“Mac, she’ll have the estimate from your home in town by tonight. She told me to tell you that if you want carpets and other items that you didn’t have in the house, to let her know. She’s going to assume, until she hears from you, that it will be the same in the building.
“I did want to go by there and have a look. I’m thinking right now I’m going to need to have it rewired as well. If for no other reason than the internet will need to be upgraded.” Charlie told him to call the cable company and they’d drop off the wiring needed for that and that Mac could have it ready for them to hook up. “She is a jack of all trades, isn’t she? Didn’t your son want to go into business with you two?”
“He had his heart set on procurement for the government. His grandma was in charge of that when she’d been alive and he thought it was something that he could do. Worked out better than he thought. He met his Milly there one day and they’ve been in love since. Charles is a mite older than Mac. She was what they called a late-in-life baby. Couldn’t be more in love with her if she’d been born right after her brother. There are eleven years between them.”
On his way home that night, he had driven by the house in town. It had a sold sign on it, and he hoped it was his. To know that it was being worked on, too, made him feel like he’d done the right thing in buying the Heathers estate.
After being shown around the house that they said he’d be living in soon, he went back to the building downtown. It wasn’t a bad hike to get to it from the house, but it would serve him well when the winter weather decided to keep the roads closed around town. At least he’d be able to work when things were down.
He found a crew of about ten men in the house. For whatever reason he was disappointed that he couldn’t be in the house just with Mac. Axel wasn’t even sure that he liked her all that much. She was caustic and a little bit hard on someone. He found her working in the second-floor rooms. When she glanced at him, not saying a word, he asked her how things were going.
“The plumbing in this house is new, so you won’t have to worry about that. Also, the entire place has been rewired another thing you won’t have to worry about either. However, while there is internet service here, it looks like instead of wiring it up in the walls, someone thought it was a goodidea to just run lines from room to room by stapling the wire directly to the floor. Morons.” He asked if she could fix that. “The true way to fix it would be to run it through the walls, but that would cause a lot of mess. Tearing out walls, even if it might need it, is always messy. However, there is a solution that can work as well. Tearing out only half of the walls to hook it from room to room and floor to floor. That’s the way that I’d go. If someone trips over a wire, you’ll lose everything.”
She told him too about the windows on the second floor. They were in terrible shape and should be replaced with something more energy-efficient.
“Even doors inside the house could use a bit of updating. You’re not planning on living here, are you?” He told her that he’d not. “I’d not take out the kitchen. Remodel and rewire it so that you have sufficient power if you want to run a microwave and the coffee machine at the same time. But if you’re just going to use this for a breakroom of sorts, I’d not do much more than throw some paint on the cabinets and leave them. It’ll save you a bundle doing that.”
“All right.” There were two half baths as well as two bathrooms in the house. He asked her about them. “While the demo is going on, however, you want the internet going in, I’d go ahead and take care that they’re updated as well. Leave one of the bathrooms with a tub, but I’d put in a stall for the other one. And the two half baths, being on the first floor, I’d redo those since you might have clients using them as well.”
He’d not thought of someone using his bathrooms. He didn’t like sharing toilet space and thought that he’d be using one of the bathrooms on the second floor if he needed to go. But he would do as she said about the bathrooms, even enlarging the one by the garage so that he could have a small washer and dryer put in should he want it.
“You’re thinking long term then. If I were to sell it, it would be better if the house was family-oriented rather than not.” She said she was forever working with the assumption that the house or whatever might be going to someone else. “I like that idea. And while I’m at it, I think that I’ll take care of the kitchen but last. If that’s something that you can work into the project.”
“You’ll have to pick out some cabinets if you want new ones, which is what you should be doing. And the flooring. Hard wood would wear better than carpet or even tile. Tile would be cheaper, but I have a feeling that you’d rather go with what it needs and damn the money part of it. If that’s your thinking, you should step out of the living room area and look at the screened in porch. I’d not change that at all, but to put in new screens and better windows for winter. It’s a lovely room that you could use for some of your clients too that need a breath for something.”
He loved the way that she seemed to think outside the box and told her so. When one of the workers called for her, she told him she’d be back in a few minutes. That was when his brother Gilman showed up. He was just showing him around when they saw what the workers were doing.
“Dad told me that you were going to hang out your own shingle. Is that true?” He said that it was that he was sick of working for a firm. “If you want to have a partner in this venture, I’d like to rent some space from you as well. I could easily set up here and not be in your way.”
“Don’t you need to have a studio or something? I mean, I know very little about art and glass blowing but it would seem to me you’d not need an office space.” His little brother laughed. “Tell me what you need. I don’t care if you want to have space here. Just…the contractor is here now, and we can have her design the rooms for you. If you want.”
“Absolutely. I’ll get with him.” He told Gilman that it was a her, not a him, and he laughed all the harder. “I’ll have to be careful with that. I was assuming something that wasn’t right, and that could get me castrated.”
Gilman walked around the upper floor with Mac. He found himself trailing along, and when his brother asked Mac out, he wanted to smack him upside the head. Again, he didn’t understand that. He still didn’t like her very much.
Chapter 3
Mac had a pounding headache. It was pressure like she’d never experienced before. She was prone to migraines. Usually, she could just lie down for a little while, about an hour, and it would ease up. But this one. Not today.
She and her crew were going to start ripping up carpet in the downtown house. The other place, the estate home, is what they were calling the larger home. It made it easier, she thought, if they were to think of them as two separate jobs. She knew that it did her, but it wasn’t really working out that way. When ordering, her dad ordered for both projects at the same time. That would work all right, but she thought that they should have been billed as two separate places.
“Want me to cancel the order, honey?” She said that it was all right. The equipment and supplies were going to be delivered to the estate house and she’d just have to have a crew go out there and bring it here. “They’d charge you nearly what it cost in the savings to have them separate them out and deliver them to each place, I’m betting.”
“That’s what they said to me when I called about the order. It’s no biggie, Dad, I promise. I’m just dealing with this pain in my head, and I don’t want to be a bitch about anything.” He told her that she was doing a fine job of not taking it out on him. “I’m trying.”
As the crew was getting some of the items that they needed to work on today, she found herself a dark corner and lay on the floor. It wouldn’t be ideal for her to be there, it was dangerous, as a matter of fact, sleeping on the job, but she needed relief, and it wasn’t going to come with her not being able to get to her doctor’s or at least rest like she was planning to do. After about twenty minutes, she was ready to give up when one of the Hathaway men showed up.
“I’m Kahana.” She told him good for him. His grin might have been cute if she wasn’t in so much pain. “Your dad told me that you suffer from migraines. I can help you with that. If you’d allow me to.”
“I have a doctor, but he’s out of town right now. Usually, I get a shot of something in my head, I can’t think right now, and that will do me for a while.” He asked her what kind of meds did she get. “Let me think for a moment. It starts with a d…I can’t remember.”
“Dihydroergotamine? Or it’s usually called DHE.” She told him that was it. “That’s usually for severe migraines. Has he ever tried giving you Sumatriptan? It’s a lesser dose, but it might do the trick without making you sick. I heard too that you have a terrible tummy reaction with the DHE.”
“Please, I’ll take just about anything right now.” He didn’t waste any time but joined her in the room she was in. After taking her blood pressure, which was up a little, he injected the Sumatriptan right into her head and waited with her when it started to take effect. “That feels so much better already. Not gone but tolerable.”
“I’ll give you a second dose here in a few minutes. Just try to relax and breathe.” He asked her if it was possible for her to go home to rest. “It would be but I drove myself in here today. I don’t feel well enough to drive myself home.”
After the second dose, she felt like she could fly a kite. Or be the kite. She knew too that she wasn’t going to be able to go home at all with the way that she was feeling. Just to stand up off the floor made her slightly ill; however, her head didn’t bother her so much now. When he administered the third dose to take the effect all the way off her head, she couldn’t have moved if her life depended on it.