Ok, another try, I think I addressed most of the problems. I was trying to make her intnetionally obtuse when he's asking questions. Let me know if it works.
“Looks like you need a hand.”
Gail looked up from the flowerbed she was trying to turn. Once upon a time these flowerbeds must have been beautiful, but years of neglect had left them nothing but lumpy extensions of the weedy lawn. The man at the garden center told her the best thing to do would be to dig everything up, turn the soil with some fertilizer and start over. It had seemed like the most easily accomplished job on her long, long list.
Sadly, she thought she might be right.
The man standing on the other side of the rusty wrought iron fence wasn’t looking at her or the flowerbed. He was peering at the mansion lurking behind her. Instead of turning toward the ruined mansion she’d inherited two months ago, Gail studied the man studying the mansion.
First, he needed a shave. And a complete change of clothes. His jeans were either twenty years old or had been through a very rough decade. Homeless. Not homeless for very long, she judged. He didn’t look at all hungry or wild eyed. His broad shoulders and narrow waist made him appear powerful and capable, two things Gail wasn’t feeling right now. His dark hair could use a trim and his beard had threads of gray running through it. His round face looked friendly, but the wary brown eyes that met hers didn’t seem to fit.
“I could,” she told him. She'd never been able to turn down a stray. “If you would dig up this flowerbed, I could give you some lunch.”
“Work for food?” he said softly. His voice was warm and curiously comforting. Gail felt it curling around her spine, relaxing her. His hands, she noted, also looked more than capable. “Huh. Sounds like a pretty simple transaction. Sure.”
“The gate-“ Gail started to direct him to the gate, but he cut her short by jumping over the fence. “Or you could just jump.”
“How much do you need done?” he asked.
Gail barked a laugh before she could stop herself. The mansion needed roof, plumbing and electrical work just to bring it up to code. The gutters had forests growing in them. The antique car sitting in the garage on four flat tires might have a family of possums living in the trunk. The lawn, if it could be called that had mostly been taken over by weeds and would have been two feet high if the city had not taken pity on her and mowed it without charging her. None of the appliances in the kitchen worked and the place seemed to be infested with rodents. Plus, the crazy aunt who’d left it to her apparently did not celebrate trash day.
His tense mouth broadened into a transforming smile at her laugh. His eyes brightened making him look handsome in a dirty, down and out kind of way. It made Gail wonder how dehydrated she was. Her heart was pounding and she felt silly and light.
“Let me rephrase that,” he said, still smiling. “How much digging do you need done?”
“Eventually all along the fence, but just do as much as you can do. And when you find the daffodils, throw the bulbs in this bucket.” She kicked the dented aluminum bucket she’d rescued from the garage. “I hope to replant them after the fertilizer soaks in. There’s more gloves in the garage.” She held out the shovel.
“I’ll go see if I can find those gloves.”
Gail stripped off her own gloves. “I’m going in the house for some water. I’ll bring some out.”
He nodded and started toward the garage.
Gail went to the house, taking her dark brown hair out of the ponytail it seemed bent on escaping anyway. She walked through the front door, dodged the stack of twenty-year-old newspapers and turned down the oak paneled hall to the kitchen. The wallpaper above the chair rail hung in long strips, in some places to the floor. Something to keep her clients busy this winter. If she could get clients. The Persian runner on the floor she thought might be salvaged with a good cleaning.
My house, she thought. My ancestral home. She looked down the ornate if shabby hall wondering where these rich relatives had been when she was waitressing her way through college. Or better, when she was being bounced from foster home to foster home after her father vanished and her mother died just before she turned twelve. She touched the oak paneling. Several gallons of Murphy’s oil soap would fix that. She’d hoped when she got here that there would be a letter on the kitchen table explaining everything. So far she’d sorted through mountains of papers, but no letter had surfaced. No oil soap either.
But the crumbling behemoth could still be the answer to her dreams even if it hadn’t fulfilled her hopes for a family.
Gail made her way through the kitchen. The linoleum looked like it might have been installed shortly after the Depression. The ornate green and yellow leaf pattern wasn’t one Gail would have chosen but it suited the kitchen with its marble counter tops and white painted cupboards. A huge gas stove crouched at the far end of the room. Only one of the burners worked. She took a crystal pitcher out of the cupboard and filled it from the tap which leaked so badly she really didn’t need to turn the water on to fill her glass. There was so much wrong with this place she didn’t even want to make a list. Sometimes late at night she wondered if she hadn’t so much inherited the place as been saddled with it. She took down two glasses and filled one of them from the tap.
Sipping from her glass, she picked up the photo she’d found on the first day here in the old woman’s bedroom.
There were four people in the picture. The severe looking older woman who’d bequeathed the house to her, younger in the photo than in the picture the lawyers had given her, but still as severe. An older man who managed to look more severe. A round faced woman with a sweet smile that Gail had seen reflected back at her from mirrors all her life. The last person in the picture, a boy somewhat younger than the women, wore the pissed off expression of a cut off driver. Gail had seen that expression most recently in her rearview mirror. Those people were her family. Her actual blood relatives. Her father always claimed he’d been an orphan before he ran out on her and her mother when she was nine. Apparently, he’d been wrong. Or lying.
Gail rubbed the bridge of her nose. She hated thinking about her father. It nearly brought on a migraine every time. She refilled her water glass and put it on the silver tray. She supposed the crystal pitcher and the silver tray were antiques that she shouldn’t be dragging around like junky second rate Tupperware, but there didn’t seem to be anything else in the house. Mostly likely, even the jelly jars she used for glasses were valuable.
“Thirsty?” she asked.
He was digging industriously, making progress a lot faster than she had. “Not yet. Thanks.”
“I’ll put it over here.” She set the tray on the ground and picked up the hand trowel she’d been using to trim the edges of the flowerbed before she got frustrated and gave up about ten feet ago.
“So what are you trying to do with this place?” He asked.
“I want to open a therapy practice for depressed people.”
“Just depressed people?”
“Yea. I’m a psychologist and I specialize in people who are clinically depressed. I want to use this place as an out patient and halfway house for depressed people.”
“How would that work?” he plucked a couple of bulbs out of the soil and tossed them in the bucket.
“I would have a number of clients who would live in the house and more would come for the day and go home at night.” Gail looked into the bucket. It was nearly full. She’d need to go find another one soon.
“You would stay here by yourself with a bunch of patients?”
“No, I have a friend who is a psychologist. She’s agreed to live in the house and we’d have a couple of staff members around to help out, but we wouldn’t need much. I won’t be taking severely disturbed people. Just people who need a boost.”
“What would these people do here?”
He was digging a lot faster than she had been. “I use a lot of occupational therapy. I’ve noticed that when someone is depressed and you give them a task that is not too easy, but not too difficult, then they feel a sense of accomplishment and it helps lift their mood. Take this flowerbed. If you were my patient, I would have you doing exactly what you’re doing now. At the end of the day, you would be able to see quantifiable progress. It provides a sense of accomplishment. And if this was part of your ongoing therapy, you would be able to watch the flowerbed go from weedy mess to beautiful blooms. Plus your body will start releasing endorphins giving you a natural lift.”
“So you’re going to get a bunch of depressed people to fix up your house?”
Gail looked up to see what his expression was. He sounded more offended than dubious. His face didn’t reveal anything. There was sweat running down the sides of his neck. “Well, yes and no. When I hatched this plan I didn’t realize how much work the house needed. I thought I’d be able to just start up with enough money to pay a few salaries and the patients could do cosmetic work, but the house needs a lot of work just to bring it up to code.”
“Does work therapy work?” he shrugged out of his shirt. She watched the play of his muscles across his sun browned back. He ruffled his gloved hand through his hair.
Gail felt her mouth go dry. She wondered if she should drink more water. Or perhaps just pour the whole pitcher over her head. That might give the wrong signal. But why was she concerned about the signals she was sending a homeless guy who was working for her so he’d have a meal today?
He coughed. “So, does work therapy work?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry. My mind wandered. Actually it does. The program I worked with in Denver placed teens in jobs. I worked with several contractors who took our kids on to do painting or clean up or other simple jobs. Some of the kids got really excited by the results when they looked at a room they had spent all day painting. It also gave them an opportunity to work with other people.”
“Do you think it stopped them from committing suicide?”
Gail tossed a bulb at the bucket. It rolled across the top and fell off. She definitely needed another bucket. “I can’t say with absolute certainty what the kids would have done if they hadn’t come to us, but I know I saw a lot of progress. Some of our kids discovered that they really enjoyed working with their hands. It gave them some instant gratification.” She stood up and dusted off her knees. “I’m going to go find another bucket in the garage.”
