Remodeling The Bachelor

“The man with the pretty painting, Mama.”

Now Janice really did draw a blank. “Painting?” she echoed, trying to remember if she’d noticed a painting anywhere. She came up empty.

“Yes. In the living room.” Kelli carefully enunciated every word, as if afraid she would lose her mother’s attention at any second. “There was a big blue lake and trees and—didn’t you see it, Mama?” Kelli asked impatiently.

“Apparently not.”

Art was definitely Kelli’s passion. The little girl had been drawing ever since she could hold a pencil in her hand. The swirls and stick figures that first emerged quickly gave way to recognizable shapes and characters at an amazingly young age. Beautiful characters that seemed to have personalities radiating from them. It was her fervent dream to send her daughter to a good art school and encourage the gift she had. Kelli was never going to go through what she had, wasn’t going to have her ability dismissed, devalued and ignored.

“I’ll have to go look at it the next time I’m there,” she told her daughter, then paused before asking, “You are talking about Mr. Zabelle’s house, right?”

Kelli sighed again. “Right.” And then she got back to what she’d said initially. “Maybe he’ll want you to do more when he sees how good you are.”

Bless her, Janice thought. “That would be nice.” To that end, she’d left the man with a battery of catalogues, some of which dealt with rooms other than the kitchen and the bath. A girl could always hope.

“If you do more, will we have enough for a pony?” Kelli asked.

Ah, the pony issue again. Another passion, but one that had far less chance of being realized. At least for the present. But she played along because it was easier that way than squelching Kelli’s hopes. “Not yet, honey. Ponies need a special place to stay and special food to eat, remember?”

The golden head bobbed up and down. “When will we have enough for a pony?”

“I’ll let you know,” Janice promised.

Making another turn, she looked down at her left hand. She still missed the rings that had been there. The ones she’d been forced to pawn in January to pay bills. January was always a slow month as far as business was concerned. The month that people focused on trying to pay off the debts they’d run up during the Christmas season. Room additions and renovation moved to the back of the line.

If there was any money leftover after the Zabelle job, she was going to put it toward getting her rings out of hock. The stone on the engagement ring wasn’t very large, but Gary had picked it out for her and she loved it.

A bittersweet feeling wafted over her. She and Gary had gotten engaged one week, then married two weeks later because he’d discovered that his unit was being sent clear across to the other side of the world to fight. He never returned under his own power.

She fought back against the feeling that threatened to overwhelm her. Five years and it was still there, waiting for an unguarded moment. Waiting to conquer her. Again.

But you did what you had to do in order to keep going. Pawning her rings had been her only option at the time. Bills needed to be paid. The rings didn’t mean very much if there wasn’t a roof over Kelli’s head. After Gordon had lost the business, she was very mindful of not putting her daughter and herself in jeopardy of losing the things that were most important to them. That meant not waiting until the last minute before taking measures to safeguard home and hearth.

“Can we go out to eat, Mama?”

Trust Kelli to ground her, she thought. She felt guilty about letting herself get sidetracked. “You bet, kid. You get to pick the place.”

That required absolutely no thought on Kelli’s part. “I wanna go to the pizza place.”

Pizza was by far her daughter’s favorite food. Janice laughed. “You are going to turn into a pizza someday, Kel.”

Her comment was met with a giggle. The sound warmed Janice’s heart.

“Where’s your cheering section?” Philippe asked two evenings later when he found only J.D. on his doorstep. He leaned over the threshold and looked around in case the little girl was hiding.

“Home,” she informed him. He stepped back to let her in. “My babysitter doesn’t have a date tonight.” When Gordon’s newest flame found out about his cash-flow problems—basically that it wasn’t even trickling, much less flowing—she quickly became history. When she’d left to come here, Kelli and Gordon were watching the Disney Channel together. “Kelli wanted to come along.” But this was going to involve long discussions of fees and she preferred not subjecting her daughter to that. “I think she likes you.”

Walking into the living room, Janice abruptly stopped before the framed twenty-four by thirty-six painting hanging on the wall.

My God, it was so large, how had she missed that the first time?

Because she was focusing on landing this job, she thought. She tended to have tunnel vision when it came to work, letting nothing else distract her. Although she had to admit that she had noticed Philippe Zabelle would never be cast as the frog in the Grimm Brothers’ “The Frog Prince.”

Janice redirected her attention to the painting. It was breath-taking. Kelli had an eye, all right. “I know she likes your painting.”

“My mother’s painting,” he corrected, in case she thought that he had painted it. “I’ll let my mother know she has a new fan. I know she’ll be delighted to hear that she’s finally cracked the under-ten set. Most kids don’t even notice painting unless they’re forcibly dragged to an art museum.”

Forcibly dragged. Zabelle sounded as if he was speaking from experience. Had his mother forced art on him, attempted to make him appreciate it before he was ready? She’d taken Kelli to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles when the little girl had still been in a stroller. Kelli had been enthralled.

“Most kids didn’t start drawing when they are barely three,” she countered.

He led the way to the kitchen table. She had paperwork for him, he surmised. He eyed her quizzically. “Drawing?”

Pride wiggled through her like a deep-seated flirtation. “Drawing.”

He assumed she was being loose with her terminology. He remembered his brothers trying to emulate their mother. Best efforts resembled the spiral trail left by the Tasmanian devil.