Page 31 of Once Upon a Fall

“Some . . . help?” I ask, confused.

“Yeah. You have a lot on your plate; I thought maybe you could use a hand.”

“Um, wow. Thank you, but I’m good. I’ve got it handled.”

What am I saying? I don’t have anything handled. Wasn’t I just telling myself I’d take all the help I could get? Here’s a man—a handsome one, even—offering to help me, and I’m saying no?

His lips pull into that straight line. “Okay,” he says. “Just thought I’d offer.”

He turns around to leave.

“Wait,” I say, just as he walks out the door and is about to shut it. “On second thought, if you really can’t sleep, I could use the help.”

He turns back toward me. “What would you like me to do?”

Dean

The prince announced he would stay a while longer. He had several excellent reasons. Chief among them, raccoons.

“Hmm, I don’t know,” Rosie says, her thumbs hooked under the straps of her pink overalls. “I think it needs to go a touch to the left.”

I move the picture slightly left.

“Better?” I ask from atop a step stool, holding framed artwork with one hand and a level in the other.

“I think so?” she says, not sounding all that confident.

I offered to help Rosie one time, Friday night, because I couldn’t sleep. Since then, I’ve painted trim, patched some holes, and then painted the walls the color “Cinderella Blue.” This morning I’m on a step stool with a level, making sure a glass slipper print hangs straight. This was after hanging a gallery of pumpkins above the bed.

I’ve been asking myself how I got here, but I know. I can’t do anything with the farm until the raccoons are out. The only company that called me back came out Saturday, took one look at how many were up there, and said they didn’t have the right equipment. So, I’m basically in a holding pattern. And somehow that holding pattern turned into helping Rosie with the inn.

I knew Friday night, when she told me she had to finish the rooms and also head up the festival, that there was no way she’d get it done. So when I couldn’t sleep, instead of adding to my list of ways this business could run better, I figured helping would be a better use of my time.

I didn’t expect it to turn into an entire weekend thing, and now here I am on Monday, still helping.

“My arm is falling asleep,” I tell a still-contemplating Rosie. I also want to tell her we don’t have the time to hem and haw over these small details when she’s still got three rooms to finish.

“Sorry,” she says. “I think it’s good.”

“Good,” I say before handing her the level and pulling a pencil from my back pocket to mark the spot for the nail.

I set the picture on the floor, carefully leaning it up against a wall before picking up the hammer and box of nails I’ve set to the side.

Rosie goes back to wiping down one of the side tables she found at an estate sale, humming a song while she does.

I’ve learned a lot about Rosie over the past few days. Her approach is chaos. There’s no order to it. Tools are everywhere, and she jumps between tasks like a browser with forty tabs open. She starts four things to finish one and finishes a fifth she never mentioned starting, and still does things like going to church with her family on Sunday, even with a task list a mile long.

It’s been hard to watch her process (or lack of one) and keep my mouth shut. But I’ve learned that unsolicited advice doesn’t get taken. People don’t change unless they want to.

Rosie is genuinely skilled, though. Underneath the chaos, she knows what she’s doing as far as renovations go and claims she learned it all by watching YouTube videos. Which is impressive.

She works past exhaustion, fueled by Dr. Pepper and some sort of Energizer Bunny energy that, if bottled, would make billions.

Also, she hums when she’s painting. Or she talks. And talks. I don’t think she likes silence all that much; she usually fills it with music, stories about the town, or updates on which Edna is which. And then there’s the rambling and the apologizing for the rambling.

Her chatter is mostly light and easygoing, but then she’ll drop something heavy in the middle of a story, like how her mom passed away ten years ago, and then move on as if she never said it.

By every metric I’d normally use, she should be exhausting. But . . . she isn’t.