I thought of what Arthur had said to me in the lunchroom. “Maybe you should look for another job,” I told her. Sherri’s eyes widened. “Benefits aren’t good here and it can’t be any fun to work for my father.”

  She tapped her long nails on the desk. “Every time I make a mistake, even if it’s a little one, it’s like the world is ending, Mr. Lindhart gets so angry. Now I’m so afraid of making mistakes that I think I make even more.”

  I thought of how I always got clumsy around my dad, tripping and knocking into things and dropping stuff. “He makes me nervous, too. He waits for me to do something wrong so he can call me out. He’s happy when I mess up.”

  Sherri nodded. “Yeah. But I can’t believe he treats his own daughter like that.”

  “He treats everyone like that,” I answered. “If I were you, I’d look around. Even if it was a pay cut, it would be worth it. Listen, I have to leave for the afternoon. I’m going to put a note on his desk so you don’t have to tell him.” She looked anxious at the idea of me leaving and I couldn’t blame her. I felt the same way.

  I walked into my dad’s office. I hadn’t spent a lot of time in there, even when I worked two floors down. It was decorated a lot like our house with what I knew was expensive furniture and art. There was a picture on the desk of Ian scoring a goal in lacrosse. You couldn’t even see his face because of his big helmet, but he looked strong and powerful, and there was a player on the other team lying on the ground near Ian’s feet. It was an image right up my dad’s alley.

  His desk was very neat and orderly. I took a piece of paper and in my best handwriting I explained that I had to leave for the afternoon for personal business. I would see him at home. I held my hand steady so that it wouldn’t shake as I wrote it.

  Then I picked up my bag and put on my coat quickly, suddenly afraid that he would catch me before I left. I reminded myself that I was an adult. That I was free to come and go because I wasn’t in jail, no matter how much my life sometimes felt like it. I rushed out into the parking lot anyway and I was sure I saw my dad’s car on the service drive as I got onto the freeway. I turned on the music and kept going.

  Digger’s house was in a state of chaos. There were a bunch of guys there working, trying to put in an alarm, new pipes, electricity, and everyone was stepping on each other and, it appeared, fighting. Like almost coming to blows. “Excuse me?” I called from the doorway. “Hello, can you all listen to me?”

  They could not. I tapped a guy as he walked by. “Excuse me? Do you think you could yell loud enough to get everyone’s attention?”

  He nodded and when he sucked in a big breath of air, I covered my ears. After his bellow finished echoing through the house, I held up my hand and tried to speak up. And be commanding. “Hi, I’m Rebecca. Could I please talk to whoever is in charge of each of your crews for second?”

  I recognized the electrician, carpenter, and plumber that I had met before and I introduced myself to the plasterers and the alarm guys, who, it turned out, couldn’t do too much. It was hard to put plaster on walls that were structurally unsound, and they couldn’t wire windows and doors for alarms if there were only holes instead of windows and doors. There was also the whole issue of not having power. I told them I would call them to come back in a few weeks. The rest of us reviewed the construction timeline I had written up, and although they had a few change and additions, they agreed that it would basically function and hopefully cut down on the existing confusion.

  “Can you go back to work, then?” I asked hopefully.

  They could, and they did. After a few hours I felt like things were definitely under control. I spent my time taking more measurements, discussing issues with the guys working, trying not to freeze in the frigid house, and then, very bravely, looking into the garage. Nope! Still full of raccoons.

  I waited as long as I could, then finally sent a text to Digger that I was leaving. I had been wanting to see him, a lot. I said goodbye to all the workers and gave them my number, hoping I would still have my phone after seeing my father for them to call me on it. I forced myself to drive at the speed limit rather than 20 or so miles under it to delay my arrival at home.

  He wasn’t there yet and my mom and brother were waiting for him to have dinner. “Just so you both know, I left work really early today, and he’s going to be very angry,” I told them. “I’m expecting it and I don’t want you to be surprised.”

  “Why did you do that?” my mom asked plaintively. “Why would you antagonize him?”

  “I had things to do.”

  “Digger,” I heard Ian mutter angrily.

  I was opening my mouth to tell him not to blame Digger when we heard the front door slam. All three of us jumped. My mom made shooing motions. “To the table! To the table!”

  No one said a word at dinner. I couldn’t eat from nerves, and it didn’t look like my mom and Ian were doing much better. Only my dad enjoyed the food and washed it down with a bottle of very expensive Cabernet from a wine cellar Lindhart had auctioned off last year (restaurant closure after a bitter divorce and custody battle, he had told us).

  “Did you enjoy your afternoon, Rebecca?”

  I stared at my plate.

  “Where were you?” he asked me calmly.

  “There’s nothing in your office for me to do, Dad. I went to help a friend.” I spoke slowly and carefully so that my voice wouldn’t shake.

  “I’ll decide what there is for you to do.”

  I nodded.

  “You do seem fairly useless helping Sherri. You got in her way and wasted her time. The story of your life, isn’t it?”

  I nodded again.

  “We’ll decide tomorrow what to do with you. You and I will need to talk now, privately, about your decision to leave the office without my permission.”

  “My mother called.”

  My dad stopped swirling the dregs of his wine. “What?”

  My mom glanced quickly at me then spoke up again. “My mother called from Louisville. She would like me to come visit her. I think I’ll leave tomorrow.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” my father told her. “You have responsibilities here. You have a son to take care of. You can’t just leave because that old bat calls you.”

  “She’s my mother,” she explained. “If she needs me, I have to go.” She looked at me and then looked at the door and I got the message.

  My father argued back that she couldn’t go and I was sure he would prevail in that, but the distraction was working for me. Ian and I looked at each other and quietly got up from the table, and I went to his room with him and stayed until I was sure my father had gone to bed.

  He wouldn’t have forgotten, but the crisis was averted. For now.

  Chapter 9

  “There she is.” I ran down the steps and jumped on Digger, my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. “How’ve you been, baby girl?”

  I was kissing his neck like some kind of sex maniac. There was something in the way he smelled that made me feel…insatiable. “I wanted to see you the whole week,” I said between kisses.

  Sherri and I had devised a system for me at the auction house. We called all over the company and got a list of jobs that needed to be done, in a variety of different departments. I brought work back up to her office, or she explained to my dad that I had gone to Appraisals, or Legal, or Marketing to do a project for them. I learned more in that week about how the business was run than I had in two years that I had spent sequestered with Melina. It was much better for both Sherri and me that I had real work to do. It even seemed to make my dad, not happy, but appeased to see me working on something. Even though he told Sherri to check carefully over everything I did.

  This new system meant that I was actually busy, but it also gave me time when I was supposed to be in another department to go to Digger’s house and supervise some and answer questions and keep track of the situation there. I had made a quick side trip to the garage to say hello one afternoon, but I didn’t have time to stay and he had been too busy to do anything more than give me a peck hello and then another goodbye. We had talked on the phone but it wasn’t the same thing as holding on to him and feeling his arms around me. That felt great.

  Digger was nuzzling my neck, biting me a little. “We could try this later with no clothes between us.” He could feel me shiver and he chuckled against my skin. “Sounds good to me too. Come meet my mom.”

  My head jerked up. “What?”

  “My mom’s in the car. She’s dying to meet you.”

  “Oh, my God!” I wriggled out of his grasp and straightened out my clothes. “I just jumped all over you! I thought we were going to pick her up. She’s in the car, now?”

  No, now she was standing next to the car, watching me attach myself to her son. She had probably seen a lot of women act that way in his lifetime, I told myself. I put a smile on my face and clutched Digger’s hand as we walked over the freshly-plowed driveway to his car.

  “Rebecca? I’m Melissa Brody.” She looked a lot like her son, dark hair and eyes, tall and strong. She wasn’t smiling back.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said, willing myself to stop blushing about my earlier behavior. I dropped my purse and bent to pick it up. It dumped out on the asphalt. Digger squatted down to help me and between the two of us we got everything back in. He put his arm around me.

  “You’re all good,” he said softly. He was peering at the house. “Is your mom here? We could introduce them.”

  “No, she and my dad already headed to Louisville.” I had left the office the second my father did, saying that I was feeling sick. I thought that Sherri was probably right behind me.

  My mother had insisted on going to see her mom, adamantly insisted on something for the first time in I didn’t remember how long. My father had decided he should keep tabs on her instead of me, so he went along also. He didn’t trust my grandmother at all and she hated him right back. They had fought a decades-long battle over my mom; my dad loved to score victories, like not allowing my mom to visit for Christmas, and shoved it back in my grandma’s face. But my grandmother had one important card she could always play: money.

  My grandma lived very, very modestly with a houseful of small dogs, but my father knew that my grandfather had left her a mint. My father wanted that money, he wanted my grandmother to leave her estate to my mom, so he walked a careful line with her. If he pushed too hard, if she ever found out how he really treated my mom, he knew that she would leave it all to some kind of toy dog rescue organization. Maybe this visit was to make sure of the inheritance.

  It felt a little awkward, the three of us standing in the driveway, so I cleared my throat and opened the door to the back seat of the Ford. “Should we go?”

  Digger and his mom got into the front. “Here,” he said, and tossed something over his shoulder to me. “You’ll need something else to keep you warm if you’re not sitting up here next to me.”

  I unfolded the blanket and blushed even more at the body heat reference in front of his mom. “Thank you.”

  It was abnormally silent in the car as we rumbled down the dirt road. “You’d think the people around here would pay to pave it,” Melissa Brody said to her son. “They look like they have enough money to pave over the state. Cheap and selfish, I suppose.”

  Great. I was making a wonderful first impression.

  Digger gave his mom a look. “It’s their property, they get to do what they want. Like how you left up the Christmas decorations until June last year to piss off the neighbors. It was your house, you got to do what you wanted. Isn’t that what you said at the time?” His mom looked at him and they both cracked up. I relaxed a little bit in my seat.

  Little by little, I managed to make myself start talking and even more slowly, Mrs. Brody started to respond and even talk spontaneously to me. Her favorite topic was, of course, her children, Digger and Ilsa.

  “You must be so proud of them,” I said.

  “Ilsa will be a doctor,” she agreed.

  “Yes, and Digger, having his own business, his own house, being so…” I trailed off when she turned around to look at me over the back of the seat and I caught Digger grinning in the rearview mirror.

  “Go on, Cinderella. I’m enjoying having my praises sung.”

  I fussed with the blanket. “I was just going to say you don’t seem so bad to me.”

  “You should have seen him as a kid. He was a holy terror,” Mrs. Brody told me. “If I heard screaming, crying, or sirens near the house, I was sure that Digger was involved.”

  I burst out laughing. “He must have been such a cute little guy.”

  “Cute, with the soul of a devil. I should have named him Trouble.”

  “That’s my middle name,” he assured me.

  “What’s his real name?” I asked his mom.

  “Digger,” he said firmly. “Digger Trouble Brody.”

  “Joseph is his middle name, for his father,” his mom explained. “We called him ‘Digger’ because he was always in the dirt somewhere.”

  “Now I’m always covered in grease,” he said. “I’ve never been clean in my life.” His eyes caught mine in the mirror again, and I smiled at him.

  “Digger was the leader of the pack,” his mother said. “Our house was the clubhouse. Always full of people coming and going. He’s always been that way.” She glanced back at me. “Until recently, when he got busy with other projects.”

  I sank back in my seat. Yes, I was obviously supposed to be the project keeping him away from his friends, his life.

  Digger got the conversation back on track by reminding her of when he had put all the poppers under the wheels of her car. We drove the short distance left to Ann Arbor with both of them making me laugh, talking about Digger when he was a kid and how bad he was. His mom clearly loved him like crazy, anyway. I noticed she turned around when she spoke so I could hear her well over the roaring engine of the Fairlane. Even if she didn’t like me, she was still thoughtful about my hearing.

  “Ilsa!” A beautiful, dark-haired woman about my age jumped up from her chair in the apartment lobby when Digger called her name.

  “You’re late,” she said, but she was smiling.

  “He drove carefully. Precious cargo,” Melissa Brody answered, cocking her head at me. I hung back as they all hugged and kissed. They were so different from my family.

  “Hi,” Ilsa said, breaking free from her mother and coming to where I stood a few feet away. She reminded me of both Digger and her mom, but she didn’t have the harsh strength of their features. She was just lovely. And smart, I reminded myself. I stepped forward and tripped over the edge of the rug.

  Digger swung his arm around me. “This is Rebecca,” he said.

  Ilsa looked me up and down. “Yeah, I figured,” she said. My smile faded. Maybe she would warm up. Maybe.

  Melissa put her arm through her daughter’s and we went up to Ilsa’s apartment. She had three roommates and they were all home, talking, laughing. Ilsa pulled Digger into her bedroom to fix a closet door that she said was driving her nuts, leaving me with her mom and the other women. I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Um, I made some cookies for you all, for the apartment.” I held out the bag and in seconds one girl had opened the container and then all the roommates had their mouths full of oatmeal raisin cookies.

  Digger’s mom broke off a small piece and slowly chewed it. “You made these, yourself?” she asked, raising her eyebrows, and I nodded.

  “They’re delicious,” one of the girls, Cheyenne, told me enthusiastically. While they chowed on the cookies they talked about their classes. They were all in med school and they told us about the crazy hours of studying. It sounded like they were all loving it, though.

  “I wish I had been able to go to college,” Mrs. Brody said. “I wanted Digger to go too. He had to work.” She looked over at me. “Did you go on after high school, Rebecca?”

  “I did.” They seemed to be waiting for more. “I, um, yes, I did. I was a liberal arts major. It was, I guess, just fine.”

  “I suppose it’s hard to appreciate things, when you’re given so much,” Melissa commented.

  My mouth dropped open. “No, I appreciate very much…”

  “All fixed. You ladies ready to go?” Digger wiped his hands against each other. “See?” he said to me. “I’m dirty again.” I caught the roommates elbowing each other and smiling, and I had no desire to understand their inside joke about Digger being dirty.

  I stood up, feeling so uncomfortable. Ilsa and her mom walked out arm in arm again and I followed them. “Cheyenne is still interested, Digger,” Ilsa said over her shoulder, and her red-haired roommate shrieked in protest. “I can fix you up whenever you’re ready.”

  “Shut up, Ilsa.” He sounded like he thought she was joking. I didn’t think she was.

  We went to Ilsa’s favorite restaurant for lunch, a super crowded, busy deli in downtown Ann Arbor. “Is this ok with you?” Digger asked me as we went in.

  I smiled largely. “Of course!” The three of them talked and laughed throughout the meal. I sat feeling like I had just failed another big test. This had been my chance to make a good impression with his family and I had already ruined it. I was letting it slip away.

  I realized they were all staring at me like they were waiting. Someone must have asked me something. I looked from face to face, trying to get a clue as to what my answer should be. I nodded carefully while checking to see if I was going the right direction. “Sure,” I told them.

  Digger swallowed a huge bite of sandwich and picked up my hand. “It’s too loud in here,” he said. “We’ll talk more when we go outside.” So that hadn’t been the correct response. I wondered what I had agreed to. He finished his meal and then mine while his mom and sister continued to talk. Digger handed money to his mom. “See you outside,” he said, and bent and kissed her cheek. I thought maybe he whispered something, too.

  “Cinderella, you’re looking like someone stole your last cookie again,” Digger told me, adjusting me so that I was tucked under his arm.

 

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