by Sarah Hogle
It’s all fun and games until he tracks me down after the trash has been hauled away, tossing me rubber gloves and a mop. “Hope you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, miss big-shot event coordinator.”
I’m stretched out lazily in an empty claw-foot bathtub that inexplicably sits in the center of the ballroom, reading the smutty parts of one of Violet’s old Harlequins. He glances at the cover and a muscle in his cheek jumps.
“I’ve been getting my hands dirty since I got here,” I retort dryly. “You aren’t the only one who’s made a few trips to the dumpster, sir.”
But I don’t think I’ve appreciated the irony until now, easing the gloves over my fingers, that I’m being forced into taking up the housekeeper role again. I wish we had the budget to hire a professional cleaning crew, but we’ve got to save money wherever possible and that means fumigating, painting, scrubbing, bleaching, patching, all by ourselves. My gaze darts to the ceiling corners, where Violet might be watching us and, it can only be assumed, laughing wickedly. I am starting to visualize her with horns instead of a halo.
“Don’t mix chemicals. Make sure to keep the windows open while you clean. If you pass out, it’ll take an ambulance half an hour to get here.”
“Thanks, man.” I give him the thumbs-up, but my gloves are too long, so it just looks like I’m holding out my hand at an odd angle. “I’m aware that mixing chemicals is a no-no, but it’s good to know if I pass out you won’t even drive me to the hospital.”
“You’re the one who pointed out I could be saving money on gas,” he replies, leaving me to single-handedly fix up the first floor. It isn’t fair. He’s going to get his floor done so much faster, since he’s got all those muscles to help out. I think his workout regimen involves deadlifting logs.
You know what sucks? Not having the electricity turned on yet. If I could run a vacuum hose along the baseboards it would save my back from having to stoop and scoop debris into a dustpan every five seconds. I think a cat’s been living in here, too, because whenever I work the broom I see little cat hairs floating away from me, refusing to be dustpanned. The walls in the west wing aren’t that bad, but they do bear plenty of scuff marks. If I can rub those off, that’ll save me a paint job.
I run to the bottom of the staircase and scream up: “Have you seen the Magic Erasers?”
At first, I think he’s ignoring me. But then a heavy object clatters between the floors, between the walls. I open the broken dumbwaiter in the foyer to find a chunk of brick that sloughed off the chimney, a piece of paper taped to its front. NO. In aggressive capitals.
“You couldn’t have just yelled that?” I holler up the metal chute. “This required more work than saying no!”
I close the door and a minute later the dumbwaiter rattles again. I pull out a remote control for a toy airplane. The message taped to this one reads: will you bring me the lysol wipes
This man’s unbelievably stingy with his decibels and he’s got to have the best-preserved vocal cords ever. When he’s a hundred years old he’ll be able to sing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Grumbling, I grab the wipes from the kitchen, which is operating as our home base for cleaning supplies, and run them up the stairs.
“Down here,” he calls from the end of a hallway on my right, sticking his hand out a door to wave. I don’t make front-door deliveries. I chuck the wipes like a football right as he emerges, which means the package hits him in the neck. “Ow!”
“Sorry.”
“What’d you do that for?”
“I said sorry! Why didn’t you just go get them yourself?”
He frowns and rolls his shoulder, which in my opinion is a little dramatic. I didn’t hit his shoulder. “My legs are tired.”
“So are mine!” They aren’t, truthfully, but my arms and back are, so I want credit.
“You’re not the one going up and down stairs all day.”
“If you let me have a few rooms on this floor for my guests, I’ll be your errand girl,” I offer. “You’ll never have to come downstairs again.”
He tuts. “Not a chance.”
This is when my attention homes in on the pile of used-up Magic Erasers in the room he just vacated. They’re sitting in front of an ornate ivory wardrobe that matches one I’ve got downstairs, its built-in oval mirror reflecting my fury. “You liar.”
Wesley follows my line of sight. “Oh, those Magic Erasers. Sorry. I just used the last one.”
I seize the Lysol wipes from his hands and throw them down the dumbwaiter.
He has the nerve to go, “I didn’t really want them anyway,” at my back as I march off, stomping hard enough to rain more plaster below onto floors I just swept.
* * *
• • • • • • •
THE COMMUNAL MOOD IN Falling Stars spikes in temperature from rankled to downright irate when we decide to work right through lunch and dinner, subsisting on Violet’s expired pretzels and Wesley’s sweet tea, which he doesn’t know he’s sharing.
Night’s falling, but I don’t want to be the first one to give up. I’ve stolen a few peeks and I know he’s got four rooms upstairs totally spotless. But what’s the point of a billion rooms if you aren’t going to hold on to any furniture to put in them? It’s freaky empty up there. Even your thoughts would echo.
“We’ll have to get the electricity turned back on again,” Wesley shares when he finally lumbers downstairs for the last time. I know he’s finished for the day because he’s brought all his trash bags down with him. They reek powerfully of bleach, which knocks me back in time to Around the Mountain and its persistent chlorine smell.
Thank god this day is over. I drop my extendable feather duster, sagging along a wall.
“After the auction and estate sale, I hope we’ll have enough money left over to dig a pool,” I muse aloud.
A choked laugh bursts from Wesley’s throat. “We’ll be lucky if we make enough to cover all the costs for new flooring, new windows, new pipes, new drywall—the only pool you can afford is one of those round plastic kiddie ones from the dollar store.”
“Pessimist.”
“One of us has to be realistic.”
“I get it,” I groan. “You’re Mr. Reality Man and you have no tolerance for good vibes or whimsy, but you know, dude, you’re really starting to bum me out.”
“Mr. Reality Man? What kind of superhero lottery did I lose? And for your limited information, you aren’t the only one who wants this place to succeed in some capacity.” As an animal sanctuary. Which will not, by the way, turn a profit. How am I the impractical one here?
He continues to tally up costs. An electrician. New insulation, which he tells me will save us money on heating and cooling in the long run, which I already knew. Mansplainer. I suggest solar panels and he’s visibly jealous he didn’t think of it first. “Should fix that dumbwaiter,” he mentions. I want to crack a joke using the word dumb but I’m too tired.
“We’ll need to hire a real landscaper,” I say, adding to the list.
“I’m a real landscaper.”
The waist-high grass twenty feet from Falling Stars doubles over in laughter. “Are you, though? The grounds are a mess.”
“It’s an ecosystem.”
Lazy justification for a mess. “When I stayed here,” I reply airily, and he’s heard me begin enough sentences this way that he’s already rolling his eyes, “the yard was immaculate. Neat hedges. Short grass. There were violets and roses and all sorts of beautiful flowers that you could actually see, not covered up by weeds.”
“Those aren’t weeds.” He gestures to the wall, as if I have X-ray vision and can view what lies outside. “That’s Cain’s reedgrass. Smoky Mountain manna grass.”
“Well, it looks awful.”
“Ugh. I can’t—you are just—” He shoves a hand through his hair. At the
rate he’s doing that, he’s going to end the week with bald patches.
“What? It does. Don’t you know anything about gardening? You want to get plants that are pleasant to look at. Tulips. Snapdragons. I’ll send you a link.”
“Violet specifically instructed me to grow those plants in large quantities because they’re endangered species, along with Virginia meadowsweet and spreading avens and Blue Ridge catchfly, because conservation is more important than the useless aesthetics of neat hedges. I’ll send you a link.”
“Oh.” I stand tall, but I don’t feel it.
Wesley takes all the height I’ve just given up and adds it to his own, towering over me. “Nature conservation was important to Violet. I don’t know if it was when you stayed here, but she hired me after she heard about the diminishing numbers of Fraser fir and ginseng being poached from the parks. She felt it was her responsibility, with considerable acreage at her disposal, to replenish what humans have destroyed.” He’s getting all worked up over this. “Is it pretty? Not necessarily. Sometimes chaos serves a larger purpose.”
“But you want to raze it, you said. For your pig nursing home.”
“First of all, this is not the first time you’ve mentioned pigs,” he tells me, vehement. “When did I ever say pigs? Not that I’m not going to get pigs, but you keep going back to that one animal—” He waves a hand. “Never mind! I’m not razing all of it, just a few acres, and none of the endangered plants. Some of the property is wild but can be altered without hurting the environment.”
“So . . . some of the property is simply neglected, you mean.”
“You think that’s neglect?” He angles his head, facial muscles clenching, and takes a stride toward me, then another, getting up close in my personal space. Oh, wow. When his eyes flash like that, they don’t remind me of root beer or bronze coins. They’re daggers glinting in starlight. He’s never invaded my personal space before, as if I am an ogre to be shied from, so I must have really touched a nerve. “You have no idea how much work I’ve put into that land. Weeding out invasive species and adding flowers to attract endangered birds. Over a hundred boxes put up for native pollinator bees. There’s a method to the madness.”
I don’t have anything intelligent to say. “Okay, but it still doesn’t look good.”
If I could read auras, I think Wesley’s would be black as the night sky right now. His wild stare fixes on me for a tick too long, which sends my nervous system spiraling; my automatic reaction is to smile, and he definitely takes it the wrong way. He stalks off and doesn’t speak to me for days.
Chapter 9
WISH 3. MAYBELL, DEAR, I’d be thrilled if you painted a mural in the ballroom.
Wesley was right: there isn’t going to be enough money in the budget for an in-ground pool. I’m gratified, however, to report that the estate sale netted a nice chunk of change. Which Wesley didn’t help with. At all. He hid up in his bedroom the whole time and wouldn’t come down even when I tried to tempt him with vegetarian hamburgers, because he thought it was a trap. (It was. I needed help lifting a chair into the back of a teenage girl’s truck, but he saw us struggling from his window and came out to help. He made up for the moment of niceness by glaring excessively.)
If I can’t offer my guests a refreshing swim in a pool, they can at least stand in the ballroom and marvel at my giant painting of a waterfall lagoon.
I’m having trouble making the paint do what I want with it; it’s dripping down the wainscoting instead of staying put. I try to blend colors à la Bob Ross and they’re too faint, more like the memory of color than true pigment. My trees are pale green blobs. I can’t get the branches to distinguish themselves, so I add black for definition and end up with bigger blobs. I’ve got enormous, washed-out black blobs on either side of a blue smear that’s supposed to be a waterfall.
“What do you think?” I ask aloud. It gets lonely, so I like to imagine that Violet and Victor are hanging around, keeping me company. Victor’s finally out of his stuffy old bedroom I still can’t bring myself to enter, relaxing with some ghost magazines in the library. Good Housecreeping and (After)Life. Victor loved his magazines. Whenever I see a TV Guide at the grocery store checkout, I’m transported back to the ottoman at Victor’s bedside, reading him the “Cheers & Jeers” section. His favorite show was The King of Queens and he told me, every single time I watched an episode with him, that nobody has range like Jerry Stiller.
“Perfection,” I reply to myself, because that’s exactly what Victor would have said about my disaster mural.
Violet, I think, would gently tell me I’d done a good job, and then at one in the morning I’d walk in on her redoing my efforts. “Thought I’d help just a tiny bit,” she’d say guiltily. Then she’d distract me with spontaneous chocolate chip pancakes. She made them for dinner sometimes, as a special treat, which I thought was the most incredible thing. Chocolate chip pancakes for dinner! In our pajamas! Don’t tell anybody, she’d mock-whisper, even though the only other person at home was Victor and he loved to encourage the indulgence in special treats.
“Violet, I think I should have hired a professional for this,” I say. The summer I lived here, I found a Garfield comic book in the library and promptly zipped through a comic-drawing phase. Violet and Victor were overly complimentary of my clearly plagiarized comic strip about a lazy rat who loved spaghetti, and made me believe I was a genius. Maybe Violet asked me to paint a mural because she thought I’d grow up to be more talented.
The sky in my mural looks like the sea, and the lagoon looks like . . . someone who doesn’t know how to paint tried to create a lagoon and didn’t take her time with it. I don’t have the patience to nurture the skill required for this.
When I was a kid, this room was the one and only fragment of Falling Stars I privately thought could be improved. When you tell a ten-year-old you have a ballroom, she’s going to picture the one from Beauty and the Beast. And then when she finds out the floor has shaggy peach carpeting, the windows are adorned with heavy floral drapery you’d find in a Best Western, and the piano isn’t even an old-timey-looking piano but rather an upright piano that belongs in a church—well, that child is going to be underwhelmed.
“We’ll get a proper grand piano,” I murmur, dabbing my paintbrush into a blue puddle. “Or a harpsichord. The carpet needs to be ripped out, for sure. You can’t throw a lively masquerade ball in these conditions.”
“A lively what?”
I twist on my stool, paintbrush dribbling cerulean across my skirt. Wesley needs a goddamn bell around his neck.
“Uhh . . .” I cast about for a good lie. You can’t have a ballroom and not throw a holiday masquerade ball—the idea is madness—but he needn’t know this particular event is on his horizon until the day he walks in and gets a load of me and my forty finest guests outfitted in Regency attire. Because yes, costumes are absolutely necessary. “A baseball. I want to throw a baseball.”
He raises his eyebrows. I smile with all my teeth and start estimating how much work it would be to put down a baseball diamond on the property. Everything I know about baseball can be traced back to that scene from Twilight.
Then his gaze skids onto the mural.
Okay, so it doesn’t look like an expert did it. I’m not an artist, except when it comes to flavors, icing, and sprinkles. But he doesn’t have to look at my painting like that, with his lips closed around an unspoken Hmm.
“At you,” I snap. “I’m going to throw a baseball at you, if you don’t change your face.”
Wesley endeavors to change his face. “Are you using watercolors?”
“Yeah.”
He appraises the wall as if in pain.
“Why? Does it matter?” I love watercolors. They’re so dreamy and serene.
Groaning deep in his throat, he throws his head back and walks straight out of the room.
I sta
re after him. “Does it matter?”
I squint at my painting, straining to view it through someone else’s eyes. It isn’t recommended. I slip back behind my own eyes again and ponder the merits of paint-by-numbers wall hangings. Would that be considered cheating?
Wesley returns with a large, rectangular plastic tub loaded with bottles of craft paint. “Whoa!” I paw through the rainbow of colors, some brand-new, some a quarter full, with rivulets of dried paint encircling the caps. “Where’d you find all this?”
“Upstairs.”
I shake a bottle of sunflower yellow. “These are fresh, though. Do you think Violet—”
“These are acrylics,” he interrupts quietly. “I think you’ll find them easier to work with.”
“Okay, great.” I squeeze some admiral blue onto a paper plate. “Thanks.”
Wesley leaves, and he’s right, the acrylics are a way better medium. The paint stays where I ask it to, thick and vibrant. I begin to hum, swishing my brush, until Wesley reappears and plucks the brush from my grasp. I frown at my empty hand, still in midair, until he prods a new brush between my fingers.
“Use this one,” he tells me, and disappears again.
But not for long.
Every time I turn around, he’s hovering in the doorway. I can’t focus while he’s doing that. “What?”
He looks like he wants to backseat-paint so badly and can barely hold it in, pressing his knuckles to his lips, other hand cupping his elbow.
“Nothing,” he mutters.
I lower my brush, which has smoother bristles than the last one and applies paint more evenly. “Come on, spit it out.”
“It’s just . . .” He begins to point, then tugs his fingers through his hair sheepishly.
“Listen, if you happen to have any tips, I’m all ears. I don’t know why Violet asked me to paint a mural. I haven’t painted since art class in high school.”
Wesley loses his hold on his restraint and drags over a chair, positioning it two feet from mine. He second-guesses the distance between us, then drags it another foot in the opposite direction.