She also needed an electric hot plate. Before taking ownership of the tiny house, Vivien assumed she’d be purchasing two double burners so she could replicate a full stovetop. Lying in bed, envisioning the kitchen right under the loft, she realized she’d be buying one single-burner hot plate—nothing else would fit on the little shelf under the countertop. She wouldn’t really unpack the truck until she got to New Mexico, but, unlike the first part of her journey, where she catnapped in rest stops from her home in Florida to Bale’s in Kentucky, she would spend the next four nights in Shrimpfork, making adjustments to her preconceived idea about what tiny living was all about. She was so unprepared. She tried to keep the panic tamped down.
She wondered about Priscilla Workman. The lady had been very vague about what she needed from Vivien. Ms. Workman—who insisted Vivien call her Priscilla—sounded very sweet and gentle on the phone. Vivien got very few details, though, and wondered if she was going to encounter a hoarder or someone who hadn’t filed a single paper in the last fifty years. It was impossible to know—and no amount of speculation would help. She would just have to wait until she got to Sandstone to find out.
Vivien tossed and turned, eventually rolling over on her back, ready to stare up at the ceiling for hours, as she’d done her whole life when she couldn’t sleep. She gasped. Stars winked at her through the skylight in the roof. Was it a signal from the universe that she was going to get through this? She decided to go with that, and soon fell asleep.
When she woke up in the morning, she had no idea where she was. She sat up and cracked her head on the sloped eave of the ceiling. Living tiny was going to require all sorts of adjustments. The first one being: roll to the center of the mattress to get up if you didn’t want to wake to a goose egg on your forehead every morning.
Vivien managed her first shower, with the toilet sitting center stage. It proved to be less awkward than she had feared. Besides, using the toilet as a perch to shave her legs turned out to be an unexpected bonus.
She unhooked Shrimpfork from the electricity, water, and septic lines with no trouble. It was still early and the crowd that had greeted her on arrival was nowhere to be found. Vivien found she missed her new celebrity, but comforted herself with the fact that curious crowds were probably just around the next corner.
She walked over to the office to check out. Wanda was there, barely visible behind the counter. Had the stack of crocheted blankets grown?
“Good morning, Wanda,” Vivien said, standing on her tiptoes to see the woman.
“Good morning, Vivien,” Wanda said.
Vivien was surprised Wanda remembered her name—there must be fifty people in the park, but she realized Shrimpfork probably had something to do with that.
“I’m checking out,” Vivien said.
“So soon?” Wanda asked. “Check-out isn’t till eleven.”
“I’m kind of on a schedule.”
“Bodey wanted to get some pictures of that little house of yours and put it on Facebook.”
Wanda leaned forward and knocked the stack of blankets off the counter. Vivien managed to catch them before they hit the floor.
“Oh, hell’s bells,” Wanda said, rushing around the counter to grab the blankets from Vivien. “I am so sorry. This place is just a mess.”
Vivien noticed the woman appeared to be about to burst into tears. Vivien felt badly for the woman, but realized she might be able to capitalize on the situation.
Vivien took a deep breath and said, “It would be easier than you think to get this office tidy.”
“Tidy” was not a word Vivien normally used, but her sales training mentioned using vocabulary that was familiar to the potential client. Wanda seemed like a woman who might aspire to “tidy.” Vivien watched for Wanda’s reaction. When Vivien first started to offer organization plans to people, she just presented the facts as she saw them. It did not take her long to realize that not everyone greeted this sort of observation with enthusiasm. They saw it as criticism.
“Oh?” Wanda said.
“Oh” was pretty noncommittal. Vivien was still too new to the game to be able to read anything shy of “What the hell do you mean by that?”
“This is a small space,” Vivien said. Deciding that Wanda might be more receptive to the personal approach, she added, “Which I know all about.”
Wanda said nothing. She seemed ashamed. Vivien couldn’t stand it.
What harm would it do to give away a few secrets?
“I think you need to organize your…” Vivien stalled, her eyes darting from the crocheted toilet paper covers to the blankets and back. She settled on “…artwork.”
Wanda beamed.
“I’m not very good at staying organized,” Wanda said. “It’s like dieting. I’ll do it, but I never stick to it.”
“You just need to display everything so people can see what you have to offer,” Vivien said, lifting a limp toilet paper cover up as an example. “Piling them up not only makes it look cluttered, but limits your customers to seeing only what’s on top. They don’t know what they’re missing!”
“I never thought about that.” Wanda gave her stack of blankets a disapproving glance, as if they were to blame. “But I don’t have any money to do some fancy display case—even if I had room for one.”
“Do you have a bookcase?” Vivien asked.
“Yes,” Wanda said. She brightened suddenly. “Use the bookcase as a display case? For the toilet paper covers?”
Vivien nodded, trying to look modest.
“That’s easy! Bodey’s going to be busy in the next couple days,” Wanda said. “But it’s a pretty narrow bookcase. I don’t think it will hold the blankets.”
Vivien thought a moment.
“You know what would work?” Vivien said. “One of those multi-layer pants holders. It’s sort of like a tree with branches on a tension rod. They’re really strong.”
“I don’t have one of those.” Wanda frowned.
“But I do!” Vivien said, rushing out to her truck and extracting it from the flotsam and jetsam.
“I brought it with me to be a space saver in the tiny house,” Vivien continued, as she handed the package to Wanda. “But I actually don’t even have room for that!”
Vivien was rewarded for her efforts. Wanda waived the cost of the space for the night. Wanda also insisted Vivien select a toilet paper roll cover. Vivien had enough challenges with the toilet/shower without adding a yarn toilet paper cover. She still hadn’t figured out how to keep the toilet paper dry. Vivien didn’t have the heart to tell Wanda the yarn would get soaked in her toilet/shower combo.
“If you’re ever back this way, make sure to stop by,” Wanda said, as Vivien climbed into the truck. “You and your little house are a breath of fresh air.”
“I’ll do that.”
Vivien started the truck. She pulled onto the road and realized she was smiling. She looked up at the sky, giving it a thumbs-up.
Chapter 9
Vivien’s self-congratulatory mood lasted less than an hour. She’d been driving the battered Orlando family truck since she was sixteen, but dealing with traffic in unfamiliar places while towing a tiny house took nerves of steel—never Vivien’s strong suit.
Vivien tried not to call her parents every time she felt her grand adventure might be a little more than she’d bargained for. Her mother had seemed dazed when, on Vivien’s twenty-second birthday, Vivien announced to her parents that she’d bought a tiny house and was starting her own business.
“I don’t understand,” her mother said. “Why would you do something like that? That’s…that’s…”
“Crazy—that’s what it is,” her father added glumly. “You’re just a kid. Why would you do something like that without consulting us?”
How could Vivien explain that she wanted adventure? She loved her parents, but
their completely safe existence held no appeal for her. Anything she thought of saying sounded like an indictment of their perfectly respectable, but ultimately boring lives.
“But you just got your degree,” her mother added. “Shouldn’t you be doing something with that?”
Vivien wanted to say, “You mean something sensible?”—but didn’t. She’d anticipated that question and had a very adult answer. She cleared her throat.
“Actually, my psychology degree will come in very handy,” Vivien said.
“I can’t wait to hear how,” her father said.
“Well, psychology is the study of the mind. Of human behavior,” Vivien said. “Everything I learned in school I can put into play when I talk to somebody about what they want in a closet. As a matter of fact, I don’t even have to ask them what they want. I already know! I study the person and the whole design just comes to me.”
“Why can’t you study people in Florida?” her mother asked.
Vivien could see the pain in her mother’s eyes.
“It’s just something I need to do for me,” Vivien offered gently. “And I’m really good at this.”
“That’s the trouble with your generation,” her father said. “You only think about yourselves. When you’re a little older, you’ll see that you have to take other people into account.”
Vivien didn’t doubt that. But she wasn’t older. She was twenty-two, with a weird talent for organizing and enough money for a sixty-four-square-foot house.
“When will you be going?” her mother asked.
“I don’t know,” Vivien said. “I still have to buy a truck, so it might take a while to get going.”
“You can have our truck,” her father said.
“Harold!” her mother gasped.
She sounded like her husband had turned out to be as terrible a turncoat as her daughter.
“What?” her father said, defiantly. “That truck hasn’t let us down yet. She’ll be safe. That’s the main thing.”
Vivien had long suspected her father kept a restless spirit tamped down. Maybe he didn’t think her idea was as crazy as he was making it out to be. Wasn’t it the solemn duty of every parent to pull one direction when their child started to pull in the other—no matter what the child’s age? Vivien realized both her parents would have to turn in their grown-up cards if, when hearing their daughter was off on what they considered a vaguely gelled plan, they shrugged their shoulders and waved her off with a kiss and wishes for her continued success.
Her father had practically insisted on going with her to pick up the tiny house, but she held her ground. She was stepping into her new life and she was going to do it without any help from anyone.
Except for taking the family truck, of course.
As she tried to keep one eye on the GPS and the other on the road while also making sure the tiny house was still behind her, she was starting to wonder how and why she’d come to this conclusion. How bad would it have been to have her father along for this daunting experience?
* * * *
The middle of the United States flew by as Vivien conquered Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas in a rush of RV parks and incredulous, curious onlookers.
She had managed to purchase her one-burner hot plate, but she was still without a couch. Within an hour of Taos—and an hour and a half from Sandstone—her time to focus on her own stuff was running out. Although she knew it would not be the end of the world if she arrived in Sandstone couch-less, she didn’t want to be distracted with her own organizational needs when she finally settled in to help Ms. Workman.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. She’d looked in the big box stores and the tiniest parking lot flea markets, but nothing seemed to fit the designated sofa area. Everything she saw was either too large or was…a chair. She was just about to give up when she passed a tiny furniture store as she was leaving Angel Fire, New Mexico. She would have driven right by the place, except for the inflatable Saguaro cactus wearing a sombrero that was wafting in the breeze in front of it. In two arms, the cactus held a sign that read: If you haven’t found it, you haven’t looked here.
Vivien stepped on her brake pedal. It was hard to argue with logic like that.
The store was a mess. Vivien wondered if she was just being critical, given her new line of work. But everywhere she went, she saw room for improvement. Or in this case, rooms for improvement. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to the layout of merchandise. A pile of suede moccasins abutted a rack of pots and pans. A display of earrings fought for attention with electric toothbrushes. A dusty Christmas tree obscured a collection of wool ponchos.
“Looking for something?” a man’s mellifluous voice asked from somewhere behind a tower of fluorescent sneakers.
“Um, yes,” Vivien said, turning in the direction of the voice. She had her well-practiced speech all ready. “I’m looking for a sofa or love seat that is no bigger than fifty-one-inches long and thirty-inches deep.”
While waiting for the man to dash her hopes one last time before she headed to Taos, she added, for good measure:
“And one that preferably turns into a bed.”
“Yeah,” the voice said. “We have one. Follow me. I’m Pablo, by the way.”
Vivien, stunned, followed the sound of Pablo’s footsteps to a corner of the store that seemed to be the designated furniture section. There were carved whitewashed chairs, end tables, lamps, and a makeup counter.
Maybe not the furniture section after all.
Pablo had still not turned around to face her. She studied him as he moved objects out of the way. He had broad shoulders, with muscles that rippled under his faded flannel shirt. His worn jeans seemed molded to his backside.
“Here you go,” Pablo said, turning to face her.
Vivien knew she should look down at the sofa…or love seat…or whatever it was he was going to show her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the salesman.
He was only about her own age, but seemed much surer of his place in the world. Jet-black hair tumbled over his forehead. His jaw could have been a geometrical example of square. His piercing black eyes held her gaze, but his expression was matter-of-fact. He finally broke the silence.
“Is this what you’re looking for?”
Vivien forced herself to look behind him.
“It is!” she said in surprise, stepping around Pablo and looking at the piece of furniture in question.
She meant it. By this point, she could eyeball a sofa and know its dimensions.
“It’s an adjustable futon,” Pablo said.
Vivien studied it. The futons she knew folded out like a sofa bed—which would never do in Shrimpfork. It would hit the bathroom door. Instead, this beauty had arms that adjusted up and down. Folded completely up, the futon would fit in the living area with room for an end table. When she needed it to expand into a sleeper (although she could not envision when that would be—sixty-four square feet barely fit her), she could angle it, folding the arms down until it was long enough for a person to sleep on, although it would have to be a person on the shorter side. As an added bonus, the cream-and-brown design was subtle enough not to overpower the room.
The mechanical arms on the futon were as easy to operate as they appeared. This was a relief—especially compared to everything else she’d learned to operate this week. Pablo interrupted her thoughts as she laid both arms flat into the bed position.
“Do you want to try it out?” Pablo asked.
Vivien flushed. She felt there was no way she could casually pull off lying down on the bed in front of this gorgeous man. She sat on it instead, patting the cushion.
“It’s very comfortable,” she said.
“Do you want to buy it?”
This was going a little fast. She was still trying to figure out if she could try out the bed without looking ei
ther slutty or silly.
“Yes?” She realized she sounded as if she were asking a question. She lowered her tone to sound more decisive. “I mean, yes.”
In moments, Pablo had the futon loaded into the tiny house. While he slid it into place, Vivien brought in some boxes from the truck to hold the futon against the wall, so it would not slide across the floor if she took a turn enthusiastically.
Vivien followed Pablo back into the store to pay for the futon. They threaded their way through the pathways separating the eclectic merchandise. Of all the people to whom she’d offered organizing tips across the country, she thought she could do the most good helping Pablo. She fantasized about returning to Angel Fire to straighten the store out, working side by side with Pablo, whose attitude would soften toward her as they discovered exciting ways to arrange the store. She could be here in less than an hour after she wrapped up her Taos assignment.
As Pablo took her credit card, Vivien leaned in, elbows propped in the small cleared space on the counter.
“I’m on my way to Sandstone to help a lady organize her house,” Vivien said, watching Pablo work the credit card reader attached to his iPad. He even made that look hot.
“Cool,” Pablo said absently, pushing the iPad toward her. He pointed to a line on the screen. “Sign here.”
“I’ll probably be coming back this way when I’m done,” Vivien said as she tried to use her prettiest writing—not easily accomplished when you were signing with your finger. “Would you like a little tip on getting this place cleaned up?” she asked boldly.
In her business classes, she’d learned that you had to make an impression in the first few minutes. She’d been in the store almost a half hour and didn’t feel she was connecting on a professional or a personal level. It was now or never.
Pablo looked at her with his intense eyes and then looked around the store. Vivien wondered if he was suddenly seeing the shop through her eyes—if he was seeing what they could accomplish together.
Tiny House on the Road Page 5