Save the Date

by Mary Kay Andrews

  She’d tried reading out in the back garden, but swarms of gnats and mosquitoes forced her inside. The courtyard was cooler, but at least out here on the stoop she could use the window fan to keep the biting bugs at bay.

  Despite the fan, her face was sheened with perspiration, and her arms were slicked with a combination of sweat and insect repellent. Her hair was a hot, damp mess, and of course, she wore no makeup.

  “Hey!” Jack called. Poppy turned to see where the voice was coming from, and bounded over to greet her old friend and his dog.

  “Poppy!” Cara called anxiously. But the dog was content to give Jack’s outstretched hand a lick of acknowledgment, falling quickly in step with the pair as they approached the stoop.

  It was too late to run inside and try to clean up. Instead, she smiled up at him. “Good run?”

  “Hot. Shaz wasn’t really too much into it, so we just kind of took it easy this morning.”

  Cara leaned down and patted Shaz’s head. “Let me get you guys something cold to drink,” she offered.

  “That’d be great,” Jack said. She moved aside the box fan to allow her guests to enter the shop.

  “Sorry about the heat,” she said, turning from the refrigerator in the shop’s kitchenette. She held out a bottle of cold water, and went to the sink to run water into a bowl for Shaz.

  “Trying to save money on the electric bill?” Jack asked. He’d been in the shop for less than five minutes, and sweat was already dripping from his face. He held the bottle of water to the back of his neck, wiped his brow with a paper towel Cara handed him.

  She made a face. “The air conditioner’s not working. Again.”

  “Geez,” he said. “How long has it been like this?”

  Cara set the bowl on the floor, and Shaz and Poppy both crowded around it, lapping water as fast as they could.

  “More than a week,” she said. “It’s been hell.”

  “What does your landlord say?” he asked. “Didn’t they send somebody over to fix it?”

  “My landlady passed away week before last. I’d been calling even before that, and I’ve been trying to reach her daughter, but so far, no call back. This is typical of them. Worst. Landlords. Ever.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Jack said angrily. “You can’t live like this, with no air.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve got two or three box fans, like the one I’ve got in the doorway, but all they really do is move the hot air around. Pretty miserable.”

  “Where’s your thermostat?” Jack asked. “I’m no HVAC guy, but I can at least take a look.”

  She pointed down the hall, toward the staircase. “On the wall, there.”

  Cara followed Jack down the hall. He stood in front of the small metal box mounted on the plaster wall. He punched the Cool button, but did not hear the unit switch on.

  “Okay,” he shrugged. “Fuse box? It’s an old house, I’m guessing maybe the electrical hasn’t been updated in a while?”

  “Probably not in at least thirty years,” Cara agreed. “Sometimes if I’m using my hair dryer or iron, it shorts out a circuit. The fuse box is back there, near the back door to the courtyard.”

  He flipped open the fuse box and studied the row of breakers and fuses. “Doesn’t look like any of the breakers have been flipped. Do you change the filters pretty often?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Every month.”

  “Is the unit outside?” Jack asked, his hand on the doorknob.

  “In the courtyard.”

  “Got a screwdriver?”

  * * *

  The unit, a rust-speckled gray cube, sat on a wooden platform in a corner of the courtyard garden. Jack unscrewed the back panel of the unit and peered at the exposed machinery.

  “What are you looking for?” Cara asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “Just anything that looks obviously wrong. I was hoping maybe it was something simple, like a slipped or broken blower belt. Or maybe that the condenser was iced over, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

  He fetched the garden hose from a large terra-cotta pot where it was coiled nearby. Turning on the spigot, he sprayed it over the box, in a deliberate back and forth pattern.

  “What’s that for?” Cara asked, swatting at a mosquito on her neck.

  “Rinsing off the coils,” he explained. “They can get blocked with all the pollen and dust and leaves and crud, and then you don’t get cooling.”

  She nodded, acting as though she understood.

  “I turned the controls off before we came out. Would you go inside and flip it on and see if we get lucky and it starts up?”

  Cara crossed her fingers, flipped the thermostat on, and prayed for the dull thump that signaled the unit coming to life. Nothing. She ran her hand in front of the air register. More nothing.

  “Sorry,” Jack said, meeting her at the back door. “I looked at the manufacturer’s plate on the back of it—it was installed in ’82. The average life span of a central-air unit is supposed to be ten or fifteen years. I think that thing is DOA.”

  “Crap.” She leaned her forehead against the wall beside the thermostat. “I don’t think I can go on like this.”

  “You shouldn’t have to. Tomorrow, first thing, send the landlord a registered letter, telling her you plan to have the unit repaired or replaced, and that you’ll deduct whatever costs you incur from your rent.”

  “And what do I do in the meantime?” she asked. “I looked at the weather report this morning. This heat wave isn’t going to let up. We don’t even have any rain in the forecast. And anyway, I don’t have the money to buy a central-air-conditioning unit like that. It’s probably at least three or four thousand dollars.”

  “Can you open some windows? At least get some air circulating? These old houses were built to catch cross currents.”

  “I’ve tried, believe me. They’re all painted shut. I hacked at the window in my bedroom with a screwdriver and even a steak knife, but I couldn’t get it to budge. Every window in this house is like that.”

  He glanced toward the stairs. “Want me to give it a try?”

  “Be my guest.”

  * * *

  The staircase opened into a hallway that was the twin to the one on the first floor. The second floor, as she’d warned, was stifling. What had probably originally been a bedroom was now a combination living/dining room, visible through an arched entryway that Jack estimated had been installed sometime around the turn of the 1900s.

  A large bay window looked out on the courtyard garden, and there were double banks of windows on the side walls, overlooking the sliver of side garden that separated this building from the ones next door.

  A faded Oriental rug in muted blues, greens, and roses covered the wood floors, and a pair of overstuffed white slipcovered sofas faced each other, separated by an old painted trunk that was used as a coffee table. Bookcases flanked the windows. In the dining area, a round oak table was surrounded by a set of four mismatched high-backed chairs painted a soft fern green. A matte-green vase in the center of the table held a bouquet of wilted daisies. A small side table held another box fan, humming ineffectively in the corner.

  He’d seen some of the finest, most elegant parlors in the historic district, spaces filled with valuable antiques, priceless art, silver, first-edition books, and designer trappings. But none of them looked as welcoming as Cara Kryzik’s living room.

  This room looked to Jack like a room where you could sit and sip a glass of wine, read a book, or just be. There were paintings scattered about, on the walls and propped on the bookshelves, watercolors and oils, all of them either landscapes or still lifes with flowers. He was no art expert, but he thought these were probably the works of gifted amateurs—flea-market finds, most likely. There was also a laughably small flat-screen television nearly hidden on the bookshelves among the books.

  He thought of the living room in his own cottage on Macon Street, cluttered with bins of his clothing, books, and de
tritus. At least when Zoey lived with him, the place was clean. There was a ratty leather sofa, now covered in dog hair, a lumpy brown leather recliner where he fell asleep more nights than he’d like to admit, this facing his prized sixty-four-inch high-definition surround-sound television propped on a pair of sawhorses. No pictures hung on his walls, no rugs softened his floors. It occurred to him that although he owned his own house, he had never taken the time to make it a home.

  “Where’s the kitchen?” he asked, turning toward her. Cara stepped into the hallway and pushed aside a flowered green and white curtain that concealed what he’d assumed was probably a closet or bathroom.

  At one time, it had probably been another small bedroom. But now the space was fitted with a set of 1950s-era flesh-pink metal kitchen cabinets, a small two-burner stove, with a cherry-red teakettle on the back burner, a stained porcelain sink barely big enough to hold a medium-sized saucepan, and the skinniest refrigerator he’d ever seen. There was a single window over the sink, and it held a jelly jar with a cluster of faded pink flowers. A flowered mug in the sink held a teaspoon.

  “You cook in here?” he asked.

  “All the time,” Cara said with a laugh. “It’s tiny, but it does the job.”

  They continued down the hallway, and Cara pointed through the open door. “My boudoir.”

  Cara’s bedroom was a large, high-ceilinged room, with wide coved crown molding at the ceiling, and high baseboard molding, all painted a yellowing white. The wallpaper was old and age-speckled, but the pattern of ivy and white roses against a pale aqua background made the room look like the inside of a garden.

  The ceiling was painted a soft aqua, and there was a large Victorian brass gaslight that had been electrified, hanging from the middle of an ornate plaster medallion. The scarred heart-pine floors were bare, with the exception of some scattered braided rugs in muted colors. An elaborately carved and gingerbread-decked mantel on one wall held a small coal-burning fireplace.

  Her bed, a white-painted four-poster, was unmade, its crocheted bedspread tossed aside, the pillows and sheets rumpled.

  “You caught me,” Cara said lightly. “I usually make my bed, but last night was so miserable, and it’s so hot, I couldn’t stand being up here one more second.”

  “I’m shocked,” Jack said, with a laugh.

  “Nice room,” he said, looking around. “All original woodwork and plaster and wallpaper. Even the fireplace. I guess that’s the upside of having a cheapskate landlord. They left everything alone. You’d be surprised how many downtown houses from this era I see that have been carved up or stripped of everything original.”

  “Oh, it’s all original,” Cara said ruefully. “Right down to the ancient plumbing, the leaky roof, and the crappy wiring.”

  He went over to the double set of windows facing the street, took the screwdriver she’d given him earlier, and ran it across the windowsill. Paint shavings fell onto the floor, but the window stayed shut.

  He went around the room, examining the other windows, but they were all in the same condition, as Cara warned, painted shut with years and years’ worth of layers.

  “Okay,” he said, turning to her. “I’m gonna run home, get my truck and some tools, and I’ll be back in about half an hour.”

  “Really?” Her face lit up. “It’s your day off, and I know you do this for a living and I hate to ask … but if there’s any way you can cool this place down—even a little—you would totally be my hero for life.”

  “No big thing,” he said lightly, heading for the stairs.

  “Just leave Shaz here with me and Poppy,” Cara called. “They can stay out in the garden where it’s a little cooler.”

  29

  Half an hour later, Jack eased his pickup truck into the lane behind Cara’s town house. Back at home he’d taken a quick shower, and grinned at himself in the bathroom mirror as he shaved for the first time that weekend. Wouldn’t hurt to not look like like a Yeti, he decided. He changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots, then went outside to load what he needed.

  He went around to the bed of the truck, grabbed his tool belt, and fastened it around his waist.

  Cara met him at the gate from the courtyard, unlocking it so he could enter. She eyed the tool belt, then looked over his shoulder at the truck. “Ladders?”

  “Yup. I’m thinking I’ll probably need to unseal the windows from the outside as well as the inside. No telling what all they did to paint those windows shut.”

  “I had no idea this was going to be such a production,” Cara fretted.

  * * *

  Like those of many homes and shops in the historic district, Bloom’s front windows were covered with decorative and functional wrought-iron burglar bars. Jack attacked these with his cordless screwdriver. Cara helped him lift off the bars, and set them aside, along with the flower boxes she’d planted with ferns and Nikko Blue hydrangeas.

  He pulled a lethal-looking tool from his belt. It had a spade-shaped head with wicked serrated edges, and he ran it along the edge where the windowsill met the bottom of the lower window sash.

  “What the heck is that thing?” Cara asked.

  He held it up for her to examine. “It’s called a window zipper. We have to use them on almost every historic restoration we do downtown.”

  “Gotta get me one of those,” she nodded.

  He performed the same operation on the top of the window sash, then ran the tool along the sides of the sash.

  “Now we move inside,” Jack told her.

  He used the zipper on the interior of the front window, and then, with an X-Acto knife, removed globs of old paint from the sash lock before he could finally flip it open. Then he examined the window jambs. “If we’re lucky, these babies will still have the sash cords and sash weights.”

  He took a small pry bar and worked it cautiously under the edge of the jamb, popping off the molding and exposing the channel, where he pointed at the cotton sash cord. “Good news.”

  He pushed hard on the bottom sash, but it didn’t budge.

  “Uh-oh,” Cara said glumly.

  “I’m not done yet.” Now he took a slender putty knife, inserted it between the windowsill and the bottom sash, and lightly tapped it with a hammer, working the knife from side to side along the sash. He did the same thing on the top of the sash.

  This time, when he pushed, the window slowly slid open.

  Cara threw her arms around Jack. “My hero!”

  He grinned. “And it only took what? About forty-five minutes?” He poked his head out the open window. “I’ll put the burglar bars back up—but you’re definitely gonna need some window screens, or you’ll get eaten alive in here. Do you happen to know if there are any still around?”

  “I think I remember seeing some screens in the toolshed,” Cara said, with a shudder.

  “What?”

  “The last time I opened the shed, I saw a rat. I haven’t been out there since.”

  “Does that mean you want me to rummage around in the shed?”

  “Yes, please,” she said meekly.

  Twenty minutes later, he was back, with an armload of wood-framed window screens. His shirt and pants were streaked with dirt, and a bit of cobweb hung from his hair. She silently picked it off.

  “See any rats?”

  “Mmm. Not the rats. But evidence that they’ve been there. You might want to put some poison out there. I also found more sets of burglar bars, probably for the second-story windows. I’m thinking I’ll need to put those up if we can get those windows open.”

  “Absolutely.”

  After he’d worked his way around to the back of the house, unsealing the windows, Jack got out the extension ladder and clambered up to work on the second-story windows.

  Declaring herself his assistant, Cara did what she could to help, rinsing off the window screens with the hose, wielding the window zipper on the inside windows, breaking the painted seals with the putty knife and hammer the way he�
�d shown her, fetching tools from his truck, and even ferrying the newly cleaned window screens up the ladder.

  Overhead, the sun blazed down. It was hot, sweaty work. But by six that evening, Cara had enough open windows—with screens and burglar bars in place—to admit what little hot breeze existed.

  After loading the ladder and the last of his tools into the truck, Jack came into the town house.

  “Up here,” Cara called down. He found her in the kitchen alcove. She handed him a cold long-neck bottle of beer before uncapping her own.

  “Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. “Thanks.” They clinked bottles and he drank thirstily.

  “Are you kidding? You just spent your whole day—your day off—doing what you get paid thousands of dollars to do.”

  “Wait’ll you get my bill.”

  Her face fell.

  “Kidding. Really. I was happy to be able to help out. I just wish I could have resuscitated your air conditioner. Getting the windows open is only a temporary fix, you know. You’re gonna have to make your landlady install a new air unit.”

  “I’m calling Sylvia first thing in the morning, and I’m going to keep on calling, and I’ll send her a registered letter, like you suggested. But in the meantime, I am so, so grateful to you, Jack. Let me at least take you out to dinner, as partial payment. Okay?”

  He gestured down at his grimy clothes. “Like this?”

  “Okay. I’ll cook here. What do you like?”

  She opened the refrigerator, and stood in front of the door, letting the cold air wash over her. “Ahh.”

  Jack leaned against the doorjamb, appreciating the view.

  “I like you,” he said.

  And he did. Her topknot had mostly come undone, and loose strands of her butterscotch hair fell over one eye and around her exposed collarbone. Her face was pink and sunburned, and her chest, arms, and legs were dirt-smudged. She was barefoot, and he noticed that her toenails were painted sort of a coral color. Her cotton sundress was thin and faded, and in the dim light of the kitchen he could see her body clearly silhouetted through the light from the refrigerator.