Woodlands

by Robin Jones Gunn

  “He likes you,” Travis surmised.

  “I like him,” Seth said.

  “They’re all boys,” Travis said. “The two girls already got sold.”

  “Do you think I should buy this one?” Seth asked.

  Travis seemed to ponder the question deeply but only for a moment before saying, “I think you two are good for each other.”

  Leah pressed her lips together so she wouldn’t break into too big of a smile. She loved all three of the Buchanan children. Whenever any of them did or said something especially endearing, Leah allowed herself to get all choked up. If she couldn’t have her own children, she would funnel her motherly emotions into these three pixies every chance she had.

  “It’s a deal,” Seth said, putting out his hand for Travis to shake. They shook vigorously, and the puppy yapped his approval.

  Emma covered her ears. “Stop barking,” she ordered.

  Leah adjusted her precious cargo and realized how heavy Emma was getting. “I have to put you down, sweetie. Auntie Leah is getting to be an old lady, and she can’t hold you as long as she used to.”

  As Leah bent at the knees, Emma got down and went right to her daddy, who effortlessly picked her up and slipped her around to his back so that her arms were around his neck and her legs around his middle.

  “What are you going to name him?” Travis asked.

  Without hesitation Seth said, “Bungee. I’m going to call him Bungee.”

  Travis laughed and repeated, “Bungee.”

  Leah doubted that Travis knew what a Bungee jumper was, although it was possible. He had surprised her more than once with his keen sense of observation. It was a fun word to say, and Travis repeated it. “Bungee.”

  “I better take this guy home so he can get used to his new house tonight,” Seth said. Looking at Kyle he added, “Is it still okay if I write the check next week?”

  “No problem,” Kyle said. “Whenever it’s convenient for you.”

  “You can give the money to me,” Travis said. “It’s for me to go to college.”

  “We’ll make sure it goes into your college account, son,” Kyle said. Then looking at Leah he asked, “Do you want to stay for a while? Have you had dinner yet?”

  “We need to get going. My car decided to have a nervous breakdown this afternoon,” Leah said. “I have to call Martin to see if he can tow it over to his station tonight.”

  “Do you need any help?” Kyle asked.

  “I think I’m okay. Seth said he could drop me off back at my car.”

  “That is, after we make a stop at Dairy Queen so I can repay Leah for helping me out today,” Seth said.

  Kyle looked at Leah and then back at Seth. “I’ll tell you what’s even better than a fast-food dinner. You talk Leah into making you one of her spinach casseroles, and you’ll be tempted to turn into a vegetarian.”

  “I am a vegetarian,” Seth said. “I’m only into Dairy Queen for their shakes. I’m making up for lost time during the past four years in Costa Rica. So far I’ve only tried three of their flavors. I’m making my way down the list.”

  Leah caught Kyle’s eye, and she knew what he was thinking. Leah happened to know that Kyle was a Dairy Queen Blizzard aficionado as well.

  “Have you tried the Oreo yet?” Kyle asked.

  “Not yet,” Seth said.

  “And did you know that Leah is a vegetarian, too?” Kyle added.

  Seth smiled at Leah as the squirming puppy tried to crawl out of his arms. “No, I didn’t know that. I think Leah and I are discovering quite a few things we have in common.”

  To Leah’s surprise, she didn’t blush at his comment. For some reason it didn’t embarrass her. She felt natural standing here with Kyle and Seth and hearing Seth say such a thing. It was as if the two of them were long-lost classmates, getting caught up at an impromptu reunion. Seth was connected to Glenbrooke in a unique way: He was related to the man who had built the house they were standing in.

  “If you’re free on Saturday, Seth, you’re welcome to come for our Easter egg hunt,” Kyle said.

  “And bring Bungee,” Travis said, patting the puppy on the head. “He might want to visit his mommy.”

  “Will do,” Seth said.

  “We can go out the back here,” Leah suggested, pointing to the screen door. It led to the back deck where Seth stopped to admire the sprawling backyard lawn bordered by ancient evergreens and cedars.

  “You have a beautiful home,” Seth said to Kyle. “It’s really something, the way you’ve fixed it up.”

  “When you come back on Saturday we’ll give you the grand tour,” Kyle said, putting down Emma and taking Sara from Leah. Neither of the little girls liked being displaced, and both put up a fuss.

  “I’ll see you real soon,” Leah said, blowing the girls a kiss. She and Seth left side by side.

  “What should we do first?” Seth asked. “Eat, or take care of your car?”

  “Either one. You pick.” At that moment, Leah didn’t care. She felt as if her wish upon Pluto or Venus was coming true. She was in the company of a charming man, and he happened to have a puppy under his arm.

  Chapter Five

  It does your heart good to see a real family like that, doesn’t it?” Seth said, as the two of them got back in his car. “Mom, Dad, 2.5 kids, and a couple of dogs, living the American dream. I noticed they even had a hammock in the backyard.”

  “You didn’t see a lot of those in Costa Rica?” Leah asked, holding Bungee on her lap.

  “What, families or hammocks?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I saw very few families because of the kind of organization I was with. And I spied a few hammocks here and there. But I never had one I could call my own.”

  “And that’s what you came to Glenbrooke for? A hammock of your own?” Leah asked, still trying to obtain a clearer understanding of why a man who had the world at his feet would give it up to move to Glenbrooke of all places.

  Seth grinned as he headed down the driveway. Once again he avoided Leah’s pointed question. Bungee sunk his pointed teeth into Leah’s hand, and she pulled away with a cry. “Hey, no biting, Bungee.”

  “We can put him on the floor in the back, if you’d like,” Seth suggested.

  “No, he’s okay,” Leah said. “He’s going to have to learn his manners sooner or later.”

  “Not necessarily at your expense.” Seth stopped the car at the end of the driveway. He reached over and took Leah’s hand in his, pulling it closer for an examination of the teeth marks. Leah noticed how rough and worn Seth’s hands felt. She was used to holding hands with little girls and elderly friends. Compared to them, her hands always felt like the rough, dry, overworked ones. As they were cradled now in Seth’s hand, she actually felt feminine. The sensation surprised her, and she pulled away.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Why don’t we take care of my car first.” She really didn’t want her time with Seth to end, and she wasn’t sure why she had suggested dealing with the car rather than eating.

  Seth took her request to heart and drove toward Fourth Avenue. Silence nestled down between them for a full two minutes, and Leah didn’t like it. She had enjoyed the way they had chatted freely. I was too abrupt, pulling away like that. Why did I do that?

  “Or,” Leah suggested tentatively, “we can swing by my place. I just happen to have a spinach casserole in the freezer. I could put it in the oven while we get my car, then we could eat at my home afterward.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Tell me how to get there,” Seth said.

  Leah directed him into one of Glenbrooke’s older neighborhoods, less than half a mile from where she had left her car. They pulled up in front, and Seth said, “This is your house?”

  Leah nodded and tried to evaluate her quaint bungalow from Seth’s point of view. The house had a steep roof with a brick chimney that ran up the left side. The chimney was painted white, like the rest of the house. The front door was rounde
d at the top and had a leaded, stained glass window in the upper section. She had found the stained glass, which depicted a pale blue morning glory, at an estate sale and had it fitted into a new front door when she moved in almost six months ago. Her small front yard had been mowed recently, but she hadn’t planted a lot of flowers or bedding plants yet. Two overgrown azalea bushes stood to the right of the front door like a pair of matronly sisters, heads bent close, sharing a bit of juicy gossip. They were both budding and about to cast a spray of white blossoms across their four-foot-wide bosoms.

  “You’re right,” Seth said, eyeing the maple tree’s trunk. “That tree is almost larger than your house.”

  “I might need to get it trimmed back one of these days.”

  “Great house!” Seth said.

  “It needs a lot of work still.” Leah thought of the long row of self-sticking notes on her refrigerator that listed all she planned to do to make her property and home look better. She had focused her efforts over the past few months inside, including installing a dishwasher, which she had managed by herself with no problem. “And it’s really small inside. It wasn’t as nice looking when I bought it. It was gray with a red-brick chimney, and the front door was painted red.”

  “Nice choice on the color and the new door. I envy your being a home owner.”

  “It’s not all that great when you need a plumber in the middle of the night.”

  Seth laughed and opened his door. “Do you want me to leave Bungee in the car?”

  “Of course not,” Leah said, scooping him up. “He has to come in and meet my dog, Hula.”

  “Hula?” Seth asked as he took Bungee off Leah’s hands. “Named after an exotic Hawaiian vacation?”

  Leah opened her front door without a key.

  “You don’t lock your door?” Seth asked, stunned.

  “Sometimes. I left it open today because my friend Lauren was coming over this morning to pick up some of the eggs for the Easter egg hunt Saturday. I volunteered to decorate more than I could handle.”

  Leah led Seth through a narrow entryway into a small kitchen. On the tile counter sat fifty hard-boiled eggs in their cartons, waiting to be decorated. Leah had left a note for Lauren on top of the first dozen.

  “Looks like Lauren didn’t make it over here.” Leah turned to Seth, and with a cunning grin she said, “So, how do you feel about dyeing a couple dozen eggs tonight?”

  Seth was examining her ceiling. “Did you put in the skylight? It looks new.”

  “Yes,” Leah said looking up. “It was too dark in here. I put in the ceiling fan, too. It can get hot here in the summer.” She reached over and stroked Bungee behind the ears. He was gnawing on Seth’s thumb. “Do you want to meet Hula?”

  “Of course.”

  Leah led Seth and Bungee only a few feet to a door off the kitchen.

  “You keep her in the pantry?”

  “This isn’t a pantry,” Leah said. “This is something I think you only find in old houses in the Northwest. It’s a mudroom.” She opened the door into a small room with a linoleum floor, a deep sink, and a metal baker’s rack stacked with gardening pots and tools. A doggy door opened to cement steps that led to the backyard. Hula wasn’t in the mudroom.

  “She must be in the backyard,” Leah said, opening the door and stepping outside. Hula had positioned herself comfortably at the bottom of the steps, basking in the last bit of sunlight that spilled through the gap between two large trees in the neighbor’s yard.

  “Hi, girl,” Leah said as Hula slowly rose and came to check out the puppy in Seth’s arms. “This is Bungee. What do you think?”

  “Your yard isn’t fenced, I see,” Seth said. “I better not put Bungee down, or we might end up chasing him all over the neighborhood.”

  “He can stay in the mudroom, and we can put a board over the doggy door, if you want to leave him here. You don’t mind, do you, Hula?”

  Hula returned to her corner of sunlight as if to register her apathy.

  “I’ll stick the casserole in the oven and set the timer,” Leah said. “I’ll also call Martin to see if he can meet us at the car with his tow truck.”

  Leah made her call and placed the homemade spinach casserole in her not-so-clean oven while Seth situated Bungee in the mudroom.

  “All set?” Leah asked, hanging up the phone.

  “All set,” Seth replied. He had washed his face, and a few beads of water still clung to his eyelashes.

  “All I have in the mudroom are paper towels,” Leah said apologetically. “Did you want a hand towel?”

  “No, I’m fine. I like your house. It’s really nice.”

  “You’ve just seen half of it. The clean half.”

  “Only one bedroom?”

  “Yes,” Leah said.

  “I had hoped to get into a little house like this,” Seth said as they made their way back to his car. “I had to settle for an apartment in Edgefield, at least for the time being.”

  “You’re really set on the supposedly ‘normal,’ Middle-American lifestyle, aren’t you?”

  Seth closed the car door behind him and gave her a puzzled look. “Why does that keep surprising you?”

  “Because,” Leah spouted, shutting her door hard for emphasis. “It’s so uneventful here.”

  “Costa Rica can be uneventful, too. So can Sweden. It’s not the place; it’s the people.”

  “Well, this is all I’ve ever known. I would think that someone who has been to Europe and who has camped out in a tropical rain forest would find all this pretty blasé.”

  “If you’re seventeen, maybe,” Seth said, starting the car. “That’s why I left the U.S. at that ripe, know-it-all age. I spent my senior year of high school as an exchange student in Sweden. Later I backpacked through Europe as far south as Greece.”

  “And you saw the Alps and Paris and Venice,” Leah said.

  Seth turned and gave her a humored expression as if Leah’s three stated locations were all good guesses. “Yes, I saw a lot of Europe. A lot of wonderful places. And I met a lot of fascinating people. But I returned to the U.S. for college. That’s when I lived in Boulder. For the last four years ‘home’ has been a Quonset hut with a wide variety of roommates who have no idea what the terms ‘privacy’ and ‘lights out’ mean.”

  “Turn right at this corner,” Leah said, motioning for him to keep talking.

  “I’ve never had a place of my own, the way you do. I looked around one day and realized the incoming staff kept getting younger and younger. I was the oldest staff member except for Keegan and Marabella, who ran the program. And they’re settled in for the long haul. They have their own cabin. They even have their own hammock.”

  Seth pulled up in front of Ida’s house where Leah’s car was parked.

  “So you came to America in search of your own cabin and hammock,” Leah surmised.

  “Something like that.”

  “Boy, are we ever different,” Leah said, leaning against her door. “Ever since I was fourteen I’ve dreamed of going places and seeing things. What I wouldn’t give to live in a Quonset hut or hike the Alps or go dancing in the streets of a Greek fishing village.”

  Seth laughed. “It’s not all like the movies.”

  Leah returned his smile. He had such a nice smile. “I know. But I always wanted to see for myself that it wasn’t like the movies, you know?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Leah looked down. She wanted to answer with the phrase that filled her mind at that moment and to admit to him what he obviously hadn’t figured out yet. She wanted to say, “Because, behold, I’m Leah.” That phrase had been enough to determine her destiny.

  But Seth didn’t know that. He didn’t act as if her options were limited.

  Leah lifted her head, and with a fresh breath of hope, she answered, “You know, maybe I will someday soon.”

  Chapter Six

  Martin showed up with his tow truck before Seth could comment on Leah’s statement,
but that didn’t matter. She felt brave and strong for having said what she did. And she meant it, too. Maybe she would take off and see the world someday. The freedom the very thought gave her was exhilarating.

  Leah found it hard to keep from smiling as Martin checked under the hood for possible problems. At this moment she felt she didn’t need a car to take her anywhere. She had something better. She had hope. And hope could take her places she hadn’t been in a long time.

  How strange that hope should have returned to my life after such a long, cold season of silence.

  Leah glanced at Seth. He and Martin were engrossed in examining her car’s engine. When Martin said he didn’t see anything obvious that could cause the problem, he hooked up her Blazer to his tow truck and promised to have a look at it first thing in the morning.

  Seth drove Leah home, but before they entered her front door, they could hear Bungee barking from the mudroom. They hurried to rescue the forlorn pup and remove the board from the doggie door so Hula could get in and have her dinner. Poor Hula looked offended that Leah had locked her out but had allowed the little pip-squeak to take over her domain.

  Seth comforted Bungee in his arms while Leah checked on the spinach. The oven was turned off. “Oh no, don’t tell me my oven is breaking down, too.”

  “Hey, I think your friend came by and took some of the eggs while we were gone,” Seth said, nodding at the kitchen counter.

  Leah noticed that half the eggs were gone. A note from Lauren replaced the note Leah had left on the counter. It read,

  Sorry it took me all day to get over here. Molly Sue had her two-year-old checkup at the doctor’s this afternoon. I turned off your oven because it smelled like something was burning. Hope I didn’t ruin your dinner. See you tomorrow night at the Good Friday service.

  xoxox Wren

  Leah checked the frozen state of the spinach and reset the oven. “Looks like it’ll take another half an hour. Can your stomach wait that long?”