“The door hit it.”
“What door?”
“The one to your cellar. Come on,” he murmured, reaching for the gas can himself, “I could use something cold to drink.”
She snagged the can before he could, her sense of indebtedness growing stronger as they cut toward the little house her husband had repaired. Logic told her Justin couldn’t be hurt too badly. After all, he’d worked all afternoon hauling boards without a hint of hesitation or complaint. That she’d been aware of, anyway. But whether or not he’d been in pain before, he was now. And he’d hurt himself protecting her and her child.
“We’ll have to go in the front,” she said as they approached her house a few minutes later. “I have iced tea or lemonade. Which would you prefer?”
Leaving the chain saw by the can of gas near the back porch, Justin told her he didn’t care as long as it was cold and wet, and followed her past a propane tank at the side of the house. He was pretty sure from her preoccupation that she was thinking about the tree she needed to clear from her back door. He didn’t doubt that she wanted to get started on it.
All he wanted was to get his car running and get home.
That was what he’d been telling himself, anyway.
He pushed his fingers through his hair as he took the steps up her front porch, the motion more habit than exasperation. He wasn’t anywhere near as frustrated by the delays as he should have been. But then, he hadn’t intended to accomplish anything today anyway, he reminded himself, pulling open the screen door Emily had already disappeared through. That was the only possible explanation for why he didn’t feel like pacing out of his skin. Delays of any kind usually made him crazy.
The interior of the little house was dim. It was also cooler than it was outside. Drawn as much by curiosity as that coolness, he stepped over the threshold and let the screen door bump closed behind him.
Emily was nowhere to be seen. He could hear her, though. Her gentle voice filtered through a doorway to his right as she spoke to her baby. It sounded very much as if she were commiserating over how awful it must feel to be wet, and making assurances that she would remedy that situation in no time at all.
Figuring she must be changing her baby’s diaper, he pushed his hands into his pockets and took another step into a room that smelled faintly of cinnamon and lemon oil.
The starched white curtains had been drawn to keep out the heat of the sun, but as his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could easily see around the neat and sparsely furnished space.
To his left, a stone fireplace took up most of the wall. Across from it, a simple wooden bench was filled with embroidered pillows. Beside him, a rocking chair had a small quilt draped over its back.
The reds and blues in the quilt were muted in the pale light, but the exquisite workmanship in the beautifully crafted piece was evident. Resisting the urge to touch it, he glanced toward the old treadle sewing machine beneath the narrow front window. Judging from it and the oil lamps atop a crowded book case, it appeared that Emily was into antiques.
She also seemed to have an eclectic sense of philosophy. Two small posters lay on the braided rag rug that covered most of the wood floor, presumably waiting to be put into the inexpensive frames propped against the wall. The smaller one was of a secluded mountain stream cascading into an enormous waterfall. The flowing script across the bottom read Go with the Flow. The poster next to it, larger and presumably for her daughter’s room, was of a teddy bear in a pink tutu looking out a window. It simply said Dream.
“She’s happier now,” he heard Emily say as she emerged from the bedroom and headed for the doorway across from him. “She wanted her bassinet. Please. Come in,” she invited, only to come to a halt when she reached the doorway herself.
Over her shoulder he could see a large wood table graced with a bouquet of flowers. Other than that, he could see nothing in the roomy, Spartan space but the basics. An old stove, an older refrigerator and white painted cabinets. He couldn’t even see a sink, but that was because the limb occupying her back porch blocked the early evening light—along with the sink itself. Part of that limb had punched through the window and was hanging like a bushy verdant waterfall nearly to the floor.
He heard her pull a deep breath, saw her slender shoulders rise. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to figure out that the Fates were having a field day with this woman. In the past few months, she’d lost her husband, had a child and been shafted—whether or not she wanted to admit it—by an itinerant who’d split with a chunk of her hard-earned cash. Considering the way the Fates had jerked her around today, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the broken window over the sink hadn’t just supplied the proverbial last straw.
The thought had him reaching for her shoulder. Before he could touch her, she let out a sigh and stepped away.
Frowning at himself, wondering what he’d thought he was going to do, he shoved his hands into his pockets and watched her head for the window by the refrigerator. She pushed open the unruffled white curtains to let in what light there was, then took an oil lamp from the top of the refrigerator and set in on the table.
He was thinking that the electricity must be out here, too, when she stooped to pick up the bar of soap that been knocked to the floor and headed for the sink, picking her way through the glass on the floor as she went. As if she tackled a jungle of foliage in her kitchen every day, she rustled her way through the leaves until she found what she was looking for.
Metal squeaked over the rush of water as his glance slipped down her long, windblown braid. Life here was as foreign to him as life on Mars. But nothing he’d encountered so far puzzled him more than this woman’s almost philosophical acceptance of what would have had anyone else he knew reaching for antacids, at the very least.
It was almost as if it hadn’t occurred to her to be upset just now. Luisa, his long-suffering cleaning lady, would have thrown her hands into the air and railed at the litany of saints she evoked for everything from world peace to a lost sock had she been faced with this mess. His mother—along with nearly every other woman he knew—would have stared blindly at the disorder, expecting someone, anyone, to materialize from somewhere and tend to it, lest she wreck her manicure.
Emily simply worked around it.
“You might want to wash,” she said, drying her hands with a towel she pulled from the refrigerator handle. The towel went over her shoulder as she reached into a cabinet. “The bathroom’s through there,” she said, nodding to a doorway on the other side of the refrigerator. “That would be easier than trying to get to the pump in here.”
He’d barely glanced past her when his brow furrowed. “The pump?”
“The water pump. I don’t have faucets.”
Curious, he pushed aside the bough hiding the gunmetal gray sink and stared at the tall, upright and decidedly old-fashioned metal spout with its long wooden handle. “This place must have been here since the turn of the century.”
“It has,” she replied over the clink of ice in a glass. “Mr. Clancy said the building was here when his father bought the place years ago. They sold it to us along with these two acres of land in exchange for a year’s work from Daniel. He worked for him for a wage after the land became ours.”
“You didn’t want to modernize?”
She’d wanted to. She’d wanted to keep the rose print wallpaper, too, tattered as it had been. She’d never had anything pretty on her walls before. But Daniel had stripped it and painted everything white.
“We were used to a simple house,” she said, reminding herself that this winter, she would repaint every room. If she got up her nerve, she might even pick colors that were outrageously bold. The only room she had painted so far was Anna’s and that was soft, shell pink. “The walls and the foundation were good, so Daniel only had to repair the roof and replace the windows.”
Daniel