an antique carriage house.”
Her father pointed a callused finger at her. “Don’t move. I have to wait on a customer.”
“I’m not moving until I finish my soup. I don’t care what you and Davey say.”
“Truer words never spoken right there,” her father grumbled.
Tess spooned up plump clams, potatoes, buttery milk. She’d worry about her fat intake another day. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees on a television above the bar. It was a home game. The patrons of Jim’s Place didn’t like the idea of shutting down Fenway, building a new park. But that was the nature of things, Tess thought with a fresh rush of frustration. They change. Even in her father’s neighborhood. Even with his daughter.
At the tables behind her, a group of about a half-dozen men were arguing over who was the greatest president of the twentieth century. “Ronnie Reagan.” A dark, young construction worker raised his beer glass in solemn homage. “Bow your heads when you say his name.”
“No way. FDR was the man.”
“Harry Truman.”
Davey shook his head and glanced back at the men, all younger than he was by two decades or more. He weighed in, deadpan. “Adlai Stevenson.”
“Get out. He was never president.”
“Should have been,” Davey said.
A kid in dusty overalls frowned. “Who the hell’s Adlai Stevenson?”
“Ignoramus,” his friend, the one who’d named Reagan, said. “He was that—who the hell was Adlai Stevenson?”
Davey sighed as Jim Haviland came back around the bar. “Country’s doomed, Jimmy. Your daughter’s stuck with an old barn that has snakes, and these dumb bastards never heard of Adlai Stevenson.”
The conversation shifted to baseball, an even more dangerous subject in metropolitan Boston than politics. On another night, Tess might have joined in. Good food and a good argument were part of the charm of her father’s pub, a contrast to the pace and complexity of her normal routine as both business-woman and designer. Unfortunately the last man in her life hadn’t seen the appeal of Jim’s Place and chowder night.
“Pop,” she said, “it’s not a barn, and I wasn’t stupid not to take cash. This was a great opportunity. I never could have afforded something like this otherwise. It’s a half block from the ocean. It just needs work.”
He put together a martini, seemingly absorbed in his work. Tess knew better. It had been just her and her father for so long, she knew when he was on automatic pilot. She’d had ample opportunity to tell him about her carriage house, and she hadn’t. And they both knew it. She was the daughter who’d lost her mother at six, who’d always told her father everything. Even as they’d carved out the landscape of their adult relationship, she and Jim Haviland hadn’t abandoned their tendency to speak their minds. It didn’t matter if the other didn’t want to hear what had to be said.
But not this time.
Tess finished her soup while he pretended to concentrate on his drink-making. It wasn’t that she needed her father’s approval. They’d worked that out a long time ago. It was just that her life was easier when she had it.
“How much work?” he asked.
“A lot,” Davey said.
Her father shot him a warning look, and Davey shrugged and finished his beer.
Tess opened a small package of oyster crackers. She never ate them with her soup, always after. “A fair amount.”
He nodded. A place that needed work was something he could understand. “You’ve decided to keep the house?”
“I don’t know. I think so. Pop, when I was up there this afternoon, I kept thinking of all the possibilities. There’s something about this place—it fired my imagination.”
That he could understand. Her imagination had put them at odds before. He grunted. “Well, if you decide to hang on to it, a bunch of these bums here owe me favors.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” She nibbled on a cracker, and added, “But if I go through with this, I think I’d like to do as much of the work as I can myself.”
Davey gave an exaggerated groan. “If there’s anything I hate, it’s cleaning up after some do-it-yourselfer.”
“Give me a break, okay, Davey? I’m trying to have a conversation with my father. This is important to me.”
“True confessions,” Davey said. “You’re a day late and a dollar short, Tess.”
She ignored him. “I’ve got pictures, Pop. Do you want to see? Ike Grantham gave them to me when he signed over the property.”
“Ike Grantham.” Jim Haviland snorted. “Now there’s a piece of work.”
“Pop.”
“Yeah, sure. Show me your pictures.”
Tess slid off the stool and picked up her satchel. Her father’s pub was one of the rare places that made her feel short. She unzipped a side pocket and removed the best two shots of the roll Ike had taken. He’d been very proud. “It’s a great place, Tess. I know I can trust you with it.”
She passed the pictures across the bar to her father.
He put on his reading glasses and took a look. “Tess. Jesus. It is a barn.”
“I’m telling you,” Davey said, “it’s got snakes.”
Davey was getting on Tess’s nerves. She almost told him the place was haunted by a convicted murderer whose descendants lived next door, never mind that one of them was a six-year-old who thought she was a princess. But she said nothing, because arguing with Davey Ahearn only encouraged him.
“It’s in Beacon-by-the-Sea, Pop. Remember when we used to go up there for picnics on the beach?”
“Yeah. I remember.” He took off his glasses and pushed the pictures back to her. “Long commute.”
“It’d be a while before I could move in, and I’m not sure I would. If business keeps up, I could keep it as a weekend place.”
“Old as it is,” Davey went on, as if he’d never stopped, “it’s probably got asbestos, lead pipes. Lead paint.”
“So? I could buy a duplex up the street with lead paint and asbestos.”
Davey eased off the bar stool. “Now, why would you want to buy a place in a neighborhood with people who’ve known you your whole life? That wouldn’t make any sense when you can fix up some goddamn barn some goddamn rich nut gave you in a quaint little town up on the North Shore where not only no one knows you, no one wants to know you.”
“That’s pure prejudice, Davey, and I earned the carriage house. It wasn’t ‘given’ to me.” Except she’d thought
