Tiny House on the Hill

by Celia Bonaduce

  Shortie, staring out the window, was losing patience. He started to squirm. “Okay, okay,” Summer said. “We’re out of here.”

  While Lynnie stood impatiently on the sidewalk waiting for her dramatic farewell, Summer strapped Shortie into his car seat, a boxy affair that took up an extraordinary amount of room in the back seat of the cab. A new vehicle for Summer meant new restraints for Shortie.

  “I know you’re going to hate this,” Summer said, feeling guilty that Shortie was no longer going to be riding shotgun or poking his head out the window. All her research pointed to a doggy booster anchored to the middle of the backseat and a harness pulled snugly across his broad chest. The dog looked at her with alarmed what-the-hell? eyes as she snapped the harness into place. “Sorry dude, but this is for your own good. The videos all say you’ll get used to it.”

  But Shortie’s eyes said otherwise.

  Summer turned her attention to Lynnie. She was surprised to see tears misting in her neighbor’s eyes. Summer tried to remember Lynnie’s every little annoying quirk, but one-by-one they deserted her and she found herself in the older woman’s embrace.

  “I’m going to really miss you,” Lynnie said in a jagged voice.

  “I’m going to really miss you, too,” Summer said—and, to her surprise, meant it.

  Summer inhaled sharply as she caught a glimpse over Lynnie’s shoulder of the apartment complex and the river beyond.

  Maybe I could still change my mind! Most of my stuff is still in the apartment, after all.

  But Summer was resolved to look forward, tough as that was.

  “Thanks for taking care of everything,” Summer said, disengaging herself from Lynnie’s embrace. “Not having to deal with the furniture and the rest of the stuff has been really great.”

  “Oh, now,” Lynnie said. “What are friends for? And remember, you can always come back.”

  “I know,” Summer squeaked.

  “I mean it,” Lynnie continued. “You go get this crazy idea out of your head and come right back here. There’s security, a solid paycheck and probably a nice man waiting right here.”

  Summer remembered why she wanted out. She gave Lynnie a quick peck on the cheek and jumped in the truck. In a moment, Hartford, Connecticut, was nothing but an image receding into her past—or at least into her rearview mirror. She thought about Lynnie’s parting words and felt better about her choice. She didn’t want security, she didn’t even necessarily care about a solid paycheck.

  But she had to admit, that “nice man” part sounded pretty damn good.

  Getting to Cat’s Paw, Washington, by way of Cobb, Kentucky was far from a straight shot. As much as Queenie was bad-vibing Summer to get to the bakery as quickly as possible, Summer was determined to stick to her plan—or as much of her plan as possible now that she was going to help her grandmother on the other side of the country.

  She knew Queenie would never approve of the tiny house philosophy, let alone a real tiny house, so Summer just didn’t mention she’d be bringing one with her. And it wasn’t just the tiny house. She’s mapped out a route of thrift shops along the way where she planned on stocking up on cashmere and wool sweaters. Of course, stocking up had a whole new meaning when a person was going to live in 220 square feet. Maybe she’d just buy the most appealing sweater in each store. She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror and frowned. She knew that was never going to happen. If she found five sweaters that appealed to her, she was going to buy them. It occurred to her that there was a huge barn up at Queenie’s house and maybe she could keep her new stash of bulky sweater in there? She shot a look at Shortie in the back of the cab. He refused to meet her eye, indignant that he was strapped into a booster seat.

  “You’re no help,” Summer said.

  Summer sighed. All the research she’d done insisted that he would get used to it. She hoped so, since this was his future.

  “At least you know what your future holds,” Summer said.

  It was only four hours to Philadelphia from Hartford, but Summer pinned it in Google Maps as her first stop. As soon as she’d made up her mind to make her sweater-purses, she started taking an interest in the wardrobes of all the ladies, and some of the men, at work. She found herself following a plus-sized woman named Breeze, who always wore gorgeous clothes (including knockout cashmere and wool sweaters that would shrink beautifully), making notes and sketches and, if she could get away with it, taking photos. Breeze finally confronted Summer in the hallway, asking if she needed to call Security. Summer stammered out her reason for following her. Luckily, Breeze took the stalking as a supreme compliment. She told Summer that the secret to her entire wardrobe was a thrift store in Philadelphia called Bodacious and Curvaceous that catered to curvy ladies.

  “You should definitely go. You won’t have to limit yourself to puny purses from small, medium, and large sweaters,” Breeze said proudly. “Honey, you’ll be able to create messenger bags with some of the loot you’ll find there.”

  Summer checked out Bodacious and Curvaceous online and determined it would make a great first stop on her road to bohemian purse-maker. But now that she was on the road, she wondered if she would have been better off finding a thrift shop closer to Hartford. While traffic flowed smoothly down I-95, Summer was perfectly confident behind the wheel. But when Google Maps’ mechanical voice began to navigate her toward the intimidating George Washington Bridge, her hands broke out in a sweat.

  Summer had driven all kinds of tractors and snowplows when she was a teenager at Flat Top Farm, her grandparents’ property, but nothing had prepared her for this. She tried not to look over the rail where she could see so much water from the cab. Shortie was causing a disturbance in the backseat; he must have known he was missing something. Summer’s right butt cheek suddenly started to vibrate as she realized she was drifting into the lane to her right. She remembered when she bought the truck the salesman mentioned this feature: The seat would pulse when the car detected a crash threat. Summer’s palms were buttered with a new layer of perspiration. Had she been about to crash, and on the George Washington Bridge? She checked her odometer; she was a little more than one hundred miles from Connecticut. She’d barely gotten underway! Was this a bad omen?

  She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and didn’t breathe again until she was off the bridge. Once she felt secure, she checked the side and rearview mirrors and glided cautiously to the left. The seat signaled her negligence and her left butt cheek jiggled.

  “Oh, come on,” Summer said indignantly to the seat. “That wasn’t even a swerve! No way was that a crash threat!”

  She arrived in Philadelphia with only an hour until Bodacious and Curvaceous closed.

  Plenty of time to scoop up some treasure.

  Summer crept along Spruce Street looking for a parking space. One butt cheek then the other vibrated with outrage. Summer watched the clock: forty-five minutes till the shop closed. She gave up, pulled in a valet lot, and then realized that valet parking was probably not going to be something she should be spending money on. But between the interactive seat and the fact that no space seemed large enough for Big Red, her nerves were shot.

  She dug through her purse (a midsized red slouch bag made from a J. Crew Christmas cashmere) for Shortie’s Therapy Dog jacket. When planning her trip, Summer mentioned to Lynnie that she had concerns about traveling with Shortie. She could find hotels all along the route that would take him, but what was she going to do with him at stores? Lynnie then suggested getting a therapy dog vest online.

  “But he isn’t a therapy dog,” Summer said, looking dubiously at Shortie.

  “That’s not the point,” Lynnie said.

  “I think that is the point.”

  “Well, if you want to play strictly by the rules,” Lynnie said. “Then you go ahead and knock yourself out. I know you’d never leave Shortie in
a car by himself…so how do you expect to buy a cup of coffee or do all that sweater shopping?”

  Lynnie had left it at that. That night, just for curiosity’s sake, Summer googled “therapy dogwear,” and came up with myriad choices in all sizes, styles, and patterns. Some even came with official looking badges. Summer wasn’t one to break rules, but struggled with her decision. Was a bogus vest better than tying Shortie to some outdoor furniture while she did her shopping? Just the thought of his little eyes following her into a store made her tear up.

  Summer bought a cute blue and silver coat with two paw prints on either side and a smiling canine on the rump. She attempted a faux-therapy-dog outing, initially exhilarated by her outlawing. But when attempting to enter a store, Summer saw a man with a real therapy dog and couldn’t bring herself to pass herself off as someone who needed emotional support.

  At her exit interview at work, Summer brought up the Shortie problem as one of her main concerns for the trip. If there is one thing people in insurance can do, it’s get the ball moving. In no time at all, Shorty was licensed as a bona fide emotional support dog. It did cross Summer’s mind that her friends in high places might have actually thought she was in desperate need of a support dog, but she preferred to think they were all just animal lovers.

  Fishing the coat out of her bag, she released Shortie from his chair, cinched the coat around his middle and snapped on a leash. Shortie looked startled and confused, like he’d been released from one prison just to be rowed downstream to another.

  Summer put him on the ground and appraised the look. The real therapy dog coat was dull, so while she had the legal paperwork, she still had him wearing his original cute outfit from the Internet. It wasn’t out-and-out breaking the law, but still she felt like a renegade. The coat was made for a slightly longer dog, so the fabric jutted out over his head. When Lynnie first saw him in it, she thought he looked like an armadillo. Summer couldn’t really argue and vowed to make him a jacket out of a man’s argyle sweater when she had her business up and running.

  Summer was proud of herself. Besides the fact that she had gotten over the challenge of her first bridge, she was three hours closer to the tiny house and her future—not to mention three hours closer to Bale—and was on her way to her first sweater purchase!

  I’ve got this! she thought.

  Shortie seemed anxious to stretch his little legs, and pulled at his leash. But before Summer had taken no more than ten steps, her cell phone rang. She halted and dug in her purse again. She could hear it, and she could see it flashing with lights that would have made a disco proud, but she couldn’t put her hands on it inside the slouchy purse. I’m going to have to figure out how to put a few pockets in these purses, she thought.

  She noticed that the purse seemed to be stretching, and not in an attractive way. Maybe there was more to this sewing than met the eye. She finally managed to fish the phone out of her purse. She whipped back her hair to answer it as Shortie strained at his leash in order to christen the tires of a tantalizingly close Mercedes Benz.

  “Hello?” Summer said, giving Shortie a little more leash.

  “It is I,” Queenie said.

  Summer chided herself on not checking the number before she answered. She’d have to be more diligent. The best way to keep Queenie in the dark about her plans was to just not talk to her. Avoidance had served her pretty well up until now and she saw no reason to mess with success.

  “Hey, Queenie,” Summer said, inching closer to the Mercedes. There was no reason for both she and the dog to be miserable. “What’s up?”

  “Just checking in on you,” Queenie said. “Making sure you haven’t changed your mind about coming up here.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Queenie said. “I told Keefe you were coming and he said he’d be surprised if you showed, so I’m just…”

  “Keefe?”

  “Yeah,” Queenie said. “Keefe Devlin. You remember Keefe Devlin, don’t you?”

  “Of course I remember Keefe Devlin!” Summer said, trying to keep her voice even. “What’s it to him if I show or not?”

  “He’s just trying to make plans,” Queenie said. “He’s still the manager of the shop, you know.”

  “I’ve got to go, Queenie,” Summer said. “You can tell Keefe I’ll be there sooner than I thought. Whether he likes it or not.”

  “No need to act like a fishwife,” Queenie said. “Keefe is just doing his job. I’m sure he doesn’t care if you show one way or the other.”

  “I believe you,” Summer said as she hung up, tears stinging her eyes.

  She was jerked out of her melancholy by a harsh male voice.

  “Hey!”

  Summer looked around. The angry voice belonged to a red-faced man in a green T-shirt and baseball cap. He strode over to her.

  “Your dog peed on my tire,” the man said accusingly, pointing at Shortie.

  Summer looked down at Shortie, standing triumphantly by a spreading puddle.

  “I see that,” Summer said.

  She wondered if she should apologize, but decided against it. After all, she hadn’t peed on his tire. Why were men always causing trouble?

  The man glared at her, then at Shortie, then jumped over the puddle. He opened the door, got in and drove away, screeching out of the parking lot.

  Summer looked down at Shortie again. The man had not upset Shortie, who was all set to move on with his day. Summer gave the leash a little tug and they headed toward the store.

  “You’re a very wise man, little guy,” Summer said. “Never sweat the small stuff, right?”

  She strode briskly to the store. A sign on the door read: “We’re closed! Thank you for your business and have a bodacious and curvaceous life!”

  Summer sat on the front stoop and put her head in her arms. Nothing was going according to plan. Her phone buzzed. This time she looked at it. It was Bale in Kentucky.

  Chapter 4

  “Hello? Hello? Hello?” she practiced three different approaches to the word before answering.

  “Hello?” she finally said into the phone, settling on the sort of smoky secretarial I’m-having-sex-on-my-desk number she’d never gotten to use at work.

  “This is Bale,” he said. “Bale Barrett—with the tiny house.”

  Various sentences popped into Summer’s head: Yes, I have you on Caller ID (too pathetic?)…I only know one Bale (too haughty?)…Is something wrong? (too risk-management?)….

  She settled on: “Hi, Bale.”

  “I’m finishing up the house,” Bale said. “I was just double-checking to make sure you still want to use the horse trough as a bathtub.”

  Summer had seen a tiny house online with a galvanized steel watering trough converted into a bathtub. It embodied all the romance of the tiny house adventure she envisioned. When Bale barely blinked at the complexity of the concept, she was thrilled. But now, the thought of arriving at Queenie’s with a bright red tiny house shaped like a caboose with a bathtub made from a horse trough gave her severe doubts.

  Galvanized was taking on a whole new meaning.

  “Are you having second thoughts?” she asked.

  “I think that’s my question,” Bale said with a deep rumbling laugh.

  “Oh!” Summer tried to recover some ground. “No, I’m not having second thoughts. Unless you have another idea.”

  “I’m been thinking about you,” Bale said. “And I do have another option.”

  You’re thinking about me?

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  She thought she sounded the epitome of sophistication.

  “I just did a shower installation using half a whiskey barrel,” he said. “I have the other half of the barrel and thought that if you wanted a shower instead of a tub, you might like it.”

  Summer
wandered Spruce Street aimlessly, curvaceous sweaters forgotten. Lost in conversation while Shortie sniffed at every new tree, there was something sexy about discussing her bathing options with a handsome man in Kentucky.

  Summer pictured herself climbing into the half whiskey barrel and realized the vision of lounging in a horse trough with bubbles up to her shoulders was a much better image than her climbing clumsily over the side of a half barrel.

  “I think I’ll stick with the tub,” she said.

  “You got it,” Bale said. “See you in two days, then?”

  “Looks like it,” Summer replied. “I’m in Philadelphia right now and tomorrow I should be in West Virginia.”

  “Beautiful country out there,” Bale said. “Are you going to Dolly Sods?”

  “Are you kidding?” Summer replied. “Why drive through West Virginia if you aren’t going to Dolly Sods?”

  “That’s my girl!” he said. “Well, wish I were going with you, but I have a bathtub to build. See ya.”

  “See ya,” Summer answered clumsily. As Queenie’s granddaughter, poor diction did not come easy.

  She knew she shouldn’t read anything into his offhand remark, “I wish I were going with you,” but her resolve deserted her. She felt a little giddy with the anticipation of seeing him and the fact (well, the supposition) that he sounded as if he couldn’t wait to see her.

  Summer checked the battery on her phone. She was down to twenty-three percent. She always filled up her car at a quarter-tank and always recharged her battery at twenty-five percent. But she was a new, more reckless version of herself. She decided to throw caution to the wind.

  “Come on, Shortie,” she said, pulling him and his therapy jacket into a coffee shop.

  The shop was nearly deserted. She headed toward a small booth in the back, walking straight-backed, as if training Shortie how to act in a public place. The doctor who gave Summer Shortie’s license cautioned her that the dog needed to be well-behaved in all public places. Shortie was clearly not a method actor. His tail wagged and he made eye contact with every patron, whether they were smiling at him or not. She promised him if he would just not cause a scene, there would be bacon in his immediate future. Whenever he went off script, Summer, knowing dogs had exceptional hearing, would just whisper “bacon” under her breath. It seemed to work every time.