by H M Shepherd
“Sam? It’s Nick. Listen, are you busy right now?”
“No,” he answered, sitting up immediately. “I’m free. Why?”
“I went a little overboard at this antique store, buying things for the house, and it won’t all fit in my car. Could you possibly—?”
“Where are you?”
“I, uh….” The phone hissed as Nick hesitated. “It doesn’t really have a name. It’s in some barn off Route 662. The mailbox says Lapp. I don’t know what else I can tell you. Want me to text you my location?”
“No need,” Sam said, cradling his phone with his shoulder while he pulled his boots back on and retrieved his scattered belongings. “I know where it is. I’ll be there soon.”
NICK TRIED once again to rearrange the items in his car, attempting to fit just a few more small pieces he didn’t want flying around the back of Sam’s truck. It was a pain-in-the-ass game of Tetris with trunks, end tables, and lamps, with little odds and ends all stuffed in the spaces between them. He had already saved space by putting most of the books into the trunks and removing the raggedy lampshades he intended to replace anyway. If he took out just one of the trunks and wrapped it in a drop cloth, it would be safe enough in the truck, but that would require unpacking almost everything just to free it from the tangle.
It had been an accident that he’d found the barn at all; he’d actually been on his way back from filing paperwork at the county offices in Reading when he’d managed to get himself lost. He’d turned off the main road after getting stuck behind a line of slow-moving buggies. He had had his phone mounted and a navigation app running, but once he lost service, it became stuck attempting to reroute him. Eventually he’d just closed it altogether out of frustration.
After a while, he’d escaped the never-ending line of dairy farms—all owned by the same family, apparently, which made him a little anxious that he was just going in circles—and about a mile down the road, had found a barn. The doors were all wide-open, and there were a couple people milling about, so he stopped there, intending to ask for directions. Instead, he had managed to waste hours combing through the rows upon rows of antique furniture and folk art. Nearly everything seemed to be decorated in some way in bold, bright colors that depicted trees, flowers, and especially birds. Nick had even found a collection of samplers, most of them made over a century ago. One in particular had caught his eye, a small piece done by a nine-year-old named Rebecca Fischer, bearing the words “O edel Herz Bedenk dein End” surrounded by carefully cross-stitched blossoms and stars. His phone still not working, he’d found the owner, a tiny old woman and asked what it meant.
She’d told him, “Something like, ‘Noble heart, think about your end.’”
“That’s a bit morbid.”
“Yah, well,” she’d said with a shrug. “’Tis what it ’tis. It was a pretty common saying to decorate things with—let me show you this over here once.”
And that had started it. Nick had freely allowed himself to be led around, picking up anything he thought he could make use out of, until he had the immense pile of stuff currently overwhelming him. He was so lost in thought that he failed to notice Sam’s dusty red truck pull into the small lot beside him. It wasn’t until Sam rolled down the window (how old did that truck have to be to have a manual window crank?) and called his name, that he looked over to see Sam appraising the pile of furniture Nick had amassed, with visible amusement.
“I know, it’s ridiculous. But everything is in such good shape, and it would fit in so well.”
“How do you mean?” Sam asked, pausing for a moment on the running boards before stepping down.
Nick scoffed. “Well, I can’t go putting particle board Ikea stuff in such a nice old house. And this,” he said, gesturing with one sweeping hand, “is the whole reason I’ve been so cheap when it comes to everything else.”
With a laugh Sam agreed and walked around the back of the truck to unlatch the tailgate. “Get up. This’ll go a lot quicker if I just pass everything up to you.”
Nick did as he was told, bracing himself to scramble into the bed. However, his foot caught a wet spot on the gate and he found himself falling backward. He flailed, attempting to grab on to something, anything, and failing miserably. His stomach lurched, and he prepared to hit the gravel parking lot back-first, but instead of pain and the sickening sensation of air emptying his lungs, he found himself feeling the warmth of Sam’s broad chest. Sam caught him hard, with one of his arms circling about Nick’s waist. Nick turned with the momentum, and found his face pressed against Sam’s T-shirt. He caught the heady scent of sawdust and wood stain.
“Are you all right?” Sam asked, but he was interrupted by the old shopkeeper crossing the parking lot toward them.
“A little schusslich, ain’t ya?” she teased Nick as she drew closer. Sam let go of him so quickly that he tripped a little trying to right himself. “Slow yourself down a bit before you get hurt.”
“Gut Owed, Mrs. Lapp. How are you?” Sam asked.
Should have figured that they knew each other, Nick thought. When he’d first noted the way the locals treated one another, he’d chalked it up to general amiability; he’d seen both his parents, who had spent their entire lives in Pittsburgh, strike up hour-long conversations with complete strangers. But it turned out that most of his current neighbors took a while to warm up to people and didn’t go out of their way to seek out new friendships. They acted close to one another because they genuinely were. It was nice to see, if a bit difficult to break through as an outsider.
“Well enough, especially with this nice young man cleaning me out of stock,” Mrs. Lapp said with a cackle.
“Nonsense, I’m sure he barely made a dent.”
Without help this time, Nick hauled himself into the bed of the truck. Sam began to pass up the furniture piece by piece, starting with the headboards, all the while chattering on with Mrs. Lapp. As they shifted into Pennsylvania Dutch, Nick lost the thread of the conversation. He still felt hopelessly out of place living here: too urban, too dark, too different. The language barrier, though he seldom ran into it, didn’t help assuage that feeling at all.
But any conversation, even if it wasn’t one he could participate in, was a good enough distraction, and with it, the work went quickly enough. Mrs. Lapp finally excused herself and went back into the barn, and Nick gingerly stepped among his belongings toward the edge of the truck bed.
“Here,” Sam said, reaching up to him. He took Nick by the forearms and gave him the leverage to jump down from the side, and Nick wanted to believe that he held on just a touch longer than he needed to.
From the barn Mrs. Lapp waved a hand and asked them both to follow her. The three of them wove through makeshift aisles until they reached the ladder going up to the loft. Only there did she slow down, taking each rung one at a time, while both men watched anxiously from the bottom.
Nick went up last, and to his surprise, he found the loft was mostly devoid of any antique junk (there was an old Singer treadle sewing machine that he made note of, intending to come back for it when he had room in his car and an idea of where to put it in the house). Here, Mrs. Lapp’s stock was confined to the walls, where row upon row of white disks hung, each with a different, brilliantly colored design.
“There’s some over here that were hand-done by Jacob Zook, and a few from Johnny Ott and the Claypooles.”
The names meant absolutely nothing to Nick, but he nodded politely and hoped he looked suitably impressed.
“Some are prints. But anything newer than that and you’ll have to go elsewhere.”
“Hex signs,” Sam said as Nick looked at him. “You’ve never seen one?”
“Only since I moved here, but I didn’t know that’s what they were. I don’t think they’re common out where I’m from.” He looked a little more closely at one bearing a large rosette with hearts painted between each of the branches. “You said hex—these aren’t supposed to be magic or anything?”
“No. Well, sort of. Some say they’re good luck, and some say that everything on them is a symbol for something,” Sam said with a shrug. “I can’t say I know much about that. But mostly they’re just for nice.”
“Pick one,” Mrs. Lapp said to Nick. “Any you’d like, free of charge.”
“I couldn’t possibly!”
But Mrs. Lapp waved him off and started pointing to some of her favorites. “Now, that one there might be good for your hotel-thing.” It was mostly green, with a shamrock painted in the center between two birds. A line of three flowers—tulips, perhaps—curved along the bottom of the disk, and in the petals of the middle flower was a snake. “Zook’s Irish hex sign. Tourists like it, especially the ones who say they’re Irish. I can’t tell you how many I’ve had through here who go on and on about being one-sixteenth Irish on their mother’s side. I want to tell them they’re barely Irish and they’re certainly not Deitsch, but they pay well for that sort of nonsense, so I don’t argue. You Irish?”
Nick could see Sam trying to suppress a laugh behind her. “No, ma’am,” he answered dutifully, “but not Dutch either. One-hundred percent Italian.”
“Pity. I don’t think they make Italian hex signs, sorry to tell you.” She took Nick by the arm and turned him back to the wall. “But go on, pick a sign once!”
Nick eventually settled, after much urging from Mrs. Lapp, on one of the many Willkommen signs. This one in particular bore a large red-and-yellow bird, or a distelfink, as he was told.
“It’s a goldfinch,” Sam said, translating. “It’s meant for good luck and happiness.”
Nick just thought it looked pretty, the way the bird’s tail feathers swooped around the border of the disk.
Once the hex sign was safely tucked in the passenger seat of his car, he turned back to Mrs. Lapp to tell her thank you. Haltingly, he told her goodbye: “Macht’s gut.”
She smiled broadly and waved. “Macht’s gut! Don’t be a stranger, now!”
WHEN THEY returned to the house, they unloaded Sam’s truck, taking everything as far as the living room. By the time they finished, the sun had not yet set but was low on the horizon and hidden behind the hills. “Let’s just stop here,” Nick decided loudly after taking only the hex sign from his own car. “If you want some water or anything, go ahead and help yourself,” he told Sam as he unlocked the door to his cottage, pausing to pick up a package a courier had left by his door. “Maggie’s been in her crate all this time, and I need to let her out.”
Sam did so gratefully, downing two full glasses before he realized that he still hadn’t heard any of the usual noises Maggie made when she was let out—not the frantic whine when she spotted Nick and knew she was about to be freed, or the skitter of her nails as she attempted to investigate every square inch of the cottage. “Nick?” he called out, but there was no answer. He wandered into the living room and down the hall, feeling awkward as he ventured closer to Nick’s room, where Maggie’s crate was kept.
He saw Maggie first and was shocked to see the normally high-strung little dog sitting completely still, her eyes fixed on Nick where he stood at his desk, staring with a blank expression into the package he had taken from the porch. Slowly he began to fish through its miscellaneous contents until he pulled out a crocheted scarf. No part of his face moved, but his eyes began to fill with tears that quickly overflowed and coursed down his face.
Sam stepped forward. “Nick….”
“Looks like my fiancée, or no, my ex-fiancée finally went and cleared out all the stuff I left in her apartment. She made this for me,” he said, holding the scarf a little higher. “She used to spray her perfume on it whenever it came out of the wash, so I’d think of her when I wore it. It still smells like her.” He finally broke, dragging his forearm across his eyes. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would still bother me so much.”
Again Sam found himself at a loss for words. He looked around and caught sight of a wine bottle lamp on the bedside table. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He ran across the street to his own house and grabbed a four-pack of Yuengling from his fridge. In the cabinet he found a bottle of apple wine he’d received as a Christmas gift and never intended to drink but hadn’t had the heart to throw away, and took that as well. He didn’t even have any wineglasses or a corkscrew, but he figured Nick would.
By the time he got back, Nick was sitting out on a bench outside on the porch. Maggie had followed him there, remaining eerily calm and subdued. She sat on the ground beside the bench, with her head raised just high enough for Nick to rest his hand between her ears. Every once in a while, he absentmindedly scratched behind them, and Maggie would lean farther into his touch.
Without asking for permission, Sam went inside and poured Nick a glass of the wine. It should probably have been chilled, he thought vaguely, but even without it, the wine was cool compared to the heat and humidity outside. He went back out, handed the glass to Nick, and set the open bottle and the beer on the floor between them before sitting beside him and opening a can of beer for himself. They were silent for what seemed like ages, until Nick began to speak, pausing only to take a drink.
“I met Olivia when I started working at the firm in Philly. She was a paralegal there. We didn’t start dating until after the attorney she worked for opened her own practice and took Liv with her. Didn’t think it would be proper. But I guess the time we had been working together still meant something, because we got engaged about five months later and it didn’t feel like it was too soon.
“We didn’t set a date or anything. We didn’t even move in together since Liv worked closer to Doylestown and it seemed smarter for her to keep her own apartment. We spent the weekends at my house, though. There didn’t seem to be any rush. And then a couple years ago, we found out she was pregnant. We were finally starting to make plans, and started looking for a house, but then… then she miscarried.”
“I’m so sorry,” Sam murmured, but Nick barely reacted beyond a nod.
“I probably could have saved us. I can make excuses, say I wasn’t sure what to do to make it better. But the truth is that I was too wrapped up in my own pain to help her. We started to drift apart, and she stopped spending weekends with me. And then she ended it. It was right before I moved out here.” He smiled bitterly. “And that’s it. That’s my tragic backstory. That’s why I came running out here with my tail between my legs.” He raised his glass to no one in a cynical gesture and drained the rest of it. Sam passed him the bottle to refill it. “What’s yours?” Nick finally asked, his tone biting. “I know there’s something you haven’t been telling me, and I’ve been too nice to ask.”
Sam didn’t answer at first, and then said, “My sister—Ellie’s mother—is in prison. She and her husband were in a car accident when Ellie was ten. It killed him, and my sister was depressed and in pain all the time. She got addicted to her medication and kept getting DUIs. And then she got into another car accident and killed someone. She had so many priors that her public defender talked her into a deal. So she’s in prison, and I have custody of my niece.” He didn’t mention the night that social services had contacted him, telling him someone had to come collect Ellie immediately or she’d be sent to a temporary home until other arrangements could be made. She’d been so angry, refusing to speak or even look at him for the better part of her first week with him. It had been easier to take her anger out on him, who had the misfortune to be present to bear the brunt of it, rather than on her sick, absent mother. And Sam had taken it, if only so Ellie could still love her mother without complication.
But Nick must have realized this without being told. Some of the misplaced hostility drained from his face, and he whispered an apology. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”
“I’ve been wanting to say something for a while now,” Sam said with a shrug. “I didn’t think it was right, you helping me so much without knowing the whole story.”
Nick shook his head. “Maybe
it was better that I didn’t know. She got a clean slate with me. I don’t think we would have gotten along if she thought I pitied her.”
“Maybe,” Sam agreed, both impressed and a little envious that Nick had such a better read on Ellie despite knowing her for such a short time. “She was a horror at first. When I was just her uncle, I was her friend, and when I had to be her parent, it was just ridiculous. I’m only ten years older than her, you know.”
“You didn’t have any authority,” Nick observed. “I’m thirty-two. I’m probably closer to her mother’s age.”
“Her dad would have been thirty-six this year if he hadn’t died. It’s not too far off.”
“I didn’t realize you were so young. I kind of feel bad for staring at your ass so often.”
Sam choked on his beer. “You what?”
“Sorry.” Nick took the wine bottle, which was already half-empty, and poured himself another too-full glass. “Don’t pay any attention to me. What is this, anyway?” he asked, squinting at the label on the bottle. “It’s good.”
“Apfelwein.”
Sam heard Nick mutter something about “more German shit.” He swallowed deeply and forced himself to return to the topic at hand. “I thought… you were just talking about your fiancée. I thought—”
“I’m both. Or I like both. I’m bi. Whatever you want to call it. Sorry if it grosses you out.”
“It doesn’t! I mean, I’m….”
“Gay? I figured.” When Sam’s jaw fell open, Nick began to laugh. “No, you’re not, like, you know, sequined-thong-at-a-Pride-parade gay. But in my experience, straight guys don’t tend to panic when people see them touching other men.”
“I don’t—!” But he had, he realized, up to and including multiple times earlier that day.
