“We’re headed to the hardware store. When you’re done unloading, park in the back,” she says, nodding in the direction of the house. “Your car will be safer back there.”
“It’s not safe out here?”
She and Pen give me identical pitying looks. “You on the northside now,” Pen says. “The sooner you learn that, the more stuff you’ll get to keep.”
Stella nods. “Park in the back,” she says again. “The gate code is 4693 and your key will open the single door on the back porch—not the French doors. Just leave me enough room to pull in and out of the garage.”
“Got it.”
With a quick wave of her hand, they drive, literally, into the sunset. It’s full-on dark by the time I finish unloading my Jeep, and I drive around back as per her instructions. The driveway emerges on a narrow dead end. Pecan trees, ligustrums, and a tall wrought iron fence hide the back of the house from view. When I pull in, a motion light beams into my eyes, and even at the end of the driveway, the tall ligustrums help to shield my ride from the view of the side street. In short, the Jeepissafer back here than parked at the curb on St. John Street.
Stella didn’t have to tell me I could park in the driveway. She could have just let me walk out tomorrow morning to find my window bashed in for the twenty I keep in the center console and my roadside air station.
So maybe she’s not an utter dragon.
This is what I’m thinking as I enter her house, as instructed, from the single door on the back porch. I step into a kind of mud room with old-as-dirt linoleum floors, a washer and dryer, a utility sink, and a large water heater. Interspersed with these are three other doors. One’s clearly the swinging door to the kitchen. The one to my right must go to the garage that looks to have been added on sometime in the last fifty years. The third doorway, to my left, opens to a darkened hall.
Yeah, maybe I know I should just go through the kitchen, but curiosity pulls me down the hall instead. And the first door to my left stops me in my tracks.
Just one bedside lamp illuminates the expansive room, but the space seems brighter. Except the floors, almost everything is white. Like mine upstairs, the queen-sized wrought iron bed frame is white, but this one looks much heavier. Each corner post is capped with what looks like an iron pine cone, and the scrollwork that makes up the headboard and footboard look to be knotted together with little three-pine-cone clusters.
That bed has got to be over a hundred and fifty years old.
It’s covered with a chenille bedspread of soft white. The white night stand, dresser, and vanity look just as old as the bed. And French. They stand on curvy legs that seem ready to dance as soon as you turn your back.
The bed is made, and except for a white, silky-looking robe draped across the foot of the mattress, the room is free of clothing and clutter.
Despite everything being white, the space isn’t blinding or pristine. It’s soft. And clean. It looks cool. Inviting.
This is Stella’s room. This is Stella’s room, and I shouldn’t be staring at it.
But my eyes fall to that robe. And then to the open door of a bathroom on the far corner of the room. All I can make out of it is the white tiled floor.
Stella walks across these wood floors from the bathroom to this bed, wearing that robe.
The thought tightens my balls. “Shit.”
I jerk away from the door, grateful no one’s around to hear my curse.
I pass a hall bathroom and another bedroom with pink flowered wallpaper that I’m betting is Maisy’s before the hall connects with the rear of the entryway, and I make my way back upstairs.
The closed bedroom door at the top of the stairs and the now empty bathroom remind me I’m not alone, so when I get to my room, I jam my AirPods into my ears and start rearranging and unpacking to Post Malone.
Thirty minutes later, when I have my weight bench situated in one corner with the dumbbells mostly out of toe-stubbing range, and I’ve swapped out the ruffled, tea rose patterned sheets with my own charcoal black ones, I skip “Fall Apart” in exchange for “Jackie Chan,” and that’s when I hear voices. I palm my AirPods.
“You need a shorter one.”
I’m pretty sure it’s Stella, and her voice is coming from down the hall.
“Tyler, if you use that one, you’ll drill straight through the door.”
Someone responds, but the sound is short and too low for me to catch.
“I know you can.”Her voice softens.“That’s not what I meant. You’re my brother. I’m trying to help.”
This time I catch the deep, male voice.“No… hel...p.”
“Yeah, but… “I hear the floor creak.Stella’s voice lowers, but now it sounds like she’s right outside my door.“T, I think we’re scaring her.”
