Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

by Babette de Jongh

  Quinn and Sean came into view, walking up Quinn’s drive toward Melissa’s parked car. Sean turned to his dad and said something, and Quinn clapped him on the shoulder. The second he got in the car, Melissa drove off like she’d just robbed a bank and needed to make a quick getaway. Quinn raised his hand to wave goodbye, but there was no way Sean could’ve seen it.

  “Bitch.” Abby took another sip of wine. “She could’ve waited for them to say goodbye.”

  Quinn stood there for a minute, looking sad and lost.

  “Poor guy.”

  Georgia barreled around the corner of the porch, her little feet on the wood planking sounding like horse’s hooves. She leaped onto Abby’s lap, carelessly shoving Griffin aside and spilling Abby’s wine.

  “Rude!” Abby swiped at the splat of wine that had landed on her bare thigh. “And covered in dirt!” Georgia’s face, feet, and belly were a dark, orange red. “Where have you been digging?”

  Georgia gave a triumphant barroo! and wagged her tail, clearly satisfied with herself and the world in general.

  “Get down.” Abby set her now-empty glass aside and shooed Georgia onto the porch. “You bad girl. You’re gonna get a bath.”

  Abby had cleaned the floors earlier—not an easy feat pushing a vacuum cleaner while also depending on the knee-scooter for balance. No way was she letting Georgia walk across her clean floors on those feet. “Hope you enjoy getting a cold water-hose bath, ’cause that’s what it’s gonna be.” She stood. “Let’s go to the barn.”

  Bathing Georgia was usually a quick half-hour task, including brushing and drying her. This, Abby knew, would take a good hour or more. “But it’s gotta be did,” she said to herself. (Like cursing, deliberately incorrect grammar usage often made her feel better about the unfairness of life.)

  She got down the steps by sitting and scooting down one step at a time while easing the folded scooter along with her, step by step. At the bottom, she used the porch rail for balance, stood on her good foot and opened the scooter. With trepidation in her heart, she mounted her unruly steed and began the long and dangerous trek across the front yard, down the drive, and over the flagstone path to the barn.

  The damn scooter—she really ought to give it a name; a horrible, terrible name, something like Hannibal—tried to kill her at least a dozen times a day. It instilled a false sense of security by gliding like an ice skater across the manicured grass, but on the gravel drive, it dug ruts and threatened to tip sideways whenever it encountered a rock that didn’t slide merrily out of its way. And the flagstone walkway, forget about it. If it wasn’t the flagstone’s uneven surface tripping her up, it was the deep and treacherous pit of pea gravel sucking her down.

  But she made it to the barn, finally, and said a prayer of thanks for smooth concrete flooring. Georgia, who’d been right beside her all the way, hung back when Abby scootered into the horse-washing stall, clearly suspicious of its heavy-duty coiled-up hose and top-of-the-line multifunction spray nozzle.

  Georgia eyed Abby for a second, then turned and trotted to the barn’s open door. Not doing this, the dog’s demeanor declared.

  “Yes, you will, too,” Abby said, her voice hard. “Get over here.”

  Abby took bottles of horse shampoo and conditioner off the shelf and set them down on the rubber-mat flooring next to the drain, which emptied into a buried 55-gallon drum with holes in the bottom. (Abby knew this because she’d been staying here the summer the barn was built. Grayson had called the drain system a cheap man’s septic tank.) Abby turned on the spigot and uncoiled the hose.

  Georgia sat by the door and looked contrite, her tail thumping ever so slightly.

  “Yeah, I know you’re sorry. But you still have to get a bath.”

  The tail thumped some more, and Georgia whined softly, looking out toward the yard. She’d been trained to obey, to come when called, and not to run free unless she’d been given permission.

  “That’s right. You’d better come here. Don’t make me come and get you.”

  Georgia wouldn’t run, but she wasn’t going to make this easy, either. Abby took a lead rope off the wall and scooted toward Georgia, who leaned into the corner and looked toward a freedom she knew better than to take.

  “I don’t know why you do this to yourself.” Abby clipped the lead rope to Georgia’s collar. “You know it always ends up this way.”

  But to be fair, Abby usually bathed Georgia in the bathtub with warm water, which she didn’t seem to mind all that much. But enduring the cold water that spewed from the outdoor hose with punishing force obviously wasn’t on Georgia’s list of favorite things to do.

  But you know, Abby felt put-out enough at Georgia’s misbehavior that she didn’t much care whether the bad little dog enjoyed her bath or had to suffer through it. This whole exercise had interrupted Abby’s happy hour, completely obliterating the relaxing effect of the wine. Now, once Georgia was clean, Abby would have to start relaxing all over again, but she’d already be 140 calories in the hole.

  She tugged the unwilling dog into the washing stall and picked up the dripping hose. Georgia pulled against the restraining lead rope, and Abby jerked back, then tied the rope to the handlebars of the scooter. “It’ll be over before you know it,” she promised. Relenting a bit at the sight of the dog’s trembling flanks and desperate eyes, Abby turned the nozzle to the gentlest setting. “Come on. It won’t be that bad.”

  She wrapped her fingers around Georgia’s collar and hit the nozzle’s spray button. Next thing she knew, Abby was on her butt, the scooter was halfway across the barn, and Georgia was gone.

  Chapter 16

  Quinn stood in the living room of the sprawling, Craftsman-style estate house, taking stock. He’d been running the AC, so a little of the musty smell had begun to dissipate. A good deep-cleaning might remove the rest of the odor, and a few coats of paint and varnish would bring out the timeless beauty of this old place. Even the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms didn’t look too bad to regrout and refinish. The place was starting to look good, but that didn’t mean he should fall in love with it, or with the idea of staying once he’d completed the renovation. He needed to remain committed to his goals.

  He knew the idea of putting down roots here was pie-in-the-sky thinking brought on by a better-than-imagined weekend with Sean, the first time they’d really connected in years. Quinn tried to stop his imagination from spinning out impossible scenarios, but they kept coming back, so he let himself dream a little dream that could never come true—not if he planned to make any money. Maybe if he won the lottery…

  He didn’t mind the animal noises and the school field trips quite as much as he had at first.

  No, scratch that. He couldn’t fool himself about the field trips. But at least those subsided during the summer months, and if he decided to stay and live at the estate, he’d be out working during the weekdays anyway. And after spending a significant amount of time with the animals, their braying and honking and crowing and barking and clucking and meowing didn’t bother him anymore. Worn out from staying busy all day, he even slept right through the rooster’s early-morning alarms.

  So yeah, if he won the lottery, he could see himself staying here and building a bayside paradise, not for an imaginary retired couple, but for himself, for Sean, and maybe even for Abby, if that worked out. He and Abby and Sean could plan and renovate the estate house together, then they’d all live there, happily ever after. Abby would be next door to her aunt Reva, so they’d each have a built-in support network right next door.

  And Reva would probably retire sometime, right? So the field trips would be a thing of the past one of these days. Meanwhile, Sean could have a cool part-time job that would keep him close to Quinn. During the summer months—to supplement his lottery winnings—Quinn could take more cabinetry jobs that would allow him to work at home, make his own hours, and spend even more time
with his son.

  The more he thought about it, the more possible it all seemed. (Well, except for the lottery part. For that, he’d have to buy a ticket, though he knew that would only just barely improve his chances of winning.)

  Tomorrow, he’d be back down to earth. But today, he let himself believe. The weekend he’d just spent with Abby and Sean made him think that anything was possible. And maybe it was, as long as his real estate agent hadn’t acted on his suggestion—okay, mea culpa, insistence—that she do something to get rid of the farm next door. At the time, he’d been pissed off and freaking out that his only hope of a bright future was about to be sabotaged, and he hadn’t cared what the neighbors thought, because he planned not to know them.

  He didn’t want to think about the drama it would cause between him and Abby if Delia had set something nasty in motion. He hoped to God that Delia had ignored him and done nothing, but he had no way of knowing because she still hadn’t answered his text.

  He’d told her once that he admired her ability to separate work and real life by setting regular hours and not being a slave to her phone during the time she’d chosen to block out for living her life. At the time, he’d meant it. They’d been dating then, and he’d been glad she wasn’t always available—to her clients or to him—because he didn’t plan to be all that available, either.

  Now, he wished she wasn’t quite so disciplined.

  He checked his phone, just in case, but no. Nothing. He tried to call her again, but got the same message he remembered from before: Sorry I missed your call. I’m out of the office until Monday. Please hang up and leave a text message.

  He’d have to wait until tomorrow to do anything, so he might as well put it out of his mind until then. Fortunately, Quinn was good at sticking his head in the sand; he’d done it for at least a decade of his marriage. He popped the cap off a Stella Artois and turned on the TV, planning to zone out until time to go next door and feed the animals.

  * * *

  Wolf was taking an afternoon nap on a newly built and not-quite-soft bed of leaves. Recent rains had taken his old bed from soft to soggy, and the scant supply of new-fallen leaves was only just now dry enough to make a bed. Not quite asleep, less than awake, he drifted in between, wishing he felt safe enough to stay in his soft dirt den under the farmhouse porch.

  He missed pillows.

  Ever since he’d seen the kitten curled up on a pillow inside Abby’s house, resting in the secure knowledge that she could sleep deeply without worry, he’d been dreaming of pillows. Big pillows, little pillows. Fluffy pillows, flat pillows. Pillows in sunlight and pillows in shade. Pillows on the ground and pillows elevated off the ground by wooden blocks. When he saw himself floating in the air on a pillow that turned out to be a cloud, he had a thought: Now, I’m falling asleep. Now, I’m dreaming.

  His soft cloud-pillow bumped into another one. He looked up, surprised to see his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since the alpha took him away from her. At first, he’d been proud to be chosen and had hardly looked back at his mother, who was busy sniffing at the round, rubbery-smelling feet of the big metal thing—which he later learned was a truck—that the alpha had dumped him into before driving away. That was when Wolf realized that his mother wasn’t coming with him, and that he would never see her again.

  In the dream, his mother sat upright and howled, her nose tilted upward to an evening sky that was streaked with orange and purple and many other colors he didn’t have names for. Silhouetted against the setting sun, she looked so beautiful, her gray fur tipped with black, her golden eyes half-closed, her ears tilted back as she gave herself to the end of another day. Then, she turned and leaped onto his cloud, scratching at his side. “Wake up,” she moaned, scratching him again. “Hurry. Please wake up. I need your help.”

  Mother had never asked for his help before. She had always been the one to help him and his siblings. He tried to wake, to rouse himself, to come to her aid, but he couldn’t. She scratched at him again, and the cloud she’d been sitting on floated away. Suddenly, she wasn’t beside him anymore, but sitting by herself on a cloud that drifted farther and farther away from him on the uncaring breath of the wind. “Mama!” he whined, trying to call back her comforting scent of milk and dirt.

  She scratched him again…even from so far away? She scratched him…and he woke.

  Georgia, her eyes pleading, whined and worried and pawed at his side. “Help. I did a bad thing, and I think I hurt Abby. Can you help?”

  He sat up. “What happened?”

  She sent her thoughts and fears at him so quickly he couldn’t keep up. All he got was a sense of panic. He stood and shook himself. “Show me.”

  She scurried through the forest, streaked across the road, and bolted down the driveway. “Hurry, hurry!” Her tail waved like a flag, not in happiness, but in anxiety and warning. On the way, she kept trying to explain what happened, but with his own emotions churning, he didn’t understand.

  He followed, his nose on her tail. He followed, ready to defend her and her loved ones from anything, even if it meant he had to give his life to do it.

  She led him to the opening of the barn, where Abby sat on the floor next to a bent hunk of metal. He saw that Abby wasn’t hurt, and his adrenaline rush subsided. Finally, Georgia’s explanation sank into his consciousness. “I got scared and I pulled and I ran away. I made her fall, and she needs help.”

  When Abby noticed them, she inched toward them in an awkward, scrambling movement like an upside-down spider. “Georgia!”

  Georgia turned and ran, leaving Wolf alone with Abby, who didn’t seem to be hurt—but it didn’t look like she could stand up, either. He sat, panting with anxiety. I don’t know what to do.

  “Get help.”

  Wolf didn’t understand the words, but he knew what she meant. He ran down the drive, turned the corner, and ran to the frog pool that had killed all the frogs. Sounds came from behind the hard see-through door that was covered by a dark cloth. He scratched at the door, but nothing happened. Georgia crept up to sit beside him. “I’ve tried that already.”

  Wolf scratched again, pawed at the see-through door with as much strength as he could muster, and Georgia helped.

  But she was right; it wasn’t working. The hard surface resisted his claws, no matter how much he tried to break through it. He stopped pawing at the door and sat. Turning his nose up to the sky the way he had dreamed of his mother doing, he howled.

  Georgia joined in, and Wolf thought how beautifully her voice blended with his. His howl was low and mournful for all he’d lost and all he didn’t understand. Hers was high-pitched and beautiful with the blended sounds of love and worry and contrition. In the melodious tones of her howl, he heard her joys and her sorrows, her hopes and her dreams of the future. Her howl contained everything he already knew and loved about her, and everything he hoped he’d one day have the chance to learn. Every note was so beautiful it made his heart ache.

  The see-through door slid open with a screech worse than a barn owl’s, and Quinn—the first one, not the other—ran out and passed Wolf without even looking. He didn’t say anything, but just kept running like he knew where to go, and it turned out that he did. Wolf followed at a loping run, with Georgia hustling right behind him as fast as her little legs could go.

  At the barn’s opening, Quinn yelled, “Dammit, Abby. What the hell?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whined. “I…” Wolf didn’t hear anything after that except a melody of human whining sounds (Abby’s) and human angry sounds (Quinn’s) that made no sense to him.

  Georgia had already absconded, and Wolf didn’t see any benefit in staying, either, so he followed her scent to the den he’d dug under the front porch.

  “What’s wrong?” Wolf asked Georgia. “I think she’s okay. Are you okay?”

  Georgia shivered and hid at the back of the den. “I knew
I shouldn’t run. I knew I shouldn’t pull. But I was scared and I couldn’t help it. I pulled, and she fell over. I’ve hurt her.”

  “I think she’s okay,” he repeated. He curled himself around his friend from behind and tried to absorb her shivering.

  “I did wrong.” Georgia backed up against him. “I know I did wrong.”

  He knew how that felt. “It’s okay. I’ll take care of you. If we have to, we can run away together. I’ll take care of you.”

  “I don’t want to leave.” Georgia showed Wolf how much she loved her home, and how much she loved Reva, whom she felt she’d betrayed. “I hurt Abby, but I didn’t mean to.” Georgia’s shivering came in short, violent bursts. “I was supposed to take care of her. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  Wolf didn’t have any good advice to help Georgia with her regrets, her fears, or her worries. If he had, he wouldn’t have been exiled from his family and banished to the forest. All he could do was curl himself around her and try to comfort her until her shivering subsided and she finally fell asleep.

  * * *

  Abby sat next to the folded-up scooter in the middle of the barn aisle. She held a rolled-up lead rope in her hand.

  Quinn knelt beside her. “What happened? What the hell are you doing out here by yourself? Why didn’t you wait for me?” He realized he was yelling, and not giving Abby a chance to respond. He took a breath and let it out. “Are you okay?”

  The corners of her truly luscious lips tilted upward. “I’m butt-hurt, but other than that, I’m fine.”