“Nah, don’t go yet.” He bends down and fishes a beer out from the tangle of grass beside the steps. “Here.” He holds the bottle up invitingly. “I’ve got a couple of cold ones in the truck—I thought maybe we could drink them down by the creek.”
“Well…” There are beads of moisture on the glass, and as Andie watches, one slides down the bottle, leaving a tiny, slick trail. Nothing, she thinks, could possibly taste as good as a cold beer right now. Smell be damned.
“Sure.”
Cort’s pickup is parked at the far side of the drive, close against the house. He reaches over the truck’s tailgate and pulls up four beers. Andie glances in and sees that the cooler is filled with slushy water.
“Been waiting long?” she asks.
“Kinda.” As they walk toward the woods, Cort holds the beer bottles two in each hand, his long fingers hooked around the glass necks. “To tell the truth, I saw the two of you working back there, but you both seemed a little tense. I didn’t want to interfere with anything.” He grins. “Plus, Miss Gert looked like she was in a mood to call the cops on me again.”
“For stealing Nina this morning? Next time just knock, would you?”
His voice turns serious. “I’ve been meaning to talk with you about that. I know this isn’t the big city or anything, but you should still lock the doors at night, just to be safe.”
She starts to protest, but they’ve reached the woods and are walking single file along the trail that leads to the creek, so she can’t see Cort’s face. She lets the subject drop, for now.
The path is overgrown, and as they walk she’s busy fending off the pricker bushes, saplings, and branches that reach out to snag her clothes. Ahead of her, Cort’s back is tall and straight. He’s had a haircut recently, she notices, and the skin at the base of his skull is pink.
“So what’s bothering Gert?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Oh, I don’t know. Seems like everything does these days.” Andie considers telling Cort about her father, but it sounds silly to say she’s upset because he’s visiting. “I think maybe the whole idea of selling the house is starting to get to her.”
“Makes sense.” He seems about to say something else, but Andie catches sight of sunlight sparkling on water.
“The creek!”
The trail ends abruptly. There’s a small clearing on the creek’s bank, a place where the trees give way to a smooth shoulder of rocks, moss, and fern, and Andie pushes past Cort to reach it.
At its deepest point, this bend of the creek approaches three feet. As a child, Andie loved to paddle in its shallow water. The memory of mud squelching between her toes causes an involuntary shudder down her spine. She slips off her shoes and settles onto a rock warmed by the small patch of late afternoon sun that has managed to filter its way through the branches above.
Cort nestles two of the bottles into the side of the bank and sits beside her, their feet dangling companionably into the cool green water below. He palms the top off a bottle, hands it to her, then does the same to his own.
The beer is colder than the creek water, and the first, icy swallow satisfies something deeper than thirst as it rushes down Andie’s throat.
“This is just what I needed,” she says, leaning back and closing her eyes. She can feel Cort shifting beside her, searching for a comfortable position.
“Did you miss it much when you were away?”
At first, Andie thinks he’s talking about the beer. When she realizes he means the creek, she opens her eyes and considers.
“I don’t think I thought much about it—I just kind of assumed it would always be here.” She props herself up with an elbow and looks at him. “How about you?”
“I went to school out West for a couple of years. I loved it there, too, but I think I just have New England in my bones. I can live other places and be happy, but no place else feels like home, you know?” He glances sideways at her. “Especially here. I try not to take it for granted.”
Andie leans back again and shuts her eyes. There was a time when to live at Evenfall—to be claimed by Frank and Clara—was all she wanted. To be claimed by anyone, really. Even Richard. She remembers the mornings before she’d leave for boarding school. Always, she’d spend those early hours walking the meadows and the woods. She’d carved her initials in the bark of more than one tree, desperate to leave some sign that she’d existed here, that she’d belonged. But she’s an adult now, she reminds herself. She’s built her own life, one far from here. There’s no point in going over the past. Instead, she concentrates on feeling the shadows of the leaves move across her face, the puffs of breeze against her skin. She can hear the water, and if she listens carefully she can just make out Cort’s slow, quiet breathing. It’s peaceful, and she feels herself getting sleepy. She’s on the verge of dozing off when she hears Cort’s voice.
“So what was Italy like?” he asks. “Tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?” She doesn’t open her eyes, just lets herself drift with the sound of the water.
“You were a student, right? So you took art classes?”
“Not exactly,” Andie says. “My concentration was on architecture, which means I focused on buildings. One building, really, for my thesis.”
“But you were always drawing and stuff—I thought you wanted to be an artist.”
Andie gives up on resting. She’d forgotten how inquisitive Cort was as a child. Apparently, he hasn’t outgrown the trait. She sits up and drains the rest of her beer.
“I thought so, too. But my college advisor pointed out that art majors are a dime a dozen, and if I wanted to support myself, my paintings weren’t going to do it.” She recalls, with a shiver of distaste, the dismissive wave of her advisor’s hand over her midyear portfolio. “So I switched to art history, with a focus on architecture, and then I liked it so much I kept going. I just finished my PhD. That’s why I was in Italy.”
“Congratulations,” Cort says. He’s in the middle of opening another beer, and he raises it in a toast. Andie nudges him with her foot, and he twists off the cap and hands her the bottle.
“Thanks.” She takes a long pull of the beer. “Now if I could only get a job.”
“Sounds like we have something in common.” He clinks his bottle against hers. “So, tell me about this building. What’s it like?”
“Amazing. It’s a palace—a fort, really—built in the fifteenth century. It belonged to one family for almost three hundred years, and they just kept adding to it. I studied how it was built, who lived there, and how they used the space.”
If she closes her eyes, Andie can see the palazzo, centuries-old dust motes drifting through its dark, cool halls. She’s sketched its exterior so many times she can feel its shape beneath her fingertips: the slim Doric columns; the vaulted entrance; the grand courtyard. Births and deaths, marriages and affairs, have all taken place between its massive walls. Yet only the stone remains.
“Huh.” Cort’s quiet for a moment, considering. “So you basically wrote your thesis on what home meant to this one family.”
It’s an oversimplification, but close enough to the truth that she opens her eyes and nods. “Pretty much. But it took me two years and three hundred pages,” she says.
He flicks a beer cap at her knee. It bounces off, coming to rest in the moss, and Andie picks it up, runs her finger along its sharp edges.
“So what did you do in your time off?” he says. “You did have time off, right?”
“Not much,” she says, still thinking of the cool, silent space of the palazzo, the way the outside looked in the predawn air. “I hung out with friends, mostly. Shopped some, ate a lot. It’s kind of a different pace there.” Sensual is the word she thinks of, like the memory of a fat, ripe tomato in her hand. Because she’s with Cort she amends it. “It’s slower, more of the moment. You can’t find that here.”
“Depends on where you look.” He reaches up and breaks off a long, slender switch f
rom a volunteer sapling, then idly brushes its tip through the creek. “So, you do all this by yourself, or are you with somebody over there? Some eye-talian stallion?”
The thought of anyone mistaking Neal, with his reddish blond hair and ruddy skin, for a native Italian makes Andie laugh out loud.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. It’s just, I remember you used to do this when I babysat. Ask me a million questions.”
“Yeah, and you never answered any of them then, either.”
“That’s because it’s none of your business.” She takes another swallow of the beer. “Now your turn. What are you doing these days?”
“Not much.” He traces the end of the switch along the instep of her foot. “Mostly helping dad on the farm while I figure out what to do with my life.”
“How’s that going?”
“What, helping dad, or figuring out what to do?” The switch is tickling her calf now, and Andie swats it away. “It’s okay. I got a degree in agricultural engineering—did I mention that? Not a PhD or anything, but pretty good for a country boy.”
“Congratulations,” Andie says.
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t seem to be doing me much good. What I’d really like to do is have my own place, but that takes money. So I’ll probably wind up working for the aggie extension or something, at least for a few years.” He lays back, lacing his fingers behind his head. The leafy canopy overhead shifts and sways, casting shadows on the water below. It’s quiet for so long that Andie starts to think Cort has, impossibly, drifted off to sleep. She’s on the verge of dozing again herself when he speaks.
“Was this place ever a working farm when you were here?”
“Evenfall? It depends on what you consider working.” She struggles awake. “Uncle Frank worked it, sure. But he probably never made much money. He was a security guard over at the GE plant most of the time I was growing up.”
“But my dad says it was always good land. I wonder why they stopped.”
Andie shrugs. “Who knows? Between Clara’s sewing and the job at GE, they did all right. Maybe he just didn’t want to farm.”
“Maybe,” Cort says. He sounds unconvinced.
“You know, it’s kind of weird to think of him growing up here,” Andie says. “He was always so quiet that Clara and Gert ran the show. I forget that this was his home first.”
“Yep,” Cort says. “Those strong-willed Murphy women will run you right over if they get the chance.”
Andie rolls to her side and pretends to frown. “Who says that? Aunt Clara was as meek as they come.”
“Maybe so,” he concedes. “But you take after Gert.”
She pummels him until he sits up, laughing, and grabs her wrists. “You do,” he says. “Except she probably hits harder. Her hands are a lot bigger—yours are delicate little things.”
It’s true. Andie’s always been secretly proud of her hands. “Another Murphy through and through, God help me,” Frank would say, shaking his head and looking at her. “Except for the hands—those came from your mother.”
Now she holds them up to the light. Her fingers are long and slender, but strong, with smooth oval nails. Cort places his right palm against hers, dwarfing it.
“You’ve got that Murphy jaw, though,” he says. He brings his hand up slowly and cups her face, tracing his thumb along her jaw. “And the eyes.”
Andie’s urge to push Cort away is lessened by just how good his touch feels, like water on a plant that’s been neglected for weeks. She makes no move to stop him from leaning closer. She can feel the heat of his skin, the soft cotton of his shirt against her arm. Her face is growing flushed, and her breath is coming faster. She closes her eyes. There’s a touch of warmth against her lips, and then an ungodly crashing noise.
Andie’s eyes pop open and she jerks away from Cort. A second later Nina comes tearing through the undergrowth. The dog dashes into the creek, paddles straight out, then turns and swims back. She claws her way up onto the bank and races in crazy circles around them, stopping just long enough to shake and spray them with water. Finally, she collapses panting at Cort’s feet and rolls over, legs waving in the air.
“Jesus.” Andie takes a deep breath. Her heart is pounding, and droplets of creek water dot her shirt and her hair. “That damn dog.”
“She’s something else.” He glances up at the sky. “Shit. It’s getting late—I need to head back and help dad feed.”
He stands and extends his hand, but Andie ignores it. She’s embarrassed enough by their almost-kiss that she prefers to scramble to her feet on her own. Cort doesn’t seem to mind. He picks up the four empty beer bottles, holds back a sapling at the beginning of the trail, and lets her go ahead of him. All the way home she can hear him whistling behind her as she tells herself how crazy this is. He’s not a minor, exactly, but with ten years separating them, he might as well be.
By the time they reach the clearing, she’s decided their almost-kiss was a temporary lapse in judgment brought on by the beer, the heat, and possibly the fact that she’s miles away and on a different continent from the last man in her life. She’s calm enough to face Cort when he strides up beside her, and ready to let him down gently.
“Frank never kept cows, did he?”
“Cows?” She covers her confusion by pretending to rack her memory. “Nope, I don’t think so. He did have one old milk cow when I was a kid, but that’s it.”
“I bet this field would be great pastureland. Look at the stone walls.” He points, and behind the scrub trees that surround the clearing Andie can just make out the faint outlines of rock. “Somebody must have used it for that.”
“I know Uncle Frank’s father kept animals. I’ve seen pictures.”
He stops and looks around the field. “You ought to clear those wild roses. They can take over a pasture so quick that before you know it there’s no room for anything else.”
“I kind of like them,” Andie says. She doesn’t stop walking. “And besides, in a few months it won’t matter.”
They don’t speak again until they reach the house. Nina, who took her own path home from the creek, has re-appeared, and Cort bends down to scratch behind her ears. Immediately, she flops over on her side, pink tongue hanging out.
Andie, standing on the front steps, can’t help herself. “Do you always have that effect on females?”
“Only the four-legged ones.” He straightens up and walks over to her, leaning against the door frame. “Prove me wrong—have dinner with me Friday night.”
“Thanks, Cort, but I don’t think so.” Andie turns to go inside, but he puts a hand out to block her.
“Why not? You have to eat. And dinner with me can’t be worse than Gert’s cooking, can it?” He runs his fingers through his hair until it stands up in little spikes. He looks so woeful Andie can’t help but laugh.
“You used to make that face whenever it was time to go to bed,” she says, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.
Cort, to his credit, doesn’t go for the easy line, just arches an eyebrow. “You always let me stay up later, so it must have worked.”
Andie doesn’t tell him she simply didn’t want to stay up alone. She remembers sitting with Cort on his parents’ brown, scratchy sofa, watching late-night reruns of The Rockford Files and eating popcorn from the aluminum mixing bowl between them. No matter how hard he tried, Cort could never stay awake past eleven. He’d stop asking questions, his breathing would slow, and the next time she looked over, he’d be sleeping, his head propped up against the sofa’s high back. His favorite pajamas had green and blue trucks on them, and by age eight he’d worn them so often the cuffs were starting to unravel. His wrist bones showed above the threads, impossibly thin and fragile for a boy.
“You were just good company,” Andie says.
“I still am.”
When she hesitates, he touches her lightly on the shoulder. “Look, Andie, I promise to respect your status as former babysitter, okay?
It’s just dinner—no strings.” His face clouds. “Unless you’re seeing someone. Is that it?”
“No.” The answer pops out before Andie has a chance to think. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”
“All right.” He grins. “Is eight okay? I could pick you up then.”
Against her better judgment, Andie nods. Cort’s grin gets wider, and he backs away, as if afraid she’ll change her mind. “Eight it is. See you then.”
“Right,” Andie says, but Cort has rounded the corner of the house. He’s forgotten the empty beer bottles, and Andie bends to pick them up. She’s still holding them in her hands when the truck drives past. Cort honks the horn, and she raises a bottle in mock salute. The brown glass catches the sun and glints like a light on dark water.
Gert
THE dress that clings to Gert’s calves is damp with creek water and heavy with the promise of coming rain. Of the three dresses she owns, this one—blue cotton sprigged with white flowers—is her favorite. Her mother hemmed it with tiny, precise stitches, her face tired under the glow of the kerosene lamp.
She walks along the creek bank, the muscles in her thighs bunching and releasing smoothly. When she glances down, there are no age spots on her hands, and the braid that trails past her shoulders is thick and lustrous. She knows she has been walking a long time, but she is not tired.
The air here is thick, a cross between water and glass, the type of air in which words or thoughts can hang, suspended, hidden, yet almost visible.
“I thought you might not come,” he says, stepping out from behind the oak tree that grows just where the bank curves away. His face is smooth and unlined. He’s thin, but with the leanness of a boy, not the wasting that came later with age. His eyes are unchanged; the same blue, open-hearted gaze that makes her catch her breath each time he looks at her. At first, she wondered how no one else noticed the intensity of that gaze. In time, she realized that he looks at everyone in the same penetrating way. This is part of his charm. His eyes are slanted at the corners, like a cat’s.
“It took a while to get away. I’ve been home such a little time, they’re still happy to see me,” she says. She does not apologize. There is no apology sufficient for what she is about to do. Even if there was, it would not belong to Frank.
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