She didn’t answer, but she shook her head. Her breath came in tight gulps. “It’s such a mess.” She sat up, fumbled for her purse, then took a puff from her rescue inhaler. That was twice he’d seen her use it today; that wasn’t a good sign. “Maybe Ishouldjust burn it down,” she mumbled. “That would take care of the bees.”
“Sure. It didn’t look like the grease trap had been cleaned in a while,” Tom said, striking an encouraging tone. “I could make it look like an accident. Is there fire insurance?”
“See! You’re already thinking of bailing,” Rosie accused him, pulling away.
“I was trying to be helpful?”
Rosie’s face twisted in dismay. “I’m just—oh God. This is going to take so long. And I’m going to have to do it all by myself.”
“Um?” Tom said, mildly outraged. Here he was, and he thought he’d been pretty studly so far. But maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe the point was that it was going tosuckto fix everything. “You don’t have to. You could sell it, like your cousin said.” Rosie was quiet, apparently thinking about that.
“We could just go,” Tom urged her. “We could make the last ferry, get to Boston tonight. I have a key to Caroline and Adrian’s place. We could fly out of Boston. You wanna go somewhere else for a long weekend? Somewhere sunny?” Actually, the sun wasn’t Rosie’s friend. “Or snowy, now that I think about it? Anywhere. Boyd’s condo in Malibu?”
She turned to him, tears welling up. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “This is—I know you can’t have this much spare time. You can’t have thought it would be this bad.”
“I’m not saying I want to go—babe, if you want to fix this shithole up, I’ll help you do it,” he insisted. “I said I would.”
“Don’t,” she said, voice still shaky. “It doesn’t actually help, you know? If you say you’ll do something and then you don’t. Don’t you have rehearsal? And, like, a life?”
He hadn’t spared a single thought for the godawful play since stepping out his door that morning.
“Not for months,” he said, unable to recall the exact date. “I’m just saying, is this what you really want? Why doyouwant to mess with this disaster site? You don’t even own it. I can’t imagine Max expects you to put your life on hold this long.”
She gave him wide, affronted eyes. “This is my wholefamily’s place. This is where we get together,” she insisted, despite the pressing lack of any other Kellys on site to provide any assistance. “I was going to bring my kids here.”
Tom froze. “What kids?”
Rosie made a wordless noise of hurt in the back of her throat and pushed the door open on the opposite side of the car. “The kids I wasgoingto have.”
Well, that was a kick in the teeth.
At least you didn’t have any kidswas a not-helpful thing people had told him after their divorce. Like he was supposed to be grateful for the nonexistence of people he’d planned on existing, tiny humans whose faces and names he knew Rosie had already imagined.
If she hadn’t kicked him out, they could have had kids by now. They could have done any of the hundred things she’d told him they’d do.
Why hadn’t she had kids, if that’s what she’d really wanted? She didn’t get remarried, didn’t have kids, didn’t even move out of New York, which they’d only lived in to support his supposed Broadway career. If she’d changed her mind, he couldn’t blame her—they’d been so young—but that wasn’thisfault. He’d been on board for all of it.
Before she could get out of the car, Tom reached out to cup the back of her head so that she had to turn and look at him.
“Look, I’mhere,” he said. “And I’ll stay till it’s done. That’s what you asked me to do, right? Let’s just do it.”
She sighed unhappily. “Tom. That’s what you said about our wedding. And I ended up planning the whole thing.”
“I—” He couldn’t really remember what had been involved in wedding planning to negate that proposition. It hadn’t seemed like a lot? There had been a ceremony in the college chapel, then lunch with a couple dozen family and friends at an Italian restaurant. Had she wanted more?
“This is different,” he protested. “I can get the roof done. And everything else. You know what? I can handle all of it. Everything the place needs. Babe. It’ll be okay. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll do the whole thing.”
“The whole thing?”
“Yeah. I’ll take over. You’ve got a real job, right? I don’t have anything I have to do until rehearsal starts.”
“Youare going to pick out carpet samples.Youare going to make sure the wallpaper matches the linens,” she said doubtfully.
And why would she doubt his ability to do that, only because he never had? He wanted to do it all for her. He wanted to be the one who bravely ordered bolster pillows and paint swatches. He wanted to defeat the bees in her name. Knowing what to do for her was very fulfilling, a satisfaction that had grown rarer and rarer before vanishing from his life entirely.
“Fine. You got me. I’m already planning to half-ass the window treatments,” he said. “Like, do the middest possible job picking them out.”
Instead of laughing, which was what he’d wanted her to do, her big blue eyes searched his face as she transparently wondered whether he was going to flake out on her.
