A Conard County Courtship

by Rachel Lee

  That morning he’d put a pork roast in some balsamic vinaigrette, sealed it in a plastic bag and had let it soak all day. Usually he was left with enough after cooking the portion of tenderloin to make sandwiches for a day or two, but he suspected there’d be no leftovers this time. Everyone liked his roast made this way.

  He glanced at the clock and decided he had an hour before he needed to pop it in the oven. Plenty of time to call Jimmy’s mom and see what she thought of this overnighter. Or if she’d even heard of it yet. Then he’d hit the shower himself and get ready for a pleasant evening.

  He always enjoyed evenings with his son and figured there’d be far fewer of them as time passed. Enjoy it while you had it was his motto. He picked up the phone. Not surprisingly, the Jacksons’ number was on autodial. Jimmy and Matthew had been as thick as thieves forever.

  “Hi, Mims,” he said when she answered. “Tim Dawson. I wonder if you’ve heard the latest plans the boys have made.”

  She laughed. “I was just being informed. Sleepover here tomorrow night?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “It’s fine with me. Bring Matthew over around two if you can. I’d like the two of them to wear themselves out so they’re not up all night.”

  He chuckled. “Good plan. I hope it works.”

  “They’re still young enough that no matter how hard they try not to, along about ten or so, as long as I have them in sleeping bags, they’ll sleep in front of some movie. And I always pick a movie they know well so it won’t keep them awake.”

  “I need to remember that. Okay then. I get the next round.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  He was smiling as he hung up. He liked Mims Jackson a whole lot and had ever since junior high when, for the first time, he’d noticed she was a girl. He’d been a lovesick puppy for all of three weeks, but then someone else had caught her eye, and he, oddly enough, had felt almost relieved to get back to his guy friends. He’d felt cut off during that brief, intense relationship.

  It had been another three years before a girl had crossed his radar in a way that made him want to try again. That girl had been Claire.

  He was looking through his freezer at vegetables, trying to decide which ones he wanted tonight, when he heard a sound and turned. Vanessa had made quick work of her shower. She was wearing a fresh green sweatshirt and fleece pants, her feet covered by black ballet slippers. A towel still wrapped her head.

  “That felt good.” She smiled. “Is the weather taking a turn? Back in the bedroom the wind sounded strong.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose I should check. If Matthew’s going to miss his sleepover, I don’t want the news to hit him at the last minute. So do you have any preference for veggies tonight? I think I have just about every kind frozen.”

  “What does Matthew like?”

  He looked at her over his shoulder and remarked drily, “I believe I asked for your preferences. He likes just about everything.”

  “Broccoli?” she asked, hoping Matthew didn’t hate it.

  “That’s probably what he would have asked for. Okay, I’ve got plenty. Feel like peeling some potatoes? Matthew loved them mashed.”

  “Glad to help.”

  He set her up, then announced he was going to shower. The need to escape had been growing stronger since the scents of soap and shampoo had begun reaching him. From there it was a small step to imagining her skin, soft and still slightly moist from the shower. Then another small leap and he’d be in trouble.

  The demons of desire were flogging him again, and he couldn’t let them take charge. Since the other night when they’d come perilously close to going all the way, he’d felt like he’d gone too far. She was happy and relaxed when they were working, and ever so slightly nervous in the evening when Matt went to bed. Dang, did she think he was going to just pounce on her?

  Well, maybe she had a right to worry, he thought as he climbed the stairs to go clean up. After all, he’d told her to shut up then dragged her into his lap like some kind of caveman. Finesse. He needed to find some finesse. He also needed to remember that this woman needed space, and he needed to stay clear as much for her sake as anything.

  He should keep his attention on the job. It had been kind of fun, though, to watch her gradual change in attitude toward the house as she helped strip it down to bare walls. She seemed to have taken it away from Bob, at least emotionally, and made it somewhat her own.

  Like that discussion of kitchen cabinets, and the changes she’d want to the kitchen if it was her place. When she’d arrived in town, she probably would have been unable to consider the house in that light, even to pretend. Now she was seeing the kitchen as it could be.

  Larry, too, in the end had wound up being good for her. His apology and recognition that they’d both been too young to be responsible for anything their fathers had done had probably reinforced her slow healing from the past.

  It still appalled him, though, that any father could have forgotten his responsibilities like that. Vanessa’s father had been a weak man in the ways that counted.

  But when Tim looked a Vanessa, he saw a remarkably strong woman. She might claim that her upbringing had turned her into an introvert, and maybe it had. Certainly she seemed more comfortable with an emotional distance.

  But a few times she’d let those barriers fall—mostly with Matthew, occasionally with him. Maybe the fear of loss and judgment that had been instilled in her for so many years was loosening its grasp.

  He hoped so. She deserved a life full of people who cared about her and about whom she cared.

  But his meanderings were pointless. He had a job to do for her, and they’d probably both be better off if he just paid attention to it. Rapunzel was entitled to her tower for as long as she felt she needed it, and he was no Rumpelstiltskin to steal his way in and demand something from her.

  Thank goodness for the dinosaur puzzles. They’d been making the evenings much more relaxed than they might have been otherwise. Especially since he’d crossed the line the other night.

  Oh, yeah, especially since then.

  * * *

  Matthew, ever the bundle of energy, was eager to join Tim and Vanessa in the morning on a trip to the storage room to look at the cabinets and to the paint store to look for swatches. The whole thing sounded like a great deal of fun to him.

  Vanessa was glad he wanted to go. He made her feel comfortable, and with his chatter eased her past moments where she started to feel awkward for no reason than her own hang-ups.

  The storage facility was behind a garage and car rental place not far from the train tracks. The building wasn’t huge, but it was big enough that Tim had been able to rent a climate-controlled garage-size unit to stash the cabinets and other things he didn’t want exposed to temperature and humidity changes.

  She definitely liked the cabinets, as he’d promised. Much nicer than the ones already in place, and they looked new.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked.

  “Somebody ordered them and then didn’t want them after all. So I picked them up for a song. I can modify them to fit easily enough.”

  “I like them,” she said with certainty as she ran her hands over them. The wood might or might not have been the currently favored color, but she liked the warm mahogany look of them. “I love them,” she said a minute later. “Just love them.”

  “Then I’ll put them in. I just wish you’d be the one enjoying them.” Vanessa, who had just started to wonder what he meant by that, was glad when he turned swiftly to point at some furniture. “Some near antiques we can put in the house if you want to make it look occupied. A loaner. My in-laws left the stuff behind when they jumped ship.”

  Matthew, who’d been looking into spaces behind things, announced, “They didn’t jump
ship. They went to New Zealand. They live with hobbits.”

  Tim arched a brow. “Is that what they told you?”

  “They sent me a picture of a hobbit house under a hill.”

  Vanessa had to cover her mouth with her hand. Tim looked thunderstruck. “So...what exactly did they tell you?”

  Matthew shrugged. “It was a postcard in a letter they sent. They didn’t say much, but the postcard said it was the Underhill hobbit house. So I looked up hobbits. They aren’t much bigger than me.”

  “Oh, boy,” Tim said under his breath, then asked, “You looked up hobbits?”

  “Sure. They look funny, though, with all that hair on their feet.”

  “I see. Son, we’re going to have to talk about this later, but right now I need to get Vannie over to look at paint.”

  “Sure.”

  Apparently, a photo was too real to just deny, Vanessa thought, amused, as they piled into Tim’s truck to head to the other end of town and the lumberyard and home improvement store. The place was huge but was locally owned, to judge by the sign. Hadn’t Tim said he’d read the books to his son? In was interesting to her to watch the way Matthew could weave fiction and reality so seamlessly. Sure, the books were just a story, but now he had a photo of a hobbit house, and he’d looked up hobbits to learn about them. She figured it might be hard to walk that one back.

  “Maybe I’d better avoid Harry Potter,” Tim muttered as they drove toward the store.

  “No, I wanna read it,” Matthew said.

  “Just so long as you understand it’s all pretend.”

  “Of course,” Matthew said. “Magic isn’t real. But dinosaurs are!”

  “Were,” said Tim.

  “They’re not all dead,” Matthew announced. “I talked to my teacher about it. Crocodiles. Alligators. And some kind of fish I can’t remember.”

  “I guess I’m going to have to go back to school,” Tim said as he turned into the parking lot.

  But Matthew was looking at Vannie. “What’s that fish?”

  “Coelacanth,” she answered promptly. “For a long time we thought they were extinct, but then some fishermen found one. Then later we found out they were commonly being eaten as food in some fishing villages near India and Indonesia.”

  Matthew giggled. “Then maybe a T. rex will show up someday.”

  Vanessa shuddered playfully. “I certainly hope not.”

  “Remind me not to let this boy watch Jurassic Park,” Tim said as he stopped the truck and turned it off. “Next thing you know he’ll be doing his own cloning.”

  The home improvement section of the sprawling store fascinated Vanessa. She’d never visited one before because she’d always lived in apartments that came with maintenance. She realized as she walked around that she could spend hours here taking it all in.

  But Tim guided her over to the banks of paint chips, and she was off on a new dream. So many pretty colors in varying hues and shades. How was she going to make up her mind?

  “You don’t have to decide right now,” Tim said. “We can take home as many chip samples as you want.”

  Well, that was an invitation to plunder, Vanessa thought. By the time she had every chip that interested her even mildly, she had quite a stack in her hand.

  Tim was smiling. “Any others?”

  “I think I just overwhelmed myself.”

  Then Matthew approached with a strip of dark blue paints that didn’t get very light and passed it to his father. “I want these colors in my bedroom.”

  Tim surveyed them. “Really? It’ll be awfully dark.”

  “I know, like night. Then we can put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.”

  “Oh.” Tim was clearly trying to hide a grin. “We’ll think about that,” he said, his tone sober.

  Matthew looked at Vanessa. “When he says we’ll think about it, that means he doesn’t really like it.”

  Vanessa laughed. “You never know.”

  “True,” said Tim. “I didn’t say no.”

  Matthew brought his strip of paint chips along as they left and headed for home.

  The trees were tossing more edgily, and the sky had turned a dark gray.

  “Autumn,” Tim remarked. “Very changeable. I read once that the worst time to sail is in late autumn or early spring, because the weather is so variable and could get bad without much warning. That could be true, I guess. All I know is our weather seems to be bouncing around this week.”

  When they pulled up at the house, Vanessa eyed the snowman they’d built. While it had done a good job of lasting, right now it was little more than a heap of snow surrounded by yellowed grass.

  Inside, they went to the kitchen, where Tim set about making peanut butter sandwiches for whoever wanted them. Vanessa wasn’t feeling at all hungry yet, but Matthew was. He acted as if eating would bring him to two o’clock faster.

  He pushed his color chips her way. “Can you keep that for me?” he asked.

  “I certainly will, but I doubt anything would happen to it anyway.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Tim remarked jokingly. “We do have the invisible man running around who loses my car keys and makes small toys disappear.”

  Matthew giggled. “Yeah. Only you forgot where you put your keys.”

  “Probably so.”

  Matthew gave Vanessa a knowing look. “I’m too old for that now.”

  “I can see that.”

  The boy was so charming she had the worst urge to hug him until he squeaked. She guessed he wouldn’t like that at all, however. He seemed to be sprouting a good deal of independence from what she had seen.

  After Matthew had his sandwich, Tim turned on the radio to listen to the weather report. High winds all day and through the night, occasional gusts up to fifty. A front was passing to the north, and they might see a little snow but not much.

  “That’s not too bad,” Tim said. The report continued for another few seconds, warning of dropping temperatures on Sunday night. “Winter’s moving in, I guess.”

  “Halloween in two weeks,” Matthew said. “I hope it’s not too cold for trick-or-treating.”

  “Too early to know,” said his father. “But you know we’ll set it all up in the gym if it’s too cold to be out. You won’t miss a single cavity.”

  Matthew’s spirits, which were already high, rose even higher. He practically bounced up the stairs with his father to pack for his overnighter. Fifteen minutes later, they returned downstairs, Matthew with a packed backpack and Tim with a sleeping bag. Matthew had not forgotten the dinosaur puzzle and hurried into the dining room to get it.

  “Want to ride along?” Tim asked as he opened the door to let Matthew through. “Five minutes. Hardly worth pulling on your jacket again unless there’s something you want.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  She watched them leave, but as they did she felt loneliness step into her heart. Dang, what was going on inside her? She’d decided to quit worrying about the sense that something was wrong with her, that she wasn’t standoffish by choice. Once she’d made up her mind to just shut up, as Tim had told her the other night, she’d let go of a whole bunch of tension.

  But now she was feeling lonely? That wasn’t like her. She usually loved her alone time and filled it with activities she enjoyed, whether reading a book, cooking a sinful dessert to take in for the office or planning her next vacation. She liked being by herself. Quiet time, time to just flow without pressure.

  Now loneliness was an almost alien feeling to her as an adult. Settling at last at the kitchen table because the light was marginally better in here, even with the grayness of the day, she spread out the paint chips she had brought back with her and tried to imagine what colors she would paint the house.

  She’d never h
ad to make such a decision before. Every place she had ever lived had white walls in one state or another. The idea of splashing color all over a room excited her, especially since seeing the bedroom she was sleeping in here. Clearly Tim and Claire hadn’t been afraid of color, and the lavender walls in there truly appealed to her.

  It had to be Claire’s doing, she thought. The room seemed to boast a feminine touch, although what did she know about that? She supposed guys could like lavender and forget-me-nots. Why not?

  But then, with all the colors spread before her, she felt the loneliness again and wondered if this was a hint of what Tim felt with his wife gone. Maybe so. He certainly hadn’t erased Claire from the house. He’d simply moved upstairs.

  She glanced at the clock on the microwave and saw that it was well past the five minutes Tim had promised. Of course it was. He was a friendly man, and it would never occur to him to drop his son off at the door and drive away without at least some conversation.

  All the colors of the rainbow lay before her, the entire spectrum, some bold and some soft and pale, but they were all there. She realized impulse had caused her to select the brightest colors, because when she tried to imagine painting a room in such a powerful shade, she had the feeling all it would do would be to shrink the room.

  Paler colors, she decided, pushing away the strongest. But then she saw Matthew’s selection again, the deep-as-night blues he had brought home. Down at the bottom of the strip the colors were suggested as trim paint for rooms painted in other shades.

  She could imagine Tim being reluctant to turn his son’s room into a cave, but the idea of glow-in-the-dark stars was exactly the thing to tickle a boy Matthew’s age. Maybe he’d do it if it wouldn’t be too hard to paint over at a later date. Or maybe Matthew would forget about it by next week. Sad to admit she had almost no knowledge of seven-year-olds. She really liked Matthew, though. The house felt empty without him, and the evening was probably going to be emptier without his cheery voice, his fascination with his dinosaur puzzles and his running commentary on just about everything.

  Then she giggled, remembering the expression on Tim’s face when his son had announced that he had a picture of a hobbit house and had looked up hobbits. There would be some untangling of fact and fiction in the future.