by Maren Smith
“No, thank you.” She came in out of the street for good measure. “I was just curious why I got beat for something you’re willing to give away.”
“First, I spanked you. I didn’t beat you. And second, they’re willing to come to the fruit stand; you snuck in behind the orchard. That’s the difference.” Robert glared at her a few seconds longer, then disappeared back inside the house. The squeaky-hinged screen slammed shut behind him, followed promptly, although much less forcefully, by the front door as well.
Giving both the apple stand as well as the orange orchard one last look, Kylie belatedly followed him into the house.
As it turned out, the house needed more than just a fresh layer of paint. She discovered this when she nearly put her foot through the porch floor. When she heard the ominous creak, she quickly shifted her weight. There was no missing the dry rot after that, or the water stains that sporadically colored the cobweb cluttered underside of the porch roof in moldy shades of brown. The bottom hinge was missing on one of the porch window’s faded green shutters; Kylie had forgotten what single-pane windows looked like, divided into quarters like these were, framed in wooden sashes that slid up and down with the aid of weighted ropes and pulleys.
Fortunately, the home’s interior was not as rundown as the exterior suggested. Mostly, it was just dirty. Like a place that hadn’t been lived in for years, and now suddenly there were people again.
There was very little clutter, but a liberal coating of dust that drowned everything from walls, to furniture, to ceiling under a coat of dingy grey. The floor was weathered oak, marred by paths of boot prints that trailed from the front door to the kitchen and back past the woven area rug centered in the small living area until it ended at the bottom of the second-story stairs. Not one bit of furniture—from the sofa and chairs, with their dusty yellow upholstery and carved wooden legs, to the hand-crank record player by the door—looked new. It was difficult to tell without dusting first, but Kylie would not have been surprised if it all predated the First World War.
What really startled her, however, was the lack of lights. She turned in a full circle, searching carefully for signs of even one light switch or electrical outlet, but stopped when she spied the oil lamp resting on a homemade lace doily on top of the closed record player. Another waited on the short table, close to the wall at the bottom of the second story stairs.
“Oh my God, I’m in the dark ages,” she whispered, covering her mouth with her hand. “Please, oh please, oh please, let there be indoor plumbing.”
She could do a lot of things, Kylie rationalized. She could live without computers, without television, Starbucks coffee and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. She could live without movies on demand or her portable DVD player. She could maybe, maybe, even sit back and wait until Nickelback and Matchbox 20 decided to form their bands and blast their earth-shattering (in Kylie’s opinion, anyway) music over the public airways. But there was no way, absolutely no way at all, that she was going to live in this alien 1940s world if her only toilet option was an outhouse.
As if she had a choice.
As if she could click her heels three times and fervently whisper, “There’s no place like home” before being magically whisked back to the big city life she’d left behind.
As if something that hokey could work anywhere but in Hollywood.
She tried it anyway, feeling really stupid even as she closed her eyes, tapped her sneakers together and uttered the magic words.
Nope. She was still standing in Robert’s living room, looking at a house full of dust and cobwebs and 1920s furniture.
Being as the house was marginally cooler than the front yard and not wanting to let all that ‘coolness’ out, Kylie shut the front door behind her. Knowing she was here to stay, she reluctantly shrugged out of her jacket and hung it on the hat rack beside her.
She backed up a step and nearly tripped over an army-green duffle bag that had just been dumped on the floor in front of the door. She nudged it closer to the wall with her foot before hesitantly calling out, “Where are you?”
“In here,” Robert called back from the kitchen.
Her sneakers left their own interesting, zigzag tracks as she followed his boot prints and his voice into the next room. Robert was sitting at the dining table, his elbows braced on the dingy checkered tablecloth, his large hands folded around a jade green coffee cup. A second cup had been set before one of five vacant chairs, the jet black liquid inside still steaming.
Robert gestured at the cup. “Sit down.”
Ugh, did she have to?
Not wanting to create another point of contention, she reluctantly pulled back the chair and looked at the hard, cushion-less seat. Lowering her bottom onto that unyielding surface felt exactly as one would expect it to, and Kylie stifled a groan as the battered muscles behind her protested. She tried to balance as much as she could on her thighs, and when that failed, she perched on the very edge of the chair. Neither position was comfortable, however, and there were no pillows anywhere in sight.
Robert simply drank his coffee and waited until she gave up on comfort. He even ignored the irate look she shot him before accepting her cup of hot, truce coffee.
“Thank you,” she mumbled.
“Hope you like it black.”
The coffee was strong, unsweetened and tasted as if the grounds had been sitting out on the table for at least a year before brewing. Kylie regretted her first sip before it was even halfway across her tongue. Needing to get the awful taste out of her mouth, Kylie briefly weighed the pros and cons of covertly spitting it back into her cup. She swallowed rather than start another argument out of sheer rudeness, but there was absolutely no helping the grimace that contorted her face or the full-body shudder that followed.
“Good stuff,” she lied, her eyes watering at the foulness of it.
Pretending not to notice, Robert drank another sip from his own cup and stared stoically past her to the bare wall. “If you’re going to stay here, I expect help around the place. Cleaning up a couple things would be a welcome start. Meals would be nice, too. You got any luggage stashed out there in the grass somewhere?”
“No,” she said with a cough. She swished her tongue through all the nooks and crannies of her mouth, trying to dig out the stray coffee grounds before she accidentally chewed on one.
“You live around here?”
Caught in the act of picking a chunk of burnt coffee bean off the tip of her tongue, she looked at him. “To be honest, I’m not even sure where ‘here’ is.”
Heck, at this point she’d settle for knowing exactly when here was.
His chair creaked as he leaned back, studying her through slightly narrowed eyes. “You riding the rails?”
‘No, I came back in time because you, you perverted old cradle-robber, kissed me. I actually haven’t been born yet and won’t be for another fifty years.’ Smart enough not to say any of that out loud, Kylie bought herself a few seconds of time to think by taking another long sip of truly awful coffee. Then she changed the subject. “I saw your duffle bag. How long have you been back?”
“Four days.” Through the open kitchen window, they heard the sound of a car pull to a stop out front. Robert barely glanced in the window’s direction when a series of car doors opened and shut again, but he didn’t get up. “Is your daddy going to show up on my front porch with a shotgun and an attitude when he finds you here?”
Idly wondering if her granddaddy was even tall enough yet to reach a doorknob, she shook her head. “Nope.”
“You on the run? Is the law going to come knocking on my door because of you?”
“I am not on the run,” Kylie said confidently. “No one is going to come looking for me.”
No one even knew she was here. On the heels of that depressing thought, Kylie paused to wonder if anyone at back in her time had realized she was missing yet.
Again came the hollow jarring of car doors opening and slamming softly shut again.
Then a motor roared to life outside. Robert again glanced at the window, listening to the crunch of roadside gravel as a vehicle drove away, but then she quickly became the focus of his intense attention. “I’m the boss here. I can’t pay you, but if you want to stay, I’ll give you a place to sleep and food to eat, just so long as you remember this is my place, my property and—”
“Your rules,” she finished with him and nodded to let him know she understood.
He opened his mouth to add something else, but a rooster crow from directly outside shut his mouth with a snap of pure surprise. He swiveled on his chair to stare at the window, the look on his face almost comical, except that it was quickly overwhelmed by another tidal wave of anger. Launching up from the table, he stormed to the window and pushed the curtain aside.
“Aw hell,” he swore under his breath. And then again, as he marched back to the front door, repeated with significantly increasing passion, “Hell. Hell! Hell!”
Abandoning her coffee, Kylie jumped up to follow, all but running to keep up with his long-legged and angry stride. She caught the screen door with both hands to keep from slamming into it as she trailed him out of the house and down into the yard. One of the two apples crates was completely missing from the fruit stand. In its place was a wooden cage loaded down with six or seven chickens, one of which was crowing.
Robert stood over the birds, fists braced against his lean hips, shaking his head over and over again. “What the hell am I supposed to do with chickens?”
“Eat eggs?” Kylie offered helpfully.
“And feed them what?” he demanded, locking her under the full heat of his angry, unwavering stare. As if she were the one to blame for this extra, unasked for responsibility.
“It’s summer.” She spread her hands. “The grass is full of bugs. We could turn them loose during the day, and they’d pretty much feed themselves, right? All we’d need to do is provide them with fresh water, collect the eggs, and give them a safe place to roost at night.”
“And when winter comes?” he asked pointedly. “What do you expect me to feed them then?”
Kylie shrugged with one shoulder. “Table scraps if we have them, I guess. And if that’s not enough, well…I make a mean chicken and dumpling stew.”
He scowled, anger playing across his face as his jaw clenched, again and again. Finally, he picked up the crate and brought it to her. The chickens cackled in alarm when he set them none too gently at her feet.
“You want them, fine,” he said. “Consider this your first job. Put them someplace.” He pointed behind the house. “Barn’s that way.” Shaking his head, he stalked back to the fruit stand, grabbed his buckets and, muttering something that sounded suspiciously close to, “I must have lost my damn mind!” and “What the hell am I doing?” under his breath, he headed again for the overgrown wilds of his orchard.
Heaving the homemade cage onto her hip, Kylie followed his impatient directions around the side of the house. As she neared the rail of the back porch, the sound of running water became as much of a beacon as the weathered brown of the old barn walls and roof, peeking out between the tall weeds, massive dome-shaped blackberry brambles and rose bushes that hadn’t been trimmed in ages.
Difficult to see in the tall grass, she accidentally stumbled through the remains of an old garden. Only a few plants were sturdy enough to repeatedly reseed themselves. Although not much of a gardener, she recognized the half dead potato plants and a veritable overgrowth of asparagus stalks at varying thicknesses. Nothing else looked familiar or productive until she tripped on a zucchini as long and as big around as the lower half of her leg. Ants had made a meal of it, causing the vegetable to rot from the inside out, and when she accidentally put her foot through the soft exterior, her sneaker sliding on the mushy innards, she nearly went face-first down into the grass. She was more careful where she stepped after that.
As it turned out, there was an actual chicken coop attached to one side of the barn, but the fence was in desperate need of mending. Raccoons, possums, weasels, hawks, owls, coyotes and stray dogs; the area had to have predators and there were lots of little holes in the fence, not to mention under it, to make setting the chickens free in this enclosure a risky proposition. Still, she supposed, it was better than nothing.
Kylie took hold of the wire mesh and gave it an experimental shake. Given some pliers and some decent wood or metal posts, she could probably fix most of this in a few hours—a day at most if she had to plant new fence posts. In the meantime, she would simply have to lock the birds in the coop at sundown to help protect them.
She walked all the way around the coop before she found the gate. It, too, was in serious need of mending. She spent a few minutes pulling the overgrowth and grass back from the wire in an effort to find all the gaps, but in the end, she had no other option but to make due.
Kylie set the chickens free in the small enclosure. There were five hens in all and one strutting, arrogant rooster, all of which gave her no more than a precursory cackle of alarm before discovering a nest of carpenter ants at the base of one rotting post.
“Bon appetite,” she said, and left them to it.
Dusting her hands off on the seat of her jeans and promptly wincing at the resulting discomfort, she turned around to look at the barn. Both buildings were as run down as the house, but what attracted the majority of her attention was the series of zigzagging irrigation ditches, conveyor belts and waterwheels that fed in through one wall through connecting wooden channels and three sliding doors. At the moment, the channels were dry and the doors were all three closed. The largest waterwheel was attached directly to the back wall, with a multitude of rods and gears that disappeared in through a window that was too high up for her to peek through without a ladder.
Curiosity piqued, Kylie rounded the barn until she found the front doors. Unhooking the latch, she slid it open and promptly brought the entire lower half of the paper wasps’ nest that had been attached on the inside crashing down around her feet.
“Yah!” she screamed, already running even before the angry hum of that nest’s residents began to register in her ears.
She’d never moved so fast in all her life, an ominous humming behind her putting wings on her feet. Reaching the back of the house in record time, she shot around the side toward the front.
“Bees!” she screamed at Robert, who was once again transferring apples from his buckets into a new crate at the fruit stand.
Robert looked up, but if he heard what she’d yelled, he didn’t seem in a hurry about responding. At least not until she reached the porch and he saw the dark cloud pursuing her. Then his eyes got huge and he broke into a run, too. Straight toward her.
“Bees!” she yelled again.
“Get inside!” The instant he reached her, his hands began slapping at her back, pushing her up the steps. Her foot nearly went through the porch floor all over again. This time, when the wood cracked and gave way beneath her weight, Kylie fell crashing to her hands and knees.
Grabbing her arm, Robert half-dragged and half-threw her into the living room. He slammed the door behind them. It wasn’t until she started picking herself up off the rug that she realized she could still hear buzzing. It sounded awfully loud for being on the other side of the door.
And then Robert was on her again, slapping at her hair, her shoulders and her back. His huge feet stomped the floor all around her, narrowly missing her fingers once and not quite missing her foot.
“Ow!”
“Get your shirt off!” He didn’t give her a chance to refuse, but grabbed her arms and ripped her shirt over her head.
Kylie yelped, slapping her hands up to cover her bra and breasts. “What are you doing?!”
Without bothering to answer, he ran the shirt to the nearest open window and flung it outside, then slammed that window shut. He darted into the kitchen and two more windows were quickly slapped down. Robert was rushing back out to the living room toward her when she felt a lig
ht bump against her arm and then the tickle of little legs. Craning her neck to see, Kylie shrieked when she saw the wasps tangled in her hair and falling from there onto her shoulders. When she felt another light tickle crawl from the back of her jeans onto the small of her back, she panicked completely.
Slapping and shaking out her hair, she scrambled to her feet and began stamping on the floor. Suddenly everything seemed to be crawling with wasps. “They’re coming in under the door!”
“No, they’re falling off you!” In quick, brushing slaps, Robert struck the tickling wasps from her back at the same time that she felt that first sharp sting.
Kylie jumped with a shriek and his hand responded more vigorously, slapping the wasps off her pants. “Ouch! Ow! OW!”
She tried to turn away when his hand became focused all over her bottom and thighs, but he only yanked her back around, brushing and slapping with a hand that felt as hard as iron. It was like being spanked all over again, and the pain of it was more than she could take.
Bursting into tears, Kylie struggled to get away from him, only to feel another sting against her shin.
“Get your pants off!” Robert didn’t wait for her to obey this time, either. He had her jeans unfastened and was stripping them down off her thighs before she could knock his hands away.
“Stop it! OW!” A loud buzzing near her ear was the prelude to another sting and Kylie threw herself into shaking the remaining wasps from her hair while Robert crisply smacked his brushing hand down her bottom and thighs. She fell backwards onto the couch when he finally yanked her jeans and both sneakers clean off her feet and ran to throw those out the back door.
Left in only socks and underwear, Kylie sprawled across the cushions, her arm thrown up across the back of the couch, her bottom positively throbbing, only now with the additional hurt of three different stings to escalate her misery.