Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5

Episode One:

Leaving and Finding Home

When Adrian had gone out the window she had more or less known that it wasn’t the end of it. What she hadn’t expected was that Amy’s parents would beat her back to her own house. She had just stood in the driveway a long time wondering whether she should go in at all or just turn around and run off. In the end she’d walked in and had been assaulted by two walls of screaming parents.

            She had lost track of how long her mother and Amy’s parents had been screaming at her and had tuned them all out a long time ago. She’d grown up with screaming, so it wasn’t hard to do, but now what was going through her head couldn’t just be a fantasy to get her through the moment. No, this time she was going to have to really leave.

            Then Amy’s mother was screaming in her face so that she couldn’t ignore her. “Our daughter was an innocent, and what you did to her it’s… it’s…” Well, it must have been really bad because she apparently couldn’t find a word to describe it.

            Adrian said nothing. She never did when people were screaming. If you said anything to them you got smacked; that’s what her father had taught her. If you defended yourself when people were tearing you down, you got beat down. Sometimes she’d gotten beat down just because he knew she was thinking about talking back. So now, bigger and more able to defend herself. she didn’t waste time with words. If she got mad enough or felt threatened enough she just started swinging and hoped for the best.

            “What the hell’s wrong with you?” her mother’s shrill voice chimed in, and Adrian tried hard to remember that her mother hadn’t always been a monster like this. Sick, yes; a monster, no. She had tried to be a good mother once, but Adrian’s father had ruined that, too.

            She tuned them out again thinking, I’ll get the money I’ve saved, pack my clothes, and get the hell out of this crap hole. It’s only two weeks to my eighteenth birthday, and I was planning to leave then anyway. My bitch mother isn’t going to try to stop me. Hell, the way she’s talking she’s probably going to kick me out, and I’m not going to give her the satisfaction. God damn Amy playing the victim! I’m out of here. Amy’s parents will have to blame someone else the next time they find the horny little bitch with her legs up and some girl’s face in her crotch. They’ll all have to find someone else to kick around. I’m sick to death of this shit. I’ll get on my bike, and I’ll never… Never!.. come back to Slocum.”

            Then Amy’s dad was yelling at her, and she knew what he was going to do next because violence had been her life. He came at her yelling, “You fucking little dyke!” He pulled back to hit her, and while she might not defend herself verbally, since her father had left she’d never allowed anyone to hit her. She ducked the blow, and the next thing he knew she was throwing her own. Her fist connected with the side of his head, and he immediately fell to the floor. Her hand stung, but the pain felt good – a reminder that she didn’t have to take that sort of crap lying down anymore.

            “Leave me the fuck alone! All of you!” Adrian hissed out. “I didn’t do a damn thing to your daughter that she didn’t want me to do. You can believe whatever crap she tells you, but she’s been doing this a lot longer than I have. We’re both seventeen, so legally you can’t do shit to me. You can beat me to a pulp, but I have to tell you I’m not going to stand here and let you do it, and between you and me I’m so used to being pummeled that it’s not likely to do you much good – win or lose. I’m going to leave this stinking shit hole, so you won’t have to worry about me screwing Amy any more, but there will be some other ‘dyke’ crawling into and out of her bed because that’s what she is.” She stomped up the stairs she’d repaired a dozen times and started packing, closing out the screaming between the parents that started up as soon as she left.

            “You really going?” her little brother asked from the door.

            She turned to face him and nodded saying, “Yes, but you knew I was leaving in two weeks anyway.” Then she turned back to her duffel bag and continued stuffing her clothes into the bag. He walked around in front of her standing on the other side of her bed.

            “I thought you were just mad. That you’d change your mind because you always do. Adrian, who’s going to take care of me?” he asked. There were tears in his ten-year-old eyes, and she almost changed her mind.

            “We’ve been through this, Brian,” she said with a sigh, still packing.

            “But if you leave like this you’ll never come back, and… I’ll never see you again.” He flopped down on her bed and started to cry. She felt her own tears sting her eyes and ball up in her throat, but she shoved them down. She didn’t cry; her father had beaten that out of her. He’d been gone before Brian had been old enough to remember what their father was like. Of course by then their mother wasn’t much better. At least her abuse was mostly verbal, and when she did hit she just slapped your face. So far she hadn’t slapped Brian at all.

            “I’ll call at least once a week, Brian, and maybe when I get settled I can send you money and you can come visit me every once in awhile. I’m just going to Shea City, not the end of the earth.”

            He dried his eyes and his nose on the back of his hand and ran snot up his arm. She handed him a tissue and wondered who really was going to take care of him, but she’d had to take care of herself since she was younger than him, and now it was time to save herself. How many times have I almost killed myself living in this place with these idiots? If I stay here I’ll die here, and it will be soon. I have to go through with my plans. I just have to do it at a run instead of the way I wanted to.

            She had just finished packing when the screaming downstairs stopped and she heard Amy’s parents’ car leaving the driveway. Then her mother was yelling again, and she could tell she had called Adrian’s uncle. She couldn’t stand it if he screamed at her, too. She threw her jacket on, shouldered her duffel bag, and walked up to Brian who had started crying again. “You’ll be all right, Sport, and if you’re not you call me and I’ll come and get you.” She kissed his cheek then turned and walked out of the room. She walked down the stairs and right past her mother on the phone.

            Her mother hung up quickly.

            “I have had it with you, Adrian! This is the last straw! I didn’t raise you to be a God damned split licker! I want you out of my house and out of my life!”

Adrian almost laughed then. Was her mother oblivious to the fact that she was packed and heading out the door? Does she know I’m leaving and just wants to have the last word one more time? Is she even thinking about who’s going to pay the bills, clean the house, cook dinner, and do the laundry? Or is she really as bad as I think she is and she really believes that she does all those things. Brian will be fine; I can’t worry about him. There has to be a time when self preservation takes the day. It has to be today. She didn’t say anything just continued her trek for the door.

“Damn you, Adrian! Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you!”

“I’m just doing what I was told,” Adrian mumbled and walked out the door. She practically ran to her bike in the driveway. She put down her duffel bag and lifted her tool box and strapped it to the bike first. Then she loaded the duffel bag on. Her mother was still screaming at her as she started the bike and took off. She thought she was home free, but at the end of the street her uncle jumped into the road. She could either stop or run him down. She pulled the bike over and killed the engine with a dread she hadn’t felt in a long time.

            To her surprise he approached her with caution. He was a big man, and not afraid of anything, but he must have known she’d been pushed way too far. As he got closer she could smell the familiar smell of whiskey on his breath.

            “Where ya going, Adrian?” he asked in a voice that was choked up and not his own even when he’d had a few too many – as he obviously had it being a day of the week that ended in Y and all.

            “Shea City. Please don’t try to stop me, Harry.”

            “I’m not going to. You have to go, Adrian. We all know how Slocum is. That girl’s parents aren’t going to shut up, and they’re going to make it sound like you near raped their little girl. Once everyone knows what you are it’s not going to be safe for you here… not that it ever really was.” He sighed. “There were so many times… so many times that… well, I wish I had done more. You know what I mean? I shouldn’t have let your daddy get away with treating you the way he did, or my sister either for that matter. Jason wasn’t that good at hiding it, it’s just… well… as long as you don’t see a person do something… and when it’s family. If you fuck up sometimes you can just make things worse, you know? It wasn’t till he was gone that Evellen told me how bad he was beating you. And that’s just the way people are around here. We just don’t deal with anything till their ain’t no choice. That’s why this is no place for someone like you, and I don’t mean just because you’re queer. I’ve known since you were three years old. So did your mother if she’d just admit it. And if a kid is born like you… well then, how can there be anything wrong with that? You’re smart, Adrian, you’re a thinker, and the way you can draw pictures… you got talent, kid. Slocum isn’t any place for someone who thinks, or who has the sort of soul you do. No matter what you do you’re going to do it well, and no matter what you are or where, I’m always going to love you, you hear me?”

            She nodded and he reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of cash.

            “Here.”

            “I can’t…”

            “Yeah, you can, girl. Hell, you been working for me since you was eight, and we both know you do way more than I do some times and I ain’t never paid you what you’re worth. Consider that back pay and you take care of yourself. Call me when you get where you’re going, and if you need me you just call and tell me.”

            She took the money, hugged his neck, and then she rode off into the night. She was resolved and nowhere near tears even when she drove by Amy’s and could see her silhouette in the window as she was arguing with her parents. She wondered how she’d feel when she knew that Adrian was gone, if she’d feel anything at all. She wanted to think that the girl at least had enough soul to feel some guilt – if not now, maybe later.

            It didn’t matter. She didn’t love Amy, and Amy didn’t love her. It was just sex. Still, she’d thought they were at least friends, and for Amy to act like Adrian had forced her into depravity was not only hateful but nowhere near the truth.

            As the old Honda Goldwing put miles between her and home and the reality of it all started to creep into her mind, her sadness and even her anger were replaced by relief and excitement. She was finally free – of everything.

            I will not be a victim or a prisoner of my past. I have no past. Today the world is new, I’m new, and whatever the future has in store for me it couldn’t be as bad as what I’ve been through.

            She pulled into a gas station gassed up and bought a map. Shea City was the first thing she saw. It was close, and she and her uncle had done several jobs down in the “gay” district on B Street. Every time she went there she felt like she was home and she never wanted to leave. She’d known for a while that was where she would flee as soon as she turned eighteen. It was close, too, less than two hours away, but she was too tired and emotional to drive safely. Besides, what good would getting there in the dead middle of the night do her? She rode to a nearby cheap-assed motel, got a room, carried her stuff in, locked the door, and then shoved her tool box in front of it just to be on the safe side. The place wasn’t too bad, but then after the sties they’d lived in her whole life anything that was reasonably clean and didn’t have holes in the wall you could throw a cat through seemed mighty fine, so she figured she wasn’t a good judge of what a bad part of town might look like.

            She sat down on the bed with a sigh and finally pulled the big wad of bills her uncle had given her out of her pocket. She counted it in disbelief and then counted it again. It was two thousand dollars, and she had over a thousand of her own money left over even after gas and the motel bill. She knew damn good and well Harry couldn’t afford it. She almost did cry then – probably would have if she hadn’t forgotten how.

She’d been to Shea City lots of times, but she’d never had to drive in the traffic. As luck would have it, it started to rain just as she reached the city limits and she hit rush hour traffic. She started to freak completely out; she had no desire at all to dart in and out and around traffic on her bike in the rain. She took a deep breath, let it out and got slowly, and then off on the next exit deciding to just find a gas station, buy a paper, and hang out till the traffic and the rain died down a little.

            She shook off as much water as she could and went on inside. It was late spring so it wasn’t really cold, but she still didn’t like to get rained on. Besides, on the bike a sprinkle might as well be a downpour. The rain had gone through the zipper on her leather jacket, and her shirt was soaked. She started to wish she’d just stopped under an overpass and put on her rain gear, but she always got wet through it, too, so most times she just didn’t bother. At least her tool box and duffel bag were mostly waterproof.

            The gas station had tables and chairs set around the coffee and soda machines like they thought it was a caf�. She found a seat where she could keep an eye on her bike, bought a paper and a cup of coffee and sat down. She threw the rest of the paper aside and started to look at the classifieds. She needed two things, an apartment and a job. She had hoped to have time to do this right, but now she was desperate and she knew from experience that was never a good place to be when either job or house hunting.

She actually needed the apartment more urgently than the job which figured since she was sure she wouldn’t have any trouble finding work but an apartment that she could afford was a different story.

If she tried to stay in motels till she found something then she’d burn through her money quick – even at forty dollars a night – and she doubted she’d find anything humans would want to stay in for that price inside the city. If she could get an apartment she could stop worrying about where she was going to stay and take a little time to find a job.

            Most of what she saw was way out of her price range, and what she could afford was in the wrong part of the city. She wanted to be around B Street – preferably on B Street. She wanted to be some place where she didn’t have to hide who she was. Instead of being a secret minority she wanted to be like everyone else for a change.

            There were a couple of apartments listed in the area, both way out of her budget by the time she put up a deposit and first and last month’s rent.

            She supposed most kids her age wouldn’t know about all that shit. They’d run away from home and be lost, but she’d been basically running things at home for so long that there wasn’t much she didn’t know about renting. Hell, Harry was the only person in her family who didn’t rent some squallering hole somewhere. Nope, Harry owned his squallering hole. It wasn’t all his fault the house was a pit. He worked hard and he made decent money, but his wife was scum, and he had three of the most worthless children ever born who he was constantly buying out of one jam or other. Of course his drinking didn’t help much, either.

            Poor Harry, she’d left him two thousand dollars short and without his best hand. She’d call him when she got settled, and next time he was working in Shea City she could help him out. Of course he would have to replace her, and if he had someone else he wouldn’t need her. That was a sad thought, so she just didn’t think it.

            She pushed the guilt and doubt out of her head. I can’t worry about any of that. This is it my shot at having something better than the crap I’ve had till now. To see if life always has to suck or if sometimes it can be sweet.

            It had quit raining, and the traffic seemed to have died down a bit, so she got back on her bike and headed for B Street in search of her new life.

The real problem was that it was hard to do any real searching for anything as long as she was trying to keep the bike in sight. It wasn’t like a car; she couldn’t lock her stuff inside it. Everything she owned was on that bike, and she didn’t trust anyone. She didn’t feel really good about walking around with three thousand dollars rolled up in a sock and safety pinned to the bottom of her pocket, either. Her appearance had to just be screaming “Come and mug me! I’m a green-assed kid all alone in the big city.” She thought seriously about getting a room just to hide her stuff in but couldn’t make herself part with more money because what if that was the difference between getting in an apartment and not getting in one, eating or not eating?

            She was just starting to be sure that she was in way over her head and about to become a movie of the week when she drove past a rustic caf� with a large outdoor dining area that she knew well, Rhonda’s Caf�. She and Harry had built the “outdoor” dining area. It was just a large room that had four-foot walls with plastic curtains that could be rolled up in the summer and rolled down in the winter. The roof was supported by huge timbers that had damn near given Harry a hernia when they put them into place. They had built it a little over a year ago. She felt a little disgusted with herself that she gravitated here because it was at least familiar to her. So much for my brave new world.  Of course familiarity wasn’t the only reason she was drawn to Rhonda’s. She parked out front and went in, quickly finding a seat close to the door with a clear view of her bike.

            When the waitress came over she smiled broadly looking from Adrian to the bike, “New in town?” the pretty little redhead asked.

            “Yeah,” Adrian said. The waitress set a menu on the table in front of her. “I ah… I’ll just have a coffee if that’s all right.”

            “Sure.” She took the menu and left.

“On the house.” A coffee and muffin were placed in front of her, and when she looked up it wasn’t the red head but the black woman she recognized as the owner. To say that she remembered her would have been a drastic understatement. She’d been the main component in many of Adrian’s favorite fantasies. Adrian found her so attractive that she had permanently imbedded her picture in her mind and had half a notebook full of drawings of her.

“Thanks.”

She sat down across from Adrian. Adrian looked up at her and met and held her gaze. She was a stunning older woman, though Adrian couldn’t have guessed at how much older she was. She was exotic-looking, tall and well built with ebony skin and dark brown eyes. Most of her black hair had been pulled back in a pony tail away from her face, but some stray strands hung in lose ringlets on either side as if they refused to be tamed like the rest. When she spoke with a slight British accent wisdom and grace seemed to echo from her voice. “You work for Harry Garrison don’t you?”

“I did…” Adrian stuck out her hand over the table, “I’m Adrian, Adrian Bar.”

“I’m Stella White,” she said, as if the name didn’t ring in Adrian’s brain fifty times a day. “I own Rhonda’s, and yes I’m well aware of the ironic nature of the name of my business,” she said and smiled. “You’ve grown up very nicely in the last year.”

“Ah thanks,” Adrian said, more than a little embarrassed.

“You looking for work?”

“Yeah,” Adrian said, hardly believing her ears, “and a place to live, if you know of any.” She sipped her coffee, hoping it made her seem less anxious and hid her lust.

Stella looked the girl over. She was a looker. The sort of young butch the fems climbed over each other to hit on here on B Street. She was as tall as Stella was – which would put the girl at five ten – with a healthy bronze color from working outside and maybe because she had more than a bit of American Indian blood. She had short black hair, small tight breasts, and was well muscled from real work not from any work-out routine. And the little shit was way too charismatic for her own good. Her green eyes were haunted but not without a sense of humor and wonder about them. Mostly she felt good. Stella was a person who lived by her instincts about people, and this Adrian felt like the sort of person who you could trust. If I weren’t already up to my ass in a relationship and wasn’t old enough to be the girl’s mother I’d go after her myself. She’s got a good spirit – an old one, but a good one. And she knows her business. I watched her when she was working with Harry, and it was pretty obvious that he was mostly drunk and that she was doing all the real work. Still, she could be trouble because of the way the women are going to react to her and baggage – the girl is carrying around so much baggage you can almost see it dangling from her fists. Still, I need what she can do, and I don’t want to see her have to run the B Street gambit and maybe wind up in trouble.

            “What if I told you that I have both for you?” Stella asked carefully. Then seeing the curious look in the girl’s eyes laughed and said, “It’s no indecent proposal. I’m not looking for a lover – have one of those – and if I was looking I certainly wouldn’t want to hook up with someone as young as you. I just bought the small apartment building directly behind Rhonda’s, and it needs a whole lot of work. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s damn close to being condemned. I think we could work out a deal if you’re interested.”

            “Yeah,” the girl said quickly with an eager smile.

            “Eat your muffin and drink your coffee, and I’ll go line the girls out and get them ready for the lunch crowd.” Stella got up and started for the kitchen. Halfway there she turned around and said, “Why don’t you grab your things? At the very least you can store them in the building till you get settled somewhere else if you don’t want to take the deal.”

Adrian set her things down in the entrance hall. She would never admit it to Stella, but the large over-sized tool box was heavy. Between that and the duffel bag she felt like her arms were going to fall off. The old brick tenement building was a four-story walk up with a service elevator and four large apartments on each floor.

            “See? I didn’t lie; it’s a bloody mess,” Stella said. “Windows out all over the place, heater doesn’t work, but it’s nearly summer now. The plumbing leaks all over the building, and most of the electric is screwed completely up. Holes in the walls, peeling paint, and the floors are a fucking mess.”

            But all Adrian saw was potential: high-vaulted, ten-foot ceilings; lots of real wood trimmings; and through the holes in the carpets you could see a mosaic tile floor. Remodeling was what she had been doing with her uncle since she was eight years old. at first just being his gopher and then later basically doing ninety percent of the actual work.

            “I bought the building and all the building permits and now… well, all my available cash is gone. I’d like to live in…” She walked into the apartment on the left as you walked into the building on the bottom floor. “In this one. If I could get in here before fall and quit paying rent where I’m at now that would be great. Marcella could help you; she’s a very capable girl and I think you two will really hit it off.”

            “There’s nothing in this building that I can’t fix,” Adrian said excitedly.

            “Well, here’s the deal, Adrian. I know the main cost of building anything is the labor. I’m going to give you that apartment, and pay your utilities,” she pointed to the door across the hall from hers, “for as long as you want to live here. I’ll pay for all the building supplies you need, give you the use of my truck, buy you any tools you need, and you can keep them. In return, you remodel this building, and if you want to you can work at the caf� Friday and Saturday nights and I’ll pay you what I pay everyone else and throw in your your meals free. So what do you say?”

            “I’d have to be an idiot to say no,” Adrian said.

            “So, work on mine first and then yours. I’ll have my appliances delivered this week.” Stella smiled brighter then. “I’d like it to be a little rustic like a cabin in the woods, a little more open, but accented with bright colors. I like red and yellow and blue and green.”

            Adrian made a mental note, nodding her head then asked, “When do you feel the best?”

            “What?” Stella asked not understanding.

            “Everyone has something or someplace or sometime when they felt the most safe, the most comfortable. I’d like to design around that, because a home ought to be someplace you feel protected.”

            Stella smiled as if she didn’t really have to think about it. “I lived in England mostly on the army base outside London till I was sixteen. My father was an American service man, a colonel stationed at the base. My mother was a Brit and in the spring when everything was in bloom my mother would take me out to the countryside and we would stay in her parents’ house. They were wonderful people, and it was a peaceful place. My mother would lay on the ground with me under a big cherry tree in full bloom, and I would look up through the branches of the tree through its limbs and leaves and flowers at the blue sky beyond, and my mother would tell me stories. Now when I meditate I always go back there because it makes me feel safe and loved. I lost my mother when I was fifteen and I never got to go back there. My father brought me here to free-thinker hell – the American South. No place for an artist, a lesbian or a by-racial child with a British accent. It sent me on a path to a hell that it took me years to climb off of. But thinking about that place and that time always made me feel better.”

            “What about your partner?”

            “Toni hates B Street and everything else, so… I don’t worry too much about what Toni wants. Besides, she’s hardly ever home; she travels for business a lot,” Stella explained. “There are sixteen apartments and the basement. I’d like this to be like a community. Adrian, a place where people talk to each other in the hall. Where they aren’t afraid to go to each other’s rooms to visit or have dinner. Where people feel safe leaving their doors open in the evenings and everyone cruises from apartment to apartment, maybe have some sort of meeting room in the basement. I want each apartment to be unique, different colors, a different feel; so that when you’re visiting you know you aren’t home. Do you know what I mean, Adrian?”

            “Everyone should feel comfortable visiting one another, but they should also feel like they have their own space and people should be reminded when they aren’t in their own apartment to treat their host with respect,” Adrian said.

            Stella laughed and clapped her hands together, “How old are you?”

            Adrian thought about lying, but told the truth hoping it wasn’t going to cost her this really sweet deal. “Seventeen, but I turn eighteen in just two weeks, and I’ve been doing this kind of work most of my life and I’m really good at it.”

            “I don’t doubt your abilities at all,” she smiled. “In fact, Adrian, I trust you so much that I’m not going to even look at my apartment till you finish it.”

            “But I’ll need your input.”

            “I just gave you my input, dear. I’m a busy person, but I like simple things. Like telling an obviously capable and creative soul what I want and coming back and finding just that.”

Stella had believed in Adrian, and when she’d questioned Marcella she’d tell her just enough to make her want to break her own pact not to look till it was finished. Stella certainly hadn’t expected Adrian to instantly become the only person on her staff at the caf� that she couldn’t do without, and she certainly hadn’t expected what she was looking at now.

            “Three weeks!” she said in disbelief.

            “You like it?” Adrian asked, a hint of anxiety in her voice.

            “She’d have to be a fucking nut job not to like it,” Marcella said, punching Adrian in the arm.

            “Thank you, Marcella,” Stella said facetiously. Then she looked back at Adrian. “I love it,” she said as she looked around the room. Adrian had knocked the wall between the dining room and living room out, knocked a hole between the dining room and kitchen, and installed a bar with logs for support. Facing the kitchen under the bar was more cabinet space. She’d stripped the cabinets down to their bare wood, then stained and varnished them. Rough pine boards made a wainscoating about waist high all around the walls of the living and dining rooms with tree limbs for a chair rail. Above that the walls were painted like a tie-died shirt in bright colors, and the ceiling was stark white. The floors had all been stripped of their carpet and the tile floors cleaned, patched, re-sealed, and waxed. The wall that faced the outside had two brand-new thermo pane windows and was covered in floor-to-ceiling bookcases made of darkly-stained pine. The otherwise solid wall of bookcases was broken only where the windows were, and the blinds for the windows were actually attached to the shelves on either side.

            “I love it, Adrian. It’s perfect.”

            “Marcella said you collected black and white prints; I thought they’d look good against the bright colors. She also said you like house plants and had a shit load of books, so there is a shelf at window level and it’s actually made of pressure-treated wood so you can put your house plants there.”

            “Where did you get all the…,” she couldn’t think of anything else to call it, “the trees?”

            “They were trimming some big trees down the street, so Adrian took the truck down there and they let us have anything we could haul off for free,” Marcella supplied. Stella was some amused. She’d never seen the big girl so excited; she usually played things pretty cool.

            “Let me show you the bathroom.” Adrian led the way, and opened the door when they got there. “There was a crap fiberglass tub in here, so we ripped that out, found one of the old claw-footed tubs from one of the other rooms and brought it down here – that was a bitch – cleaned it up, painted it, and set it up. Then Marcella said Toni liked to shower, so we made the round rod from copper pipe, supported it with chains from the ceiling, and then just hooked up the shower head with an extra length of pipe to reach the tub.”

            And that was just the tip of the iceberg. She had dropped the ceiling to seven foot, successfully covering up the crappy condition the old ceiling had been in and making the room easier to heat and cool. She’d also put in a vent which the room hadn’t had before. She’d built shelves over the commode for storage and put in a new sink with still more storage under it. She’d cleaned the tan-colored tiles the walls had been covered with and replaced broken or missing tiles with bright blue and green. Then she’d re-grouted and sealed it. The walls and ceiling above it she had painted in high-gloss bright white to make the room look bigger.

            As Stella walked in the guest bedroom, she saw that the back wall was red, the other walls and the ceiling where bright white, and the closet door had been made with the same pine lumber she’d seen in the living room. This would be the room Tony would turn into her office – filled with all her electronic crap. The other guest room was exactly the same, but it had a blue wall. All very nice, very livable.

            But when she saw her bedroom she gasped. Adrian had enlarged the closet to cover one whole wall and faced it and the doors with the same rough pine she’d used everywhere else. But it was the mural that covered the back wall and spread over the ceiling that made her lie down on the floor. Suddenly she was looking up through the cherry tree in her grandparents’ garden. The tree had a trunk made of a split piece of tree, and limbs had been fixed to the ceiling in places. Parts of the limbs and trunk were painted, and parts were real, and the transformation was so flawless that she could hardly tell the difference. The walls were painted with flowers and rocks – in short, made to look exactly like an English country garden.

            “You all right Stella?” Marcella asked. It was only then that Stella realized that there were tears running down her face. Stella nodded her head then said, “How did you know, Adrian?”

            “You told me.” She put down a hand and Stella reluctantly allowed herself to be helped off the floor. “I looked up English country gardens and cherry trees on the internet on Marcella’s lap top.”

            “It’s perfect, Adrian. I had no idea you were such an artist. You obviously belong here, baby. You and this building seem to have set up a rapport. You don’t get any more creative than what you’ve done here – and it’s functional. Furthermore, this is just exactly what I want. I didn’t really know what I wanted, but this is it. Life is usually full of compromises – living with what you have and learning to enjoy it – you very rarely get exactly what you want, and you certainly don’t get it in three weeks. Did you two sleep at all?”

            Adrian and Marcella smiled, obviously pleased with themselves, and then said at the same time, “Not much.”

            “Well, don’t kill yourselves. You two help me move tomorrow and then start on your own place, Adrian, and make it just the way you want it.” Stella looked around the room one more time. “Make it as perfect for you as this place is for me.”

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