“I’m glad to hear it. I know you’ve been burning the candle at both ends over at the Callahan property. Figured housekeeping was the least of your concerns.”
It had been. It wasn’t like the apartment direly needed a deep clean, but it had been nice to come home to everything all tidied up and straightened out. Startling at first, but once he saw the note and recognized his mother’s kind gesture, appreciation was all he felt.
“Want me to see if she can come by again next week? I was going to call her anyway and have her fit my place into her schedule too.”
“That would be great, but I will not let you pay for it this time.” He made a move for his billfold slipped into his back pocket.
“Oh, no, you don’t. Do you remember all the years you cleaned our house when you were growing up? Without even being asked to?”
“Those were called chores,” he said, hand now dipping into his wallet to pull out a stack of bills.
“No.” Pearl pushed her son’s hand away. “It was called being the best son a single mama could ever ask for.” Her eyes creased in the corners as her face filled with thankfulness at the loving memory. “Even in high school, you would spend your Sundays doing laundry, vacuuming, and cleaning our little townhome. You’d have everything sparkling and shining when I came home from my shift at the Stop-and-Go. Now, try telling me again that I don’t owe you for that.”
“Youdon’towe me for that.” He reluctantly returned the money to his wallet. He wouldn’t win. “I was just doing what little I could to take care of you.”
“And let me take care of you now.” Her hand came down on his chest, patting lightly right over his heart.
“Thank you.” He leaned forward to leave a kiss on his sweet mother’s cheek. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” She beamed at him with a pride he wasn’t sure he’d earned. “You want to leave this mutt here with me for the afternoon while you head back to work?”
“Didn’t you just watch him the other day?” It would be a huge help, no doubt, but he didn’t want to take advantage of his mother’s generosity. She was doling it out like candy today.
“We have fun together. Plus, he chases the critters off. Last week, I lost an entire watermelon to a sneaky little squirrel. Not on Waylon’s watch. He canvases the perimeter of these gardens like he’s a warden in a maximum security prison.”
A colorful description, J.P. had to admit, but Waylon’s proud head tilt only solidified Pearl’s assessment.
“I’ll pick the two of you up for dinner tonight. Campfire Café? Five o’clock?”
“That sounds like a delicious plan.”
All the thingsJ.P. had on his list to do at the fixer upper involved tools that would create enough noise to wake the dead. While rustling Nora from a peaceful slumber had made him all kinds of devilishly giddy last week, knowing she’d been under the weather made him temporarily want to play nice.
She’d looked like death warmed over the day before. Whatever she had, it came on swift and sudden. For her sake, he hoped it left just as quickly as it arrived.
For several hours, J.P. surveyed the old, dilapidated home, making notes and calculating a realistic timeline for the completion of the project. Sooner rather than later, he’d have a small crew of guys to help him out. The sheetrock installers. The electrician and plumber. Tile and flooring guys. He’d work on the custom cabinetry, as that was his specialty. But right now, he was still in the demolition phase, and it wasn’t worth Miles Callahan’s money to pay more than one person to do it when J.P. knew he could tackle it all on his own.
Searching for a task that didn’t involve eardrum-splitting decibels of volume, he got to work in the back downstairs bedroom, pulling rotting sheetrock from the walls. He had his eyes covered with protective goggles and his nose and mouth behind a mask, but the dust that plumed into the air with each removed wall couldn’t be good to breathe. He found himself trapping a big breath in his lungs before launching the sledgehammer into the sheetrock, turning his head to avoid the spray of particles.
He winced, feeling bits of debris hit his arms like shards of shrapnel. His ears buzzed. He swung again. The metal head of the hammer careened into the wall with brute force and a hole over three feet wide opened up. A cloud of dust spewed from the interior like the aftermath of an explosion. J.P. cowered, startled by the sheer magnitude of fragmented wreckage. But suddenly, that cloud took on another form, shape-shifting like a villain in a superhero movie. It caught him up and spun him around like a tornado, and that buzz from before was now a roar.
J.P. felt it on his neck first. That sharp, biting sting of pierced flesh. Then another on his forearm. He swung the large mallet in his grip, waving it like a sword, but it did nothing to combat the disorientation or panic.
Another sting on his cheek, followed by one in the tender flesh on his side.
He should have recognized it right off the bat, but when he’d dealt the final blow to the wall, he’d disturbed some sort of hive within it. Hundreds—maybe even thousands—of very, very angry bees swarmed him. He was pretty sure over half of them had already stung him.
J.P. dropped the sledgehammer and hightailed it out of the house. A determined cluster followed, zipping through the halls and pathways, hot on his heels. It had to look like some sort of cartoon, J.P. racing frantically about with a trail of angry hornets chasing him.
By the time he got to his truck, out of breath and woefully out of energy, only a handful lingered.
He locked himself in the cab. A half dozen bees buzzed in front of the windshield, swishing back and forth like wiper blades. Then, one by one, they flew off.
Never more grateful for a bench seat in his truck, J.P. slumped over. Exhaustion racked his mind and body.
He’d disturbed something in that wall. This was more than just a few bees flitting over from Nora’s hives to give him a bad time.
For a transitory moment, he wondered if he’d had it all wrong this entire time. Were the bees that harassed him on a daily basis Nora’s? Or had they actually been the ones hidden in the walls of the old house?
