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“I know. But she kept offering them to me, and my mom always says it’s impolite to refuse food at a stranger’s house, so I kept eating them and praying for rescue.”
From four feet above her head, he smiled his dazzling smile. With the color leaching out of the sky, he looked as though he’d been lit from the inside, his teeth whiter and his skin darker than they had been this morning. Phosphorescent, almost, his bright shirt and charcoal slacks an afterimage burned onto her retinas.
He climbed down, picked up the ladder and the broken bulb, and carried them into the garage as if he owned the place.
Ellen gazed into the gathering twilight and focused on breathing.
She’d braced herself for a fight tonight, but the tussle this morning had left her so tired, and he was so much easier to be around than she’d remembered. She hadn’t been ready for this … what? This casual rapport. He made her feel safe, and feeling safe worried her.
Paging Dr. Freud.
She sank into her chair and willed herself to relax. It had taken her so long to bring the Dawsons around this afternoon, she’d missed her chance to watch the movie. By the time Henry fell asleep, she’d been ready to hang up her gloves. Couldn’t she just sip her wine and look at the empty front lawn and let him steer for a while? It was nice, sitting on her porch and talking to Caleb. He was good company.
Also, disconcertingly hot, and dangerous to her peace of mind.
And he wanted to put up a fence.
He came back out and sat beside her.
“So what were you and Nana looking at?” Ellen asked.
“Primarily the album from her lecture tour in the Netherlands. Nineteen seventy-three, she said.”
“Is that the one with Bruno and all the mustaches and leather?”
“For an hour.”
Ellen smiled, but this time the smile was mostly for Nana, so she didn’t have to second-guess it. Carly’s grandmother had traveled the world as a feminist lecturer and professional consciousness-raiser in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Camelot to take a faculty position at the college and make a home for her orphaned granddaughter. She looked like a sweet little old lady, but in fact she was as mouthy and lascivious as a frat boy, and about ten times as liberated.
“And then I spent the afternoon in the office giving myself a headache over a contract I had to sign and fax back to Breckenridge.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing, it turns out. It just took me forever to understand it.”
“Not your forte, huh?”
“I’m no good with paperwork. Anyway, to top it off, tonight I had dinner with my whole family.”
“That’s bad?”
“That’s just Wednesday night. I love them, but they find a different way to drive me crazy every week.”
She fought back all the other questions she wanted to ask. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend?
Her curiosity had no shame. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much about the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow.
“It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.”
He laced his fingers behind his head, resting his elbows against the chair back. “It has its moments. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?”
“Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry a few days a week. She’s sort of family. Both of my parents are gone.”
“What about the ex, does he help out?”
“He’s an alcoholic.”
Caleb made a pained face, a standard response to her confession about Richard. He was probably thinking the standard thoughts and would soon offer one of the standard platitudes. What a shame. How hard for you.
