Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

by Babette de Jongh

“Fine,” Abby said. “She’s had her shots, and her road rash is much better. I’ve named her Stella.”

  “That’s perfect,” Reva said. “How’s everything at the farm going?”

  “Welp, the goats and donkeys keep knocking down the fence between us and the new neighbor. I’m on my way to the hardware store right now for supplies.”

  “New neighbor? What new neighbor? Somebody bought the place next door?” Disappointment rang in Reva’s voice. As long as the place remained on the market, there had been a chance—a slim one—that the city might still buy it to convert into an animal shelter. “Well, hell. I guess that’s that, then.”

  “I know,” Abby said. “But I think you’ll like him. He’s pretty nice. He’s going to help me repair the fence.”

  “That’s good,” Reva said, but her voice still sounded subdued. “What else is going on? I have to admit that I’ve been too exhausted to check in with the animals like I promised. Georgia keeps pinging me, though. Something about a new dog? I’m too tired to really connect in and get a clear picture. They’re working us from dawn till dark at this place. I’m surprised I’m paying them instead of the other way ’round.”

  “Aw.” Maybe that was a good thing; the animals wouldn’t be telling on Abby. “Yep, there’s a stray dog hanging out across the street. I’ve been feeding him, but he won’t come close. I’ve only actually seen him once.” She didn’t add that it was when he tried to kill a chicken. “How are the classes?”

  “Amazing. I’m learning a lot that isn’t in the manual. I’m glad I decided to learn hands-on instead of just studying the manual and taking the test.”

  Abby pulled into the local hardware store’s parking lot. “Hey, well, I’m here at the hardware store,” she said.

  “Oh, okay. I’ll let you go, then. You’re using the Bayside Barn credit card for all that stuff, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  “And you’re paying the bills as soon as they come in, right?”

  So far, she’d just been piling the mail in a stack, but she planned to catch up on that tomorrow. “Yes, ma’am. But hey, let me let you go so Quinn and I can get this fence repair done before dark.”

  “Quinn, hmmm?” The speculative tone in Reva’s voice sounded like her psychic powers might be kicking in. “Is he cute?”

  Time to get off the phone. “I’ll tell you all about him later. I’m hanging up now. Bye, Aunt Reva.”

  * * *

  Quinn sacrificed a new bag of generic-brand Fruity Loops that he’d bought for Sean. Shaking the bag as bait, he led the goats into an empty barn stall, tossed in the bag, then locked them in before they knew they’d been fooled. The unhappy baaa’s didn’t begin until after he’d lured the donkeys into another stall with a granola bar.

  The damn goats had skinned the hedge down to its toughest branches, eaten the top three cardboard boxes of laminate flooring he’d left stacked in the bed of his truck—just the boxes, not the flooring, thank God—and scattered the contents of his tool belt to kingdom come.

  He used a big magnet to find nails and screws and an assortment of tools in the tall grass beyond the pool. By the time Abby pulled up next door, he had set up a heavy-duty stand of work lights, removed the damaged section of wire fencing, and pulled up the bent metal posts. With the late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the straggly trees on his side of the fence, the lights weren’t needed yet. Whether they’d need them at all depended on how helpful Abby could be.

  He wasn’t holding out much hope. Women, in his experience, only got in the way when there was real work to be done. If she decided to wander off and make lemonade, he hoped she put a liberal amount of vodka in it.

  Abby backed Reva’s car up to the gap and got out pulling on a new-looking pair of work gloves. “The smallest roll they had was a hundred feet. I was on my knees praying that the guys at the store would be able to fit it in the trunk. It’s gonna be a bitch to lift; we’ll have to do it together.”

  “Ya think?” Unable to resist showing off, he lifted the roll out easily and carried it to the wooden corner post where they would begin the run. The wooden posts were concreted into the ground every sixteen feet and interspersed with two cheaper metal posts between each wooden one. The old metal posts were bent and rusted; he had tossed them on top of the tangled pile of wire in the fenced pasture beyond.

  He went back to the truck for the new metal posts and dumped the whole bunch on the ground near the work area. “I rolled up what’s left of the old fencing and tied it with baling string. It’s in a pile over there”—he nodded in the general direction—“along with all the old posts. I’ll take it all to the metal-recycling place on my way to work tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.” She put a hand on his arm and leaned toward him. He thought she might kiss him, but she didn’t. “I really appreciate all your help.”

  Georgia appeared from somewhere to supervise the operation, sniffing the tools and fencing material, then toddling off to eat grass, or poop, or do whatever it was dogs did when they had nothing to do.

  Abby and Quinn worked together well. He jabbed the prong end of a metal post into the ground, then she held it while he used the post driver to hammer it deeply into the ground. She held the fence roll against a wooden post while he nailed the wire to the post with U-shaped nails. He used the come-along to pull out the slack in the wire, and they both worked together to fasten the wire to the metal posts with specially shaped fencing clips. He snipped the wire at the end of the run while she held the roll taut to keep the raw edges from snapping back.

  No lemonade-making miss, he thought appreciatively. Knowing that he was in danger of doing more appreciating than he should, he said the first thing he could come up with that had nothing to do with Abby’s sweet smile, her glowing cheeks, or her curvaceous body. “You really should replace the rest of this fence line. The part that runs through the hedge is pretty much rusted out.”

  “I don’t know if Reva wants us to do that,” Abby said, sounding worried. “Wouldn’t we have to cut down the hedge first?”

  “We’d have to trim it back pretty drastically,” he agreed. “But the goats have already gone some distance toward completing that project. I didn’t notice that they were in my yard until they’d already had a grand old time unloading my truck and chomping on the hedges.”

  “I’m glad they stayed in your yard. If they’d gone as far as the cat’s-claw forest, we might never have seen them again.”

  “Damn. I didn’t think of that.” He grinned at her and started gathering tools. “I locked them and the donkeys up in the barn instead of shooing them across the road. Too bad.”

  “You don’t mean that,” Abby chided. It was clear she thought he was too nice to chase her aunt’s wandering goats away, when in fact he just hadn’t thought of it.

  “Don’t fool yourself; I may not be as nice as you think I am.” He unplugged the work lights and rolled up the extension cord. It hadn’t gotten dark enough for the lights to be useful, but Quinn hadn’t known how long the fence-mending would take. Abby had been much more helpful than he’d anticipated, and the work had gone smoothly.

  Once they’d cleared away all the tools and stashed the unused wire in the barn’s storage room, Abby invited Quinn to dinner. But they’d done that yesterday, and look how that had almost turned out. He’d better go back to being the friendly neighbor on the other side of the fence. “Thanks, but I’ve got a lot of work to do next door. I’m installing new flooring in the master bedroom.”

  Since Sean wasn’t coming after all this weekend, Quinn had decided to sleep in Sean’s room this week—the only room he’d finished—and complete the renovations in the rest of the pool house. If he worked every evening this week, he could have the whole place done—except regrouting the vintage floor tiles in the kitchen. Those bitches would take forever.

  “I unders
tand you’re busy,” Abby said. “But would you at least let me fix you a plate? I’ll bring it over so you can eat while you work.”

  There wasn’t any way he could decline a hand-delivered dinner without seeming rude, and even though he wasn’t interested in a relationship, he wanted Abby to like him. “Sure, that’ll be great. Thanks.”

  When she delivered a foil-covered plate an hour or so later, he set the plate on the coffee table and invited her in for a glass of wine, but she stood in the open doorway and shook her head. “Nope. I won’t keep you from your work. But I do have one quick question: You haven’t, by any chance, been tossing newspapers over the fence onto my back patio, have you?”

  “No.” He turned toward her and laughed. “Should I be?”

  She laughed, too. “No. I was just wondering. This morning, I stepped on a soggy newspaper someone had left on my doorstep, and when I came home this afternoon, there was another one. Dry and readable this time, though. I might clip some coupons later.”

  “Whoa. You’re living the good life over there on your side of the fence.” He stepped close, close enough to see the threadlike gold rim around the pupil of her hazel eyes and the pale brown tips of her black lashes.

  She smiled the shy smile that had captivated him from the beginning. “I wouldn’t say I’m living high on the hog, but life on the other side of the fence isn’t all that bad, either.”

  She put a hand on his arm and leaned in. And this time, she did kiss him. “Thanks for everything.”

  Her kiss had been a chaste peck, her closed lips soft on his. “You’re welcome,” he responded, looking into her eyes. He debated with himself for a moment, but decided he couldn’t allow that chaste little kiss to stand. He wrapped an arm around her and drew her body up against his, hip to hip, stomach to stomach, heart to heart. He could feel hers hammering, or maybe that was his. Her mouth had dropped open, an O of surprise.

  He couldn’t stop himself from taking advantage of that surprised little O.

  When he finally pulled away, her eyes were dazed, her cheeks were flushed, and her wavy hair stuck out where he’d run his fingers through the thick, soft strands. “That’s better.”

  She nodded, and her hand drifted up to touch her lips. “Um… Okay. Well…good…um… Good night.”

  “Good night, Abby. Sleep well.” The word sweetheart came up from somewhere inside him, but he had the good sense not to say it. She wasn’t his sweetheart. He didn’t have the time or the money or even the inclination for a sweetheart. And yet, when she left and he closed the sliding glass door behind her, he felt disappointed that he hadn’t taken her up on her dinner offer.

  * * *

  Every day for the rest of the week, Abby stepped out the door to find a new, crisp newspaper folded on her doorstep. Every day, Georgia sniffed the paper with intense interest, then looked up at Abby with a “Do something” demand in her imploring brown eyes.

  This morning was no exception. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” Abby wailed. Disgusted, Georgia turned away, tail low. She hardly even ate her breakfast, just picked at it before walking away.

  As always, after completing the morning feed and cleanup routine, Abby tended to the stray dog across the street by dumping and refilling the water bucket and putting out a new (disposable) food dish, which the dog invariably carried off into his vine-covered lair. As always, Georgia followed, attending to her supervisory duties and clearly judging Abby’s work to be inferior. When Abby began to head back across the street, Georgia sat and yipped, looking from Abby to the forest and back again.

  “I can’t go in there,” Abby said. “He’s going to have to come out.”

  Georgia wagged her tail and barked again.

  Abby put her hands on her hips. “Puppy, puppy,” she called, knowing it wouldn’t work because it hadn’t worked yet, and she’d been doing it every morning. She made kissing noises. Again, no response. “Puppy, puppy, come on out. We won’t hurt you.”

  Apparently satisfied that Abby had at least tried, Georgia stood and headed back down the driveway, tail waving like a banner.

  Abby poured a glass of iced tea and sat in a chaise on the patio to check her text messages. The night before, Reva had texted Dog-tired after shoveling shit all day; I could have stayed home to do this. The text had been followed by a photo of a wheelbarrow full of animal poop with a close-up of Reva’s blistered hands in the foreground.

  Abby had replied: Should I mail a pair of gloves?

  Reva’s reply had come through later that night, after Abby had gone to bed. No, don’t need gloves; I was wearing gloves when I got those blisters. They keep us so busy! Hardly had a chance to relax all day. Even lunchtimes are used for instruction; we eat while watching PowerPoint presentations. It’s 11:00 p.m. already, and we have to get up at 6:00 a.m. Hope all is going well at the farm. Please text and send pics so I can communicate with the animals when I get a break. (You know it’s easier if you can see their eyes.) Especially Georgia. She keeps pinging me as I’m falling asleep; she says you need to be talking to that stray dog that’s been hanging around. How did the fence-repair project go with the new neighbor? How are the chickens?

  This message had come along with a photo of a cafeteria with a blurry projector screen at the front of the room and a bunch of college-age kids photo-bombing the picture.

  Abby took a sip of her iced tea and replied: Who’s the cute blond guy with the buzz cut?

  The distress call of a donkey rose up from behind the barn, loud, insistent, and terrifying. Elijah sounded hurt, and his cries of fear and pain rose in volume and intensity. Abby dropped her phone on the chaise and ran toward the sound.

  “Abby,” Quinn yelled over the fence. “Everything okay?”

  “No,” Abby huffed as she ran. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m coming to help,” Quinn yelled. “Hang on.”

  Abby ran around the side of the barn to see Elijah in the field, tangled in the roll of used fence wire she and Quinn had left out. “Damn!” Abby had completely forgotten about that old wire. The poor donkey had tried to step over it to get to some tasty overhanging leaves, and ended up with the wire tangled around his legs. Elijah bellowed in fear, his eyes rolling, his nostrils distended. He tried to rear, but the wire around his legs hobbled him. Miriam, the other donkey, stood nearby, wailing in sympathy.

  Abby approached Elijah, one hand out. “Shhh,” she soothed. “Be still, baby.”

  Quinn rushed up, breathing hard. “Don’t try to help him yet, Abby. You’ll both end up getting hurt.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do,” she hissed without sparing Quinn a glance. She rubbed Elijah’s nose. “I’m not going to walk away and leave him like this.”

  “Do. Not. Move. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Why hadn’t Abby paid more attention to where Quinn left the old bent-up wire and posts? Because he’d promised to take them to the recycling place the next morning, and he hadn’t done it, that’s why.

  Quinn came back with a halter and lead rope in one hand, and a pair of stout bolt-cutters in the other. He handed over the halter. “Here. Put this on him and hold him still.”

  She buckled the halter—it didn’t fit but was better than nothing—and gathered the lead rope into short loops so she could hold it close to Elijah’s chin and keep him from rearing. She hoped. “Why didn’t you take that wire away like you promised?”

  “My bad.” Quinn started clipping the wire strands that held Elijah captive. “I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  “Elijah better not get hurt because of this.” Abby knew that her accusing tone wasn’t fair; she’d been as responsible as Quinn for this trap they’d set. She should have paid more attention when he told her where he’d left the wire. She should have reminded him to take it away. She shouldn’t have released the donkeys—and the goats, for that matter—into
a field that wasn’t safe.

  “I said I’m sorry.” Quinn clipped more strands and separated the wires that wound around Elijah’s left back leg. “I take complete responsibility, and I’m doing my best to fix the problem.” Quinn pulled away a wadded section of wire, releasing Elijah’s leg, which he promptly used to kick out at Quinn. “Would you hold him still, please, before he kills me?”

  Abby knew that a well-placed donkey kick could be lethal, and Quinn had no choice but to bend over, putting his skull in too-close proximity to Elijah’s flashing hooves. “I’m trying,” she griped. “Maybe you should get his front legs free first, so he can’t kick out.”

  “Eventually, I’ll have to free all of his legs,” Quinn reasoned. “I’d like it if you’d just keep him still so he can’t decide to kick my damn teeth in.”

  “I’m doing my best.” She jerked down on the lead rope. Elijah rolled his eyes and plunged up and down on his front feet. “Be still, you bad donkey. We’re trying to help.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t rile him up more,” Quinn fussed. “Pet his nose or something.”

  “I can’t pet his nose or something,” she retorted with irritation. “I need both hands to hold on to this lead rope so he doesn’t kick your thick head in.”

  Quinn moved around to free Elijah’s front legs, doing what Abby had suggested by leaving the remaining back leg for last. He didn’t, of course, give her credit for a good idea—it might not end up being a good idea anyway. The test would come when the last leg came free.

  Georgia, who’d been who-knows-where for the last few minutes, came in close to sniff out the problem. She inspected the tangled wire, and then sniffed Elijah’s newly freed back leg. “Georgia,” Abby hissed. “Go away.”

  Quinn flicked the bolt cutters in her direction. “Move, dog. You’re not helping.” He pulled free another section of fence. “Two legs down, two to go.”

  Miriam came close to sniff a section of fence that Quinn had cut away and tossed aside. Quinn half stood and flapped a hand at the curious donkey. “Shoo.”