Everything but a Husband. Karen Templeton

knock yourself out, now.”

      Galen felt a smile twitch at her mouth.

      “Hey! How about blowing some of it on a plane ticket?”

      “To?”

      “Here. For Thanksgiving.”

      Thanksgiving? Oh, yeah…that was next week, wasn’t it? Galen’s stomach knotted. “Oh, goodness, Cora. I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it.”

      “Now, don’t you tell me you were planning on spending the day alone?”

      “I hadn’t planned on anything. Besides, people do, you know,” she said, only to be cut off by an indignant hmmph.

      “Give me one good reason why you can’t come up here.”

      A harsh, startled laugh tumbled out of her mouth. But no excuses.

      “Uh-huh, that’s what I thought. Look, my girls can’t get out here—Willa’s too busy and Lynette’s too pregnant—and I can’t go to either of their places without putting the other one’s nose out of joint, so I’m staying here, and I hate spending Thanksgiving alone. Gets too damn depressing, buying one of those pathetic little turkey breasts just for yourself. So, you wanna come out Tuesday or Wednesday?”

      Galen felt the corners of her mouth lift. Right. Knowing Cora, she probably had a million friends she could spend the holiday with. But leave it to her to twist things around to make it sound like Galen would be doing her a kindness, not the other way around.

      The house did suddenly seem extraordinarily empty. And quiet.

      But…

      She shifted in the chair, making it squawk again. “Oh, I don’t know… I’ve still got so much to do. About Gran’s stuff ’n’ that.”

      “It’ll still be there when you get back, baby.”

      True enough. “But what about getting plane reservations this late?”

      “Hey, if it’s supposed to happen, the way will be made clear, you hear what I’m saying?”

      Then the dog propped her chin on the edge of her basket, gave her doleful. Right. “I can’t leave the dog.”

      “What dog?”

      Galen let out a weighty sigh the same time the dog did. “This mutt of Gran’s.”

      Doleful turned to indignant.

      She tucked the phone to her chest. “Well, you are,” she said, only to realize she was justifying herself to a dog. An ugly one, at that.

      “Last time I checked,” Cora said, “they allowed dogs in Michigan.”

      Michigan. Crikey. Galen couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out of Pittsburgh, let alone to another state. Something suddenly leeched all the air from her lungs. “Oh…I don’t know. This just seems so last minute—”

      “For heaven’s sake, girl—you ever hear of the concept of spur of the moment? Besides, you live alone now. You can do things just because, and nobody’s drawers are going to get in a knot about it. So. Tuesday or Wednesday?”

      Galen stood up, stretched, looked around the bleak little room. Realized she could go. Or she could stay. It was completely her decision.

      That, for the first time in her life, she didn’t have to answer to a living soul.

      “I’ll…call you back after I make the reservations,” she said, then laughed, nervously, at Cora’s squeal in reply.

      Mirroring his increasingly dreary mood, a cold light drizzle began to mottle Del Farentino’s truck windshield as he pulled out of the Standish’s driveway. Two days before Thanksgiving, with four clients wanting/needing/demanding Del complete their remodeling projects by this afternoon.

      He shoved his perpetually too-long hair off his forehead, glancing at the dashboard clock. Ten-o-three. Not bad, actually, considering he’d had a devil of a time getting his four-year-old daughter Wendy dressed and out of the house this morning. Something about the purple sweater—which had been her favorite up until five minutes before he tried to get it on her body—being itchy, and she only wanted to wear the pink one, which was buried underneath several strata of dirty clothes in the laundry basket. It had not been a pretty scene, but the last thing he needed this morning was to be late for his eight o’clock appointment with the Goldens, potential new clients with a large house out past Shady Lakes.

      Now there was a bright note. Hot damn, would he love to get his mitts on that one. A complete redo, not just a kitchen remodel or add-a-room project. The architect had been there—a youngish woman who understood how to blend practicality with innovation—and the plans made his mouth water. A job like this would be a real feather in his cap. Prove to the world he was more than a handyman. Not that he was complaining about all the smaller jobs that seemed to drift his way. Between Wendy’s special classes and what-all, not to mention full-time daycare, the kid ate up his income faster than a dog ate steak. Money was money, and he’d take whatever he could get. But it sure would be nice to move up to the big leagues. Which, if these people accepted his bid, just might happen.

      Damp gravel crunched underneath his tires as he pulled up in front of Cora Mitchell’s mongrel house, close to the center of town. It had a porch and some eaves and a gable or two and a couple of stories, more or less, but you couldn’t exactly call it anything. Except old. Cora, a long-widowed, vociferous, black earth mama in her late fifties, had worked her way up from temp to managing his step-mother’s Realty office. She’d recently bought the fixer-upper for some outrageously low price, only to discover the repair costs would be equally outrageous. Del pictured this project being on the periphery of his, or somebody’s, to-do list for years.

      Cora was in a dither when he arrived, as only Cora could get herself into. According to Maureen, the woman was the epitome of order and decorum in the office, but for some reason—maybe because she’d be fixing up this house well into old age—this project seemed to keep her off-balance. This morning, she was a mess. Muttering something about a guest arriving that afternoon and she hadn’t yet gone to the store and did Del think the rain might change to snow, she barely allowed a glance in his direction as she tromped from room to room, eventually stopping long enough to shroud herself within a long woolen cape the color of a grape Popsicle.

      From the basement, he heard reassuring clunks and clanks as his guys changed out her old furnace. They’d already tackled the leaky roof and the sagging living room ceiling where some overly enthusiastic soul had attempted to make a great room out of two smaller rooms by removing a load-bearing wall.

      “Who’s the guest?” he asked.

      “What?” Silvery eyes, startling against her dark skin, stared at him blankly for a moment. “Oh, you mean Galen,” she said, her breath frosting in front of her face in the cold house. They hadn’t intended on replacing the furnace until the spring, but the furnace had other ideas. Cora hooked the cape together at her throat. “Her mama and I were friends when our husbands were stationed in Norfolk, oh, Lord, more than twenty-five years ago, now. Galen and my girls used to play together, you know?”

      She picked up her purse from the hall table, clicked it open, grunted, then clicked it shut again. “Anyway, Galen’s mama and daddy died in a car accident when she was maybe eight or so. Bill and I would’ve taken her ourselves, but whoever makes these sorts of decisions decided she should go with her grandparents instead. We kept in touch, though. The girls and I even went to Pittsburgh to see her, couple of times.” She hesitated, gazing at the doorknob, her brows drawn. “Strange, the way these things happen,” she said, more or less to herself, then looked again at Del. “In any case, I’m not gonna bore you with all the details, ’cause I know you got things to do and, God knows, so do I, but her grandmother died a couple weeks ago, and that was the only living relative she had left, so I strong-armed her into coming up here for Thanksgiving. Since I can’t get out to California this year to see the girls,