She never texted me back.
It had been eight days since the last time I saw her, that morning of Popeye’s fall. I’d sent her another text two days ago. She didn’t reply to that either. I figured two unanswered messages was the max before I started to look desperate, so I left it at that.
I’d taken Popeye to Rochester to see his doctor after his accident. He was fine. I’d gone down to the hardware store while I was there and bought him the railing and tread for his tub. Installed that yesterday. Helped Doug dig a trench. Made a coffee table.
I would have rather seen Alexis.
To say this was a disappointment was an understatement. I thought things between us had gone well.
I guess they hadn’t.
It was seven a.m. and gloomy outside. I was sitting in the four-season porch of the house having a coffee when Amber—Mom—called.
Mom wasn’t really my mom. Not for any practical purposes. She’d had me when she was fifteen. My dad had been a sixteen-year-old tourist whose family had no interest in me. Grandma and Grandpa raised me.
I had only fleeting memories of ever seeing Amber as a kid. She took off as soon as she could drive. We didn’t really have a relationship until after my grandparents died.
They’d left the house to her.
My aunt Andrea, Liz’s mom, and Aunt Justine, my cousin Josh’s mom, didn’t want it. They both lived in South Dakota and had no intention of coming back to Wakan. So my grandparents had left the house to Amber, probably thinking they’d change their will to me when I was old enough, but they’d never gotten around to it. So Amber took all.
I begged her not to sell it. At twenty-three, I hadn’t had the means to buy it. I convinced her to let me run it as a rental, that she’d get a deposit every week, and she could always sell it if it didn’t work out. She’d agreed, and we’d entered into the arrangement that I’d been living under for the last five years.
When she called, she called about money.
“Amber,” I said, answering on the third ring, trying not to sound as moody as I felt.
“Hi, Daniel, it’s Amber.”
I rubbed my forehead tiredly. Sometimes I thought she wasn’t all there. “What’s up?” I asked.
“So, are you gardening right now?” “What?”
“What are you doing?”
She was making small talk. That was weird. “I’m just sitting here, in the four-season porch. Why?”
She paused.
“So, I don’t know how to say this without just coming right out and saying it? I’m selling the house.”
I froze. “What? What are you talking about?” “I’m listing it. Like, today.”
I stood. “Wha—why?”
She was making shuffling noises. She seemed distracted.
“Amber, you can’t.”
“I already have an agent. That Barbara lady? The one from Root River Real Estate or whatever? She says it’s worth five hundred thousand dollars!”
I shook my head. “But…it’s going well as a rental, it’s making money.” “I’m tired of owning it. It’s too stressful. I have to deal with the taxes—” “I’ll do it. Let me do the taxes—”
“Nah. It’s just too much work. I don’t have time.”
Bullshit. She didn’t lift a finger, I did everything. She wanted the money. I went outside and started to pace.
“Why don’t you just buy it?” she asked.
“Amber, I don’t have the money for a down payment on a house like this. It’s going to be tens of thousands of dollars.” My mind was racing. “The house has been in this family a hundred and twenty-five years,” I said. “You can’t do this. Grandpa would—”
“Grandpa would what, Daniel? Roll over in his grave?” I could tell she was rolling her eyes. “It’s being used by strangers. Don’t be so dramatic. It’s not like you live there or something.”
“I do live there!”
“You live in the garage. Why don’t you ask whoever buys it if you can just stay there? Like, rent it or something. And anyway, Barbara says it’ll probably just get bought by an investment company who wants to keep it as a B & B. So maybe they’ll keep you. You could have the same job and everything.”
“And if they don’t? If a family buys it to live in? You’d let that happen to the house? I’ll lose my job, apartment, my workshop—”
I stopped at the side of the house and peered up at it. The twisting vines and oak trees on the stained-glass window shone emerald under the hand-
wrought eaves that my great-great-great- grandpa carved with his bare hands. My great-great-grandpa had been born in the bedroom with the four- poster bed. My grandpa proposed to my grandma in the living room in front of the fireplace with the green tile mosaic.
I knew every nook and cranny of this house. She couldn’t sell it. I couldn’t let her. This was my home. My entire childhood. Generations of Grants had been born here, raised here, died here.
“Look,” I said. “Give me a few months to get a down payment together.
Please. So I have a fighting chance at a loan.”
I had no idea where I’d get the money. I got a percentage of every rental in exchange for managing the property, and I sold my furniture when I completed a piece. But it was a hobby, not a stable source of income, and the house wouldn’t rent again until at least May. I lived modestly. I had a couple thousand saved up, but not nearly enough to put down what I was sure the bank would ask for.
She sighed. “I don’t know—”
“I’ll open it up for the off-season,” I said before even thinking about it. “You’ll get all that added income. Plus, there’s work it needs,” I added quickly. “There’s water damage in the Jack and Jill room, the roof needs to be replaced. If that stuff doesn’t get repaired, it’ll just lower the value, and it’s going to take me a few months to fix anyway.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Amber. I have never asked you for anything. Please. Give me this.”
There was a long pause. “All right. Fine. Six months. But that’s it. I need the cash. I’m opening up a bike shop with Enrique.”
And there it was.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I had no idea who that was. Probably some guy she just started hooking up with who was going to take her money and run.
I couldn’t even care at this point. Nothing I could do about it either way. She always did what she wanted, and this would be no different.
I nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “Okay. Thank you.”
I hung up with her, only half believing she’d even keep the promise.
Six months. I had six months to raise fifty thousand dollars.
After the phone call with Amber this morning, I’d been to the bank. The good news was the B & B had five years of stable earnings that would more than cover the amount of the mortgage if I were to take it on, and my five years as a property manager and my good credit could definitely secure me a loan. The bad news was I had to have fifty thousand dollars as a down payment.
It might as well have been a million. It didn’t seem possible.
I stood in my workshop, inventorying. Projects were stacked up floor-to- ceiling along the walls. Grandpa’s work from before he died. He was notorious for starting something and losing interest. Sanded rocking chairs that needed to be stained, dining room tables with missing legs, dressers without knobs, bed frames that just needed to be assembled.
If I could power through the backlog, finish what was already started, maybe add a few of my own artistic touches to the pieces to raise value, I could take it all down to the indoor swap meet in Rochester and sell it. There might be enough here to raise the money.
Maybe.
This, coupled with the seven thousand I already had set aside, might do it. It would be an exhaustive amount of work. I’d still need to run the damn B & B on top of it. But I could do it. I could do all of it.
I had to.
I’d never hated someone in my entire life, but right now I hated Amber. It was hard to believe we’d been raised by the same people, given the same values, and grown up in the same place. How could she not love that house? Feel protective over it? It had a soul, it breathed. It was our responsibility.
I guess I couldn’t really be surprised. I’d known Amber and I were going to end up here eventually.
Amber needing money was the hallmark of my childhood. Amber calling Grandma and Grandpa and them bailing her out, no matter what she did. I remember the calls every couple of months, begging for wire transfers. Grandma sitting in the pantry on the phone with her daughter, the curly phone cord pulled taut and shut into the door, the conversation muffled and whispered. Grandpa was more tough love with her, but she could always get Grandma to fold.
I used to wonder exactly what my mother would have to do to fall from my grandmother’s good graces. It was like the standard was so fucking low, even the most heinous of her crimes were just followed by a sigh and a head shake.
When she visited, she stole things. She’d go down to the VFW and get shit-faced and end up in a bar fight with someone, and Grandpa would have to go get her out of the drunk tank at the post office. When she wasn’t in Wakan, she jumped from one deadbeat guy to the next. She almost never had an address.
I think the only reason this arrangement lasted as long as it had was because a reliable source of income got deposited directly into her account during the busy season. She never had a steady job. She waitressed and was a flight attendant once, but she could never hold down a position for more than a few months. Then I’d get a phone call asking me to advance her money.
Sometimes she’d claim she had some health issue that she needed cash for. A thousand dollars for a root canal, or money for a down payment on a new car because she’d crashed the last one without insurance. It was always something. Only now the something was so big, she had to sell the house to cover it.
I updated the website to show the B & B had availability starting on Friday and gritted my teeth as I hit Enter.
Being open in the off-season was almost pointless. At best, we’d be at half capacity, and the amount of work this meant for me with only half the payout wasn’t worth it. I was tied to the property when I had guests. I couldn’t even make a trip to the hardware store in Rochester when I had people in the house unless I was able to get Liz or Doug to fill in for me. I had to have coffee out by six a.m. for the early risers and a gourmet breakfast ready by nine o’clock. Checkout at eleven, then cleaning the rooms, stripping beds, checking the next guests in at three o’clock. It was a never-ending hamster wheel. And I had to do all those things whether I had one room booked or all four. But I had to make it work. Because if Amber didn’t see the money, she’d probably list the house now instead of in October.
I sent out an email blast to our guest list. I mentioned some fun new spring breakfasts I’d make, the leaves budding, a complimentary wine-and- cheese hour in the foyer that I’d be adding to the stay. Then I started in on the pieces in the garage. I was about an hour into it when my cell phone pinged. I was in a shit mood, but the second I saw who it was, that changed.
Alexis: Sorry, just realized I never replied.
I grinned. Then I called her.
She answered on the second ring. “Uh, hello?” “Hi.”
“Did you just call me? On purpose? Without texting to tell me first like a normal person?”
“Yeeessss.” I smiled. “Isn’t that what you do with phones?” “That’s not what I do with mine.”
“You make it sound like I sent you an unsolicited dick pic.” “The dick pic would have been less shocking.”
I laughed.
“What if I’d been in the middle of something?” she asked. “Then you wouldn’t have answered. Wild, I know.”
I could tell she was smiling.
“I’m working on something,” I said. “I can’t text right now.” “Oh, yeah? What are you working on?”
“A chair.”
“You’re fixing it?” “I’m making it.”
“Wooow,” she said. “You know how to do that?”
“I’m a carpenter,” I said. “The whole family is. All my cousins. Liz too.
My grandpa taught us.”
“Cool. Do you have an Instagram for your woodworking? I’d love to follow it.”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t do social media.” She paused. “Like, at all? Ever?”
“Nope. It’s a waste of time. I spend two hours on TikTok, and I lose two hours. I spend two hours in my workshop, and I have a chair. I prefer the chair.”
“But…how do you keep up with people if you don’t do social media?” “I call them.”
She laughed.
That chemistry…it was like the second we reconnected, there we were. I heard the sound of a door opening and closing.
“Where are you?” I asked, grabbing my measuring tape and getting back to my project.
“I’m sitting by the pool on a recliner.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You have a pool?” The only pool we had around here was the river.
“Yup. I just came home from a friend’s house.”
I liked this. If she was at a friend’s house and she remembered she never replied to my text, it was probably because they were talking about me.
“Which friend?” I asked.
“Eh, just one from across the street.”
She always answered my questions like this, I realized. She gave me the same vague response whenever I asked her anything. I didn’t know her last name, what hospital she worked in. Hell, I hadn’t even known she was a doctor until the Popeye thing. But I figured she’d open up to me when she was ready, so I didn’t push it.
“So,” I said, “what have you been up to?”
“Not much. Working mostly.” I heard the pith of a can opening.
I put in my earbuds so I could have both my hands. “So what kind of doctor are you?” I asked. I hadn’t had a chance to ask her before she took off on me the other day.
“I’m an ER physician.”
“Ah,” I said, measuring the chair leg and marking it with a pencil. “Why’d you pick that?”
She sounded like she was stretching. “I didn’t plan on it. I was going to go into neurosurgery, but I met my best friend and she was pursuing
emergency medicine and she got me into it. It’s fun. And I like being there on someone’s worst day. I like saving people.”
I smiled. “Any interesting cases?” “Oh, lots.”
“Like what?”
She made a humming noise. “I pulled a Barbie shoe out of a kid’s nose yesterday. And some guy used a nail gun to shoot a three-inch nail into his foot this morning. He was stuck to the floor. The paramedics had to use a hammer to pry him off.”
I sucked air through my teeth. “Ouch.”
“Once this guy swallowed a Fitbit. He was cheating and he got a text from another woman on it. His girlfriend demanded he show it to her, so he ate it. It was still tracking his steps from his stomach. We have Nunchuck Guy. He comes in once a month with a concussion. There was the guy with a flashlight stuck in his rectum—”
“Why is it always guys?”
“I don’t know, Daniel. Why is it always guys?” I pictured her grin. “Hey, I have never been to the ER. Doug does my stitches.” “Doug does your stitches?”
I nodded. “Yup. He was a medic in the army. Saves me a two-hour round-trip to Rochester every time. Uses a barbless fishhook and a ten- pound test line.”
“Please tell me you’re kidding…”
“Nope. He does a good job too. Straight.”
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “What do you use for the pain?” “Gin?”
She laughed.
I needed to use the saw, but I couldn’t do it with her on the phone, so I decided to stain some headboards instead. I got up and grabbed some brushes. “So, back to the flashlight thing. Does this happen often?”
“You have no idea. People love putting stuff up their butts. And they always want you to think they fell on it in the shower. About fifty percent of my job is keeping a straight face.”
I chuckled. “Same. Someone spray-painted dicks on the bike trail yesterday. Mrs. Jenson came to tell me, and she kept mouthing the word ‘penis’ because she couldn’t bring herself to actually say it out loud and I had to look very concerned and nod a lot.”
“Any leads on who did it?” she asked, a smile in her voice.
“Eh, it’s teenagers. It’s always teenagers. Firecrackers in mailboxes, stealing wine coolers from the grocery store, nature peeing—”
“Nature peeing…” she deadpanned.
“Yup.” I pried open a paint can. “It is exactly what it sounds like. The businesses are either closed for the season or they don’t want kids in their stores using their bathrooms, so they just go where they can. The alley outside of the pharmacy was starting to smell like a urinal.”
“And you have to deal with this? This isn’t a police issue?”
“I suppose it is if Jake can catch them,” I said. “Which he can’t. Evading the police is a time-honored Wakan tradition,” I said, stirring the stain. “That’s half the fun.”
“Ah. So what are you going to do about this crime spree, Mayor?”
“I’m working on a volunteer program for the off-season, actually. Stuff to keep them busy. Doug’s going to teach them beekeeping, I’ll do a woodworking workshop. If they do community service, they get credits to use at the rental place for bikes or kayaks. We’re having a fund-raiser for it in a few weeks.”
“Nice. I thought you said the mayor thing was honorary.”
I shrugged. “It is. I mean, I was elected. But the town’s too small for it to be a paying gig, so I always feel like it doesn’t really count. It’s just sort of something the Grants have always done.”
“Well, you sound like a very good mayor,” she said. “Even if you don’t feel like it’s a real thing—which it sounds like it is. You could have punished the kids instead.”
I shook my head. “Nah. Grace costs you nothing,” I said, brushing stain on a headboard.
“Huh?”
“Grace costs you nothing. My grandma used to say it. She especially liked to say it to herself when I was being a little shit.”
“I somehow doubt you were ever a little shit.”
“It’s hard being a teenager here,” I said. “It can be very boring. Actually, it’s hard being an adult here too. You know, if the population is less than a thousand, it isn’t even a town. It’s a village.”
“So you’re a villager,” she said, sounding amused.
“Yup. Any chance I can get you to raid my village tonight? Because I’d like to see you.”
“I can’t.” I pictured her putting out a bottom lip. “I have a girls’ weekend thing. I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”
My smile fell a fraction of an inch. It had already been over a week. I wanted to see her.
“You’ll just have to settle for talking to me instead,” she said, a smile in her voice.
I grinned “Okay. What do you want to talk about?” “I don’t know.”
“How about we play a game?” I asked.
“A game? What kind of game?” “A get-to-know-you game.”
I pictured a shrug. “Okay. Sure.”
If history was any indication, she’d deflect the questions I really wanted to know the answers to. So I decided to keep it light.
“If you could go back in time, when would you visit?”
“Hmmmmm,” she said. “That’s a good question. Am I a ghost? Or do I actually have to live back then?”
I shook my head. “Why would you want to be a ghost?”
“Too many diseases. Diphtheria, smallpox, bubonic plague. People back then lived to the ripe old age of childbirth.”
“You could be anyone,” I said. “Any gender. You could be a king.”
“You think kings had it any better? What about Charles II of Spain? He was so inbred he could barely eat. His jaw was horribly disfigured, he had rickets, hallucinations, an oversized head, he was impotent and infertile. Henry VIII had an ulcerated leg from a jousting match that was so putrid you could smell him coming from three rooms over. And some think he went mad from syphilis.”
I smiled. “So a little syph and you’re out, huh?”
“Are we still talking about the king thing, or is this a dating question? Syphilis is highly treatable and nothing to be ashamed of. A single intramuscular injection of long-acting benzathine penicillin will take care of it.”
“Okay, we get it, you know how to cure syphilis.” She laughed again.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said, dipping my brush in the can and tapping it. “I read a lot of historic nonfiction. I guess it was pretty brutal back then.”
“Historic nonfiction?” she said, sounding a little surprised.
“My favorite kind of read.”
“Me too. I like the medical aspects. I always think about how I’d do it differently if I lived back then, knowing what I know.”
“I like it because it happened,” I said. “Can’t get frustrated with the plot if it’s a true story. And you learn something.”
“Yeah. You know, reading makes your penis look bigger—don’t quote me on it, the science is really new.”
“Is that what’s going on down there? I was wondering. Just finished War and Peace, by the way.”
She laughed so hard I think she spit out her drink.
“I like to read,” I said, grinning. “It’s the only way I get to live somewhere that isn’t Wakan. I read three, four books a week. A lot of audiobooks. That way I can work and read at the same time.”
“I’ve never done an audiobook,” she admitted.
“Oh, you should. It’s like a movie for your ears. You could listen on your drive down to see me. Which is when again?”
“Daniel, you know how much I love watching you work. But I’ve got my country’s five hundredth anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I’m swamped.”
A line straight out of The Princess Bride. I was cracking up.
God, I liked talking to her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d liked talking to someone this much. I liked seeing her more, but this was a close second for sure.
I checked my watch. “I gotta feed Chloe.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding a little disappointed. “I guess I should hang up with you then.”
I set my brush on the lid of the can. “Nope, I’m taking you with me. Took me a week to get you on the phone, I’m not hanging up with you
now.”
I didn’t hang up with her later either. We talked for five hours straight.
