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I looked around the space. “Avery, this is a storage room,” I said. “Mac can’t live here.”

She gave me the look teenagers have been giving adults for millennia. That “how dumb can you be” expression.

“Not down here, duh,” she said. “There’s that big space upstairs that we don’t even use half of for storage. Why can’t Mac live there?”

Chapter 13

Mac said, “No,” at exactly the same time as I said, “What do you mean?” He spoke first the second time. “No,” he said again.

I pictured the second-floor storage area Avery was talking about. The big room that faced the side parking lot was actually two rooms with doors that slid back into the wall. In one of the building’s previous incarnations, it had been a private smokers’ club. There had been a wet bar at the end of the bigger of the two rooms, and the plumbing was still in place.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “Avery might be onto something.”

“I am,” she said. She didn’t lack confidence in her ideas. “There’s not that much stuff up there. I know because I was just upstairs to get a couple of the quilts for Charlotte—nothing really big because it’s too hard to get big stuff up the stairs in the first place. And we still have under the stairs and even the sunporch until spring because the Angels have their office in here now anyway. And Mac could even use the back staircase because it’s only sort of blocked off, and then he wouldn’t have to go through the store all the time.”

I held up both hands. “Avery, take a breath.”

“No,” Mac said for the third time.

It could work, I realized. “Mac, we should at least take a look.”

“We should,” Avery echoed. She tucked her dark hair behind one ear. “I already have some ideas for how you could do the layout.”

“And I’m sure they’re good ones,” I said. “But we’re just going to take a quick look. I need you down here with Charlotte for now.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Come take a look,” I said to Mac, inclining my head in the direction of the stairs.

He shook his head in resignation. “All right.”

He didn’t say a word until we were at the top of the stairs. Then he turned to me. “Okay, we’re here. Just count to ten and then we’ll go back downstairs and say it won’t work.”

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and took a moment to study Mac. He looked uncomfortable, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “You want to keep your work life and your private life separate. I understand that,” I said. “As you pointed out a little while ago, this isn’t a typical workplace. But if you’re interested at all, I think Avery might be onto something.”

After a long moment, he nodded slowly. “I guess it doesn’t hurt to take a look.”

I unlocked the door and we stepped inside. Overall, the space was bigger than the studio apartment Jess had lived in downtown before she found her current place. It was definitely bigger than the first apartment she and I had shared in university. And Avery was right. We really didn’t have much stored up here at the moment because it was just too much of a hassle lugging things upstairs and then having to cart them back down again a week or so later.

“I know those sliding doors work,” I said. I walked across the room and looked at the space on the other side of the two panel doors. “There’s room for a bed and a dresser in here. Maybe even a chair.”

Each of the rooms had a good-sized window that let in lots of light. And the old house had been well insulated during the original conversion years ago from a home to a business, so it was warm.

“The floors are in decent shape,” Mac said, reaching down and swiping a hand across the wide wooden boards.

I pointed at the end wall. “There’s plumbing in that wall. It wouldn’t be that hard to make a galley kitchen there and then go through that closet and connect to the bathroom in the hall.”

“What would we do for a staff washroom?”

“Do a little work on the one downstairs. We could put in a new sink and a new toilet, maybe find an end of vinyl or some tile for the floor and let Avery paint the walls.” I pulled a pen and a scrap of paper that had a short grocery list scribbled on it and sketched out a rough floor plan with a tiny galley kitchen on the back. I handed him the piece of paper. “Could you build that?”

Mac studied my drawing for a moment, pulling a hand over his mouth.

“We worked pretty well together on Rose’s apartment,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah, we did, didn’t we?”

“So can you build it?” I repeated.

He nodded. “Uh-huh. Except for the basic rough-in of the plumbing, I can do this.”

“So now the big question—do you want to do it?” I said.

Mac looked around the room. I knew he was intrigued by the way he was eyeing the end wall as though he were picturing a run of cupboards. “We could think about it,” he said. “On the condition that I pay the going rent. No special deals, Sarah.”

I nodded. “Agreed. And I have a condition.”

“What is it?”

“If this arrangement doesn’t work out for either of us for any reason, we say so—no hard feelings.” I held out my hand. “What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

Mac hesitated, but only for a second or two. He took my hand, smiled and said, “We have a deal.”

Mac and I spent about an hour after the shop closed measuring the storage space and roughing out a floor plan with measurements scribbled on the side. Avery had wanted to stay and help, but I’d promised she could help us work on the downstairs washroom.

That evening, after a scrambled-egg sandwich and a clementine for me, and some Tasty Tenders for Elvis, I got a pad of grid paper and a pencil and started turning my rough drawing into a rudimentary floor plan. Elvis sat beside me, craning his neck and poking his head in my field of vision every few minutes. He put his paw on the page at one point and looked at me. “There for the sink?” I asked.

“Merow,” he answered.

I took a look at the spot on the drawing where he’d rested his paw. He was right. I set my pencil down, stretched my right arm over my head and reached for the phone. Elvis stretched as well and then sprawled over the floor plan as I punched in my parents’ number.

“That’s not helping,” I said. He gave me a look that seemed to suggest he wasn’t trying to help.

My dad answered the phone. “Hi, sweetheart,” he said. I knew he was smiling, and it seemed to me that I could feel the warmth of that smile coming through the receiver.

“Hi, Dad,” I said. “Is it cold there?” My parents lived in New Hampshire, where my dad taught journalism at Keating State College.

“It’s two-flap weather,” he said.

“That’s some serious cold,” I said with a laugh. Dad had a mangy pile-lined leather aviator hat with earflaps, which he wore only when it was really, really cold. My mother hated that hat. She said it made him look like he’d been out in the bush about a week too long. She and I had both bought him other hats over the years, but he liked his aviator hat more than any of them.

It had disappeared once under mysterious circumstances, and the entire neighborhood had been treated to the sight of my dad in a holey sweatshirt, pajama bottoms and unlaced Red Wings racing down the street after the garbage truck and then striding back, triumphantly holding the hat over his head like he was some kind of marauding Viking with a head on a pike. The hat had never been safer after that.

“Is Mom around?” I asked.

“She is,” he said. “Hang on and I’ll get her.”

“Love you,” I said.

He’d already set the handset down, but I heard him call, “Love you, too!”