“I’ve already put in a good word for you with my buddy Ernie,” my father said as he tangoed the flamingo across the room. “He doesn’t have anything planned for the trailer until springtime. Just keep the floor swept and make sure the beer’s stocked before he picks it up again. And don’t turn on the microwave and overhead light at the same time.”

“Great,” I said.

“I can sleep in the trailer,” Polly said. It might have been my imagination, but she seemed to lose some of her glow as she said it.

I shook my head. “You will not. Joe and his crew aren’t going to start work on the next phase until Monday, so we’ve got the whole weekend to figure out the sleeping arrangements. There’s one bedroom upstairs that won’t be touched, and we can always put a bed in this room. So between that and the trailer, we should have more than enough room.”

John had rented out his Boston condo through an executive rental program. My ex-husband’s realtor wife had sold my tiny Marshbury ranchburger practically overnight without being asked. John and I had spent our fair share of time looking at houses with nonexistent peek-thru ocean views and promising typos like a huge dick for entertaining. Nothing we saw came close to the 1890 Victorian that my father was rattling around in alone. Surprisingly, buying the house was John’s idea.

So, in the end, against my better judgment, we bought the house from my father and agreed to renovate it to work for all of us. My father deposited money from the sale, enough for the next twenty years, into a bank account set up to automatically transfer rent to John and me on the first of the month. If my dad was still alive and kicking after that, he got to live with us rent free. I fully expected him to take that as a challenge and live to be at least a hundred and one.

My father settled Pink into his cracked leatherette recliner. He put a record on the old turntable.

He reached out his hand to Polly. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you for a moment, darlin’.”

Polly blushed, but she passed the kittens she was holding over to me. I breathed in their new kitten smell while I still could. Pebbles, the mama cat, was a beautiful tri-colored calico with black and ginger spots that looked like beach pebbles on her sandy white fur. Two of the kittens, Squiggy and Oreo, were black and white, and the other two, Sunshine and The Great Catsby, were ginger and white. Catsby climbed off my lap and began to scale my arm in the direction of my shoulder.