Chapter 17

After the service they returned home, a large Victorian that Andi had only seen the outside, the large front yard and porch with an iron fence around the perimeter, and in the back the large five bay garage with arched doors to look like a Victorian horse stable. She saw the hot tub and further back the large built in pool. Near that was a huge grape arbor that provided shade as a gazebo in the summer.

“Come on you, let’s look inside.” He offered her a hand, and she got out of the Ranger, then tried to collect Sandy and Madeline, who were chattering about a red bird they saw. “That was a cardinal,” he explained.

After a moment of TwinBabble® with her sister, Madeline looked up at Paul. Her eyes suddenly glowed with innocence. “Can we keep her?”

Andi had seen that look many times; it was their “I want” look of faux sweetness. It was the beginning of a manipulative streak that their future boyfriends and husbands will have to contend with to varying degrees of success and financial hardship. She thought of warning Paul, but she settled to see how he handles it for a while.

Paul crouched down. “First of all, that red bird is a boy, he wears bright red because his girlfriend likes those colors, and second of all he’s a wild bird, he would be sad in a cage. But we can put up bird feeders and you can watch him, and his buddies all you want.”

Madeline brightened, but Sandy asked, “Won’t he be mad?”

“The bird? No, he’ll love it.”

“Not the bird,” she pointed to the house, “the guy.”

“What guy?”

Sandy huffed in exasperation, “The guy who owns the hotel,” she said as she pointed at the front door.

Paul grinned. “I suppose we’ll have to ask your mommy.” The twins looked confused, so he explained, “This is my hotel and I am going to give it to your mommy to live in forever.”

The twins took that bit of information in stride and abandoned Paul. They turned to Andi and asked her if they could put up bird feeders, but she didn’t hear a word they said. The reality of what she just heard struck home, and it all came crashing down on her. Dr. Adrianna Roberts, so deep in debt that she skips meals so her daughters can eat properly, whose student loans coupled with her ex-husband’s debt has left her so far in the red that she works several second shifts a week at a second hospital, now suddenly owns a house that she dreamed of when she was a child.

She heard a roaring and a ringing in her ears. Her entire body tingled like your arm does when it “falls asleep” from the lack of blood circulation. She felt an ice cold sweat break out over her entire body. Suddenly it was like she was looking at everything through a long tunnel, and at that minute she was gone. Her functions suddenly ceased.

Paul realized immediately that Andi was going to faint, as a cardiologist he’s seen it often enough to know what her body was going through, a sudden drop of blood pressure causing oxygenated blood to stop flowing to the brain causes an entire shutdown of the brain and in turn the body. He was able to catch her in time to keep her from hitting her head. It wasn’t a glorious, beautiful catch like in the movies, but he had her, and that’s all that counts. He was able to shift her in his arms, so he laid her gently on the porch and set her legs up on one of the Adirondack chairs there on the porch. This allowed the blood to flow back to the heart, and she came back to consciousness quickly.

Andi’s eyes fluttered open, and she saw Paul smiling down on her. “Welcome back,” he said.

“Oh God, that felt so weird,” she gasped. “What’s my heart rate?”

“I didn’t check, but I looked through your purse while you were out, you can’t afford me.”

“I suppose I’ll have to marry you to get a medical opinion,” she smiled weakly.

“I also looked down your blouse, I accept your offer,” and he scooped her up off the porch and carried her to the front door while the girls asked over and over what happened. Rather than explain, he asked them to open the big front door.

They stood at the front door with a big oval etched glass window edged in stained glass. Sandy turned the big antique brass doorknob, and it opened easily. The door swung open and Paul carried Andi across the threshold. She was confronted with the master staircase of her dreams; it swept up to the second floor, where it joined the balcony that ran along 3 of the four walls up there. Over the stairs hung an enormous crystal chandelier suspended by a chain from the ceiling over 25 feet above the floor.

“Welcome home Mrs. Jarecki,” said Paul softly.

“It’s so beautiful!” she gasped, and she buried her head in his neck and wept.

It took a long time for her to recover from her shock, but eventually he set her down on her own feet, and she climbed the stairs slowly. She drew her hand up the banister slowly, admiring the polished wood that glowed with an inner luster. “It looks smooth but it isn’t slippery at all, is it anti-skid?”

“Yep, something Gus found,” answered Paul. “He said it was to keep kids from trying to slide down the banister, but I think it’s more of a high-end safety device for someone like me on the edge of old age.” Gus Di Didomissio was Paul’s best friend and a contractor who helped Paul rebuild an old, abandoned Victorian mansion. Springville was once filled with mansions like this. The village was a popular place for the rich of nineteenth century Buffalo to summer in and escape the heat of the city.

She was drawn up stairs by some force and she knew that the master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms on one side would be for their use, the others would be for guests. The twins ran the length of the balcony and selected the last bedroom as ‘theirs.’ Paul thought it was odd that with all these bedrooms to choose from, they would share a room. Andi was busy looking at the room between the twins’ room and the master that she and Paul would share as the nursery.