by Love, Aimee
“You don’t live here full time?” She asked.
He shook his head.
“Not much work out here,” he told her. “Unless you want to work on the line at the Beanie Weenie plant. I live in the city, mostly. I just come out this way summers and weekends to fish.”
Aubrey suspected the city he was referring to was Knoxville, but it might just as easily be Asheville. He could even be talking about Morristown. A population of twenty-thousand didn’t qualify you as a city in most parts of the world, but in East Tennessee, anything with more shopping than a Walmart was considered a metropolis.
“You want to come in for a beer?” Joe asked.
“You’re out,” she reminded him.
His face fell.
“Yeah... Guess I am.”
“I don’t really drink much beer anyway,” she said soothingly.
“You don’t like beer?”
“Beer is a situational beverage for me,” Aubrey told him. “I drink it at live sporting events and pool halls.”
“What about when you’re fishin’?” He asked.
“I don’t fish.”
“Maybe you should start,” he suggested. “It’d give you another excuse to drink beer.”
“I don’t really need an excuse,” she explained. “It just doesn’t appeal to me all the time.”
“Bowling?” He asked. “Beer and bowling go good together.”
She nodded noncommittally.
“I guess beer is a situational beverage for me too,” he told her sagely, then added with a wink, “I just haven’t found many situations it don’t fit.”
“Well, good night,” she said, eager to be rid of him.
As he got out, Aubrey saw that all the wet grass clippings that had been stuck to his back were now plastered to the leather passenger seat. Joe didn’t seem to notice. He walked around to her side, rapping his knuckles against the glass until she lowered her window.
“You sure you don’t want help gettin’ settled?” He asked.
“Positive,” she assured him, closing the window and reversing out of the drive.
CHAPTER THREE
Aubrey woke to the sound of car tires on gravel. She rubbed her eyes blearily and looked around. Joe’s face was inches from hers, grinning foolishly. His mouth moved but she couldn’t hear him. She pressed the button that rolled down the window.
“Mornin’” he said.
“Good morning, Joe,” she groaned, stretching a kink from her neck.
“Why’d you sleep in the car?” He asked. He was wearing a pair of khaki ca
rgo shorts in spite of the morning chill and he hadn’t shaved, but he already had a beer in his hand. She looked at the clock on the dash. It was 7:30.
“I was waiting for you to come over and show me around,” she said sarcastically.
His eyes went wide.
“Well hell,” he said. “I offered to do that last night.”
Aubrey opened the car door, forcing Joe to stand up and take a quick step back or get knocked on his ass. She stepped out and stretched elaborately.
“You sure you and Vina aren’t related?” He asked.
“Positive,” she told him. “After you,” she motioned to the deck.
“I went to get that deer out of the road,” Joe told her, taking a swig from his longneck.
She waited for him to make some further comment but he didn’t. He walked up onto the deck and stood in front of the door.
“And?” She asked.
“Couldn’t find it,” he said with a shrug. “Any idea where you were exactly?”
“Between here and the creek,” she told him.
He reached out and turned the handle, then stepped back.
“It’s locked,” he said.
“I noticed,” she told him.
He looked at her expectantly.
“I don’t have a key,” she explained.
Realization dawned on him.
“That’s why you slept in your car!”
She nodded.
“I didn’t think Vina would be very happy if I woke her up to get one.”
He gave her a knowing look. “That’s an understatement,” he assured her, “but you could a come back and got mine,” he told her, pulling out his keys. “You knew I wasn’t asleep yet.”
“You have a key?”
“I told you I helped Vina get it set up for you,” he reminded her. “And anyway, even if I didn’t have a key you could a come to my place to sleep,” he said, sticking his beer into one of the cargo pockets and sorting through the fifty keys on his ring.
“I don’t make a habit of bunking down with strange men.”
“I wasn’t implyin’ anything,” he assured her. “My dinette folds into a spare bed.” He selected a key and opened the door. Stepping inside, he held it open while she followed him.
She walked in past him and let out an involuntary gasp.
The cabin had been built during her mother’s Asian Modern period. It was a perfectly square building with a steeply pitched, pyramidal roof with a little windowed copula at the peak. The wall facing the street was solid, but all the others were composed of sliding glass doors set one after another with thick cedar pillars in between. The interior was open, but areas around the perimeter could be sectioned off with shoji screens that glided along on tracks. The only truly private spaces were along the back wall. There, the perimeter housed a tiny kitchenette, a bathroom, and a utility closet. The center of the room had a sunken conversation pit with a huge, stone fireplace and above that, surrounded by the glass cupola, was a small loft.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed.
The floors had been refinished, the paper in the screens replaced, and the built in sofas in the pit had been recovered in a heavy, off white fabric. Glancing into the kitchen, she saw all new appliances in gleaming stainless steel.
“Vina said you’d be working from home, so we made a little office.” He pointed to one of the screened off areas where a desk sat ready for her laptop. “What is it you do?”
“I run an internet store,” she told him, looking around in awe.
“Oh yeah,” he remembered. “A toy store, right?”
“Actually I sell new and used board games, most of them antique, rare, or foreign.”
“Aren’t board games toys?” He asked.
She nodded noncommittally.
“I guess you’ll be spending a lot of time in the library then,” he observed. “We don’t get cable out here and we sure don’t get internet.”
“I’m having a satellite system installed,” she told him and then realized that she would need to call her movers and the satellite people and change the address.
“There’s a queen sized mattress up in the loft,” he pointed. “But we had to get a real low frame so you wouldn’t smack your head every time you sat up. Vina said that was your favorite part of the cabin and I figured that’s where you’d want it. We could move the bed down there and put the desk up there if you want, but it was kind of a bitch to get up there.”
“No,” she told him, craning her neck to look into the loft. “It’s perfect just the way it is.”
“You haven’t seen the best part,” Joe told her. He opened the bathroom door with a flourish.
The old tile floor had been ripped out and replaced with slate, and in the corner there was a large Japanese soaking tub with little teak stairs leading up to it. The room also had a toilet, bidet, double vanity with basin sinks and a slate tiled shower stall with glass walls.
“It’s amazing,” she told him. “It wasn’t this nice when it was new.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m pretty handy.”
She looked at him, surprised.
He shrugged.
“Vina did most of the picking out but she left the putting in to me. I told you we had it set up for ya.”
“It’s amazing,” she said again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll keep the fridge stocked with beer and we’ll call it even,” he smiled and at the mention of the word seemed to realize that he didn’t have one in his hand. He looked around, confused.
Aubrey reached over, pulled the beer out of his pocket, and handed it to him.
He flashed her a smile.
“Oh hey, you haven’t seen the best part!”
“I thought you said this was the best part,” she told him, waving at the bathroom.
“That’s the best part inside,” he told her, “but the best, best part is out here.”
He walked over to the back wall and opened one of the sliding glass doors. The entire cabin was surrounded by a deck, but it was considerably wider on the back where it stretched out toward the lake. It had been expanded considerably, and the railing along the lake side had been removed and replaced with steps leading down to a whole new level of deck and a boardwalk leading out to a new dock. Joe pranced down to the lower level and held out his arms to frame the small sunken hot tub that had been added.
“And then there’s the even better, best part,” he told her and he pointed out into the lake. The cabin was built on a small inlet so that it was screened from view from all of the other houses, but where before there had been only trees, now there was another small dock. Joe’s RV could be seen clearly.
“Howdy neighbor,” he told her and slapped his knee.
“Oh hell,” he yelped. “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
She watched him run around the deck and out to his truck where it was parked in the drive behind her car. He came trotting back with a bulky package wrapped in Sunday comics tucked under his arm and a fresh beer in his hand.
He handed her the package.
“Housewarming present,” he explained.
She ripped it open. Inside was a shiny new black mailbox with the name “Guinn” printed neatly on both sides in bold white letters. On the front was the number thirteen.
“Welcome to Red Bank Road,” he told her. “I’ll put that up for you after I finish my beer. I’ve got the post and cement in the back of my truck, but I didn’t bring those out here ‘cause they aren’t wrapped and they’re pretty heavy.”
“It’s very nice,” she said seriously, unsure how to react to so many good things at once. “Thank you.”
“Vina said you never did change your name when you got married,” he told her.
“I was in the military at the time,” she explained. “Everyone calls you by your last name and it would have meant changing all my uniforms. It just seemed silly to go to the trouble.”
“Bet you were glad when you got divorced,” he observed.
She stared at him.
“Well, not glad about the divorce, you know… Glad that you didn’t have to change your name back and all.”
Aubrey nodded and walked out onto the dock, turning to look back at the cabin. Since the walls were all glass, Joe would be commanding an impressive view straight into her life. She was suddenly very glad that she had spent the night in her car. Drapes, she decided, would be the very first thing she shopped for.
CHAPTER FOUR
Joe insisted on carrying in her bags before getting started on the mailbox. As soon as they were piled on the sofa, he left and Aubrey pulled out her lap
top to check in at work. She set it up at the desk, set her cell phone to act as a hot spot, and got online. Two days worth of orders were waiting for her, and after she’d logged them, checked their payments, and sent them to the company that did her warehousing, she spent an hour emptying her customer service email inbox. Most were requests from her customers for things she didn’t carry, and she spent another hour online emailing her suppliers, trying to track the items down. She didn’t want to think about the dent she was making in her data plan.
When Aubrey was finished, she unpacked her overnight bag into neat piles on the sofa and then started to put everything away. Toiletries were easy enough, but after climbing up into the loft and finding only a queen sized bed and night stand, she was at a loss as to where to put her clothes. The bed was on a low pedestal that had a few drawers underneath, and the built-in sofas in the conversation pit lifted up to reveal storage bins, but there was nowhere to hang anything.
She thought she might be able to hang a rod in the utility room but when she went to check, she realized the door was gone. She had been so awed by the cabin’s transformation that she hadn’t even noticed. Between the kitchen nook and bathroom door, there was nothing but a line of recessed, built-in book cases. She walked into the kitchen. It had a gas range with an electric oven and a combination microwave/vent above it, a dishwasher that had two drawers that could be used separately, a white farmhouse sink, a snazzy little side by side refrigerator with a glass door and stainless steel trim, as if it had been taken from an upscale convenience store, and open shelving covering all the walls. There was little in the way of cabinet or counter space, and the only light came from a skylight in the roof, but she would only be feeding herself, so it was more than adequate.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember what it had looked like before. She saw her mother, hair in a ponytail, making them both hamburgers. The counter had been Formica instead of granite, the appliances had been mustard yellow, and instead of a skylight there had been a florescent light on the steeply pitched ceiling, but while the room had certainly been spruced up, none of the space from the missing utility room had been added to it.
She walked to the bathroom and the mystery was solved. There was pocket door she hadn’t noticed partially hidden from view by the shower stall. She slid it open and found that the little room, which had originally held a full sized washer dryer, a utility sink, and a counter, had been gutted and turned into a modest walk-in closet. It had built-in shelves and drawers, high and low hanging bars, and in the back corner there was a small single unit washer/dryer, like the ones used in Europe.
She walked back out into the main room, bundled up her things and carried them into the closet. She placed her small suitcase on one of the top shelves, carrying in the teak stairs from the tub to be able to reach, and pulled on a pair of cut off sweat pants, a lycra jogging top with a built in bra, and her running shoes.
After the incident with the deer in the fog, she was reluctant to go out into the woods alone and that reluctance was exactly why she decided to run to Vina’s instead of driving or calling. She had learned over the course of her life that if you were afraid of something, you did it anyway, and if you were really afraid of something, you did it a lot. Familiarity was the best cure for fear. She grabbed her iPhone, strapped it onto her arm, and headed out.
Out front, Joe was sitting on the tailgate of his truck, drinking and looking at the half-dug hole where the mailbox was going to be. She put her headphones on and turned up the volume so she wouldn’t have to talk to him, and then sprinted past.
Aubrey alternated sprints with fast walks every other song and concentrated on not losing her footing on the gravel road. She passed Joe’s, and then came into a more thickly forested section where the lake was invisible behind a dense curtain of trees. She crossed the culvert where one of the mountain streams emptied into the lake, and then pulled up short. There was a fresh looking gravel driveway to the left, heading away from the lake, and a recently cleared patch of land. A massive, red, four-door pickup was parked there and as she stood panting, a man hopped out of it and ambled toward her.
“Hey there,” he called.
She wanted to run off, but he held up his hand and waved her over.
Aubrey pull
ed out her earphones, letting them dangle against her chest, and met him at the end of the drive. She looked past him and saw that while there was a prefabricated, single car garage, a set of concrete front and back steps, and a bare patch of ground where a house might have been, the house itself was missing.
“Who’re you?” he asked her without preamble.
She motioned back the way she had come.
“Guinn,” she told him, still trying to catch her breath.
“Funny name for a girl,” he said, too transfixed by the sweat trickling down between her breasts to bother looking her in the eye.
“Aubrey Guinn,” she corrected, knowing full well that in a town this size he would already know that, as well as most of the details of her life.
“I guess you moved in to that crappy old cabin. You kin to the Guinns that used to live in these parts?”
Hearing the cabin, which was far and away the nicest place she’d called home in recent years, called “crappy” by a man who, by all appearances, didn’t have a house at all, was too much for her.
“I thought this side of the road was all National Forest,” she told him, ignoring his question.
He pulled off his baseball cap and ran a hand through his thick, auburn mullet. He had a very prominent tan line along his forehead. Looking more closely, she realized the tan was more a case of freckles so thick that they had merged.
“You and everyone else,” he told her, not offering any further explanation. “You gonna run by here dressed like that every day?” he asked. “Cause I might just become a morning person.”
Aubrey wondered by what stretch of the imagination twelve-thirty could be considered morning.
“Maybe you can get your wife to fix you a big breakfast,” she told him, pointing to his wedding ring.
“Hell, that cunt run off months ago. Took my little girl too,” he spat. “Besides, we’re divorced.” He pronounced it dye-vorced.