is drawing up plans for a house for me. It’s going to be a work of art. I just have to come up with the money to build it. If I ever need a thoracic surgeon, I just have to call my brother. I get corn on the cob and other vegetables free all summer long.”
“And I need to know this…why? I don’t remember inviting you for breakfast.”
Jeff whirled around. He was still wearing the baseball cap. He shrugged. “You seem to have an unfavorable opinion of me, like the dog. I’m really a nice guy. You can even ask my mother.” At the murderous look in his host’s eyes, Jeff cut off whatever else he was going to say. He scrambled the eggs and pressed the plunger on the toaster at the same time. “I invited myself. I’m starved. I can pay you for it if money is the issue.”
Olivia waved her hands in frustration. She felt like crying and wasn’t sure why. She looked down at the plate he put in front of her. The bacon was just right, extra crispy, not a speck of grease anywhere. The eggs were fluffy and golden. The toast expertly buttered, not too much, just right. “Thank you,” she said grudgingly.
“My pleasure. I’m sorry if I said something…Obviously, I hit a tender spot somewhere along the way. Does it have anything to do with this?” he said, withdrawing the baby bracelet from his pocket. “When you pitched that bowl at me last night, it fell out. I picked it up.” He slid the little bracelet across the table. Olivia made no move to pick it up but couldn’t take her eyes off it.
Olivia licked her lips. She nodded. “It has everything to do with my…attitude. I guess I should apologize. I said ‘guess,’ and that doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. Shouldn’t you be leaving? Don’t you have company waiting for you at home?”
Jeff blushed again. The sight pleased Olivia. “I don’t think so,” he hedged. “You pretty much took care of that.” He grinned. In spite of herself, Olivia laughed.
“So, you take dog pictures!”
“Yep.”
“Nice in-home business. That overhead can kill you, though. How long have you been doing this?”
He sounded like he really wanted to know. “Forever. I took over from my dad when he retired. He lives in the islands and takes charters on his fishing boat. I do calendars, too. A dog a month, that kind of thing. All breeds. I’m working on next year’s right now. I’d like to put Cecil on it, but I’ll need permission. In case your next question is ‘which one is which,’ I still don’t know.”
Jeff groaned. “I don’t do dishes,” he said, to avoid discussing the dogs. “I use those shiny plastic things you just toss in the trash. Listen, if you want to talk about…whatever it is that’s bothering you, I’m a good listener. If you pay me a dollar, we can log it under attorney-client privilege. I was just going to hang out today and write a brief.”
She didn’t mean to speak the words, but they tumbled out of her mouth anyway. “I was going to make chicken soup and maybe bake a cake. My dad always did that on bad-weather days.”
Jeff’s eyebrows shot upward. He removed his baseball cap, suddenly aware that he was still wearing it. He shoved it in his back pocket. Olivia noticed how the cap had mashed down his unruly curly hair. “My mother does the same thing. If it isn’t chicken soup and cake, it’s stew and a pie. We had a lot of bad weather back in Pennsylvania growing up, so we did eat hearty in the winter.”
Again, words she didn’t mean to utter tumbled from her mouth. “What’s your mother like?”
Jeff leaned back in his chair. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew nonetheless that he was treading on troubled ground. “I wrote an essay on her once for school when I was little. I got an A. Mom framed it. She hung it up in her bedroom. I think my dad was a little miffed. She has a wonderful smile. I kind of look like her, or so my dad says. She’s the one with the curly hair. All us boys have curly hair. My dad’s hair is poker straight. She wears glasses, and her hair is gray now. She says she’s a little heavier than she’d like to be. She’s active in church stuff, 4-H and the like. She enters all the cooking contests when they have the county fair. She wins, too. She helps Dad and can drive the tractor. Sometimes she mows the lawn. She never went to college, never had a job outside the house. Six boys were enough to handle. On Thanksgiving we always had to have two turkeys. When we’d get brave enough to take a girl home for the first time, we always knew right away if Mom liked her or not. If she was polite and formal, that meant a no-go. If she was herself, that meant the girl was okay. None of us ever pushed our luck in that department.
“When we’d get sick, she’d sit by our beds and read to us, play checkers, stuff like that. She made more noise at our graduation than the whole stadium combined. You can’t be embarrassed when it’s your mother.”
Tears flooded Olivia’s eyes.
Jeff ran his fingers through his hair, then rubbed at the stubble on his cheeks and chin. “What did I say? Talk to me. I’m a lawyer, I’m trained to deal with problems. If there are taboos, tell me.”
Olivia blinked away her tears. She got up and carried her plate to the dishwasher. With her back to him, she said, “I never had a mother. The day I was born, she told my father she didn’t want me and that she wanted a divorce. My dad told me she’d died. Then a few days ago a lawyer showed up at my door and said my mother had just died a few weeks ago and left me her fortune.”
Jeff was suddenly at a loss for words. When he finally found his tongue, he said, “Well, that damn well sucks.”
Olivia busied herself unplugging the toaster, wiping it off, and sliding it back under the counter. She tied a twist-tie on the package of bread and put it, along with the bacon and eggs, back into the refrigerator. “Yeah. It does. I called my dad, and he flew up. He left last night before you came. He said he was sorry.”
Jeff struggled for words. The only thing he could come up with was, “You didn’t pay me a dollar.” Olivia reached into the cookie jar and withdrew a dollar bill. She handed it to him. Jeff shoved it into his pocket. “We are now lawyer and client.”
“I hate lawyers,” Olivia said.
“Yeah, yeah, everyone hates lawyers until they need one. Is there more? There is—I can tell. You might as well spit it out right now.”
Olivia’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as she stared out the kitchen window at the falling snow. “How do you know there’s more?”
“My fine legal intuition, which is honed to a sharp point. Nah, it just stands to reason there’s more.”
Olivia poured more coffee into her cup. Jeff held his out for a refill. She obliged before sitting down. “My mother changed her name from Allison Matthews to Adrian Ames. Does that ring a bell with you?”
Jeff looked perplexed. “No. Should it?”
“She is Adrian Ames of Adrian’s Treasures. It’s a huge mail-order house. Wait here a minute.” Olivia ran into the great room and returned with her printouts and the letter. She had no idea why she was suddenly confiding in a total stranger. No idea at all.
Minutes later Jeff said, “Wow! What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. One minute I think I should do what she asked because ‘it’s the right thing to do.’ Then the next minute I say, screw it, she did it, I’m not making it right for her. What would you do?”
