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“Ohh, it will be!” Aunt Nattie’s voice came from around the corner of what she had always called the drawing room, and she emerged, her silver hair tied up in a bandanna, and white smears across her cheeks and down her arms. “A lot of paint and elbow grease required!” She smiled widely as her eyes landed on me.
“Hello, Aunt Nattie.”
“Rock Stevens! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” She threw herself at me, giving me a hug that made me feel like a kid again, except that I was about two feet taller than my aunt, so I had to lean down to return it.
Aunt Nattie stepped back and turned to Drea. “Oh! And you’ve met Drea!” Her smile widened further, and her light eyes danced. “Are the two of you... an item?”
“No!” Drea practically shouted it, and if I hadn’t had such a healthy sense of self-esteem, it might have hurt my feelings a bit. Was it so far-fetched that she might go out with me?
Would I go out with her?
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t noticed the way her sexy little smile teased at the side of her pretty pink lips, or the way her tight little waist gave way to a very voluptuous backside that I might have thought about a little more than I should.
“We are actually here to settle a dispute,” I told my aunt. “But first, muffins.” I nodded at Drea, who had taken back the basket of muffins and held it in front of her, and now she held them out to my aunt, her eyes narrowing at me.
“Ooh, are these from the Muffin Tin, Drea? Did you make them?”
“No, they’re from my house, actually. Rock made them.” Noah gave me a questioning look at this news, and Drea muttered, “and then didn’t bother to clean up after himself.”
“What happened to Wanda?” I asked my aunt.
“Oh dear,” she said, seeming to understand a bit more than we’d told her about the situation at hand. “Let’s take these into the kitchen and figure this all out, shall we?”
“If we had a kitchen, that would be easier,” Noah said.
“We have a kitchen,” Aunt Nattie said, leading us down the hallway and taking a left turn into what I remembered as the kitchen. Only this room had been gutted almost completely. A refrigerator stood to one side, and a sink was still hooked up beneath the window overlooking the backyard and the riverbank. Everything else seemed to have been removed, and there were piles of discarded tile and a bank of disassembled cabinets on the floor. In the center of it all was the kitchen table I practically grew up at, eight chairs flanking the enormous wooden structure.
“Sit down!” Aunt Nattie instructed us. “Coffee?”
“Uh, sure,” I said, wondering how she planned to make coffee. Aunt Nattie went to the discarded cabinets leaning against the wall and scrounged through one until she emerged again with a coffee machine, which she sat on the floor and plugged into an outlet that looked a lot like a fire hazard.
“That’ll just be a minute,” she told us, taking a muffin and then seating herself next to Noah. “Now, to what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I came home last night to find this man naked on my couch!” Drea had evidently been holding that in for a while, because it came out forcefully. With a lot of rage. It was kind of hot, actually.
“And I was peacefully dozing on my own couch watching the game, when this hooligan broke into my house and began making demands.”
“Hooligan?” Noah asked, chuckling.
“Oh dear,” Aunt Nattie said, sounding as if she’d been caught at something. “I’m so sorry, kids. This is my fault.”
“Aunt Nattie,” I said. “I have been paying rent all this time. Did you rent out my house to someone else? With all my things still in it?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds just terrible.”
“Mom!” Noah looked horrified as he grabbed a muffin from the basket and pulled off the paper. “He’s family. You’re double dipping?”
“No, no,” she said. “It isn’t like that. I didn’t mean to.” She squinted her eyes and put her hands to her forehead like her next thought hurt her. “Drea, darling. Can you tell me please. Is there anyone living in the unit next to you?”
“Yes,” Drea said. “Mr. Mulligan. And about forty cats.”
“Oh dear,” Aunt Nattie said.
“Mom, seems like you’d better explain now,” Noah said.
“Or,” I suggested, “you give little Drea here a room at your inn, and we’re good.”
“Little?” Drea fumed. “And no, that would make nothing good. That would still be bad. You’re family. You stay at the inn.” She turned to my aunt and Noah. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to yell. This...” she searched for a word. “Thispersonis infuriating.” She made a face at me as she called me a person that had me doing my best to stifle a giggle. She was adorable. And “person” was her worst insult?
