Tribute

wearing only a towel and edged closer. “I haven’t seen these before.”
    “My personal collection,” he told her with a wistful smile. “This one here?” He tapped a finger under a picture. “That’s the first one I ever took of her.”
    Janet sat on the steps of the veranda, leaning back, relaxed and smiling in rolled-up dungarees and a plaid shirt.
    “She looks so happy. At home.”
    “She’d been working with the gardeners—walking around with them, showing them where she wanted her roses and such. She got word I took pictures and asked if I’d come over, take some of the house and grounds as things were going on. And she let me take some of her. Here she is with the kids. That’d be your mother.”
    "Yes.” Looking bright and happy, Cilla thought, alongside her doomed brother. “They’re all so beautiful, aren’t they? It almost hurts the eyes.”
    “She shone. Yes, she did.”
    Cilla paged through. Janet, looking golden and glorious astride a palomino, tumbling on the ground with her children, laughing and kicking her feet in the pond. Janet alone, Janet with others. At parties at the farm. With the famous, and the everyday.
    “You never sold any of these?”
    “That’s just money.” Charlie shrugged. “If I sold them, they wouldn’t be mine anymore. I gave her copies of ones she wanted, especially.”
    “I think I might have seen a couple of these. My mother has boxes and boxes of photos. I’m not sure I’ve seen all of them. The camera loved her. Oh, this! It’s my favorite so far.”
    Janet leaned in the open doorway of the farmhouse, head cocked, arms folded. She wore simple dark trousers and a white shirt. Her feet were bare, her hair loose. Flowers spilled out of pots on the veranda, and a puppy curled sleeping at the top of the steps.
    “She bought the puppy from the Clintons.” Penny stepped beside her father, rested a hand on his shoulder. “Your stepmama’s people.”
    “Yes, she told me.”
    “Janet loved that dog,” Charlie murmured.
    “You need to make copies for Cilla, Daddy. Family pictures are important.”
    “I guess I could.”
    “Granddad’s going to make copies for Cilla,” Penny announced as Ford walked in with Cilla’s bag. “He has the negatives.”
    “I could scan them. If you’d trust me with them. Here you go.” Ford passed the bag to Cilla.
    “Thanks.” Sensing Charlie’s hesitation, Cilla eased back. “They’re wonderful photographs. I’d love to look through the rest, but I have to get to the hospital. I’m just going to . . .” She held up the bag. “Downstairs.”
    “You look more like her than your mother,” Charlie said when Cilla reached the door. “It’s in the eyes.”
    And in his lived such sadness. Cilla said nothing, only slipped quickly downstairs.
    CILLA DID a mental happy dance as the first tiles were laid in the new master bath. She glugged down water and executed imaginary high kicks through the first run of subway tiles in what would be her most fabulous steam shower.
    The black-and-white design, retro cool Deco, added just the right zing. Stan, the tile guy, glanced over his shoulder. “Cilla, you gotta get the AC up.”
    “We’re working on it. By the end of the week, I promise.”
    It had to be running by week’s end, she thought. Just as the bed she’d ordered had to be delivered. Steve couldn’t recuperate in a steamy house, in a sleeping bag.
    She went back to framing in the closet in the master bedroom. In a couple of weeks, she thought, if everything stayed on schedule, she’d have two completed baths, the third, fourth and the powder room on the way. She’d be ready for Sheetrock up in her attic office suite, the replastering should be about wrapped. Then Dobby could start work on the ceiling medallions. Well, he could start once she’d settled on a design.
    She ran through projections while she checked her level, adjusted, shot in nails.
    And in a few weeks, she’d take the contractor’s exam. But she didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think if she didn’t make it, she’d have to ask one of her own subs for a job by the end of the year. If she didn’t make it, she couldn’t afford to buy that sweet little property down the road in the Village that she knew would make an excellent and profitable flip.
    If she didn’t make it, it would be another failure. She really thought she was at her quota already.
    Positive thinking, she reminded herself. That’s what Ford would