Interloper at Glencoe

by Julianne Lee

  Once the floors were bare, the three of them set to sweeping and scrubbing the bedroom on the western side. That would be Shelby’s bedroom, and the other would be used for an office. Buckets of warm water turned gray immediately, then quickly went muddy with the filth scrubbed from walls and floors. Again and again the water was emptied and replaced with fresh, and gradually the place began to seem less dark and less musty. The wet wood now smelled sharp. Almost alive.

  “Dang, I’m getting hungry.” Neil dumped a sponge into his bucket, dried his hands on his t-shirt, and reached for the cell phone at his waist. “Hey, what do you want on your pizza?”

  Shelby grimaced, for pizza was not good for her waistline. “How about we go search down something in the kitchen? I did bring food from the apartment.”

  “You wouldn’t rather have someone just bring you food? Chinese? This town’s got five—count” ’em, five—Chinese restaurants.”

  Susan said, “No, hon, it’s down to four now. One got shut down ’cause they were trapping the ducks on the lake and serving them to their customers.”

  Ew. “I think we can pass on the Chinese food after that story, I think,” said Shelby. “I have bread and cheese downstairs, and some canned fruit. It’ll be good.”

  “Get Neil to go to the convenience store for some beer, and he’ll be fine. There’s one just up the bypass.” Susan’s fingertips lightly brushed back stray bits of hair from her face and she shook the locks back to keep from touching them too much with her wet hands.

  Neil emitted a growl of enthusiasm, and pulled out his car keys to set about doing just that while Shelby and Susan went downstairs to the kitchen. The stove was electric, and Shelby wished it were gas. Actually, on some deep, imaginative level, she wished it were wood-burning though she knew real life made cooking with wood nearly impossible. As she set to work with a wet rag to clean a spot on the filthy, chipped tile counter, she imagined a big, black wood-burning stove in the spot where now sat an avocado-green electric stove. The thing looked as if it hadn’t been turned on in decades, so there was hope. Maybe this monstrosity wouldn’t work, and she’d have an excuse to buy a gas one to replace it. Even if she wasn’t brave enough to try wood, gas would be better than this. Once the counter was clean, she set out the cans of sardines, cheese, half a loaf of bread, and a bottle of orange-pineapple juice.

  When Neil returned with his beer, they took the food out to the porch to sit on the steps in the fresh air outside. Neil persisted in eyeing the collapsed end.

  Susan said, “You’re so lucky to have gotten this place.”

  Shelby nodded, but her shoulders sagged a little as she thought of how she’d received the money for it. “I could have waited a few more years, though.”

  A small hum of agreement, and Susan added, “Your parents weren’t young people though.”

  “Nope. They were old enough to be my grandparents. And when Dad died, Mom just couldn’t hold it together after that. They’d been together too long, I guess.”

  Susan heaved a wistful sigh. “Could you imagine loving someone that much? To not be able to live without them?”

  That caught Neil’s attention, and he turned to give her a meaningful stare.

  Susan chuckled and laid a hand on her husband’s knee. “Sorry, hon, but the deal is ’till death.’ After that, you’re on your own.”

  He grunted, and with a wry smile returned to his construction reverie, staring at the collapsed end of the porch.

  Shelby poked a piece of cheese back inside the bread and said, “There sure isn’t anyone I know I’d die for.” But at the same time there was a dim longing to know what it might be like to have loved the way her parents had.

  After lunch, with Neil’s brawn handy for the heavy bedroom pieces, the work went quickly. Her bed was a heavy, bulky oak four-poster, and each piece of it was a struggle to haul upstairs. They manhandled the box spring up the stairs and onto the assembled bed frame, an awkward job for the three of them, and Shelby was deeply grateful for the help of her friends. She gave a shove to the mattress as Neil pulled, and Susan guided it as it thudded onto the frame. Then Shelby fluffed the sweaty hair at the back of her head, and slapped black dust from her hands and jeans. It was going to be weeks before this place would be anything but a dust storm.

  By the end of the day, all the bedroom furniture was upstairs, the living room on the west side of the downstairs had been cleaned, and the heavy living room pieces had been placed. Huge rolls of dirty orange shag carpet and rotten padding lay out by the street, leaving the floors bare. Her house now smelled of an odd mixture of detergent and dust and its large spaces echoed still, having swallowed her scant apartment furnishings without any effort. Her sofa was backed up to the living room windows, across from the television that, at thirteen inches, was too far away to see well any more. Even the huge bed upstairs was dwarfed by the enormous room. Only the modern additions seemed normal size. Much like her old apartment, the bathroom was barely large enough to turn around in and the kitchen was a narrow strip of space tacked onto the outside of the building.

  As the sun began to turn orange in the west, Susan and Neil departed for home after Susan extracted a promise from Shelby to accompany her to church the next morning. “It’ll be a good introduction to the community for you. Welcome to Hendersonville.”

  Shelby liked the idea and promised to meet Susan there. She waved goodbye to her friends, then went inside to change into her running togs. If she could find them. Though she was fairly tuckered out by the strenuous lifting and carrying all day, Shelby still had to make her habitual run before supper. If she put off doing it once, she might stop doing it entirely and that would be a bad thing. She was tall, and not a thin woman, and tended to overweight if she didn’t exercise constantly and watch what she ate. Running every day had become a habit in recent years, and regardless of what other exercise she might get during the day she never felt quite right if she couldn’t get out and jog around the neighborhood just before dark.

  Tonight she scoped out a route through the apartment complex on the other side of the tracks, for it was a nice, level area with streets that wound this way and that before dumping her back out onto the road by her house. Halfway through, though, she had to stop to gawk, panting and leaning on her knees. Arrayed on a tiny patch of lawn in front of one of the dozens of identical bay windows in the complex was a family of skunks. Ceramic lawn ornaments, the largest one about half life-size. The others were the babies, apparently, and they were enjoying a dip in a toy pool. Mama skunk stood guard, one baby stood on the diving board, and two others awaited their turn. The scene tickled Shelby into a fit of giggles as she heaved herself erect and lurched into a run again. Already she was liking this town.

  After supper she spent the evening cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing black crud from between mismatched ceramic counter tiles, and wearing even more porcelain from the sink already scratched and scrubbed to bare metal. Then she unpacked utensils, dishes and small appliances. There wasn’t nearly enough counter space for all the machines. Toaster, microwave, bread machine, blender, crock pot, coffee maker…she’d have to select the most important ones then store the rest in cabinets until she would need them. There was no television cable, for it wasn’t yet connected, but she had a boom-box plugged in and listened to music as she worked. In the darkness, the house around her settled in for the night. A word slipped into her mind and stuck. Home. She smiled. She could spend the rest of her life here and be happy.

  It was quite late when exhaustion caught up with her and she finally turned off the music to retire. The silence invaded in force, as if the music had been sucked into another dimension and the void filled with a medium thicker than air. Shelby turned off the downstairs lights, then by the stray light of an upstairs sconce that dribbled rays into the stairwell, she made her way up the dusty steps.

  This was now her home, and she sighed at the warmth that thought brought. She went to the bedroom door and reached for the
light button, but she froze, dumbfounded by what she saw inside the room.

  A lit candle sat on the mantel at the far side of the room. She hadn’t left one in there—all her emergency candles were tucked away in a kitchen drawer now—and this didn’t even look like one of hers. It was yellowish and stood in a short pewter holder with a curved handle. She’d never seen it before, but it was there now. Its flame threw a small circle of light around the cold fireplace.

  A movement startled her. Near the candle, in the dimness, stood a tall, dark-haired man, scratching himself.

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