4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

C aro : Me + You. Thursday afternoon. Lunch in Oak River at the diner. You available?

Me : What else would I be doing?

Caro : I don’t know. I hear a hot guy keeps coming over to your place, and he’s not there for Grandma Lydia, so…

Me : …

Me : I’ll be there.

Caro : Is noon okay?

Me : 1 is better, if that’s fine.

Caro : So he doesn’t leave until after 12, huh?

Caro : Hey, don’t ghost me! One is fine!

Caro : I’m just teasing! Me : See you at one.

Me : Oh, by the way, Grandma Lydia says that you owe her a visit and I promised her you’d come over next week. :)

Caro : … Retaliation doesn’t look good on you, Rency.

Me : :P

“You should have waited for me,” I say, setting my hands on either side of the ladder. The clatter of metal against the house had alerted me to Henry’s presence, and I’d rushed down the stairs to meet him. He already set up the ladder and was halfway to the gutters by the time I rounded the edge of the house.

For the past three mornings, I’ve beaten him to our morning projects, but I’m off my game today. I had another dream about him last night—the same one as before, exactly, with the feeling of pressure and the urgency to grab the door that inevitably closed between Henry and I—and, as was the case the previous times, it had taken an unusually long amount of time to go back to sleep afterward. The slam of the door in the dream world had echoed in my mind, keeping me awake for hours.

And there were slivers of light shining through the forest trees again.

It’s starting to impact my energy level—evidenced by Henry being able to get started before I even had time to pull my hair up and under a hat, let alone eat breakfast or drink a coffee.

“I figured you’d show eventually,” he says, glancing down at me. He does a double take, and had I not been holding the ladder, I probably would be swiping my hair up or tugging on my shirt self-consciously.

“What?” I say, shifting my weight. His green-blue eyes trace my face as if looking for something there.

“Your hair is down.”

“The curls are pretty wild, right?” I say, lifting a hand to gently smooth them.

He pauses for a moment, and then blinking owlishly, says, “They’re beautiful.” And just like that, he turns to continue up the ladder.

I’m sure my cheeks are flushed from the pleasure of his compliment. My hair is my favorite feature. I take a lot of pride in how I care for my curls—I get a special curly cut, have spent the past decade searching for the best products, and take the time to diffuse it with a hair dryer even though it takes forever. Any compliment would have been flattering, but this one is particularly so.

It’s not just the nice comment about my hair that has made me blush, though. While I have thought very complimentary things about Henry these past few days—about how his grin makes him look just a tad bit devious, how pretty his eyes are, how easy he is to talk to, just to name a few—he has never, not a single time, complimented me. There has been nearly zero indication that he might find me even remotely as attractive as I find him.

Part of me finds it refreshing to not feel worried about some random guy commenting on my clothes or face or body. The other part of me… well, it wants Henry to say nice things to me, let’s put it that way. And between the dreams of him filling up my nights and our shoulder-to-shoulder house repair work filling up nearly my entire morning each day, I’m getting quite the dose of Henry and his dark mahogany hair and pale ocean eyes.

And I think about it entirely too often.

It’s because he’s the only cute guy for miles , I tell myself. It’s because I haven’t been on a date in a year. Haven’t had a flicker of a spark with anyone in twice that amount of time.

And besides, I remind myself in a failing attempt to keep my emotions in check, I’m not moving here. What’s the point in starting something if it’s just going to be a fling? Something to end in heartbreak?

Because this man could easily break my heart. He’s a good listener, he’s smart. Self-motivated, too. When I mention that my grandma is learning French, he tells me he studied it in school himself and has been keeping up with it for years.

“You should talk to Lydia in French!” I tell him. “She rarely gets the chance to talk to anyone in real life.”

“I don’t think she’d see me,” he says. “And I doubt I’m at a native speaker level myself, anyway.”

“She is pretty busy,” I agree, thinking about my grandma’s filled-up mornings and biweekly lunch dates with friends. The woman is quite the social butterfly.

Even though he’s never been to France, we talk about places he’d like to visit and why, and I can tell that he’s well read, beyond the fiction books we’d chatted about previously. At times, he’s even given me a run for my money with his knowledge of places and their histories.

And while I’ve never felt any sort of way about blue-collar guys, I find his impressively high level of competence incredibly attractive. He knows how to do nearly everything, it seems, and the few times we encountered something he didn’t already know how to do, he has come back the next day with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of how to get it done. He also listens to me carefully as I explain the things I know how to do, when I ask questions, and when take initiative with the repairs. He hasn’t mansplained anything to me even once.

That, combined with his occasionally witty quips, sideways glances, and almost unnervingly light eyes, and I’m completely sucked in.

I’ve tried to stay away. On the second day he came over, I passed him the list once he arrived, asked him if he had any questions, and ghosted away into the attic to pull out the boxes I’d be poking through with Grandma later that day. And while I was excited about what stories they held, I couldn’t focus on that joy—not when I knew that he was out there, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, repairing deteriorated mortar in the brickwork of the chimney. I broke my commitment to no-contact: first, by sticking my head out the screen door to ask if he wanted coffee, then by asking a million questions about tuckpointing. He finally invited me out to join him.

There’s something about him that is warm, that pulls me to him. I’m a moth and he’s a flame.

When we say goodbye and go our separate ways every morning, I feel displaced for a while, disoriented. I have to get over it, because our projects are running out, and tomorrow is Friday. Our last morning together.

****

The idea of not seeing Henry every day bothers me. It follows me into the afternoon, all the way to the café where I’m meeting Caroline for lunch.

Caroline can immediately tell I’m preoccupied and, in typical Caroline fashion, instantly calls me out on it.

“What’s the deal, Rency? You barely protested just now when I told you that I need an additional shooter for that insanely high budget wedding coming up and that is not like you.” She’s a photographer, so summers mean weekends filled with weddings and weekdays filled with summer graduation photos for seniors and hours and hours of editing.

“After the fiasco two summers ago, you can hardly blame me,” I say.

Caroline scoffs. “I was practically an amateur then. I haven’t stabbed a groomsman with a boutonnière pin since then, I swear.”

“He bled all over his white shirt,” I remind her.

“But! I photoshopped that all out, so in the end, does it really matter?”

I open my mouth to inform her that yes, it definitely does, when she cuts me off. “No, no cousin, do not distract me. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

My brain scrambles to decide which to reveal: my desecration of the marriage license in the funeral home? The recurring dream that wakes me up but slips away into half-realities every night? The attachment I’ve developed to Grandma Lydia’s handyman?

“I signed the marriage license,” I confess.

Caroline blinks at me. “Come again?”

“The one at the funeral home—the one with my name on it. I signed it.”

Caroline’s confused expression transforms into a mischievous grin. “Shut up!” she crows, delighted. “I knew I’d rub off on you someday! Heck yes you did.”

“Caroline, stop pretending like this is a good thing. It’s not. I vandalized a document. A historical document. A government document! It’s not funny.”

She doesn’t even try to hide her laughter. “Girl, it is. It’s so funny. You signed a hundred-year-old marriage license on behalf of one of our ancestors. It brings your name full circle, like a creepy small-town prophecy fulfillment. I love it. Why are you making that face? I told you to do it, remember? I’m in full support.”

I groan and put my head in my arms. Why did I think that she would encourage me to do the right thing—to go and confess and try to make amends? Maybe even come with me as moral support?

“Why did you do it if you’re so torn up over it?” she asks.

“I don’t know!” I say, lifting my head. “I was standing there and I felt so weird, and then all of a sudden, it was like I was compelled to do it. I was signing it before I even processed the pen was in my hand.”

“Ooh, spooky. Maybe you were possessed by the ghost of our great-great-whatever-grandmother. You should tell Grandma Lydia. I bet she would get a kick out of it.”

“No way,” I say. There was no way I am telling Grandma about my small-town crime. “And,” I add, pointing at her, “I was NOT possessed. Not by our great-great-grandmother or anything else.”

“Well whatever happened, I love it. Almost as much as I would love it if you told me that you and Handyman Henry had moved beyond the longing stares and flirty banter and that you finally picked a guy to take you out on dates—and one to keep you here, too. With me. Since we both know that that’s what your love life is all about.”

She bats her eyes at me and I snort. “There are no longing stares or flirty banter, Caro. I’m just helping with the repairs so Grandma doesn’t have to pay any more.” I don’t mention that today, after the comment about my curls, I caught him staring at me more than once, an indecipherable look on his face. It had me surreptitiously checking for coffee stains or armpit sweat every time.

“Well that’s noble of you, because if it were me and I was single, I’d be on the porch with a cup of tea sipping up any drop of a handsome man who was wandering around my property. Grandma doesn’t expect you to be out there swinging a hammer anyway, does she?”

“Of course not. It would ruin her you’ll-stay-here-forever plot if she made me do too much physical labor.”

“Exactly. So leave the last day of work to Mr. Fix It and fix yourself a pot of coffee.”

“Caro, this is hardly problem-solving.”

“False. You are focused on the wrong problem. The problem I am trying to fix is the one in which you don’t have a boyfriend. Let Mr. Fix It fix that problem for you. Kill two birds with one stone.”

“Two?” I ask. “My singleness is one, sure, but the second?”

“Convincing you to move here, of course.” I shove at her, but she just swats my hand away, equally playful. “Oak River calls to you, cousin. Don’t fight it.”

“I’ll fight you,” I grumble.

She just tilts back her head to laugh.

We finish off our sandwiches and get iced coffee refills to go, talking about other plans for the summer. A visit to Lake Michigan is a given. An overnight in Rapid City to go out to some of the trendier new restaurants is on the books. We’re outside, saying goodbye, when Caro puts her hand on my arm.

“Rency, I know I was teasing you before, but I’m serious about branching out. If you have a good connection with this guy, what’s the harm in seeing if he’s interested? He’s got a job, he’s not a creep, he’s not a jerk, you have nice conversations. A dating app can’t promise half that when you first swipe on someone. Why not see where it goes?”

It’s not like I haven’t asked myself this same question before. I want to date—I want to fall in love, plan a future with someone. I struggle to jump in, though. I quit online dating after just a few days, installing and reinstalling the apps every few months, hopeful, then too nervous, to ever meet up with someone after mediocre DMs. Caroline is the risk-taker, not me. Naturally social, almost always playful, and completely adorable, she’s always been the one to charge ahead, bold. I’m the one with the logical arguments, the let’s-take-a-step-back commentaries. Caroline loves pulling me along on her adventures, and she’s brightened up my life with decades of adventurous summers and a college life of dancing and social events, but the world of love is the one space she hasn’t been able to help me enter.

When I don’t say anything, Caroline wraps me in a hug. “I don’t want you to let the good things pass by. Some of the best things in life are risks. Scary, but the payoff could be worth it.”

“I’ll think about it,” I promise, my face in her curls that match my own.

“Good,” she says, satisfied with my concession. “And hey, you never know. You could be the next Mrs. Handyman.”

I roll my eyes as I pull away. “Bye, Caro!”

She winks, elbows me in the ribs playfully, and blows me kisses all the way back to her car.

“Who is this?” I ask, sliding a black-and-white photo across the table. Grandma Lydia picks it up, holding it away from herself and with her head tilted just so in order to see it without her reading glasses. She refuses to wear them around her neck, but there are pairs stashed all over the house “just in case.”

“Ah, that’s my mother,” she says. “Isn’t she so cute?” The girl in the photo is dressed in a short knit dress paired with white leather shoes and cuffed white socks, her hair cut just below her ears in a bobbed style that puffs with the voluminous curls that are the signature of all women in our family.

“Very,” I agree. She looks young, maybe just nine or ten. She’s on the steps of this exact house, a small smile on her face.

“She was born in 1931, not long after my grandmother was remarried. Well, married for the first time since… you know, the whole lightning bolt thing.”

“That’s pretty soon after her first wedding was supposed to happen, wasn’t it?”

Grandma Lydia shrugs. “Yes, but back then, there were different attitudes about

getting older and getting married. A different set of expectations, you know. Not like today,” she says pointedly. “All of these modern sensibilities. Girls can just go off and have careers and never visit their grandmothers at all, I hear.”

“Save it for Caroline and my slew of other cousins who aren’t living here for nearly three months,” I remind her, smirking. “Now tell me everything you know about this picture.”

As she shares, I write down her words in a notebook so that I can type them up later. I have the recorder going, too, but I like having little notes to myself so I don’t have to relisten to hours of footage.

“Well, here she is out front. I imagine this was a new dress of some sort, but I don’t know for sure. Everyone in our family loves photography—that’s where Caroline gets it; it’s in our blood—and so I’m sure her mother would have taken the picture for even less of a reason than a new dress. I don’t know how old she is, but maybe this was when she was nine? 1940?”

I nod, scribbling as fast as I can. “Tell me about your mom,” I prompt. “What was her childhood like?”

“Oh, as lovely as any girl could have had during those Great Depression years, she would have said. The family farm suffered a lot, but they didn’t go hungry, thanks to the farm. Something like this—a little knit dress—was probably a special gift and not an everyday purchase. She had a dog she loved. His name was King. He was a border collie, and she and her brother taught him all sorts of tricks.” Grandma pauses as if lost in thought.

“What are you thinking about?” I ask, watching her trace the line of her mother’s shoes.

“Just about her. About her laugh. I wish I could hear it again, you know? It’s been so many years since… She would have loved your curiosity and the way you love everything organized just so.” She blinks up at me, eyes a bit glossy, and pushes herself away from the table. “But those are the stories of today, right? Let me see. What’s something worth the history books… let me think now…”

I watch as she preps her second cup of tea, and I wonder what this whole experience is like for her: generations of stories held inside one woman, the memories swirling in this contained inner space. Was it lonely? To remember but not have anyone to remember with? I feel overfull with emotions, thinking about what it must be like to have so many stories held inside.

“Ah, I’ve got one,” she says, pouring the steaming water into her teacup. “It’s about King, her dog. She loved him so much and once, when she was younger than even in that picture, he saved her life.”

“Really?” I ask, nudging the recorder closer to where she’d leaned up against the counter.

“That’s right. The story, as she told it, was that, after days and days of rain, she finally escaped her house and went out to the back to play in the forest. She hadn’t been allowed to bring King. He wasn’t really supposed to be her pet, but more of a working dog. So, he was tied up near the house, and she was off playing. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going because she knew her mother would have been upset because it was so muddy and her shoes were sure to be dirty, if not ruined. She liked playing near the river, and when she got there, she found that a tree had fallen clear across it. Normally, the river is like we see it today—just a few feet deep, not too rapidly flowing. But that day, it was rushing past, deep and dangerous from the many days of rain. My mother, not understanding the threat it posed, decided that she wanted to cross the river on that fallen tree. So, determined to be able to do so and to brag to her brothers about it, she attempted to cross.”

Grandma Lydia pauses, leaving me on the edge of my seat.

“And?” I ask, watching my grandma sip her tea.

“And she fell right in, of course, and was promptly swept down the river. She was a good swimmer, but the river was fast; she was fully clothed and didn’t expect the plunge. She felt herself go under, felt the river swallow her up, when she felt a pull on the back of her collar, tugging her back. She passed out anyway, but when she woke up, it was King who was there, circling her and whining and barking. He was sopping wet and muddy himself, and his barks brought her family running. Somehow he had gotten off his lead and knew she was in danger and plucked her right out of the river.”

“Wow, that’s incredible,” I say, impressed. “How lucky!”

“It was! And after that, her family let King follow her wherever he wanted. After he died, she never got another dog. I don’t think she could have loved another dog as much as that one, based on all her stories. Maybe there are pictures of them together in this pile somewhere.”

We sit in silence together for a moment, both lost in our thoughts of the past.

Grandma Lydia sets down her tea with a little sigh, her cup only partially empty. “Well then, granddaughter, with that, I’m going to call it a night. Too many stories for one old woman in one evening, I think. Turn off the lights before you go to bed now, won’t you?” My grandma plants a kiss on my forehead before wandering away. There is still a bit of sadness tinging in her voice, and as I hear the weight of her steps creak along the stairs, I wonder: Would leaving the house feel like losing the memories?

It just makes me more determined to make sure that never happens, money and developments be damned.

****

Tonight, the dream shifts.

This time, the door doesn’t slam before I can reach it. I make it to the threshold in enough time, and in spite of the soupy vortex of the dream, I follow Henry into the little house in the woods.

The interior is filled with warm oak wood and intricate carvings. I follow him through the hallway, past a little parlor and a coin-tiled bathroom, and into the back of the house, where the space opens up into a kitchen and, beyond that, to the south, a greenhouse.

This is how I know I’m in a dream. I’ve been to the little house in the woods. Not inside it, but around it. I’ve peered through its windows, walked its circumference. I know that there isn’t enough light filtering through those woods for a greenhouse to offer sun to any number of plants, no matter their inclinations about shade and sunshine. I know that ivy covers the glass panels and that, in spite of them miraculously still being intact, the light only makes its way through the gaps between those vines.

Ten years ago, when I snuck around the little house in the woods, nature had staked its claim on the now-century-old building, making it look more like a fairytale than reality.

But this interior is nothing like that. The glass walls of the greenhouse gleam. The kitchen is both ancient and brand new: a large polished white porcelain sink is set near a gas range stove, tiles that look modern but antique are on the floor and wall, and green glass-blown overhead lighting dangles on brassy gold chains from the ceiling.

And in this kitchen is Henry: shirtsleeves shoved over his elbows, button-up partially undone, shoving a hand through his thick dark auburn waves.

I watch, dream detached, as he takes out his tools and then, from the bottom of his toolbox, removes a tin box, red wax hardened in drips along its seam, as if applied quickly and without skill. He holds it carefully, weighs it in his hand with a thoughtful expression, and then walks through the interconnected door to the attached greenhouse.

From the threshold, I observe him go to an inner corner, where an unfinished portion of the floor is dug out in a rough rectangle. The ground is paved with bricks in a familiar herringbone pattern—just like the walkway of my grandmother’s house. He places the tin box inside the hole, places a wooden lid overtop of the open space and, just like a few days ago, I watch as he completes the herringbone, compacting sand between bricks and finishing the pattern with deft, easy skill.

When Henry stands, he brushes his hands off in a gesture that has become familiar to me, a look of determination on his face. Overtop the newly finished space, he drags a potted plant, and now it’s like every other space in the greenhouse. No one would ever know that, somewhere underneath the bricks and earth, a sealed tin box had been stashed.

Henry goes into the kitchen. He undoes another button at the neck of his shirt. He splashes water from the sink up his forearms and on the back of his neck. His forehead gleams, just slightly sweaty. It must be hot outside for him in this vision, in spite of the night, but I can’t feel anything at all, my dream-self detached from sensation.

He’s leaning against the sink, head down and shoulders arched as if deep in thought, when the door slams behind him—behind us. He spins to see who has come in and, right before the dream dissolves, I see his green eyes—a deep, mossy green unlike his usual pale seafoam—widen. His voice is the same as it is in real life, just edged with a bit more harshness than I’ve ever heard from him before.

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

And then, of course, I wake up.

****

The light is on again.

I can see it, the glow of the little house in the woods. I don’t try to fight the pull to the window I feel upon waking, the way it tugs me toward the pane of glass. Instead, I swing my legs over the edge of my bed and let my eyes search for it. The pieces of light filter through the thick canopy, somehow still visible.

I don’t know what it means—the recurring dreams, the alternative version of the house, Henry in the house. Why is my subconscious mind so fixated on him in the first place?

It’s just a dream, I rationalize. I put the pieces together, in perfect post-dream logic. It all makes sense. The paved floor was identical to the pattern of pavement in the path we had worked on together here at Grandma’s house. The first time I saw him, he had been wearing a white button-up, cuffed and pushed up his arms. He was handy, so the tools made sense. And he said he had been the maintenance guy for the house, so the fact my brain placed him there too was explainable. And then, of course, my feelings for him. He’s in my yard all morning, on my mind all day—why not be there all night, too?

I crawl back into bed and pull the quilt up to my chin. It doesn’t do anything to make me feel less awake. After thirty minutes, I sigh in annoyance and sit up.

My phone tells me it’s still too early to shuffle around the house without being a potentially disconcerting presence for my grandmother, so instead I tackle a more mindless task: scanning in the dozens of photos my grandmother and I had already sorted through and discussed.

Each image has a story attached—a story I now know. I feel as if I’ve entered into a sacred club, holding the lore and legacies of my family inside me, like some formal role: the Memory Keeper, the Holder of History. It only reinforces my desire to be sure that, by the end of this summer, I can make a very good case to my aunts and uncles in defense of grandma Lydia not selling the house. It feels vital that this piece of history not get erased, bulldozed into rubble .

The sky has just started to show the lightening of a pre-dawn glow when I crawl back into bed, telling myself that I’ll sleep for a few hours before drinking a coffee and meeting Henry out front. Newly exhausted, I set my alarm and finally slip into dreamless, weightless slumber.