Alexis hadn’t been out to see me since last weekend when she came with her friends, but we talked every day for hours.
I liked her. I liked her so much, it wasn’t even funny.
The sex was unreal, she was smart and beautiful, and I loved hanging out with her. I hadn’t felt like this in such a long time, I couldn’t even remember being this into someone. Maybe I never had been.
My entire life was now reduced to two things. Raising the money to buy the house and trying to get Alexis to come see me. I’d go see her if it wasn’t for the first thing.
I was working myself to the bone.
When I wasn’t dealing with guests or the house repairs I’d promised Amber, I was working in the garage on the pieces I was trying to finish. I was exhausted.
Today was the first day in a week that I was giving myself a day off, treating myself to a breakfast I didn’t have to cook before I headed over to Doug’s to help him with stuff on the farm. I should probably have just backed out and told him I had too much work to do at home—which I did. But I needed the change. And being outside and with my friends was a nice break, even if I’d be doing manual labor the whole time.
I was at Jane’s in a booth waiting for the guys. I was a little early, so I called Alexis. She answered on the second ring.
“Daniel, I can’t talk right now. I’m having an emergency.” She sounded like she was crying.
I sat up. “Are you okay?”
She sniffed. “No. Not really. The power is out, so the coffeemaker won’t work.”
I barked out a laugh.
“This is not funny! It’s been two hours and I have to go to work.”
“Okay. This is serious. You should probably drink all the vodka before it goes bad.”
“Daniel!”
I chuckled. “Okay, okay. I think I can help. Is your oven gas or electric?” “I think it’s gas.”
“You think?”
“I don’t coooook,” she said miserably.
I grinned. “If it’s gas, it should work, even if the power’s out. You can boil water and use a French press if you have one.”
“I only have a Keurig.”
“Can you just get in the car and go to a coffee shop?”
“I tried. The garage door won’t open. No power,” she said, defeated. “I’m trapped.”
The way she breathed the last word made me move the phone away from my mouth to laugh.
“Pull the emergency release,” I said, smiling. “There’s an emergency release?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying not to crack up. “There is. Go in there, and I’ll tell you how to open it.”
“This is how you die in the zombie apocalypse,” she said with wonder. “I always thought it would be an infected zombie bite or exposure or
something, but it’s this. You get a caffeine headache on the first day and you lose your will to live and you just lie down and they eat you.”
I laughed. “In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I promise I will not let you get eaten.”
“How? You’re not here.”
“I’d come get you. I’d put together a recovery team. You’re a doctor. You’re a high-value acquisition. Doug bet me a hundred bucks I couldn’t get the best Zompac squad, I need you.”
She laughed weakly.
I heard a door open. “Okay, I’m in here.”
“All right. You might need a ladder. Look for the motor. It’s a small box on the ceiling in the middle of the garage. It’s attached to a metal runner that pulls the door up. There’s a little string hanging down from it. You see it?”
“Yeah.”
“You pull that and then you can lift the door from the bottom and open it.”
There was a quiet pause. “Daniel, you’re my hero.”
“Well, thank you. But I think the standard’s a little low.” She paused. “I hate that I don’t know things.”
“How many bones are there in the human body?”
“Two hundred and six,” she said without skipping a beat. “Which one’s your favorite?”
“I like the hyoid bone. It’s basically free floating and no one talks about it.” She sniffed. “It’s very underrated.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I think you’re doing okay.”
She laughed, and I heard the garage door open.
“Why is the power out?” I asked, nodding at Popeye shuffling in.
“I don’t know.”
“Is it the whole block?”
“Gabby and Jessica aren’t home, so I don’t know.” “Did you check the breaker?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
I shook my head with a smile. God, this was so her. She was this conundrum of a woman. Completely remarkable in every way, doesn’t know about breaker boxes or how to wash a load of whites or make a bed. I think I’d been cleaning since I was old enough to walk. One of Grandma’s favorite pictures of me was me, three years old, holding a toilet bowl scrubber.
“There’s probably an electrical panel in the garage,” I said. “Go look for it.”
“Okay, hold on.”
“It’s metal,” I said, putting my coffee cup to my lips. “Probably gray.
It’ll have switches on it.”
“Like a light switch thingy?”
“Did you find a light switch thingy?” I asked, amused. “Yeah.”
“Send me a picture of it.”
I heard shuffling. Then a picture message came through. I zoomed in. “Your main breaker is flipped off.”
She went silent on the other end for a long moment. “How does that happen?”
“It doesn’t. If you overload one circuit a breaker might flip. But that would be one part of the house, not the whole thing.”
“Soooo…”
“So someone probably switched it off. Did you have someone there working on the electrical or something?”
She went quiet again. “Yeah. It must have been them.” “Just flip it back. The power will come back on,” I said.
I heard her flip the switch, and she made an excited little sound of relief.
I smiled.
“So do I get to see you this week?” I asked. I heard a car door slam. “I don’t know.”
My smile fell. I was about to push the subject, but I heard the restaurant door jingle. Brian and Doug were coming in.
“The guys just got here. I’ll let you get your coffee and call you later.” We hung up right as they slid into the booth. “Hey.”
Liz swung by and set menus in front of us. “Hey, guys. Coffee?” They both nodded, and Brian smiled at her, a touch too brightly.
The way he looked at her made me look away from him, like I was intruding on a private moment.
Brian had been in love with Liz since we were kids. She didn’t live here growing up. She only came for the summers. Brian looked forward to her visits the whole year. He’d be at my house so much in the summer that Grandma used to joke he was one of her honorary grandkids.
Then one summer we got a new sheriff—and Liz met Jake.
I watched Liz pour Brian a coffee. She had a brace on her little finger.
My jaw tightened.
Jake was putting hands on her. Again.
He never did it in front of anyone. Whenever they were in public, he always put on some fucking show so everyone thought he was this doting husband. Such bullshit.
I almost knocked him out once after she came into the VFW with a split lip on St. Patrick’s Day a few years back. He denied touching her, and I almost got myself arrested—and she was mad at me afterward. Didn’t talk to me for weeks.
Sometimes when I saw this shit on her, I’d ask her anyway, even though I knew she wouldn’t tell me. She’d just say this was a fall or a slammed door or something and she’d say it looking me dead in the eye. I hated it.
He cheated on her too, another thing nobody bothered to mention anymore because she never did anything about it, and it just upset her. He loved dipping into the tourists. I don’t know why she put up with it. She could do so much better.
I looked away from her hand.
“How’s the saving-up thing going?” Brian asked.
“Good,” I said. “I haven’t gone down to the swap meet yet, but I sold a few pieces to Alexis’s friends. That helped.”
That helped a lot.
Actually, I’d been thinking about that. Those ladies didn’t even blink an eye. They just bought them, on the spot. Maybe Alexis was right, and I needed to cast a wider net. Get a website up, an Instagram page. Maybe put a few of the smaller pieces in some of the gift shops when they opened for the summer, see how they did.
Alexis made me want to be better.
If I’d never had to run the B & B, I think I’d be doing more with myself by now. Maybe I’d be practicing my carpentry full-time. I never got the chance to really explore it because my grandparents had died, and I’d had to change gears before I could figure out if I could make a go of it.
Maybe now I never would…
If I bought the house, I’d need to keep running it as a B & B to pay the mortgage. And not the way I’d been running it either. I’d have to be open year-round to cover that kind of payment.
I’d be an innkeeper for the rest of my life.
Not that being an innkeeper wasn’t a good business. It’s just not what I wanted to do. I don’t think it was what I was meant to do.
All of this felt a little like selling my soul. Like letting the house go would destroy me, and so would keeping it.
Doug put his coffee to his lips. “What’s up with the girlfriend?” he asked me.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” I mumbled.
She wasn’t my girlfriend, because she didn’t want to be my girlfriend. I’d jump at the chance to be Alexis’s boyfriend in a hot second. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
She never made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for her, but she didn’t have to. It was obvious. I’d accepted this with a resigned understanding of my position and decided that I wasn’t going to dwell on it, especially because there was nothing I could do to change the situation. I couldn’t snap my fingers and be a damn surgeon. I couldn’t be anything other than what I was.
“Why isn’t she your girlfriend?” Doug asked.
“I don’t have anything to offer a woman like that.”
Doug set his mug down. “Have you ever heard of penguin love stones?” “What?”
“A penguin love stone. When a male likes a female, he finds a perfect stone and he brings it to her. If she likes it, she puts it in her nest and that’s it. They’re paired for life.”
Brian watched Liz taking an order at another table but talked to us. “And your point?”
“My point is, the penguin’s not picking her mate because he’s the one who has the best rock. It might look that way, but she’s not. She’s taking the rock because the male she wants the most is offering it. Sometimes what you have to give is enough. Even if it’s a rock instead of a diamond.”
I let out a long breath. If only that were true.
We ate breakfast. Doug was in a good mood, which was nice. His depression always got better in the spring. More sunlight, more time outside, tourists starting to come back. He was thinking of putting in a wood-fired pizza oven at the farm to do pizza and wine pairings in the summer, bring in more business in addition to the petting zoo and barn weddings he did.
Brian listened to us talk and watched Liz. Every time she cleared a plate, he’d look at her brace and his jaw would flex. This shit with Jake was hard on all of us, but for Brian I think it was a special kind of hell.
When we were finishing up, my phone rang. I grinned. Alexis. “I gotta take this,” I said, sliding out of the booth.
I pushed through the door and swiped the Answer button when I got outside. “Hey. You get your coffee?” I smiled.
“Iced coffee tastes soooo much better when you’re late for work,” Alexis said, sounding like her old self again.
I laughed. “Glad I could help.”
“I have to go in a second, but I wanted you to hear something. I’m going to put you on speaker but don’t talk, okay?”
“Okay…”
“Someone’s singing opera in the ER,” she said.
I could hear the squeaky sound of shoes on a polished floor like she was walking me somewhere.
“Opera?”
“We’ve got a bachelorette party here. The bride has alcohol poisoning and her friends brought her in. The whole group is drunk. One of them is a soprano, and she’s singing in the room. It’s amazing. Ready?”
“Ready.”
She put me on speaker, and I heard a door open. The voice of an angel drifted through the phone. “Ave Maria.”
It was beautiful. Ethereal. It brought tears to my eyes, standing on this sidewalk. It felt like a gift, this unexpected beauty in the middle of a mundane morning.
Alexis tapped me into a different world. She was this incredible woman, working in a hospital two hours away, treating a patient whose friend was singing in Latin. Just in her normal routine, Alexis was living a life a thousand times more interesting and cultured than mine—and she wanted to include me in it.
This gesture made me grateful in a way I couldn’t explain. She was giving me more of herself, even if it was just a peek into a moment of her day.
When it ended, Alexis whispered into the phone, “Gotta go.” And she hung up.
I smiled, wiping at my eyes. I stood there, looking at my screen, with a grin on my face.
I wanted more.
I wanted to see her world with my own eyes, not just these glimpses behind the curtain. I wanted to be a part of it.
But it was by invite only. And I doubted she’d ever ask me.
I was getting ready to head back in when the phone rang again.
This time it was Amber. My good mood disintegrated. I let the phone ring three times before I reluctantly pressed it to my ear. “Yeah?”
“Hey. Um, so I didn’t get the direct deposit this week?”
I scrubbed a hand down my face. “It hasn’t even been seven days since I reopened the house. And I had to comp the stay for my guests last weekend.”
“Uh, okay, why?”
“Just some dumb stuff. The trees dropped some acorns on them and—” “Okay, Daniel? I don’t care.” Her voice was edgy. “You said I’d be
getting money every week.”
I blew out a calming breath. “The house is booked up through Sunday,” I said carefully. “I can send you the money on Monday.”
“How much?” she asked quickly.
I drew my brows down. “Is everything okay? You seem…tense.” Actually, she seemed wired. She seemed high.
Amber being high wasn’t exactly a new development. She’d been doing better over the last few years though. But if she was getting back into drugs, I didn’t like that she was doing it when the money for the house was dangling in front of her like a blank check.
“I’m fine,” she said, a little too curtly. “I just need the money. If you can’t get me money every week, the deal’s off.”
I nodded. “Okay. Last weekend was a one-off. It won’t happen again.” “And don’t be comping people. What’s wrong with you?” she snapped.
I let this slide. No point in getting into it with her. Last weekend aside, I was very good at what I did for a living. I didn’t need her advice or her criticisms. I didn’t need anything from my mother and I never had.
There was no love lost between me and Amber. I didn’t want to see anything happen to her—but I also knew there was nothing I could do about it if it did.
Amber’s crises cycled. And she bit the hand that fed her, every time. If I offered to let her come dry out here, like Grandma always did, I’d live to regret it. I’d be more likely to find myself canceling missing checks and searching for family heirlooms at pawnshops in Rochester than I would be saving her from herself. So I had to do my best to save the house instead.
“I’ll have the cash in the account Monday,” I said. “Fine.”
She hung up on me.
I stood outside for a minute, staring at the mural on the side of the pharmacy. I wasn’t getting six months. I’d be lucky if Amber gave me six weeks. The best I could do was hope for as much time as possible.
In a season, one way or another, my life would never be the same.
