“This must have been a library back in the day,” Neil said. “Do you want to refinish the shelves or paint them?”
“What do you think?” Aaron asked. He had no idea about things like that.
“If it were me,” Neil said, “I’d refinish them. They look like walnut.”
“Can you do the refinishing?” Aaron asked.
“Oh, yes,” Neil said. “I’d like nothing better than to get my hands on this house and bring it back to its former glory in every way.”
Neil made notes in his cell phone as they toured the entire house. Then they went outside and Neil carefully inspected the exterior. He got down on his hands and knees at some places.
“These bushes will need to be cut back before we start the exterior,” Neil said. “They look like they haven’t been trimmed in decades.”
“Right,” Aaron said. This house was clearly a money pit.
“Do you have any idea of what colors you want?” Neil asked.
“I’d like to stay true to the colors of the time period when the house was built,” Aaron said. Actually, Aaron didn’t give a damn about the colors.
“The place where I buy the paint has a Victorian historical line. I can send you the colors and you could pick what you want, at least for the interior.”
“Okay,” Neil said, still not caring but knowing he had to participate in this process.
“I’ll email you the paint suggestions and the estimate tomorrow,” Neil said. “Can you give me your email address?”
Neil held his phone out, ready to key in Aaron’s address. Aaron had actually thought that far ahead and created an account using the name Richard Smith. He gave Neil the address.
“If we come to terms,” Aaron said, “how long do you think the job will take?”
“I’m thinking at least three months,” Neil said. “It might seem like a long time, but this old house needs special attention. I’ll probably do most of the work myself.”
Aaron shook Neil’s hand. “I’ll look for your estimate,” he said.
It was already dark when Neil left and Aaron decided to stay put in the house. He heated up a frozen dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. He ended the evening with scotch on the rocks in his bedroom.
He checked his email—his real email. Mrs. Davidson had sent something asking how he was doing. He wrote her back that he was doing fine and would keep her updated. His sister emailed to check on him and asked him to call her if he needed to talk. He thought about that. Sherry already thought he was acting like a stalker, but maybe he needed some of her good common sense right now. He’d call her soon, he decided. Marsha emailed asking him for a reference letter. He wrote her back that he’d send it in a couple of days and hoped she was doing well. The rest of the emails were spam or news alerts he’d set up with the stock market.
After a couple of more slugs from his drink, Aaron fell asleep, his laptop beside him.
Chapter Twelve
Aaron looked at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth. His hair had grown long, something he never would have allowed when he was working. He had a regular bimonthly appointment at a barber near his office and kept his hair conservatively trimmed. He also had a full beard for the first time in his life. It was thick but scraggly looking where it crept up his cheek in an unkempt way. He slathered shaving cream onto the areas that needed attention and sculpted his beard into something passable. He trimmed his mustache and beard and began to look halfway presentable. If it weren’t for the fact that his face was so gaunt. Aaron had eaten very little in the past few months and it was showing on his face. He wondered what Cathy would think of him if she could see him now.
Aaron ate a bowl of cereal while he flipped through the channels. He visited the news for a few minutes, then restlessly moved on. Movies, game shows, cooking shows, infomercials. In frustration, he threw the remote across the room. It hit the wall and fell on the hardwoods. Aaron rushed over and picked it up. It still seemed operational. He would have to be less impulsive. The TV was all he had.
Right before noon, Neil emailed Aaron.
“Your house is huge and in bad shape,” Neil wrote. “I figure it’s at least four thousand square feet. My estimate is $30,000. I know that seems like a lot, but it’s worth it to get an excellent paint job, which I will give you. The fee covers the paint and any painting assistance I might hire. If repair work that I can’t handle on the inside or the outside is necessary, that will be above and beyond my fee. I will also require a third of the fee up front to purchase supplies and because I will have to give up other jobs to work full time on your house. I figure it will take three months of constant work. Please let me know if this estimate is agreeable with you. If it is not, I can recommend other less-talented painters to you.”
Aaron laughed. Neil was a shrewd businessman. Actually, Aaron thought it would cost much more than Neil’s estimate. He was glad to pay the price.
“When can you start?” he wrote back.
“Next week, at nine a.m. on Monday,” Neil wrote back.
“See you then,” Aaron wrote. “Send me your routing number for your checking account and I’ll put the deposit in.” Aaron had no checks. All business with Neil would have to be done through the family LLC.
*************************
The weekend was without end for Aaron. The bright spot was when Neil emailed him on Saturday with recommendations of paint colors for each room. Aaron approved them all. What did he care?
He was beginning to feel demented and forced himself not to spy on Cathy—as much as he wanted to. He had told himself he just needed to make sure she was all right. Hadn’t he seen for himself that she was all right when she smiled on her way back to her house the other day?
But Aaron needed more than that. He needed to know if she was involved with someone else; he needed to know if he still had a chance with her.
When Neil knocked on the door Monday morning, Aaron thought he might look as crazy as he felt. He mustered up a smile as he opened the door.
“I’m ready to get started,” Neil said. Cans of paint, a ladder, brushes, roller pans, drop clothes, and various other tools surrounded Neil on the porch. He gathered up his supplies and walked into the house.
“I thought we’d do the living room first,” Neil said. “Unless you’ve got another idea. I was just thinking we could get that room out of the way so you could start using it again while I work on the rest of the house.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” Aaron said.
Together, he and Neil moved the meager furniture out of the living room into the dining room area. Neil managed to pull the cable wire over far enough to connect it. Aaron needed that TV.
For three days, Neil patched the walls and painted them an olive green color. Aaron sat in the dining room watching TV and thinking about Cathy. He did not go through the woods to spy on her. He was watching CNN on the third day when Neil entered the room.
“My fiancé would love to see this house,” he said.
His fiancé? Was Cathy already engaged to someone else? Aaron’s heart fell to the floor and began to form a puddle of misery at his feet. He had lost Cathy!
“Uh,” he said. He was speechless.
“She runs a vintage shop in town. She loves the old stuff. But if it’s not okay. . . .”
“No,” Aaron said. “Of course it’s okay.”
“Lindy will be glad to hear it,” Neil said, turning back to the living room.
“Lindy?” Aaron called after him.
“Yeah. She’s my fiancé.”
Aaron’s heart began a slow crawl off the floor. He still had a chance.
Suddenly feeling exuberant, Aaron said, “Bring her by anytime.”
On Friday, there was a knock at the door and Aaron hauled himself out of his recliner. Neil met him in the foyer.
“That’s probably Lindy,” he said. “She’s bringing my lunch today.”
Aaron opened the door with Neil behind him
. A blue-eyed woman with blonde hair in braided pigtails hanging across her shoulders stuck out her hand.
“I’m Lindy,” she said. “I’ve brought lunch today.”
Aaron shook Lindy’s hand. She sparkled her way inside the door and set a paper grocery bag down on the floor in the dining room. Aaron central.
Lindy got down on her knees and began to pull sandwiches and chips out of the bag. She put them on plates and handed them to Aaron and Neil, then made a plate for herself.
Lindy chattered through their lunch of chicken salad sandwiches and Aaron found himself responding to her. She was so damn cheery, he would have been an ogre not to find her charming.
Somewhere in the course of the vibrant conversation, Lindy said, “Our friend Cathy lives in the next house over.”
Aaron came alive at the mention of Cathy’s name. His whole body tingled.
“We went to high school with her,” Cathy continued. “She came back a few months ago after a bad breakup.”
Aaron felt guilt wash over him. He was responsible for that.
“But she’s been seeing her high school boyfriend lately, so I guess she’s gonna be all right.”
Aaron became numb. He was dead weight on the chair he was sitting in. He died in that moment.
“Yeah,” Neil said, unaware that Aaron had just died. “I guess getting back with your high school lover is the remedy for what ails you.”
Lindy and Neil looked at each other and laughed, in their own private high school world. Aaron was dead.
Lindy packed the used paper plates and napkins back into the paper bag and stood to leave. She kissed Neil goodbye and waved at Aaron.
“It was nice to meet you,” she said. “You should come out with us sometime, if you want to.”
They were so wrapped up in their love for each other, they still hadn’t noticed that Aaron had ceased to exist. He forced himself out of his grave.
“Yes, maybe I’ll do that,” he said.
And then Lindy left, leaving only pixie dust behind. Neil got back to work, and Aaron kept his eyes glued to the TV.
Near the end of the day, Neil came back into the dining room.
“I’m finished in there,” he said. “We can move your stuff back before I go.”
They moved the couch and recliner and console back into the living room. The olive-colored walls enveloped Aaron, attempted to comfort him. The crown molding gleamed like cream in a cat’s bowl.
He shook Neil’s hand and said he’d see him on Monday. Then he collapsed into his recliner and stared blindly at the TV. How could he win Cathy back from her high school boyfriend? The odds of that did not seem good. They had their memories, their music, maybe even a favorite song. Definitely a song. He felt sick.
Aaron watched the clock on the cable box while he tried to concentrate on television. He hadn’t changed the channel for hours and had sat there during sports news, a sitcom, and now an infomercial for weight loss. At eleven-thirteen, he hauled himself out of the chair with great effort. He had not eaten since Lindy’s chicken salad sandwich and he wasn’t hungry.
He put a bottle of water into his backpack, then his bottle of scotch. He picked up a blanket as an afterthought. His mind screamed at him that he was crazy, but his feet carried him across the lawn, following the beam of the flashlight. It led him to his path and he carefully made his way. The only sound was the crunching of his feet on the path.
He didn’t need his binoculars to see there was a truck in front of Cathy’s house. The light from the porch didn’t reveal what color it was very clearly, but it looked like it might be green. Definitely not Neil’s white truck. He used the binoculars, hoping he could see into a window. But the curtains were drawn, and Cathy was behind them. In her house with her high school boyfriend.
Aaron sat on the ground and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. He reached into his backpack and pulled out the bottle of scotch. It went down his throat smoothly. Every few minutes, he put the binoculars to his eyes and looked at Cathy’s house, her front door, willing the boyfriend to leave.
Aaron had plenty of time to think as he kept his rabid watch. For the hundredth time since he had moved to the bay, he questioned his actions. Surely Cathy would be horrified to know he had been skulking in the woods, watching her with binoculars. Didn’t a person have a right to privacy? She wouldn’t take it lightly at all if she ever found out, which she wouldn’t, if he could help it.
Aaron now owned two houses, neither of which was a home. He needed to unload one, if not both of them. Wasn’t his job on the bay done now? He had moved next to Cathy in desperation to make sure she was okay. He had made a vow to himself the day he told her he loved her that he would always be there for her—to love her, to protect her, and to support her. That’s what partners did, and Cathy was his partner.
But Cathy didn’t seem to need Aaron anymore. It was time for him to move on, perhaps. He could keep tabs on her, from afar. He would always be there if she ever needed him no matter what his circumstances in life happened to be.
But right now, he was obsessed and a little psychotic. He was drinking too much and not eating or sleeping enough. He didn’t even recognize the bearded man who stared back at him from the mirror. He was no longer earning a regular income, though thankfully he still had his investments. Aaron was a worker, a producer, a contributor to society. He was not a stalker ex-fiance.
He stood to leave when he heard voices coming from Cathy’s house. He whipped his binoculars to his eyes and trained them on Cathy and the boyfriend coming down the porch steps. There was enough light to see that Cathy was smiling. The boyfriend leaned down to kiss her. The kiss went on excruciatingly long. The boyfriend pulled Cathy to him. He rubbed his hands along her back, then her butt, pulling her even closer. Thankfully, Cathy pulled away after a minute or so and went back in the house.
Jealousy roiled through Aaron. He stood there a full minute, staring at Cathy’s door before he headed home. Seeing someone else kiss Cathy, put his hands on her, gave him a new determination. He had to get back to Atlanta to find out who had set him up. No more pussyfooting around about that. No more spending the day in the recliner feeling sorry for himself. No more hanging around in the woods like a lunatic. Time to get moving. It was the only way he had a chance with Cathy, if he wasn’t already too late. And if he was too late, then he’d force himself to move on.
But for now, he had to produce the goods.
Chapter Thirteen
Neil popped the cork off the champagne bottle and poured it into four vintage flutes Lindy had brought as a gift to Cathy.
“This is the biggest job I’ve ever had,” Neil said. “It’s gonna give us a good start on our marriage.”
“You should see the house, Cathy,” Lindy said. “It’s gorgeous but it hasn’t been taken care of. Neil’s gonna make it a gem on the bay again.”
Neil, Lindy, Cathy, and Zachery clinked their glasses together.
“To Neil,” Zachery said.
“Let’s get the boil started,” Cathy said.
Everyone followed her into the back yard where Neil and Zachery had made a fire pit and started a slow-burning fire. A huge stockpot sat on the grate. Cathy picked up the lid and peered inside. It wasn’t boiling yet.
“You know a watched pot never boils,” Lindy said laughing.
Cathy clanged the lid back on the pot.
“Let’s get the corn and potatoes ready,” she said.
“We’re going down to the pier,” Neil said. He and Zachery grabbed their beers and headed toward the shore.
“Just leave us with all the work,” Lindy said. “Don’t get used to this, babe.”
In the kitchen, Cathy started husking the corn, placing the ears in a neat row on the counter.
“You can cut those into pieces,” she said motioning at the corn.
Lindy got a sharp knife and began to cut each ear into three pieces.
“Dammit, I should get the potatoes ready first,”
Cathy said. She banged her fist on the counter.
“Hey, girl,” Lindy said. “What’s up with you?”
Cathy turned to her. “I need to have a girl’s talk,” she said.
“Go for it,” Lindy said. “I’ve noticed you’ve been a little tense lately.”
Cathy lowered her voice to a whisper even though Zachery and Neil were outside.
“Zachery wants to have sex and I’m holding him off,” Cathy whispered.
“You mean y’all aren’t doing it?” Lindy asked, incredulous. “You seem so close.”
“I can’t do it,” Cathy whispered. “Because I’m not over my broken engagement.”
“Hmmmm,” Lindy said. She cut an ear of corn.
“I like being close to someone because I’m so damn lonely,” Cathy admitted. “But it’s not fair to Zachery.”
“Why don’t you let Zachery decide what’s fair to him,” Lindy said.
“Lower your voice!” Cathy admonished. She put the new potatoes in a colander and ran water over them.
“Next week is Valentine’s Day,” Cathy said after a few minutes. “And Zachery is going to go all out. He’s got reservations at that expensive restaurant in Destin. I think he’s going to expect something at the end of the night.”
“Men are always expecting something, honey,” Lindy said. “Doesn’t mean you have to give it to ‘em.” She started giggling and Cathy joined her.
“But seriously, Lindy,” Cathy said after she got control of herself. “There’s other things—too much to go into right now with them out there.”
“You could come by the shop on Monday,” Lindy suggested. “It’s always a slow day. I can get some sandwiches from the B and B and we’ll have lunch. Ladies who lunch.”
“That’s a good idea,” Cathy said. “Now let’s get this stuff out there. Surely that pot’s boiling by now. Grab that wine. I need it.”
It was warm enough outside that only a light jacket was needed. Cathy and Lindy put the corn and potatoes on the table, which Cathy had covered with a plastic tablecloth. She checked the pot.
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