe, but…

  “Trust me,” she said. “Look, there’s Jenna. She’d said she’d meet us. Jenna, hi!”

  Jenna, her gorgeous red hair done in a topknot, was waiting for us on the front porch. The house looked a little sadder than it had in the pictures, with a low-pitched roof, small windows on either side of a front door and a porch that had a definite droop on one side.

  “Only six minutes from my condo to here,” Terri told her. “I’m so excited.” She took a key out of the pocket of her linen shorts and unlocked the padlock, pushed the front door open, and spread her arm out, waving me inside. “Your castle awaits.”

  I stepped forward eagerly. My house, my very first house…then I stopped. “Terri,” I asked, not quite believing what I was seeing, “where’s the floor?”

  Jenna came up and peeked over my shoulder.

  At some point, between the time the pictures I saw were taken and now, somebody thought it was a good idea to gut the house down to the studs, including the floor. There were floor joists running the length of the house, with narrow plywood strips laid across them, making a very scary-looking walkway.

  Terri did not seem to find anything distressing about this. “We have blank slate,” she said.

  I took a step forward. When I did not fall, I took another. “Did you know it looked like this? Because the pictures…”

  Terri, of course, had an explanation. “Well, see, the pictures on Zillow were a few years old. It had been put on the market a few years ago, hadn’t sold, so the owner started to redo the place, but didn’t get too far.”

  “So you knew there was no floor?” I asked. Surely not, I thought. Surely…

  “Of course I did,” Terri sounded as though I had somehow insulted her. “You don’t think I’d let you buy something without my even looking at it.”

  “And, you opened the door, saw this, and decided it was just perfect for me?” I gazed upward. No ceiling. I looked ahead. There were what looked to be rooms, outlined roughly by two-by-fours.

  “Chris, I told you we’d be starting from scratch. What did you think I meant? Besides, the location is ideal. I had Mike McCann look at the place, and he said the walls and the floor and roof joists are sound, and the foundation will last another hundred years. There’s even a yard out back, once you cut down all the weeds and saplings. And get rid of the old tires. The point is, we can do whatever we want here.”

  Jenna bravely hopped on to a few of the joists, then stepped back on to the plywood path. “All of the windows are either boarded up or cracked single pane. You’ll have to replace them all. The plumbing looks like at least fifty years old and the electric is knob and tube, ” she informed me. Jenna, I knew, had lived alone in a big old ranch-style house, right on the Chesapeake Bay. Obviously, she knew a thing or two about houses. A whole lot more than Terri.

  “What does that mean?” Terri asked.

  “It means it has to go. I thought you watched HGTV,” I said, trying to stay calm. I could feel the fear start to creep in, and I fought it down. All of this, I knew, could be fixed. In fact, I’d sold people houses in this kind of condition and knew that pretty much anything was possible with enough time and money. It wasn’t like the place had burned to the ground, right?

  Jenna was crouched down, looking at a beam. “The good news is, you can see all the beams here, and it doesn’t look like you’ve got any termites.”

  “Of course not. There’s not enough wood for them to eat,” I muttered.

  “There’s lots of room, Chris. And you could have really tall ceilings.” Terri pushed me toward the back of the house and spread her arms wide. “Open concept, yes? The kitchen along that wall, the dining room in that little bay window.”

  I was trying. I really was. “There’s no window.”

  “No,” Terri agreed, “but there will be. All we need to do is add the glass. Two bedrooms and a shared bathroom right in the back. Mike said we can move the back door out of the bedroom and to the side, and have a nice brick path to the yard. The parking pad can come right up to the house from the alley, but there’s enough room for a patio.”

  That all sounded just dandy, but…“There’s no floor. How can I live in a house with no floor?”

  “You’re staying with me for as long as it takes,” Terri said. “Every day, you can walk down here and watch them work. And I’m taking my vacation next month, and I’m staying right here in Cape Edwards to help you out.”

  The BS detector began to go off. “You’re staying right here in Cape Edwards so you can snag a McCann brother.”

  “No, honey,” Terri said. “But if something should happen, that would be a real bonus.”

  Jenna patted me on the back. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” she said.

  We went further back into the house. All the windows across the back were boarded up, and it was too dark to see much. Good thing, I thought. If I got a good look at this mess, I’d probably start to cry.

  “Terri, this is way more work than I imagined. How are we going to do this?”

  “Hey, Terri,” a voice called. “It’s Steve.”

  I looked at Terri, who actually began to blush. Was this, then, Steve McCann, contractor extraordinaire and the object of Terri’s considerable admiration? Was he going to take this broken shell of a house and turn it into something I could call home? I rolled my eyes and gingerly made my way to the front of the house.

  Steve McCann was worthy of admiration, all right. He was very tall and wiry, with broad shoulders under a plain blue T-shirt. His face was all angles: a lean, jaw, thin nose, cheekbones you could cut glass with. His hair was dark and rather long, and I put him in his midforties. He was wearing jeans and had rolled-up blueprints under one arm.

  He nodded to Jenna. “Hey, Red, are you in on this too?”

  Jenna shook her head. “Nope. Just an innocent bystander.”

  I had to look way up as I stuck out my hand. “I’m Chris Polittano. I’m the official owner. Terri says you’re a miracle worker.”

  He shook my hand slowly, and his grin was wide and showed white, even teeth. There was a lot behind that smile, but I was in no mood to try to figure any of it out.

  “Well, maybe small miracles,” said another man, coming up right behind Steve. “I’m Mike,” he said, nodding his head. “And I promise you, we will make this place look like a dream.”

  Mike was just as attractive as Steve, in a completely different way. He was older, shorter, stockier, with a barrel chest. His hair was going to gray. He had a short, neat beard, and his blue eyes twinkled with humor.

  I glanced at Terri, who was staring at Steve. “Walk me though it.”

  “Later guys,” Jenna said, and carefully walked back out to the porch and was gone.

  Steve looked around and sighed. “I bet you’re a little discouraged by all this. It’s the first time seeing the house, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t worry. We have a plan,” Mike said.

  Thank God, I thought. “Okay then. Show me.”

  Chapter Two

  As it turned out, the McCann brot
hers knew what they were talking about.

  Mike began. “First, let me tell you the story behind this house. Dave Farnham died about five years ago, and his worthless son, Dave Two, tried selling it without so much as cleaning his dad’s belongings out of the closets. After a year, he took it off the market. Then, he went through the place like Sherman through Georgia, and even pulled out the appliances and the bathroom sink. Still didn’t sell. Then, he got smart and called on our local architect to draw up some plans, got all his permits, and started to completely redo the place.” Mike’s eyes twinkled. “Well, Dave Two’s wife left him, and Dave Two went on a year-long drunk. He sobered up enough to renew his permits, then got drunk again. Then, he put the house back on the market, and that’s why we’re all here today.”

  He motioned with his head. “Let’s get on out to the porch so I can show you these plans without having to worry about anyone falling through the joists.”

  I completely agreed with his thinking, and we went out to the front porch, where we all crouched down as Steve spread the plans on the porch floor.

  “Now, as you can see, this is pretty much your basic open concept with a high-end kitchen and a bath good enough for Cleopatra,” Mike said.

  The plan looked just fine. In fact, it was pretty much what I would have expected of a redo. Except the kitchen…

  “I’d want the kitchen to be on the other side,” I said. “And maybe less laundry room?”

  “Ah. Well, here’s the thing.” Mike took a long breath. “Getting plans approved and permits in this county takes a long time. I mean, a long time.”

  Steve nodded. “Months,” he said briefly.

  “And Garson Heller at the zoning commission cannot be hurried. Not even for money,” Mike continued. “Believe me, we’ve tried.”