Because there was a most unfortunate thing that Theodore did not know about her.
After a lifetime of jumping from hobby to hobby, job to job, Bree had learned a great many skills. Ask her to scuba dive with sharks, whip up a four-tiered cake, or hand dip a colonial-times wax candle, and she was your gal. But there was one activity that had never crossed her path.
One thing she most certainly couldn’t learn to do within five weeks.
Tap dancing.
Chapter 6
Chip
Chip couldn’t go over and help.
He didn’t have time.
If anyone needed help, it was him. Right now he had no working toilet and a damaged subfloor in the bathroom. Right now, any time nature called, Chip found himself driving down the street to a gas station—even at midnight.
He had problems of his own. The priority here was clear.
Chip stood under the light of his own porch in the crisp, mid-March air, determined not to look at the elderly woman across the street hobbling from her parked car toward her door. Everything about her small brick ranch was lightless. Every one of her four visible windows, the shadowy line of her slanted sidewalk, the petite stoop. Two grocery bags swung from her arm as she shakily grabbed the railing and began to ascend.
He looked down at the circular saw in his hand and the plywood between the sawhorses at his feet, then back toward the woman across the street. Why wouldn’t her porch light come on? Why, in a week and a half, had it never come on?
Was the bulb burned out?
Did she not flick the switch up before leaving?
The woman stopped at the screen door and began digging in her purse.
He’d watched her do this the other night too. It took a painstaking five minutes to find her keys, and when she finally did, it felt like she spent half an hour trying to find the lock and turn the knob.
He dropped his gaze to the measured line on his board. He considered pulling the trigger and starting the saw. He glanced up again.
Still rooting in her purse.
He glanced at the board again. Set the saw down.
“Mrs. Lewis!” he called, stepping off his porch and then jogging across the street.
She looked up at the sound of her name and watched him until he reached the bottom of her steps.
“I can’t help noticing.” He pointed up above her head. “Is something wrong with your light?”
Mrs. Lewis, still holding the key, blinked a few times. Apparently she wasn’t used to men approaching her in the twilight of eight thirty.
“My light?” She turned back to the door. Craned her head upward. “Oh, yes, I’ve had trouble with that light for a few months now.”
“Would you . . . care if I take a look?” He gave her an easy smile. “I do know my way around a light switch.”
She flapped her hand dismissively. “Oh, honey, I see you out there working. I know you do.” If he didn’t know better, he’d say he heard a bit of teasing in her voice. She turned toward the door. “Just let me . . . get us inside here . . . and—”
“Here.” Chip slipped his phone out of his pocket and turned on the flashlight.
With the knob illuminated, it took but a moment to get the lock turned and them both inside the tiny foyer. Mrs. Lewis turned the living-room lights on and began walking toward the kitchen with her bags.
Chip turned toward the row of switches by the door.
“It’s the far left one. Can I get you something?” Mrs. Lewis’s voice carried from the kitchen. He heard a refrigerator opening. “Tea?”
Chip flicked the switch three or four times. Nothing.
“No thanks,” he called back, then stepped outside to get a closer look. “Have you tried a new bulb?”
“A neighbor tried a few weeks ago,” she called back. “No luck.”
He frowned. “I’m going to grab some tools from my truck. Can you direct me toward your basement?”
When his attempts at a quick fix tripped the breaker twice, Chip knew he’d be spending the rest of the evening working in Mrs. Lewis’s house, running a new circuit from the panel to the light fixture.
Well. Who needed indoor plumbing anyway?
After three more polite refusals of tea, coffee, and crumb cake, he was in the basement, halfway into removing the existing wire from the 20-amp breaker.
He heard the front door creak on its hinges and muffled voices upstairs.
Mrs. Lewis said, “I don’t care how much trouble the sequined body suits are giving you, Evie. It’s our spades night. If you want to work on costumes, you should address it on the fridge calendar. Honestly, it’s like you don’t respect the schedule at all.”
Chip paused in unscrewing the panel.
The hardwood floor above squeaked. “Mrs. Lewis, tell Evie she can’t sneak off to her basement to work.” He knew that muffled voice. He’d know it in his sleep.
Mrs. Lewis spoke. “She’s right, my dear Evie. Work your fingers to the nub, and you won’t have any fingers left to be my partner. Not that it makes a difference, as we’ll lose either way.”
Evie grunted.
He knew it was Evie, because the first time he heard that grunt he’d thought it came from a wild animal. But no, it was just Evie, sulking and grunting as Bree dragged her into the passenger seat of her car for work most mornings.
Bree and Evie were quite the odd couple. Fascinating. But odd.
A new voice spoke up, just as the rhythmic thud-thud, thud-thud-thud of a tapping foot came from above the joist a few feet to the left. “Forget spades. Can we talk a minute about how I’m going to lose my job?”
“C’mon, guys! Listen to you all!” Bree interjected with all the spirit of a football coach down at half. “It’s game night! Where’s your spirit? Where’s your pinazz?”
“It’s at the Barter,” the woman with the tapping foot replied, “where I also left my hope for a living wage and a bright future.”
“Birdie,” Bree said, “you’ve got the face of an angel and the toes of Ginger Rogers. You’ve been tapping for three days straight, though, so if you don’t sit down and rest your feet this instant, I will pin you down and sit on you. Evie, I brought you General Tso’s chicken. If you want it, you will have to do what normal people do and have conversations. With other human beings. Away from the basement. And Mrs. Lewis, you’re the most positive person in the group right now, so if I lose you, too, I’ll lose everyone. Tell ya what, tonight we’ll take nil off the table.”
“Nil!” Birdie protested. Her tapping foot stopped. “But that’s my only skill! You know how badly I overbid otherwise.”
“Just give in now and cut the deck, Birdie,” Mrs. Lewis said. “I’ve known Bree since she was a little girl, and I’ve never seen her lose her argument when she put her mind to it. She once convinced her grandmother, God rest her soul, to take her out to the flea market, and they came back with a pet flying squirrel.”
“Nana loved Puddles,” he heard Bree say defensively.
“Of course, dear. And Puddles—aptly named for all those puddles it left around her poor house, if I remember correctly—running off through that open window the week you left for school was entirely coincidental.”
The conversation continued as Chip gave the screw one more turn and the wire slipped out from the panel.
A moment later, Birdie spoke and his ears perked.
“I just can’t imagine why Mr. Richardson would think about remodeling the Barter,” she said. “It’s absolutely perfect as is. Maybe expand the dressing rooms—convert that empty room into a second dressing room so we won’t be so cramped—but the auditorium itself? It’s gorgeous.”
“Well,” Mrs. Lewis said, “Clarence has always been a peculiar fellow. Has been since I taught him back in grade school. He must’ve had a new lunch box every other week for the whole year, always declaring whatever new color or cartoon figure it had on it was his real favorite. Not that his parents couldn’t afford for the boy to have
thirty-seven lunchboxes.”
“If that’s the case, I’m surprised he didn’t decide to remodel the place earlier,” Bree said.
“He’s not going to shut it down to do it, is he?” Birdie said, her tone pitched high. “Surely he would’ve said so when he told us about changing to Singin’ in the Rain—”
“He’s not going to shut the place down, Birdie,” Bree said. “Theo said it would be done during the break between seasons. But I’m sure we’ll know everything we can when it hits the paper next week. Let’s eat before it all gets cold.”
Chip reached down for the wire cutters as the conversation was buried under the clatter of flatware being pulled from a drawer and dishes being placed on the table. So. The Barter was getting a facelift. He could feel the wheels in his brain starting to turn.
Some minutes later, Mrs. Lewis said, “Oh, I forgot about my young man.”
There was a pause.
“Your young man . . . ,” Bree said, “whom you keep in the basement?”
“Where else would I keep him?” Mrs. Lewis retorted. “You know everything keeps better in a cool, dark place.”
Chip smiled to himself as he continued cutting out the wire.
“You doing okay down there?” Mrs. Lewis called from the open door at the top of the stairs.
“Doing just fine,” Chip called back, reaching up to snip around the stapled wire.
“Is that—?” Bree’s voice lowered to inaudible murmurs.
“Yes, he’s come to work on my porch light.”
“But . . . he’s in the basement.”
“Yes, because the problem seems to be a short in the circuit.”
Another pause. A rather long pause.
“Should we . . .” Bree dropped her voice again.
The rhythmic thud-thud-thud began again. “How can you be sitting here, Bree, talking about food and spades and men in basements? I honestly haven’t slept in three days.”
“It’s all very simple, Birdie. I can’t tap-dance. I have accepted the fact that I can’t tap-dance. So I’m going to find another job.”
Even through thick layers of hardwood, subfloor, and floor joists, he heard the gasp. “Find another job?” Birdie exclaimed. “You can’t leave and find another job.”
“Sure I can. My half of the bills are cheap—right, dearie?”
Evie gave her patented grunt. The crinkling of bags, along with the sound of several chairs scraping against the floor, told him they had all sat down with their food.
“But who will sit with me at dress rehearsals?” Birdie sounded desperate. “Who will whisper stories to me when we’re stuck sitting on logs for hours listening to Titania drone on about ‘thee amiable flower beds’ and ‘thy coy cheeks,’ and I’m falling asleep onstage? Who will make sure I don’t fall off my log and get fired?”
“Hey, guys?” Evie spoke up. “Where’s my General Tso’s?”
After the crinkling of more bags, Bree replied, “Shoot. They’ve forgotten the spring rolls too.”
“I’ll go—” Evie began.
“Oh no you won’t. There will be no sneaking out of this house, missy. You’ll never come back and then we can’t play at all.”
“Then I can—” Birdie began.
“Shh,” Bree said. “And I won’t have you sneaking away to go practice. Everybody stay here. Mrs. Lewis, use whatever force necessary to keep them here. By golly, ladies, we are going to have fun tonight if it’s the last thing I do.”
Chip listened as the creaks of Bree’s footsteps followed her out the door.
So, the Barter sprite was about to be out a job, Chip thought, snipping around a second staple. What kind of job would a girl like that go for next? The town of Abingdon was Hallmark-Christmas-movie-town small, after all. Only so many places would even have openings.
Unless, perhaps, she wasn’t opposed to moving? Going elsewhere?
Despite himself, he found his brain scrolling through his contacts in town for any mention of employment opportunities. His mother had said something about needing a new house cleaner, hadn’t she? And that someone from the board was frantic because their manager quit and left a restaurant on Main Street to run itself into the ground. Which restaurant was that?
Of course, it didn’t matter to him where the woman who’d made his life more difficult lived.
He hadn’t started thinking of her as difficult until the issue of the Invisible Fence came up. When Russell began knocking Bree over at her own front door, she had demanded Chip pull out the dough for yet another painfully expensive, unplanned project. And after the money it had cost him to get the water line sorted out, coughing up cash for a buried electrical fence was not an easy thing to do.
But yesterday, two days after he put the line in, Bree started complaining that the fence was on her side of the property line. That she couldn’t park and get out of her car without Russell attacking her. That the dog lay in wait for her all day in the tiny grass median between their driveways (that part was true). That she had taken to crawling through her passenger door every time she got in or out of the car (also true, but funny).
At this point he had taken to dodging her when he left in the mornings and sneaking from his truck to his house—once with an actual dive behind the bushes—at night. To any bystanders it would seem he was either a burglar robbing his own home or out of his mind, but it was worth it. He didn’t have the money, or the time, to make himself a more neighborly neighbor. Even if, technically, partially, he was to blame.
Wasn’t his sister-in-law’s bank looking for a teller?
Ten minutes later Chip stood on Mrs. Lewis’s porch—phone flashlight nestled between chin and chest as he faced the wall sconce. He was just disconnecting the wire from the wire nuts as the headlights of Bree’s car turned into her parking spot. His eyes drifted as he watched her brake lights turn off. Beneath the pale yellow of the streetlight, he watched her long lean leg reach for the pavement as the driver’s door cracked open.
My, but she was beautiful.
She was wearing black leggings and ratty house shoes that had seen better days. In one of her arms she gripped the take-out bag no doubt containing the missing Chinese food.
What if he was eating Chinese tonight? The thought, the desire, flicked in his thoughts in a heartbeat. An image of him sitting on the back stairs of the Barter with a box in his lap, watching her sit cross-legged on that top step holding chopsticks, that long, burnished red braid of hers carelessly draped over one shoulder. Laughing. Daring.
A dog barked.
He blinked.
Russell swung out of nowhere, his legs racing around her open driver-side door.
Where had he come from?
Bree screamed and threw herself back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door just as the dog pounced.
For a moment or two Russell just stood there, propped against Bree’s door like a six-foot Frankenstein monster with his paws pressed to the top of her window. Finally he dropped down.
And sat.
He watched Russell’s pouty face as the dog stared at her, his nose pressed against the window, his tail wagging ferociously.
Russell licked the window and left one long, steady saliva stream behind.
Chip laughed.
He leaned his forearms against the stoop’s rail and watched Bree climb over the gearshift to the passenger seat. With one arm she pushed the passenger door open. Only after one rather unladylike spill onto the safety of her own yard did he openly chuckle at her again.
Bree’s head whipped toward him as she scrambled to standing, the takeout swinging wildly on her wrist. She pulled a leaf from her sweater. Then her hair.
“Your dog is a menace,” she said, stalking toward him.
“Come now,” Chip said, putting his hand on his heart. “Don’t say that in front of him. You’ll hurt his feelings.”
“And that collar doesn’t work.”
“Nonsense. I’ve checked it every time you’ve asked me
. Every. Single. Time. Which makes, like, fifteen.”
She frowned as she stalked up the stairs and stopped on the front porch beside him.
He felt the smile of his eyes crinkling more as he watched her fiery ones. And boy were they fiery. Another dead leaf stuck out from the top of her braid.
Tentatively, he pulled it out.
Bree stiffened.
The world around them went quiet.
His voice was soft. “C’mon. You act as though you’ve never had a fan before.”
Bree’s brow furrowed slightly, and he tipped his chin toward Russell.
“He just likes you.”
She pressed her lips together but didn’t put up much of a fight. “He wants to eat me alive.”
“He wants to smother you with kisses. Is that the worst thing in the world?”
There was another pause.
His eyes flickered to her lips, and he snapped them up when he realized what he’d done.
Heat climbed up his neck as he stepped back.
Chip cleared his throat.
He felt something hit the top of his shoes and glanced down. “Um, you may want to do something about that.”
Bree blinked, then saw the sauce dripping out the bottom of her bag. “Shoot.” Cupping her hand beneath it, she stepped back. Sauce dripped onto her palm as she pushed the door open. “Chicken emergency, coming through!” she called, dashing through the living room, past the group of sitting women, and into the kitchen.
For a wild moment he felt the urge to follow her but then stopped. Looked down at the tops of his sauce-laden shoes. Pulled the door shut.
He didn’t belong in there. With her.
He shouldn’t want to belong in there. With her.
At the very least, he didn’t want to want to belong in there.
In fact . . .
He tapped a text to Ashleigh before settling his phone back in his pocket: What do you think about lunch tomorrow?
The Cul-de-Sac War Page 6