The Sweet Spot

by Joan Livingston

  Edie didn’t start going out until Amber was nearly four, and only because Aunt Leona or her in-laws took her overnight. She knew it was unlikely she would find true love at the Do-Si-Do, but she had fun. The men knew and she knew no one could ever take Gil’s place.

  She saw Walker at the Do, and, of course, his parents’ store. Two springs ago, when he was renovating a home in the town’s main village, he came into the store three or four times a day on a coffee run or for lunch. If he were there with his crew, he’d joke with her like so many of the men. Then he started coming alone, seeking her out.

  One afternoon, Walker came into the store’s office. He sat on the desk’s corner, holding his cowboy hat, his hands rotating the brim, so it appeared he was steering it. He talked about paperwork and being the boss while he stared at the front of her dress. She stood to put a folder in the file cabinet, and as she passed, he grabbed her arm, pulling her so close his breath warmed her. He kissed her, and he kept kissing her. When she dropped the folder to the floor, its papers rustled as if a bird had been flushed fast from the woods.

  “What say I come over later?”

  His voice was full of breath and moan, and she let him put his hands all over her.

  The next day, Aunt Leona asked why Walker’s truck drove past her house late at night and didn’t go back for several hours. Edie said he was looking at some repairs the house needed. She didn’t fool her aunt then, or when she asked several times afterward.

  “Back for more repairs, eh?” Leona said with a sly grin.

  Walker made Edie feel wanted when they were together, but it would never be enough to fill her. Only Gil did that.

  Walker said once it was a huge mistake he married Sharon.

  “I dunno why we’re even together,” he told Edie.

  She placed her fingertips over his lips.

  Now she slipped her hand from Walker as she tried to get up, but his fingers cuffed her wrist to keep her from leaving.

  “Where’re you going?” he asked.

  “To the bathroom.”

  “Stay here.”

  Edie rolled onto her side to face him.

  “How’s the new job?” she asked.

  He frowned.

  “Damn New Yorkers. You know who I mean, the couple that bought the old Franklin place on the south end of town. They can’t make up their fuckin’ minds.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The woman wants wainscoting in the dining room. The man wants a chair rail. I joked they might have to flip a coin cause one of ’em didn’t want what the other one did. Maybe they’ll do both. You know how New Yorkers are.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “First, they asked for exposed beams in the kitchen. Now they’re not sure it’s what they want. They’re gonna get back to me on that one.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “On top of that, one of my framers quit mid-week. Couldn’t hack the work. Remember I told you about Tom? I had my doubts he’d last anyway, but I thought I was doin’ his family a favor. Dumb fuck can’t hold down a job for long. I feel sorry for his wife and kids.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “To top if off, the lumberyard messed up my material order. It set me back today. I hate that shit.”

  “You’ll fix it, Walker,” she said. “You always do.”

  Walker sighed. The air came from deep inside him.

  “Yeah, Edie, I will. Hey, I see you got a new neighbor. You meet him yet?”

  Edie shook her head.

  “I heard about him though. I think he’s the one who was at Gil’s ceremony on Memorial Day.”

  “I saw him that day, too. Seems like he was in an accident or something.”

  “I need to go over. Pop and Aunt Leona already have. They say he’s really nice.”

  “You do that. At least, I won’t have to worry about him.”

  “Why do you say that?” Edie asked.

  “You haven’t seen him up close. He’s one ugly son of a bitch. I can’t see a woman wanting to be with him for free.”

  “Walker, you’re not being very nice. Suppose he was in Vietnam like Gil?”

  “Then I feel real sorry for him.” He gazed around the room. “We’ll have to do this again.”

  Edie shifted.

  “Not so fast.” His hand closed tighter. “What’s with you and Lonny?”

  “Him? We’re just having some laughs,” Edie said.

  “I heard you both left at the same time the other night. You sleep with him?”

  “We left at the same time? So what. Walker, you’re hurting my wrist.”

  His lips opened and shut, but he didn’t speak. He loosened his grip.

  “Tell me more,” he said.

  “I was having fun, just like you and me are having fun.”

  “Fun. Is that what this is?”

  “What else can it be, Walker?”

  “I’m hoping for more.”

  “More?”

  He began kissing her neck. Edie’s chest rose and fell in a slow roll as he brought his hand to her.

  Real Late

  Pop was stretched on his recliner. His open mouth poured out a long, wet snore. His eyes opened when Edie tapped his shoulder.

  “Thanks, Pop. I’m gonna bring Amber home.” Edie cocked her head toward the couch, where her daughter slept beneath a worn quilt. “Everything okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled. “She’s no trouble at all.”

  “Want me to shut off the TV?”

  “Nah, leave it. I wanna rest my eyes a bit.”

  She did as he asked before she woke her daughter. Amber was too heavy to carry, so she guided her next door. The girl clung to her.

  “What time is it?” Amber asked.

  “Late, real late,” her mother answered.

  Neighbors

  Harlan Doyle sat on the porch of his grandmother’s house. His long legs were stretched, and his back rested against the narrow clapboards while he contemplated the day ahead. The rain stopped in the middle of the night, and now the sun drew moisture from the ground. His bad leg ached from it.

  He glanced at the sagging tent pitched in the front yard. He salvaged the contents now piled beside him on the porch’s floorboards. He didn’t relish sleeping here in the open or inside the house, which wasn’t worth living in yet although it might be his only recourse if it rained again. He slapped at the mosquitoes, relentless this early hour.

  The birds rejoiced in the trees around him. Last night, an owl’s call woke him twice, but it was a sound he found interesting.

  Harlan was tall and hawk-nosed, with tired, green eyes that made him look as if he possessed wisdom and kindness, and long, brown hair pulled into a tail. He used to have a pleasant face, but scars cut deep ridges along both sides. The accident messed his body, and the doctors in Mexico did a lousy job patching it, but he was done being angry with that and other things.

  His parents gave him this house, which his grandmother last owned. His uncle, his father’s only brother, reported after a visit last summer the place would fall into the cellar hole unless something was done to save it. The property had acreage, but most of it was wetland. The brothers settled on a price, and Harlan took the house and this chance for a fresh start, back where his family once lived.

  When he arrived, the house was boarded, its clapboards stripped to the gray wood. Trash filled the rooms. Anything left behind after his grandmother died was broken. He spent the last few days prying sheets of plywood off the windows, ridding the house of the small animals that lived there, and figuring how to make it his home. It would take work, and he couldn’t do it alone, but now he was here, so he’d see it through to the end.

  The first time Harlan remembered visiting this town, he was maybe six, and he rode in Da
ddy’s Cadillac from Jacksonville, Florida, one summer. Daddy and Mom took turns. Daddy was a better driver although Mom complained when he used his knees to hold the steering wheel as he rolled himself a smoke or opened a can of beer.

  Harlan stayed in the back seat, stuffed alongside whatever they couldn’t fit in the trunk. He hardly left Florida, and he wondered how different back home, as his father called it, would look as he stared out the window at the fields, swamps, and forests beyond the interstate’s guardrails. He read license plates and listened to the radio, but it was too long a trip, and he found his parents’ conversations uninteresting, except when they talked about money and relatives. They started out teasing and fun, but then their voices got sharp edges, and they didn’t speak for a while.

  Harlan lay on the back seat, tossing a baseball. A couple of times it hit the ceiling, and his eyes met his father’s in the rearview mirror.

  “Hey, buddy, one more time, and I’m chucking the ball out the window,” his father said in a low, even tone that showed he meant business.

  His mother turned around. Her hair, so blonde it was almost white, bounced around her shoulders. She kissed the air with lips as pink as petals.

  “Mind your father, honey. It’s a long ride,” she said.

  The sky seemed small in Conwell. Daddy said it was because the hills and woods closed you in, but it was green, and the houses were larger than those in Florida. Daddy stopped the car in the driveway of his grandparents’ house, and they were stretching the stiffness from their bodies when his grandmother and grandfather came outside to greet them. Daddy grew up here before he went overseas during World War II. He saw fighting in Japan and met Harlan’s mother on a hospital base when he came back wounded. Daddy had been back to visit, and Mom, when they were first married, but this time the whole family came on vacation.

  His grandfather and grandmother appeared old, not the kind of grandparents who would play with him. His great-grandmother, who sat in a wheelchair, had only one leg hanging beneath the hem of her dress. His father warned him Great-Granny lost the leg because she had diabetes, but she wasn’t what he imagined. She was a heavy woman, so the one leg she had left was as stout as a fence post.

  “Come here, Harlan. Let me get a look at you,” Great-Granny said, gesturing with her finger. “I believe he favors you most, Aldrich.”

  Harlan stayed a few feet away while the woman waited for her hug. He knew he should, and he was nearly ready when Mom dropped a stuffed alligator onto Great-Granny’s lap.

  “This is for you,” Mom said brightly.

  Great-Granny yelped and brushed the gator onto the floor, where it bounced so hard it appeared the stuffed critter was leaping to bite off her last good leg. Daddy started chuckling when Mom tossed the gator onto the coffee table and swore beneath her breath.

  “Say, Mother, what do you have there?” His grandfather’s eyes went from one person to another. “Isn’t that critter something?”

  For the next several days, Daddy took Harlan swimming, fishing, and riding around on the dirt roads in his big Caddy, the dirt kicking up behind its back tires. They went to the general store for something cold to drink. A fan from the ceiling pushed air around the store with broad paddles. His relatives complained about the heat since they arrived, but it couldn’t touch a Florida summer.

  One night he and Daddy played cards in his grandparents’ kitchen while Mom watched TV in the living room. His grandparents already went to bed. Daddy drank beer and gave Harlan his own bottle of Coke. He taught him how to play Go Fish and groaned when Harlan managed to beat him.

  “You little weasel, you got me that time,” Daddy said, and then he blew across the top of his beer bottle.

  “Pipe down in there,” Mom called from the other room. “There’re some old people trying to sleep in this house.”

  “You don’t look so old to me,” his father shouted back.

  Harlan giggled when Mom came rushing into the room, pretending she was mad at Daddy, but they ended up kissing in the kitchen. Mom twisted away, and Daddy slapped her bottom.

  “I’ll get you later,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  Mom wiggled her hips when she left the room.

  He came with his parents to Conwell a few times after that, including once for his grandfather’s funeral. He didn’t know anyone, except family.

  Harlan glanced up when a wild animal broke through the underbrush in the field beyond the large barn. It was a pasture when this was a farm, he remembered from his visits. Now blueberry bushes, briars, and scrubby trees, birch and juniper, sprang from the ground. This was the original house on the road, named for his family, early settlers in Conwell. A century ago, a Doyle built the three houses on this road, but the other two have since left the family.

  He met two of his neighbors. The old man, who was supposed to watch the place for his family, was the first. A nosy so-and-so, Benny Sweet stared at him squarely in the face, reading it, as he welcomed the warm beer Harlan offered him. Benny quizzed him on his plans. A daughter, who’s a widow, and a granddaughter lived with him. His son-in-law was killed in Vietnam.

  “A real nice guy,” Benny Sweet told him, sucking at the inside of his mouth. “Rotten luck it happened.”

  Yesterday, Benny’s sister visited, sounding the car’s horn until he came outside. She stayed in the driver’s seat, head bobbing, her hair a vicious shade of red. Harlan explained what he was doing, how he planned eventually to convert the barn into a workshop. He told her he built and refinished furniture as a trade. The moving van with his tools and household things should be here next week. Leona Sweet, as she introduced herself, was as forward as her brother, and Harlan felt self-conscious his clothes were so dirty and sweaty.

  The power company promised him electricity Monday, and he was still working on the phone. Somebody was coming next week to check the well’s pump in the cellar.

  Harlan glanced at his watch. He needed to get rolling. He should go to the city, about twenty or so miles away, to shop for a stove and refrigerator, but for now he was content using his cook stove and a cooler. Besides, he needed to get rid of the trash left in this house. He had piles of it. The dump was only open two times a week, Wednesday afternoon and all day Saturday, but his neighbor, Benny, who ran the place, told him he would be there later this morning to move piles of trash around with a dozer. Though the dump wouldn’t be officially open, this being Friday, Harlan could bring a couple of loads.

  Benny winked when he said, “It’ll be just us neighbors.”

  Harlan looked toward the end of the driveway, where a woman walked along its grassy edge. The hem of her dress swayed as she moved. He guessed she was Benny Sweet’s daughter. He couldn’t remember her name, but he recognized her from the time he stopped at the center of town on Memorial Day. He had just arrived, pushing to make the final leg of his cross-country trip, so he drove all night, staying at a rest area for a few hours to sleep. He parked the pickup when he saw the crowd. It turned out to be a ceremony. He remembered the woman’s pretty face softened by sadness. The girl beside her held a framed picture of a soldier standing near a helicopter.

  “Hey, there,” she called to Harlan, and when she was closer, “My name’s Edie St. Claire. I’m your next-door neighbor.”

  Harlan pulled himself upright. His bad leg felt dead and useless, so he punched it a bit to get it moving, feeling embarrassed. Edie kept smiling as if she didn’t notice. He was on his feet and stretching himself upright. He nodded.

  “I’m Harlan. Harlan Doyle.”

  She stood at the bottom of the steps. She held something wrapped in aluminum foil.

  “I know who you are. Pop told me about you. So did my Aunt Leona. I hear your truck go by. I brought you something.” Her hand swung forward. “This is for you. Banana bread. I made it myself this morning. It has real walnuts.”

  Feeling too tall and a
wkward standing on the porch above this woman, he limped down the steps. He took the bread. It was still warm.

  “That was awfully nice of you,” he told her.

  Edie glanced around. Harlan saw what she saw.

  “You got a lot to do here.”

  “I work with wood.”

  “Work with wood. What’s that mean?”

  “I build furniture. One-of-a-kind pieces.”

  “Fancy stuff?”

  “Sometimes.” He grinned. “My tools are supposed to get here soon.”

  Her head tipped to one side.

  “You gonna sell the house when you’re done?”

  “No. I’m planning to live here for good.”

  “For good? Really? People usually fix up these old places to make money.”

  She came nearer. Her blue eyes opened wider. He felt himself smile.

  “Not me. This house belonged to my family.”

  She laughed as she gestured toward the tent.

  “You’d better hurry up then. Winter always comes faster around here than we think, and your tent’s not gonna keep you very warm.”

  He nodded. Edie only came up to his shoulders. She didn’t seem to mind being this close to a man she just met.

  “I was going to go into town to find a roofer. I don’t have a phone yet. I thought I’d use the payphone near the store.” He slapped at his right thigh. “Bum leg. It’d be tough for me going up and down a ladder carrying bundles of shingles.”

  She studied his leg and then his face.

  “Were you in the war?” she asked quietly. “Is that how it happened?”

  “I was in an accident.”

  He glanced away for a moment. Her eyes were still on him.

  “You got hurt real bad. Sorry it happened.” She paused. “I know someone who can help you. His name’s Walker St. Claire. He’s my brother-in-law. He does this kinda work, and anyone who hires him gets his money’s worth. He could help you find a plumber and electrician, too, if you need ’em. You got a paper and pencil? I can give you his number.”

  “Come inside.”