Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  “Oh my God,” I say, and put my forehead on the table. “It’s not like that,” I mumble, but it is completely like that, in my mind, at least. What was an annoying attraction before became a full-blown crush on Thursday when I’d seen Ben at the salvage yard. There’s this—sweetness to him, which I’d noticed not only in his interaction with his dad, but also in the way he’d watched that kid he’d chased down, this leashed protectiveness he’d had for a vulnerable boy who had done him wrong.

  And then he texted me about crystal structure.

  Zoe is right, of course—not that I’ll say that to her—but I know that this really comes down to letting Ben give me his pitch under less tense circumstances than we were in during our first meeting, and politely declining. It’s not as if he’s the first person I’ve had to speak to about work. I’d fielded offers from private firms before—nothing as big or prestigious as Beaumont, but still. I’m as sure now as I was then that I’m in the right place, professionally and personally, and so it shouldn’t bother me to say that to Ben when the time comes.

  And yet it does, somehow—or at least it bothers me to have to confront the idea at all. I went to therapy for long enough to know at least part of what this is about. I don’t like change. I don’t like the idea of change, and however convinced I am about my life now, it’s easy for me to feel threatened by any alteration to it. Even the last night I spent in my shitty apartment, I’d cried myself to sleep, thinking of the years I’d spent there, the longest stretch I’d ever had in a single place. I was almost grateful that I woke up with a dead stink bug on my pillow. At least that eliminated most of the nostalgia.

  “Sweetie,” Greer says, patting my forearm. “You’re getting oatmeal in your hair.”

  I raise my head with a sigh, grab my napkin to clean up. Greer has mercy on me and changes the subject. She’s not sure about the classes she’s picked for the fall semester, and pretty soon Zoe and I are both wrapped up in talking it through with her. When we stand and gather our things an hour later, I’m lighter, more at ease—it’s what we do for each other. It’s what I’d never give up about these women. “What’s on for the rest of the day, Kit?” asks Zoe, slinging her purse over her shoulder.

  “I’m going to try and do some work outside,” I say. “Weeding. Either of you two want to help?”

  Greer’s got a family event, and Zoe bluntly says, “You must be crazy. I just had my nails done.” She leans in to give me a hug. “Send us before and after pictures, though.”

  I spend the rest of the morning in the small backyard, which is weedy and overgrown. But unlike most of the house, there’s nothing so bad about it that I can’t tackle it myself, and it feels good to be out in the sun, slathered as I am with SPF 50, digging out the worst of the weeds that have grown up around the small garden shed that, same as everything else on this property, has potential to be great, but right now falls somewhere between vaguely shabby and completely dilapidated. Once I’ve cleared an entire side, I can picture the bed I’ll dig out along the edge, the lavender or maybe salvia I’ll plant, the cream paint I’ll do the shed in. Maybe I’ll add small shutters on the windows on either side, add window boxes too. Less haunted house, more dollhouse.

  But this dollhouse isn’t getting built in a day, and I’m starting to feel a bit like a wilted flower in this heat. Still, I feel good, the accomplishment helping to wear off more of the Ben tension I’d felt this morning. Tomorrow will be fine, piece-of-cake fine.

  I get myself a glass of ice water and take it out to the front stoop, plopping onto the top step in exhaustion. I try to be out here a bit every couple of days, to wave at my new neighbors as they pass by, getting a sense of who’s who on the street. Betty was my neighbor when I lived above the bar, so there was an easy camaraderie. I want that here—the kind of neighbors who’ll watch out for your place but who also might invite you over for a cookout. Things are a bit uneven on my street, sure, with some houses fully renovated and some in grim disrepair, but since my place is on the grim side of things right now, I don’t judge.

  So far I’d met three different homeowners, including Jeff and Eric, across the way, whose house looks as if it was redone for one of those HGTV shows. It’s both perfectly current and perfectly historical. When their front door opens and Jeff steps out onto his porch, he gives me a friendly wave and I smile back, warmed by even this small cordiality, this growing sense of my place here. But the feeling cools when I see a tall, broad figure step out from behind Jeff, who turns back to shake the man’s hand.

  Ben Tucker’s hand.

  Well, shit, I think, standing too fast from where I’m sitting, my water sloshing a bit over the top of the glass to land on my feet. My street is narrow, so my abruptness is enough to catch his eye, and when he looks across the way at me, there’s a few seconds where we’re just staring at each other, that weirdness that happens when you see someone out of context, like running into a teacher at the movies. But then I see a broad smile spread across his face, and my stomach flutters in answer.

  He and Jeff exchange a few more brief words, Jeff giving Ben a firm pat on the shoulder before Ben heads down the steps. I think for a minute that he might get into the truck that’s parked out front, but instead, he tucks his hands into his pockets, glancing quickly down the one-way street before crossing to me. He stays on the sidewalk, though, looking up at me, a sheepish quirk to his mouth. “Fancy meeting you here,” he says.

  “You’re not following me, are you?” I say, and his eyes widen immediately, his smile dropping.

  “No. God, no. Sorry—I delivered some stone to Jeff and Eric this morning. They’re customers. I swear to you. I’m not—”

  I smile down at him, charmed by his sudden concern. “It’s okay. Small world, though, or else your salvage yard gets around.”

  His shoulders slouch in relief. “We do all right. These older neighborhoods, we get to a lot. And I went to high school with Jeff.” He nods up at the house. “So this is your place, yeah?”

  I look back at it, stupidly, like I’m checking to see if it’s still there, or if I’m at the right address. But really it’s just me trying to make sense of how my house must look to Ben. Probably not good. I think of Zoe’s shithole-to-ten scale. I am still definitely at a four. “Yep,” I say, turning back to him, conveying a confidence I don’t really feel. I try to redirect. “How’s everything? Your dad, and…that kid?”

  “Oh,” he says, looking a little surprised I’ve asked. “They’re okay. My dad’s busting my balls, of course. You saw a bit of that.” I have to laugh a little at the way he says this, the genial embarrassment he has at his father’s teasing. “And the kid—his name is River—he’s around. My dad’s making him work off his debt at the salvage yard.”

  “Really?” I’m more glad than I thought I’d be to hear this. The boy’s pale, stricken face had come back to me more than a few times since Thursday. “That’s—that’s really good.”

  “It’s really good for him, probably. It’s not so good for me, since I can barely get him to say four words sequentially. I think on Friday he called me ‘mister,’ but maybe sarcastically? He makes me feel like I’m a hundred years old.”

  I snort. “That’s a teenager for you, I guess.”

  “This is…” He pauses, looks up again at the house, then restarts. “This is a really beautiful place.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say. “It’s not beautiful now, but it will be.”

  “You forget that I have a unique appreciation for old things,” he says. “It’s in my blood.”

  Ben is wearing almost the exact same thing I saw him in on Thursday: t-shirt, dark blue this time, faded jeans slung low on his hips, a brown leather belt that’s so worn I can see cracks along the edge from where I stand, and shit-kicking worker’s boots that are covered in dust. He’s got a ball cap on, low over his eyes, his dark blond hair curling with sweat
around the edges.

  “Would you want to see inside?” I blurt, and then, in my mind, I dump the entire glass of ice water I am holding over my head. What is wrong with me? First I ask him to my lab, now my house? I certainly hope my vagina doesn’t have a mind to issue invitations, but honestly the way Ben looks, it’s not entirely unlikely that she’ll speak up in the next five minutes or so.

  His grin should look cocky. It probably is cocky, but somehow he wears it well, without malice or intention. He looks—pleased, like, what a treat to be asked, what fun to have a crazy almost-stranger invite you into her hot mess of a house to look around. I start to tell him that it’s no big deal, he doesn’t have to, but he’s already opened the wrought iron gate and is coming up the walk, up the steps. “Yeah. I’d love it.”

  I turn back to the door and for the first time recall that I am currently wearing a pair of old hiking boots, cutoff shorts derived from my most unflattering pair of jeans, and a Harry Potter t-shirt. My hair’s too short for a ponytail, so before I’d gone outside I’d pinned some of it back with a few old barrettes. My glasses are probably dirty too, so pretty much I look very similar to the way I did on the playground in elementary school. Awesome.

  I open the front door and wave Ben in ahead of me so I can quickly remove the offending barrettes. I need a mirror to know if this was a mistake or not, but I do my best to ruffle my hair and make some kind of sense of it.

  “Wow,” he says, standing in the living room, his hands set low on his hips. He reaches up to take off his ball cap, runs a hand through his hair. It’s sticking up everywhere, and this comforts me, given that I’m probably rocking something similar. “This is great. Look at this woodwork,” he says, crossing to the fireplace. I’m ridiculously pleased he’s noticed this, because it’s my favorite thing about the house too.

  “It needs a lot of work, I know.”

  He nods. “Quite a bit on your hands,” he says, but I appreciate that he’s not patronizing me about it. He walks around, peering under windowsills, crouching to look at the back of radiators, reaching up to run his hands along doorframes, the plaster walls. I’m transfixed watching him, how tactile he is, how focused. It’s the hardest thing not to think about what those traits might be like in another context.

  I take off my glasses, swipe them quickly on my t-shirt. When I put them back on, he’s standing under the archway between the dining room and living room, hands back on his hips, looking at me. “You do need a lot of stuff for this place.”

  “Yeah. Probably going to give your dad a lot of business, huh?”

  He smiles, crooked. “Let’s make a list,” he says. “Of all the hardware you’ll need.”

  “Really?” This is what I’ve been thinking about doing since Thursday, but the prospect of doing it with someone, someone who knows a lot about it, makes it seem achievable, exciting.

  “Really,” he says. “Grab a notebook. We’ve got work to do.”

  * * * *

  I make a quick stop in the bathroom to pick off the worst of the landscaping that’s stuck to me, grab a notepad, and head back out to where Ben is. We start in the kitchen, probably the worst room in the house, me rushing to tell him I’m planning a total redo, happening this fall according to my contractor’s timeline.

  He gives me a quizzical look, as if he’s about to ask a question, but he seems to rethink it, and taps at a bay of lower cabinets along the house’s back wall. “These are probably the oldest ones you’ve got in here,” he says. “Maybe 1930s? Too bad about the paint on them.” He crouches down, opens a door to peer in.

  “I’ll probably have to scrap everything. So this room will probably look—you know. Not historical. Maybe I don’t really need hardware for this room.”

  Ben stands and shrugs, looking around. “Maybe. But you could look for antique cabinets. It’s a hassle, but possible. Even if you don’t do that—those older cabinets are pretty small, not really suited for newer dishes and stuff—you could still get some nice antique drawer pulls, knobs. That stuff’ll go on most of the newer cabinetry, no problem. A light fixture, maybe?” He’s turning in a slow circle, nodding as he looks around, as if he can see it in his mind. I want to be in there, to see what he’s seeing.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “This wall behind the stove was probably exposed brick at some point. You could try and go back to that.” Exposed brick? I love that idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself.

  It’s this way for the next hour, Ben and I moving through each room in the house. He’s curious, asking lots of questions about what I know about the house, what I like about it, what I wish were different. He knows a lot, but he’s not a know-it-all, and he’s got a good sense of humor—he laughs easily, especially when I tell him I put a padlock on the door to the crawlspace because of spiders. But it doesn’t feel as if he’s laughing at me. He’s just—I don’t know. Enjoying me.

  We’re up in the empty extra bedroom, the one I want to turn into a home office at some point, and I’m sitting on the floor, cross-legged, making a note about how many doorknobs I’d need in here—two for the small closets, one for the door to the room, when it hits me that Ben has been here for a while now, and this can’t be what he had planned for the day. “Oh!” I say, a bit more exclamatory than I’d intended. “What about your dad?”

  He looks down at me, and I almost lose my breath—he’s so tall, so good-looking. I hate it. “What about him?”

  “Well, I mean, aren’t you needing to get back to him? Or to work? I can’t believe I’ve taken up so much of your time.”

  “I’m off-duty for the afternoon. Sharon thought my dad and I could use a break from each other today, so she’s with him at the yard while I took care of this delivery and got some errands out of the way.”

  “Oh. Is Sharon your stepmom?” I don’t know why I’m asking, why I’m so curious, but—I am. I want to know things about Ben, maybe because he’s here in my house, getting to see something so important to me. I want to even the scales.

  He laughs. “No. She’s my dad’s neighbor.” His brow furrows for a minute as he looks out the window. “Then again, I guess she has qualities of a stepmom. Or of a mom, really.”

  “Your mom is—?”

  He turns back to me, leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets. “She’s around, sort of. My parents got divorced when I was nine, and my dad and me, we’re a team, I guess. My mom’s not a bad person, but she wasn’t much up for being a mom. So I’ve pretty much always been with my dad, even before the divorce, I guess. Sometimes he messed up, and I definitely did, but we made it work.”

  “That sucks about your mom.” Before I can think better of it, I add, “My mom wasn’t around, either. She left when I was, I don’t know, three months old, I think? Maybe a bit before.” I keep my eyes down, scribble some nonsense in the margins of the notebook, look busy.

  “That’s young,” he says, and though he hasn’t moved, I feel somehow that his posture has changed, that it’s coiled a bit more tightly than it was before.

  “Yeah. My brother was around, though.” That sounds sad, sort of Oliver Twist sad, so I say, “I mean, you know. My dad too.” That’s a can of worms I can’t believe I’ve opened here. It’s bad enough I’ve mentioned my freaking absentee mother. I’ve always been the kind of person who talks, who opens up, who tries to connect with people, somehow. But bringing up my father? That’s pretty new, even for me. He’s such a source of terrible guilt and sadness that I hardly ever talk about him, not even to Zoe and Greer, who just think he’s kind of garden-variety distant, instead of so screwed up and damaging that I have to make actual, professionally coached efforts to control the way I interact with him. Thinking of it, it strikes me that I’d loved the salvage yard so much in part because I’d liked seeing Ben and his dad together. “I think we’ve got everything in here, right?”

  He doesn’t sa
y anything for a few seconds. He’s still looking at me, but I’m determined to let this pass. “Right,” he says, and brushes past me out the door, to the bathroom.

  I stand and follow, feeling awkward and inappropriate. It’s one thing for someone to be okay answering questions about themselves, but it’s another when you make them feel weird by laying out your own crappy baggage when they didn’t ask for it. But when I get into the bathroom, Ben’s already talking. “This toilet runs.”

  “Better go catch it,” I mumble, unable to stop myself.

  He’s smiling as he lets out a dramatic groan. “That is the worst, Kit. That’s a dad joke, right there.”

  “You know, what’s everyone got against ‘dad jokes’? I think they’re funny. A toilet running? That’s funny! Just picture it.”

  “What? You’re not supposed to picture it. It’s just a pun. What is wrong with you?” He’s laughing now, and it’s so infectious that I start laughing too. “I can’t believe a person as brilliant as you laughs at a toilet running joke.”

  He called me brilliant. I can feel the way my smile changes, from laughing pleasure to flattered surprise—and he’s watching it, watching that transformation. I’m standing so close to him in this small room that I can see an answering change in his eyes, and is it—is that something like hunger there, something new I haven’t seen in his expression before? He’s got one hip leaned against my sink, looking down at where I stand in the doorway, neither of us laughing now, and I think, oh, what if I pushed up onto my tiptoes here, what if I lean right into him, and then Ben straightens and says, “I’m going to fix your toilet.”

  And thank God for that, because I was maybe a hair-trigger away from making a fool of myself, stunned stupid by that dimple and those blue eyes. “Oh, no, that’s all right,” I say quickly. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch a YouTube video or something.”

  “It’ll take five minutes.” He’s already headed downstairs, probably trying to politely flee from the doe-eyes I just served up. He returns from his truck with a toolbox, and sure enough, he does fix it in five minutes, betraying no embarrassment about that—moment. Instead, he fixes the light switch in the guest room and also resecures the window air conditioner that I have in my bedroom, which he says is about to fling itself off the ledge.