by K. C. Wells
Now I needed to work harder on the mental.
I ignored my actual reflection and the stranger in it. I still didn’t know this man with the wary eyes and patches of early gray, but I knew he didn’t need a fresh shave to clean out trash all day long. He just needed breakfast and a lot of coffee. I ate two pieces of the takeout corn bread, then washed it down with a glass of cool tap water. I filled an empty two-liter soda bottle with more water so I’d have something to drink during the day and to go along with the protein bar that would likely be my lunch.
It was only quarter to six, but I had run out of things to do in my motel room. The sun would be rising soon, so heading out to the property was at least within the realm of reason now. Driving through Franklin in the near-dark made the whole town seem smaller, quieter, almost peaceful. It was a place to disappear and live a simple life—unless you were actually from here and someone could find you with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Strike one.
Or you were gay and not out to anyone from your past. Strike two.
No, Franklin was my past and my present, but it wasn’t going to be my future. As soon as the property was clean and everything sold, I was going to Canada. It was as good a place as any to start over, I decided as I turned down the state road that led to my childhood home. Martin wouldn’t follow me to Canada. He was obsessive and single-minded, and apparently not done with me, but he wasn’t that crazy.
I hoped.
My parents’ house rose up from the grass and bushes like the same bad omen it had been yesterday and would continue to be until this was finished. The junk on the front porch had been sorted, but there was still so much to do. I parked and just sat there for a few minutes, breathing hard, overwhelmed by the weight of it all as it crushed down on me.
Shouldn’t have come back. Should have stayed away. Shouldn’t be doing this to myself. Should just have it bulldozed and been done with it. Should—
No.
No, that wasn’t my voice, it was Martin’s. According to Martin, everything I did was wrong. The decisions I made on my own were wrong, which meant everything about this felt wrong. He’d trained me well for eight years.
I can do this. My voice.
With the front porch cleaned and sorted, opening up the front door seemed like the next reasonable step. Only I didn’t want to go into that house yet, so I took a crowbar I’d found in one of the outside piles yesterday and used it to pry open the rusted side door of the VW bus. It fell open with a sound like a small child being murdered and released a cloud of foul air. Something had died in there.
I wasn’t the kind of queer who screamed at the sight of spiders or got ruffled when my clothes got dirty, but the idea of something rotting away inside the bus like my mother had rotted away inside that house sent me back to the safety of my car, possessed with the sudden need to vomit. I perched on the trunk and didn’t move until I heard the sound of an engine turning down the long driveway. That familiar spike of panic froze my guts, melting only when Jeremy’s van came into view. He parked behind my car. I didn’t turn on my car to check the clock, but I bet he was—
“Sorry I’m late,” he said as he hopped out, then reached inside the van and produced two large cups of coffee.
“It’s fine.” I took the offered coffee and sipped at it, ignoring the burn on my tongue and throat.
He leaned against the side of the car and blew through the hole in his cup lid. “Have you been here long?”
“A while. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I’m not a big fan of sleeping in motels myself.”
I resisted the urge to snort—if only my inability to sleep was as simple as a lumpy bed or unfamiliar sheets. For some reason, I said something even worse: “I don’t want to be here.”
He paused in his blowing and gave me a sideways look. “Here doing this?”
“In Franklin at all.”
“Not a lot of fond memories?”
“It wasn’t so bad until I was a teenager, and I started to realize that the way my parents lived wasn’t normal. High school was hell most days, and I was grateful to get out and leave it all behind.”
Jeremy turned so he could look directly at me, and if I had seen pity in his eyes I probably would have stopped the conversation right then and there. Instead, his brown eyes radiated understanding and a kind of sympathy that didn’t patronize. “I did that myself once. I left a bad situation to start over here.”
The admission surprised me. “Why here?”
“I knew someone from Franklin. They helped me out until I got on my own two feet.”
“That’s good.” I wanted to keep asking questions so he wouldn’t be able to ask them of me, but I feared getting too personal. This was a business arrangement, not a friendship, and I didn’t need to get attached to anyone in a town I was leaving as soon as humanly possible. And the very last thing I needed, according to therapist number one, was to get involved with another man so soon.
I needed to be my own person for a while, until I could put Martin behind me for good.
We sipped our coffee for a few more minutes, until the sun came up farther and took some of the chill out of the air. “So I have a few tents in the van,” Jeremy said. “We can get those set up and designate the areas. I also have boxes and packing tape—”
“I’m not keeping anything for myself, and nothing is getting stored.”
He blinked, then nodded. “Okay. I was going to say for anything that needs to be protected for the auction, or that I’m taking back to the store to sell.”
“Oh.” If my cheeks weren’t already flushed from the cold, I’d have blushed from embarrassment.
The tents didn’t take long to set up. Each one was party-sized, about ten by twenty feet. The trash tent went up in the front yard near the cars, so we’d have easy access for whatever method I chose to remove it. The other two tents we erected in the side yard, between the house and the barn and sheds, one right after the other. The first was Jeremy’s tent—the things he wanted to buy, sell in his store, in his online store, or to his personal contacts. The tent farthest back in the yard was auction stuff. He helped me tote what I’d sorted yesterday into their proper tents; the pile in the trash tent was scary, and it was only eight thirty in the morning.
As if by some silent agreement, we split up. He went back to the piles of metal that I’d spread around in the yard. I put on a pair of latex gloves, grabbed some trash bags, and tackled the moderately less stinky VW bus.
The rest of the morning became a blur of paper and plastic shopping bags, torn boxes, and more random items than I knew what to do with. It seemed I’d found my mother’s stash of what she called “last-minute gifts” because “you never know when you’ll need one.” Most of the items were in the bags she brought them home in, clearance price stickers still attached. I found receipts that were fifteen years old, which meant she’d moved stuff out of the house and into the bus at some point, because the bus hadn’t been there before I moved out.
I ended up popping and taping some of Jeremy’s boxes so I could sort the stuff and give the auction a little bit of organization. I used a marker to label them. Baby Items. Clothes. Candles & More. Toys. Misc Household. Brand new items that seemed more like yard sale fodder than auction material came out of the bus in droves, until I had one full garbage bag, a dozen smaller empty boxes, and eight packing boxes full of things.
Eight boxes. One bus. And an entire house to manage. Impossible.
Maybe the contents of the sheds and barn were enough, and I didn’t actually have to set foot inside that house. Didn’t have to face the clutter, the crap, or the memories. Didn’t have to accept the fact that not only had I failed in my own personal life, but I’d failed to save my mother from herself and she’d died under a pile of junk.
I didn’t remember sitting down or leaning back against one of the bus’s flattened tires. Awareness of my very cold butt, seated uncomfortably on the frozen ground, clued me in—as did the fact t
hat I was staring at the knees of Jeremy’s filthy work jeans. Until I was staring into his concerned brown eyes, because he’d just squatted down. His lips were forming words, and it took me a moment to clear my thoughts and pay attention.
“Cole? Anybody home?” Jeremy put a hand on my drawn-up knee, and I surprised myself by not immediately pulling away. He wasn’t touching to hurt, just to comfort.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said.
“You okay?”
Embarrassed as all hell, but physically fine. My heart was still racing, though, and I couldn’t seem to make it calm down. “I’ll live.”
Jeremy’s lips pressed into a flat line. “You just kind of sat down there and started shaking. You get panic attacks a lot?”
I stared at him, eyes wide.
“I’ve seen a few in my day,” he said.
“All of this is just kind of overwhelming. There’s so much to do.”
“I get that. You want some water?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
I started to get up, but Jeremy waved me off and stood. He walked away before I could tell him I’d brought some tap water. From somewhere within the bowels of his van, he produced two chilled bottles of water and brought them back. He even twisted the cap off mine before he handed it over, which struck me as both gentlemanly (if I was a girl, which I wasn’t) and thoughtful (something I just wasn’t used to). I sipped the icy water, grateful for some moisture in my oddly dry mouth.
“If you’d like a little bit of good news,” Jeremy said after swigging deeply from his own bottle, “I found some moneymakers in the first shed. More bicycle frames, as well as a few that are fully intact. My bike guys will be ecstatic.”
“That’s great news.” And it was, but I couldn’t get the proper amount of excitement into my voice as the news deserved.
After a few moments of awkward silence, he asked, “You feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you. I’m fine.”
“Okay.” It was the kind of okay that didn’t quite believe me.
He returned to his side of the yard, and we both went back to work. I caught him sneaking glances every once in a while, probably to reassure himself I wasn’t about to freak out again. I didn’t plan to. One panic attack in front of him was too many. At lunchtime, I insisted on paying for the sandwiches he went to fetch from a local deli, and we ate in the front seat of his van with the heater running. I wanted to ask where he was from originally and why he’d moved to Franklin on purpose, but asking him opened me up to being asked. So I resigned myself to being curious and left it alone.
After lunch, Jeremy loaded up a bunch of bikes and parts to take to his shop for some research and maybe a few quick sales. I didn’t mind. It was all junk to me, until it turned into actual cash, and I’d never do that without his help. I kept going on the porch the rest of the day, creating twice as much garbage as anything else. This was where my mother stored her recycling—a decade’s worth of crushed tin cans, old soda bottles, and reams of stacked newspaper. I carried it to the trash tent, but kept it separate from regular garbage. Maybe I could get a recycling truck to come out and get this stuff instead of tossing it into the dump.
I worked until dark—literally. I was on a roll, though, with the porch half-cleared and my body pushed past the point of exhaustion to a place where nothing ached anymore and hunger had long since fled. I wanted to keep going a little longer, so I moved my car to face the porch and left the headlights on.
Everything went well until around nine o’clock, when two things happened almost at once. First, my headlights dimmed and then died completely. After I tried to start the car and failed, the second thing happened: I realized I’d lost my cell phone somewhere in the yard. I sat in the driver’s seat and stared at the shadowed shape of my childhood home, too tired and frustrated to do anything—scream, cry, pound the steering wheel. I just stared.
The longer I sat, staring, the more I began shivering. My body ached from the day’s exertion. I couldn’t call a tow, and I was too damned exhausted to walk five miles back to my motel room. Sleeping in the car was my best option, as long as I didn’t freeze to death. I needed a blanket, something warmer than just my coat.
I limped around to the row of tents and picked my way through the pile of boxes set aside for the auction. I’d put a packaged bedspread in one of those boxes, another item my mother had purchased because it was on sale, not because she or anyone she knew needed it. I recalled unzipping the package and sniffing for mildew (and if I’d smelled or seen mold, I’d have tossed it into a garbage bag). I managed to bang my chin on a box corner and then drop something heavy on my foot while in search of this bedspread. I found it, though, in the fifth box I checked. I shook it out as I limped back to my car, my body protesting every single step.
The thin bedspread smelled slightly musty, but it wasn’t wet or reeking of nasty things, so I climbed into the backseat with it. I wrapped up in the bedspread, cursing myself for killing my car battery. The entire thing was my own stupid fault.
Everything was always my fault.
Chapter Four
SOMEONE grabbed my shoulder and was shaking me. Heavy sleep and the hard surface beneath me only compounded my disorientation. Panic twisted my guts into tiny knots. Martin had found me. He was going to take me back.
Instinct sent signals to my hands to strike, to get him away from me—only my hands wouldn’t work. They were numb, cold, wrapped up tight and tangled within it. Someone was saying my name, and I twisted away from the sound, which led to me tumbling off my bed and onto the floor.
Of my car.
The person saying my name moved closer, rocking the car with their weight.
“Don’t touch me,” I yelled.
He froze. I did too, twisted up in a blanket, wedged on the floorboards, stuck and too terrified to figure out how to disentangle myself.
“Cole, it’s Jeremy.”
Crap. As my initial panic subsided, embarrassment took its place. “You scared the hell out of me,” I said.
“Likewise, pal.” He was somewhere behind me, out of sight, but I heard the concern in his voice. “You didn’t move when I banged on the window. For a minute, I thought you froze to death.”
“Sorry.” I tried to get my arms free and failed. After a few seconds of useless tugging and twisting, I said, “I’m stuck.”
“Hold on.”
With a little assistance from Jeremy, I got my idiotic ass free of both the bedspread and my car. Only I forgot most of my extremities were numb from the cold and my uncomfortable sleeping position, and I tumbled right out onto the grass. I flopped on my back and stared up at the morning sky, so far beyond embarrassment at this point that I didn’t feel anything except the cold ground seeping through the seat of my jeans.
Jeremy sat down next to me. “Why’d you sleep in your car?”
“Battery died and I lost my cell phone.”
“Ah. That certainly paints a clearer picture.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Making you think I was dead.” I didn’t know why I felt the need to apologize for that, but I did. Jeremy was doing me a favor, and I’d scared the hell out of him.
“It’s okay. I’m sorry I scared you when I woke you up.”
I didn’t insult him by insisting I hadn’t been scared. I’d been so confused and worried that Martin had found me that I’d almost pissed myself. That fear had to have been apparent on my face and in the way I yelled at him to not touch me. “I don’t usually sleep so heavily,” I said.
“Probably because of the cold. Listen, why don’t I drive you back to my place? You can warm up while I cook us both breakfast.”
A few hours away from the hoard sounded like a wonderful idea. A warm house, instead of an impersonal motel room, and a good meal to start the day.
“I make a mean stack of apple pancakes,” Jeremy said.
Sold. “Okay.”
“Cool.”
We did a
quick sweep of the yard for my cell phone before we left, but we didn’t find it. The stupid thing was probably under one of the tents. I really hoped I hadn’t accidentally thrown it away. The phone was a cheap buy-your-minutes-in-chunks kind of phone, so it was definitely replaceable. I just hated spending the money.
Jeremy turned the van’s heaters on full blast and by the time we reached town, I could feel my fingers and toes again. Sleeping in my car in December had been monumentally stupid, but even stupider would have been attempting to walk back to the motel and falling asleep on the side of the road. I hadn’t frozen to death, so I called it a win.
Lost Treasures Antiques took up the first floor of a three-story home on the second block of Main Street. Metered parking lined most of Main Street, but the white painted house had a narrow, private driveway that Jeremy negotiated with his wide van. He drove right around behind a large white shed, came back in a loop to face the street again, and parked there, close to a small porch and back door.
I followed him inside, into a small mud room, complete with a coat rack and washer/dryer. Another door straight ahead probably led into the antique shop, while a set of stairs went up to the second floor. He hung our coats on metal hooks before ascending the stairs. The stairs opened into a spacious, open-plan living area. While the house itself was a good hundred years old, the kitchen was perfectly modern, gleaming with chrome appliances and granite countertops. The gas stove seemed restaurant quality, and a collection of copper pots and pans hung over the island. The adjoining dining area had a large walnut table-and-chairs set, as well as a matching buffet. Next to it was a huge plush sofa across from a wall-mounted television. The whole thing was tasteful, clean, and blessedly free of clutter or grime.
“Wow,” I said.
Jeremy grinned as he swept his hand out. “I know, right? When I decided to put the shop downstairs and rebuild the kitchen up here, I figured I might as well go all-out and get the living space I always wanted.”