“Broadway! I’ll have to buy a new dress,” Max said dreamily. She coughed, then cleared her throat. “I haven’t been to New York in a couple years. Since before you were acting.”
During the decade Tom had spent in exile in Boston, he’d made sure to send Max a couple of tickets for every show he appeared in. He’d started doing so in hopes of getting some intelligence on Rosie, or at least a little goodwill, but he’dcontinued as his parents grew older and more reluctant to travel up from Florida to see him perform. Max had come without fail, though she was hit or miss on whether she acknowledged that Tom and Rosie had ever married or divorced.
It would be more complicated to get her down to New York in her increasingly poor health, but keeping the approval of a single member of Rosie’s family was probably a good idea.
“Sounds like a plan,” he deflected. “Any idea on where you might have kept the repair records for the inn though? I’m in your office.”
“Why are you up at the inn? It’s awful there in January. Damp and gray. You should take Rosie down to your parents’ place. Somewhere warm. I’d like a little great-niece next. One that looks just like her. She was the most adorable baby. Born with a full head of hair. Think you can manage?”
“We don’t haveanykids,” Tom told her, confused. “Um. Yet.”
“Well, what are you waiting for, then?” Max demanded, tone sharpening. “Rosie’s not getting any younger.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, shoving the drawer shut. “I’ll get right on that.” He slumped into the ancient, creaky office chair and bent over the desk to rest his chin on his forearm.No, Max, you’re thinking of how my life wassupposedto go.
“I hope I didn’t scare her off the idea,” Max mused. “I used to put her in charge of her brothers and cousins when we were at the inn. Had her feeding and dressing them, all that. She was the only responsible one in the whole bunch. My parents did the same thing to me, and I’d decided I was never having any of my own by the time I was married.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s it,” Tom said lightly, though hischest hurt. “She used to tell me we were having six or seven, all their names on a theme.”
Not knowing whether she was joking had been part of the fun. Rosie could really commit to a bit, and he’d imagined telling some horrified nurse that yes, they really meant to name their second set of triplets Egbert, Fiona, and Gus.
“That’s good,” Max said approvingly. “Let me know when the baby shower is. I want to get the crib.”
Tom promised as genuinely as he could, knowing both that Max would not remember this conversation in ten minutes and that Rosie probably had ten more trials for him to pass before she might reasonably consider him father material.
Maybe he should just put the roof aside for now. There were plenty of other problems in the insurance report that had not yet been tackled while he fruitlessly pursued roofing contractors and Rosie turned the basement pub into a karaoke bar.
He opened the binder to a random page. The gutters needed to be cleaned out and patched. He hadn’t the faintest idea how that was done, and the insurance company had only allowed him the princely sum of $83 to accomplish it. As his heart rate miserably picked up, he heard cars on the front gravel.
It was probably just more teenage fangirls, but he was expecting Ximena today.Please let it be Ximena.He needed reinforcements, someone to keep Boyd and the girls out of Rosie’s hair and Tom’s jock.
Tom climbed up on the desk to peer out the single window. There was a traffic jam down below: the front drive was totally full. Ximena’s roundly pregnant figure stood next to a rental car, in heated conversation with Rosie’s cousin Seth and amiddle-aged woman in a code enforcement uniform. A dozen or so teenage girls had stopped what they were doing—spray-painting furniture, beating throw rugs, taking selfies—to watch.
“What fresh hell…?” Tom muttered.
He pounded down two flights of stairs and out the front door. They were being written up. Tom had never owned a car, so he’d never been pulled over, but he recognized the smugness of a civil servant engaged in a satisfying bout of ticket writing. The code enforcement officer was scribbling a novel onto her pad while Ximena argued with her and Seth stood by with a mildly anxious expression on his face.
Everyone stopped what they were doing when Tom made it to the front yard. They looked at him as though they’d been waiting for him to make an appearance, even though this wasn’t his inn, it wasn’t his circus, and these were not his monkeys. He swallowed hard.
Time to perform a Tom who was a respectable father of three, a Tom who paid his mortgage and voted. A person to whom anyone in the world might defer.
“Is there a problem?” he asked in his most authoritative voice, praying it didn’t break.
The code enforcement officer flipped back a couple of pages in her notepad. “You’ve got no permits for construction work, you’ve got three vehicles parked in the roadway, and you’ve got no certificate of occupancy for all those guests you’re lodging here, to start,” she said.
“I told you that you needed a certificate of occupancy,” Seth said mournfully, to nobody in particular.
“What—we’re not renting,” Tom said.
“Then you need to fill out the paperwork stating an intent to use it as a habitation again,” the code enforcement officer said, unimpressed.
Paperwork. Tom wasterriblewith paperwork.
“Okay, I’ll…do that right now. But do we really need permits? We’re just painting. Nobody’s paying to be here. Nobody’s getting paid to be here,” Tom said.
The code enforcement officer looked at Seth. “We got a report that someone was doing unlicensed renovations.”
Tom cut his eyes over to Rosie’s cousin, who was fidgeting with his tucked-in polo shirt. Had he narced on them to code enforcement?
