“Of course. I’m exhausted! We unpacked all day and I’ve been up all night!”
He pulled the covers over his head. Seconds later he was snoring again.
I sat there in the dark feeling totally alone. We were hours from Seattle. Hours from all our friends. It was just the two of us making a new life together. Starling Falls pioneers. Coming here had been a gigantic leap of faith, but I hadn’t thought of it like that. I’d had no fears at all. Tom had never let me down in any major way, so starting over someplace new with him had seemed perfectly safe. But sitting there in that room while he slept through my misery, I felt betrayed and abandoned. I suppose that sounds melodramatic; it must have been the exhaustion getting to me.
We had never even spent the night in our new home and I was already wondering if we’d made a huge mistake. Hours earlier, I’d been excited out of my mind. It changed that quickly, all because of them.
Eventually the sky became pink and I could hear the snores of everyone else in the house. I couldn’t bring myself to go back to our house alone. Like a dog, I curled up on the end of the bed and went to sleep.
Chapter 5
When I woke up, I was alone. I looked at my phone and was mortified to see that it was quarter after twelve. I got up and tiptoed across the room to the front window and looked across the street at our house. The front door was open and some of our rugs were draped over the porch railing, airing out. A moment later Tom showed up on the porch with another rug and draped it over the railing. As if he could feel my stare, he looked over at Priscilla and Barnaby’s house and saw me standing there in the window. He waved and I shook my head. I grabbed my phone and texted him: You left me here. I heard his phone go off a second later and saw that his duffle bag was still in the corner of the room, phone inside.
I straightened up the room, grabbed the duffle bag, and made my way downstairs. To my immense relief, no one appeared to be home.
“Hello?” I called, standing there in the foyer, feeling like I ought to at least say goodbye. When no one answered, I left and went back across the street.
“Wow, you slept forever,” Tom said, giving me a kiss.
“I know! Why didn’t you wake me? I’m embarrassed at how late it is.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. You needed the sleep. Look what I did,” he said, leading me inside to where my fancier shoes had all been unpacked and placed on their spinner rack. He seemed like his normal self again.
“Wow. That’s so sweet.” I sighed. It looked like we were done fighting. I gave the rack a spin. “When can I wear these again?” I asked, picking up a pair of strappy teal high heels.
“Whenever you want.”
“I don’t know if there’s anywhere in this town where these would fit in. I think Starling Falls is more about shoes like those.” I pointed to a pair of old hemp hiking sandals that were sticking out of a box.
“Start a new trend.”
“Maybe,” I said. “So… When did you wake up?”
“Around 8:30. You missed quichey casserole and waffles with powdered sugar and fruit.”
“Too bad for me. I could really use some coffee,” I said.
“I thought of that. It’s set up for you in the kitchen.”
“No way. Are you serious?”
“I wouldn’t lie about that.”
Now that it was daytime again, our house overwhelmed me with its beauty. The sunlight streaming over everything felt glorious and lovely. Tom followed me to the kitchen where the coffee pot and a mug were waiting. I rubbed my eyes, unsure how I’d felt so isolated and depressed just a few hours ago.
“You’re too sweet.” I gave him a kiss.
“Comfy bed, wasn’t it?”
“No comment,” I said.
“You must have liked it,” he said, “considering you got your full eight hours of sleep in.”
“How was breakfast?”
“Good. They said they were going to leave some food out in the kitchen for you.”
“I didn’t even look. Anyway, I’m okay with just coffee. Where were they off to?” I sipped my coffee and raised my eyebrows, imploring him to dish on them with me.
“Huh… I forget what they said.”
“Oh, come on. Try to remember.”
“I don’t know that they said.”
“Fine. How was breakfast with them? What did you three talk about?”
“Breakfast was really good. You’ve got to get that quichey casserole recipe from Priscilla.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re killing me. What did you guys talk about?”
“Hmm.” Tom found another mug and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Not much. They told me about some shops in town. Do you know there’s a used bookstore across the river?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And they said there’s a little clothing boutique. Maybe you’d like to check it out?”
“Sure. We could take a walk later this afternoon and see what we haven’t discovered yet,” I said.
“That would be nice,” said Tom. “I have to write at some point, too, though.”
“Aren’t we going to at least unpack and get settled in?”
“We moved here so I could write and I think it’s important that I develop a habit of it right away.”
“Wouldn’t you write better if you were all settled in?” I asked, doing my best to smile in that adorable way he used to never be able to refuse.
“Writing’s like exercise. You can’t take too long of a break or it’s hard to get back on track.”
“I guess you’re right. I wish you liked it better.”
“Then it would be a hobby, not a career,” he said.
“Do you think you’ll find some critique groups here like you had in Seattle?”
“I think I’m past sitting in coffee shops reading other people’s slop. Having had three articles published in the Space Needler proves that I’m beyond needing critique groups,” he said, naming one of Seattle’s free magazines found in their local grocery store entranceways and gas stations.
“Not to brag,” I teased.
“I’m not bragging,” he said, giving me a cute, sheepish look. “It’s just having self-awareness. That’s all.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“So, I’ve got the time and space now to get serious, and I need you to help me keep from being distracted.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re in charge of your own writing schedule. I just thought settling in was such a distraction in itself that we ought to, you know, succumb to it for a couple of weeks. Get our Starling Falls fix. All of that. But if you’re ready to get serious about your book, I respect that.”
The thought of the $120,000 we had remaining in our savings account, all of it inherited from Tom’s grandmother, sprang to mind. The money he’d inherited, now much of it invested into this house, had seemed like a hundred million dollars. Like more money than we’d ever know what to do with. Now I wondered whether it was enough. Though we had no mortgage, we also had no jobs. And so many home repairs ahead of us. I sipped my coffee, silent.
“We need some groceries,” said Tom.
“I can get them today. I’ve been wanting to check out that cute little grocery store. The one with its very own grocer.” I waited for some kind of response but got nothing. I nudged Tom with my toe. “Do you remember what happened last night?”
“Yeah. Vaguely.”
“Just vaguely?” I asked.
“I was half asleep.”
“I was totally asleep, until it woke me up!”
“I can barely remember it,” he said, shrugging. He began unpacking a box of canned goods.
“It’s not imprinted in your mind, traumatizing you?” I asked.
Tom set down his cup of coffee and the can of veggie chili he was holding and turned to me, his face contorted in annoyance. “You mean to tell me that some married adults having sex in their ow
n home has traumatized you? Really? What do you have against them? They put us up in their house and made us breakfast. I’m not sure what your problem is with them.”
I took a step back from him, stunned by his dismissal of my feelings and his lack of humor. So much for the bright new day I was ready to have. “What happened to that guy I married who’s always on my side?” I asked. “Why are you sticking up for them so much?”
“Think about it, Courtney. They baked us a homemade pie. They let us sleep in a comfortable bed! They made us breakfast! And they hardly know us. Isn’t that the kind of behavior we were hoping to find in a small town like this? Who cares if they had sex?”
“For one thing, I didn’t want to stay there. I wanted to spend our first night in our new home alone with you. I’m sure you could tell, but you didn’t care how I felt. And, as for the sex thing, it wasn’t like they were just having normal sex. They opened our door first.”
“Like you always do, you’re overthinking this.”
“Whatever. Forget it.” I went over to a different packing box and started pulling out cake mixes and noodles and jars of peanuts. It took everything I had to not start crying.
“When you’re done with that, flatten the box. Don’t just leave it there empty,” said Tom.
I nodded, my back to him. “What’s with the rugs hanging all over the porch?” I asked, since the sight of them had irritated me and I no longer felt like holding back.
“I thought I’d air them out. Freshen them up while we have the chance.”
He meant while our dogs were away in Spokane at his parents’ house. They would be there for three more days until his mom and dad brought them down to us. Muffinseed and Hopscotch were the dogs’ names. The story was that they were rescued, and these were the silly names they’d come with. The second half of that story was, of course, a lie created by Tom. I’d given them their adorable names.
“Do you have a problem with them being out there?” he asked.
“They look a little trashy, hanging all over the railings like that.”
“I’ll bring them in later. If you can’t wait for me to do it, do it yourself. I’m going to try to get the washing machine hooked up.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”
“Aren’t we going to go bed shopping today?” I asked.
“That was the plan, until you slept until noon. At this rate I’m not going to get any writing done today or tomorrow. And once my parents get here, well, I can’t write with them here.”
“You have plenty of time. Relax,” I said.
Tom shook his head. “I’m going down to the cellar to hook up the washing machine.”
The basement, I almost said. We’d agreed we were going to call it the basement instead of the cellar because that sounded so much less creepy. But I made a conscious decision to quit feeding the tension between us and said, “Okay. I’m going to start cleaning up here in the kitchen and pantry.”
“Sure,” said Tom. He left me there by myself. I considered following him downstairs but decided against it. Before we were married, I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself. Once a fight started, it escalated until it exploded. Now I was calmer, partly out of a desire to preserve something that was supposed to last a lifetime, partly because I knew since he was stuck with me, the opportunity to pick up a fight where it had left off never expired.
I found the box with cleaning supplies and got to work in the butler’s pantry. I wiped down all the shelves, deciding at some point I would paint them bright white.
With each swipe of the cleaning rag, I felt myself calming down. Dare I say, enjoying myself. A butler’s pantry. How novel. The thrill of our new home began to cheer me up a little, as I considered how to arrange my dishes on the pantry’s open shelves.
A dumbwaiter ran up through the house from the basement to the butler’s pantry, to a door in the wall in the upstairs hallway, all the way to the attic. I was both horrified at the thought of four stories of free-falling space big enough for a child to fit through, and thrilled at the reality of owning a house with such a thing. The access door here in the pantry had been painted shut, but we’d seen from other openings that the dumbwaiter inside was still on a set of functioning pulleys.
I pictured a future where it was restored and no longer full of scariness and spider webs. We’d have children (smart, good children who had the maturity to handle such a thing) and they’d play with it like the properly old-fashioned children this house could turn them into. They’d be the kind of children I read about in books like Little Women. They’d put on plays that they wrote during snowstorms, wearing costumes they’d made from old linens they’d found in a steamer trunk.
“I think I’m going to put a trunk full of fabric and old clothes up in the attic,” I yelled toward the basement door, temporarily forgetting that Tom and I were in a fight. How many kids would we have? Four? Five? Maybe six.
I pulled open a drawer—it barely budged and then came tumbling forward with a screech—and discovered a rusty old knife at the back of it. It wasn’t some heirloom or anything remarkable. Just a steak knife from the 1940s or ‘50s. I examined it and then ran its dull blade against the paint-sealed seam of the dumbwaiter’s door. Despite the real work ahead of me, I let myself be distracted by this new project, alternating between sawing at the seam and pulling at the small wooden knob, until finally the door loosened from its paint prison. Even without the layer of paint holding it in place, the door was a tight fit. I stuck the blade in to try to pop it open, careful not to damage the wood.
“What are you doing?” asked Tom.
“I didn’t hear you,” I said, spinning around.
“I could hear you. The washing machine is going in right next to the basement’s dumbwaiter door. I opened it and I could hear you sawing away up here. I figured you were trying to break in.”
“Yeah, I got distracted from cleaning, I guess.”
“Let me have a try,” said Tom.
“I’ve just about got it opened,” I said.
“I can do it,” he said, content to steal the big moment from me. He took the little door’s knob in his fingers, braced himself, and gave it a hard tug. It popped open, revealing lots of dust and an old, yellowed calendar hanging inside the door on a little metal hook.
“Well, look at that,” I said, setting down the knife.
“Nineteen thirty-seven,” said Tom. The calendar was turned to December, showing a painting of a table covered with a festive spread of ham and breads.
“A gift to our friends, from your friends at Smyth Pharmacy, Starling Falls, Idaho,” I read on the bottom of the picture. “I wonder if Smyth Pharmacy is still in business.”
Tom stuck his head into the opening. The dumbwaiter was up at the second floor, so the shaft down to the basement was empty. “I can see a little bit of light coming from down there,” he reported. “This thing is pretty cool.”
I switched places with him and peered down the hole. “Spooky,” I said, delighted.
“I think I got the washer and dryer hooked up right. Do you have some laundry ready?” Tom had agreed to take care of washing our clothes until we were able to make a proper laundry room that wasn’t down there. His tone was a little softer now. He was trying to make peace with me. Moving is stressful, I reminded myself. People get in fights. It’s not a big deal.
“Sure. Thank you,” I said, making a pile of towels and rags I’d used as cushioning around bowls and dishes. I handed them to him and tried to kiss him, but he pretended not to notice, took the heap of laundry, and ducked out of the way. He disappeared down the stairs and I went back to the dumbwaiter. Determined to correct a bad day in the making, I opened the door and peered inside just as he peered up at me. “I seeee you down there,” I said. I smiled and waved.
He looked up at me, squinting against the possibility of dust and spider webs getting in his eyes. “I see you too,” he said g
lumly.
Screw you, I thought. I decided I wasn’t going to let him get to me. I carefully removed the calendar from its little hook and began flipping through it. The pictures were big and the calendar portion of each page was just a teensy little panel, not at all like the calendars of today. In tiny, slanting script that reminded me of my great grandmother’s signature, it said Edward beside January 12.
“Tom,” I called down through the dumbwaiter, “the family that lived here before wrote their birthdays on this calendar. It’s so cool.”
No response.
“Come on,” I tried again. “Don’t fight with me! Let’s get along and have fun with this big old house!”
Silence.
“Pretty please?” I called down the dumbwaiter.
People have accused me of being annoying. It’s true, I guess.
“I’ll be up in a minute,” he finally yelled.
I went back to flipping through the calendar. March 1 said Eleanor. April 11 said Charles. I rubbed at the goosebumps on my arms.
“Tom, come on. You have to see this,” I yelled. He ignored me. I heard the washing machine door close and the click of the dial.
July 14 said Teddy.
“Tom, what’s today’s date?” I called down.
“It’s Saturday.”
“I know that, but what’s the date?”
“The fourteenth. I’ll be up in just a minute.”
“That means it’s Teddy’s birthday!”
“Seriously, Courtney, I have no idea what you’re saying. Just give me a minute.”
There were no other names throughout the rest of the calendar except for October 28, which was marked Emmaline. “Emma-line? Emma-linn? Emma-leen?” I whispered, guessing on the pronunciation. “Emma-line,” I said again, deciding that was it.
I heard Tom clomping up the stairs. “Okay, I’m back. So there are birthdays written on there? That’s pretty cool.” He held out his hand to take a look at it.
“Careful,” I said. “It’s super old and fragile.”
“I’ll be careful. By the way, I just remembered the locksmith is going to be here soon. Good thing we didn’t go bed shopping,” he said as he checked out the calendar.
Souvenirs of Starling Falls Page 4