Nicole Young: Love Me If You Must

I opened them.

A silver and blue police cruiser angled to a stop against the curb. The driver’s side door opened. Officer Brad got out and flicked me a wave over the top of the vehicle. I tried to shrink inside myself. My eyes dropped to the sidewalk at his approach.

Never look a uniform in the eye. Be submissive. Don’t smart off. The lessons that had served me well over the years were second nature to me now. I dropped my hands to my sides. The coffee cup dangled between two fingers. The last bite of cinnamon roll plunked to the ground.

“Hello, Miss Amble.” In front of me, shiny leather boots glinted in the morning sunshine.

My nostrils flared and I diverted my gaze to a patch of grass growing over the concrete.

So. He’d already looked me up in the computer. Already knew my name. My crime. The number of days I’d served penance.

My jaw clenched. I held back the smart comments begging to burst out.

He leaned toward me as if trying to catch my eye. I gave him a broader view of my cheek and ear instead.

He cleared his throat. “I enjoyed talking to you last night, and I wondered if you might be interested in grabbing a bite to eat with me after work. You know, a welcome-to-the-neighborhood kind of thing.”

The wind kicked up a swirl of leaves. A curly gold one settled on my crosstrainer. I tipped my foot and shook it off.

“How about the Rawlings Hotel?” he said. “The beef Wellington is tremendous.”

I looked sideways at the bare branches of the maple standing between me and the tracks. As much as I would love to taste the cuisine at the gourmet restaurant, Officer Brad was probably just hoping to use me for the subject of some evening-class dissertation. I could hear the questions now. “So, Miss Amble, why did you do it? What was going through your head while you administered the lethal dose? What, if anything, did you learn from your rehabilitation? How can you live with yourself today, knowing what you’ve done?”

My adrenaline had soared with the first blare of the police siren. Now, I was too keyed up to rein in my anger. I met his eyes and jabbed one finger toward his shirt.

“Listen, Officer Brad”—I spat his name—“if you come near me again, I’ll have a restraining order slapped on you so fast your hat will spin. And if you breathe one word of my past to anyone—ANYONE—you’ll find yourself in a civil suit that’ll last ’til Judgment Day. Are we clear about that?”

“Perfectly.” His lip twitched. “So if you don’t want to do dinner tonight, how about church on Sunday?”

My jaw locked open. How dare he mock me? I wasn’t about to parade my list of sins in front of good, God-fearing people.

He tipped his cap. “Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be at the one up on Rawlings Road. Service is at ten.”

He walked back to the cruiser.

I started to turn toward my house, but stopped as my gaze landed on the neighborhood spy. The woman stood beside an island of leaves in a sea of grass. She held my stare, rake pointed skyward. I bristled. The woman didn’t even try to pretend she hadn’t witnessed the scene with Officer Brad. I could only pray the words had disappeared in the breeze.

A melancholy crept through my mind, turning high hopes into black goo. I clenched my fist. The lid popped off the Styrofoam coffee cup and blew away. I supposed I’d get ticketed for littering next.

So what. Let Brad Walters gossip to the world. With any luck, I’d finish this project and shake the dust of Rawlings off my feet by spring.

The pungent odor of a thriving mildew colony met me as I led the contractor and his two assistants into the basement.

“Careful. These things were made for a size 5 shoe,” I said, turning sideways on the steps to keep my footing.

Bare bulbs, scattered about the seven-foot-high ceiling, cast a dim glow on stone walls. The cement floor, a novelty in a turn-of-the-century home, had mostly turned to dirt over the years. Only a narrow slash of concrete around the perimeter shone a bright white, the results of a recent attempt at waterproofing. The way the realtor explained it, workers jackhammered a twelve-inch-wide ditch around the edges, buried porous drain pipes, and tied the whole thing into a sump pump. Any water trying to seep into the basement from the water table below would be safely diverted.

I unfurled the floor plan I had sketched, and hunkered under a lightbulb with Lloyd. His two cronies wandered over to the area containing the furnace and hot water heater. I pointed at the drawing with one hand and gestured with the other as I described my intentions.

“We’ll make that section the mechanical room, with a door at one end. Next to it, we’ll put a smaller room for storage. The rest will be open. Just drywall, a barely dropped ceiling, and yards of carpet.”

I turned toward the staircase and frowned. In a corner behind the steps, a half circle of fieldstone rose almost five feet from the floor, forming a cistern. In the old days, it had been a reservoir for collecting rainwater. But I had no use for the thing in my new rec room.

I walked over to it and put one hand on the cool stone. “How do you plan to get rid of this baby?”

Lloyd scratched his pure white head of hair and hunched his six-foot-something frame over to the cistern. He kicked at it with his bulky work boot. The reinforced steel toe made a hollow thunk against the stone. A pebble-sized piece of grout bounced to the floor.

He shook his head and looked around the cellar. “You’re already asking for a miracle.” One enormous hand grabbed at the rock outcropping that formed the top edge of the structure. “What you’ve got here is a wall a foot thick. There probably isn’t much of a floor behind there, so you’re looking at having to pour a new one. I’m betting you’ll have to add a bunch of dirt to make it level.” He whistled through his teeth. “You’re looking at five, maybe six thousand dollars between the demo and finish. And all you’ve gained is about eighty square feet. I say just leave it there and cover it with drywall.”

I gave a half smile. “What would I do with a leftover nine-by-nine corner behind the stairs? The design only works if the cistern’s gone. I need the full space.”

“I’m just saying you’d be better off walling the thing up and putting folding doors over the rest of the back end. Make it more storage. People can always use storage.”

I could feel a stubbornness settle in the little dip at the front of my neck. My star contractor was quickly becoming a no-man. I only worked with yes-men. I’d hired him because he was already familiar with the house. He’d done the work on the second bathroom and had spearheaded the waterproofing project. Lloyd & Sons had also gotten stellar reviews from owners of other historic properties in the area.

He was the best. I couldn’t afford to lose him. I’d simply have to help him change his mind.

With a breath to boost my self-control, I plastered on a smile. “If we turned it into a closet, we’d be blocking a light source. But I’m sure we could use that window’s handy location to remove the stones once we knocked them all down.”

Lloyd gave me a look. He folded up his reading glasses and tucked them in the pocket of his flannel shirt. “There’s no way these stones’re going through that little window. You’ll have to haul them out by hand.”

I turned at the brush of air behind me. Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood with hands tucked in the pockets of their tight blue jeans. They stared slack-jawed at the cistern.

“I’m not carrying that thing out of here,” the youngest said, a look of disbelief sending his myriad of freckles into disarray. “Come on, Dad. You’re only paying minimum wage. I’ll end up on my back and miss finals. No way.”