5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

C aro: Don’t forget that you’re second shooting for me this Sunday! This bridezilla might be the death of me, so please don’t tell me you booked a date with hottie Henry.

Me: You’ve never seen him, Caro. How do you know he’s hot?

Caro: You’re right. Henry sounds more handsome than hot.

Caro : Did you manage to lock in a date with Handsome Henry yet?

Caro : Please tell me yes and then tell me it’s not on Sunday.

Me : No, and yes, I’m planning on it.

Caro : Gotta admit, I’m a bit disappointed.

Caro : Especially since I couldn’t find a yearbook pic of him.

Me : You actually did that?

Caro : Girl, you have no idea.

Caro : See if you can get his last name and date of birth.

Caro : Oh and mother’s maiden name.

Me : You’re…

Caro : Delightful?

Me : Unhinged.

Caro : Fingerprints would be nice, too.

My last day working alongside Henry is about the same as the others had been but for a few notable things.

First, I oversleep due to my middle-of-the-night work session, and I wake up to my grandmother nowhere to be found and a note from her next to the coffee pot, wishing me a pleasant morning. When I wander outside, blurry-eyed but wondering if Henry started without me, he insists that I do exactly what Caroline suggested: relax, sit on the porch, and drink a coffee. So, I park myself there, watching Handyman Henry repair my grandmother’s old chicken coop. The chickens are no longer in residence, but the roof of the small structure needs replacing to ensure the small building doesn’t fall into disrepair. So for a solid hour, I surreptitiously watch Henry mess around with shingles and tar paper and those short, tack-like nails used for roofing while I sip my coffee and pretend to scroll on my phone .

He looks a lot like dream Henry today. His dark jeans hug his thighs a bit differently than the material of the pants he’d been wearing while in the little house in the woods, but they communicate the same durability. Instead of a white tee shirt, he’s wearing a button-up work shirt in hunter green, in spite of the promise of late morning heat. Just like in the dream, his sleeves are rolled up and pushed above his elbows. He looks like the sort of person who might have a surprise tattoo on his upper forearm, but they are both bare of any art.

When I’ve decided that enough is enough and I can’t legitimize not helping any longer, I sweep my mess of curls up into a ponytail and join Henry. He asks more questions today than he usually does, curious about what I’m up to this summer and why I spend so much time with Lydia. That was the second surprising thing about the day—his shock at the connection between Lydia and me.

“Did I not tell you before?” I ask, confused. “Lydia is my grandmother. I assumed that was obvious, considering the matching curls and me living in her house and all.”

We’re straddling the roof of the chicken coop during the conversation, both tapping nails into the arch of the building, but Henry pauses completely, fumbling his hammer as if this is some sort of revelation.

“Your grandmother?” he says, ignoring the fact that his hammer has just disappeared into a rose bush below us.

I nod, pausing my own shingling efforts. “Yep, that’s right. That’s why this is my home away from home. My dad grew up here, and I’ve spent so much time here myself over the years that I can’t bear to think of her selling. She keeps trying to get me to move here, though… and, well, I don’t think I can.”

Usually, when Henry and I work together, his focus is split between listening and doing whatever task is at hand. Now, though, his eyes are intent on me, and he’s completely focused on our conversation. It’s a bit unnerving to have his attention so entirely on me. I both crave the attention and don’t know what to do with it.

“Why not?” he asks.

I shrug. I’ve never been able to be the person who embraced change, who could alter their whole life in the blink of an eye, in a single trip with their too-stuffed car. I’m the one who plays it safe, who takes things slow. Who doesn’t, for example, sign their name on a dead relative’s marriage license.

But I digress.

“I don’t know, I guess. I have a job, but I probably could get a new one nearby. My cousin Caroline lives over in Rapid City and is always sending me job postings. I would have to give up being only twenty minutes from my parents, but I don’t think they would care so much, since they are young and would appreciate knowing Grandma Lydia wasn’t alone. Plus, they only live only an hour and a half away from here.” I hit a half-pounded nail in just to distract myself from Henry’s piercing gaze. “I’m just not a risk taker, I guess. And it seems like a risk.”

“Because of the job.”

“Yes, exactly. ”

“What about friends?” he asks. “Relationships?”

“I have a few friends, but we’re all pretty scattered. My best friend from high school doesn’t live in the state, and Caroline is probably the closest friend I have within a three-hour drive.” I glance back up to meet his eyes, just for a second. “And no boyfriend. I haven’t been focusing on dating, so that’s not part of the equation.”

Henry nods, and for a second, I think that he might have asked in a flirty way—as if to figure out if I was seeing someone—but doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he tilts his body and slides smoothly down the slope of the roof, pushing off for the short drop so that he doesn’t get tangled in the rose bush below.

“You should have used the ladder,” I admonish, watching him lean down to fish out his stray hammer.

“Where’s the fun in that?” He straightens, and whatever seriousness that was in his eyes before is replaced with a playful, partial grin.

It’s a turning point, somehow. Before this, he was friendly but a bit distant. Now he seems… warm.

Moth, meet flame.

Even though the last few hours of our morning are filled with easy conversation, I can’t help but feel a bit melancholy that he and I are about to part ways. I’m a creature of habit, and my habit has become spending my morning with him in the yard, attending to the house that I love.

By the time we’ve handled every job on the to-do list and the tools have been stashed away, I feel gripped by the desire to ask for more. His number. His email address. Something, anything that will keep me attached to him. When I pass him the envelope with his payment for the week—five hundred dollars, in cash—I want to suggest that we hang out sometime.

But I don’t. We have simply been partners, working alongside each other to accomplish little tasks that I couldn’t do alone. I don’t know what his favorite food is or how he spends his weekends, if he feels trapped here in this small town, or if he loves it like I’m secretly scared to admit that I do.

I know nothing about him, really.

So I don’t ask. I don’t suggest or flirt. Like always, I don’t take the plunge. Instead, I smile at him, tell him it was great working with him, and walk away. And, unlike the last time I looked back as I was closing the door to the house, this time he’s watching me go.

“I have a confession to make,” my grandmother says. She and I are sitting across from each other in the dining room, the formal, antique table lined with the carefully stacked and organized contents of our latest unboxing. We’ve been looking at the photos and documents and pieces of jewelry and pipes and baby blankets for hours, and the old light above us casts us in a warm, golden glow .

I eye my recorder and reach to turn it off. Grandma Lydia doesn’t stop me, so I hit the pause button. “Is everything okay?” I ask her, worried by the somber look in her eye. It’s not that Grandma Lydia is never serious that has alerted me—truly, she almost always means exactly what she says, even when it is said in a playful way—but there is something in her expression that gives me pause.

“Yes, I think so,” she says carefully, but there is hesitation in her voice. “It’s about the little house in the woods. You asked me about it the other day, do you remember?”

I nod. I had asked her how long she had had someone taking care of the property and who it was. She had said something about it being leased and how she wasn’t quite sure, how checks were put into the trust and that she needed to check with her lawyer or her estate manager.

“Did you find something out about it?”

“Maybe.” She tilts her head to the right, taps a finger on the deep woodgrain of the table. “I went to the township office to pay the summer tax bill. I like to go in person, you know, just to pick up on any interesting bits of news.”

“Of course,” I murmur. Grandma would see paying her taxes as a social event.

“Well, I pulled the tax records from the last assessment, and some other documents. And—it’s so strange—but the assessor completely forgot to look at the building and include it in the rate. Of course, I felt terrible about it. I thought maybe it had fallen into disrepair or that the tenants had left, and that is why the assessor didn’t come around to it on the documents. That it was too dilapidated or something. And then, of course, I felt tremendously guilty that I hadn’t thought of the little house in the woods at all for quite a long time. I think it’s maybe even been years.”

There is a growing sense of something in me as she speaks. A tension, a fuzziness. Like I’m fizzing, carbonated from the inside, pressure building. This conversation—it feels important. My body is tuned to the urgency of it, even though my grandma is nothing but calm as she continues.

“So I walked back there. The gravel driveway is terribly overgrown, did you know? And I started to think that perhaps I really was negligent. That, after your grandfather died, I just… well, that I really do need to sell. How could I forget about a whole house? But that’s the thing, Rency. It wasn’t there.”

“What?” I breathe. “What do you mean it’s not there?”

“The little house. It’s simply not there. I couldn’t find it. I walked down the driveway, and the shed was there— the stone one, remember?—but it’s like the house was never there. The trees are so dense that it’s hard to imagine that a house could even fit back there with the way they overhang. And the lilacs are quite overgrown. Do they even get any sunshine back there?”

“That’s… Grandma, that’s impossible. The little house has to be there. I’ve seen it. With my own eyes.” I’m sure of it, I want to say. I see the lights on at night.

“Well, you’re going to have to go out there yourself and see,” she says. “Because the gravel driveway just ended, and beyond the stone shed, there was nothing.”

“Maybe you didn’t go far enough back into the woods?” I press. “Maybe it was just beyond there?”

Grandma Lydia is already shaking her head. “I’m sure of it, Rency. And that’s why… Well, it’s made me feel quite strange. To think… but there have always been such strange things happening and…”

“Strange things?” I say, leaning forward now. My leg is bouncing, the tightening in my limbs begging for an outlet. “What strange things?”

Grandma Lydia had managed, this entire time, to tell me about her experience losing the little house in the woods with perfect composure, sans a bit of confusion. Now, she looks… shifty. As if she is about to say something she shouldn’t.

“Well, did you know that people say the Bakker place is haunted?” I shake my head, my curls brushing across the backs of my shoulders in a wave. “Well, they do. There are strange stories about the place, although Karl always denied them. Still, the place… unusual things happen there.”

I swallow, barely breathing as my grandma continues. “When I was a girl, the husband living there—of the Bakker woman—died quite suddenly, in a freak accident on the river. After that, there were other strange things. A car driving past without a driver, for example. That one I saw myself, I swear I did. And then, there is the vegetable garden. Karl used to call it his magic garden because he said he did nothing to help it grow, but it came back year after year, as if enchanted. I could have sworn I saw a wheelbarrow moving back and forth across in the moonlight one night, a decade ago. And… well, things disappear and reappear there all the time. Bicycles, tools. Once, even a car. Karl’s wife used to comment on it, saying that she couldn’t ever remember where she put anything. But it had been happening since I was a little girl, long before Karl married.”

“But couldn’t those all have an explanation?” I point out, searching for a logical rationale for each incident. “A freak accident is a freak accident. Things going missing is theft. Maybe the soil is just really fertile over there. I mean, haunted ? That’s not possible.”

Grandma Lydia shrugs. “You can say what you want, but Karl himself couldn’t explain some of the things that happened there. And now that he’s passed… Well, I find it quite strange that nothing has been done with the property or house. And that big pole barn he has back there… I swear I see lights from there sometimes, at night.”

My eyebrows pull together, thinking of Henry and what he said about being a distant relative of Karl. I’m about to tell her about how he’s clearly been in town for a while—maybe he’s been in the pole barn or working with the lawyers—when she sighs, pushing herself up and back from the table.“Maybe I am just losing it a bit and your aunts and uncles are right.”

“Grandma, I—”

“No, no, let’s just let it go, shall we?” Grandma dismisses. “And let me put these old bones to bed.”

“Seventy-six isn’ t old,” I remind her.

She smiles at me. “That’s right, Rency dear. Don’t you forget it.”