“Whatever!” I shout, embarrassment joining my anger. “I won’t bother you anymore, then. Go ahead and be alone.”
I spin on my heel, leaving him behind. From another room, I hear him yell out: “I was just kidding about the vegetables thing! Maybell! That was a joke!”
I slam the front door. A section of door frame splinters apart.
“Damn it.”
God, I have had it with today. With this week. Month. Year. Maybe Falling Stars is cursed. My phone starts to vibrate in my pocket and I decide that if it’s that telemarketer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who’s been calling me for two years nonstop, I am going to give them hell.
“Hello?” I bark into my phone, marching stiffly across the dark yard back to the cabin.
“Maybell?”
I stop short. “Ruth!”
I don’t know why my attitude does a one-eighty. Too many years spent using my customer service voice, I suppose.
“Hi! Sorry it’s taken me so long to return your call. I’ve been swamped.” Right. Violet probably wasn’t her only client, and being a home health aide must be a demanding job. “My son moved back in with me, my mom decided to visit for the next few weeks unannounced, and I just found out my daughter dropped out of culinary school to get away from her ex-boyfriend.”
I feel stupid for having called days ago, wasting her time. “Oh my gosh. You’re so busy—I didn’t really have anything important to say—”
“No worries, I’m taking a drive right now to escape the madness. So, how are you settling in?” She’s bright and cheery. Friendly. It’s nice to knowsomepeople still know how to be.
“Fine, fine. Settling in fine!” I chirp. “Everything’s great. Fixing up the manor.”
“That’s wonderful! I’m so glad to hear it.” She genuinely sounds glad, too, which makes me smile. “How are you and Wesley getting along?” There’s a cautious edge to her question that tells me she suspects we might not be.
“We’re not,” I reply baldly. “He’s driving me nuts.”
“Ah, well.” Ruth is warm. Sympathetic. “Don’t worry, it probably won’t be long before the house is good to go and you’ll be off the couch in no time.”
“I’m not—”
“The plaid is quite an interesting choice,” she continues. “The couch, I mean. Wonder where Wesley got it from. It was sostrangewhen I visited. Eerie to walk in and not see Violet’s hospital bed taking up the whole living room anymore.”
“Why’d she have a hospital bed in the living room?”
“Where else would she go?” I hear an ignition spur to life on the other side of the phone. “I’m just glad she hadaroom there, you know? The way she was living before Wesley moved in was...” She audibly shudders. “It took plenty of convincing on his part to get Violet out of that house, but he hated her sleeping there. Fire hazard, you know. And unsanitary. We’re lucky nothing fell on her. Then he got in touch with some doctors, brought me on board.”
I wheel around to peer up at the second floor of Falling Stars. All the windows have gone dark but two. In one yellow rectangle, a tall, broad silhouette looks down on the lawn. His body curves away slightly, as if preparing to make a quick getaway, but I don’t move and neither does he.
“Wesley’s the one who contacted you?”
“Before Wesley, Violet hadn’t been to a doctor in years. This woman was in her late eighties, mind you. Had nobody. I don’t like thinking about it. We tried to convince her to let us clean up. Let us donate all the stuff she didn’t need. She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything, kept saying we could get rid of it aftershe was gone if we hated her belongings so much. A benefit of moving into the groundskeeper’s cabin was that it’s only a one-bedroom, which meant no extra space to fill up with Amazon splurges.”
My attention wraps aroundone-bedroomand squeezes tight. “What about the bedroom upstairs?”
“The what? Hold on, Maybell.” I hear a window rolling down. “I’d like a number one, please. With cheese. No pickles or onions. An apple pie, too. Oh, and a Cherry Coke! Thank you very much.” To me, she adds, “Are you talking about the loft? Honey, that’s a closet.”
I stare at the silhouette in the window for one beat. Two beats. Three. The light gutters out, taking Wesley with it.
My thumb is already hovering overend call. “Thank you so much for calling me back, Ruth, I really appreciate it. Good luck with everything.”
“Good luck to you, too. I’m going to park five houses down from mine, listen to a podcast, and enjoy my food in peace.”
“You deserve it. Thank you again for talking to me.”
“Anytime, Maybell. Don’t be a stranger.”
