Finally, mercifully, he stopped, put the computer away.
Helen was trying hard not to be annoyed with him, making herself think of all his good points, reminding herself of how much she loved him. She was just stressed. There was no need to take it out on poor Nate.
She thought back to when they met, both new teachers at Palmer Academy. It was at a faculty mixer the first week of school. Nate had worn a tie with the periodic table on it. There was another woman there, Stella Flemming, the English teacher, who kept cornering Nate, saying she wanted to put him and his tie in one of her poems. The first time Helen noticed him, she wondered why the handsome science teacher with the funny tie was looking at her so strangely. Later, she smiled, realizing that he’d been giving Helen pleadingsave melooks all night. At last, she walked over, touched his arm, and said, “You’re the science teacher, right?” He nodded encouragingly. “I was hoping you could help me. I hear the Pleiades are visible in the sky this time of year, but I’m not sure just where to look.”
He smiled. “Ah, yes, the Seven Sisters. I’d be happy to point them out. Excuse us please, Stella.”
“Thank you,” Nate whispered, once they were out of earshot.
They walked out to the back lawn near the tennis courts and he showed her the stars. “Right there,” he said, taking her hand and pointing with it. “The Pleiades were the daughters of Atlas and the sea nymph Pleione,” he explained. “Zeus transformed them into doves, then into stars.”
“Lovely,” she said.
“Your dress reminds me of starlight,” he told her then. She looked down, saw the way the pale fabric seemed to shimmer in the lights around the tennis court.
“Do you think Stella will come out looking for you?” Helen asked.
Nate laughed. “Poor Stella. Maybe. She’s had a bit too much wine, I think.”
“I heard her saying she wanted to put you in a poem,” Helen said.
Nate laughed again. “Like I said, too much wine.”
“So you’re not a fan of poetry?”
“Oh, I’m a big fan. In fact, I even write a bit from time to time.”
Now Helen laughed. “Really?”
He nodded, and in a half imitation of poor Stella, he said to Helen, “Be careful, I might just put you and your glimmering starlight dress in a poem.”
She laughed again, but the next day, she’d found a typed poem in her faculty mailbox: “Helen Talks History in a Dress of Stars.” It wasn’t half bad (not that Helen was qualified to judge poetry). She had it still and would tell people, years later, that it was the poem that won her over immediately, the poem that made her realize Nate wasThe One.
“We got a lot done today,” he said now.
“Mm-hmm.”
“We should let the concrete cure a few days, but I’m thinking we can get the first-floor walls framed and ready to go up while we wait. Start cutting the pieces for the floor, too.”
“I’d like to get the garden laid out,” Helen said. “Then we can get some plant starts at the farmers’ market on Saturday.”
“Yeah, sure. Absolutely,” Nate said. Their plan was to just do a small kitchen garden this year: some greens, tomatoes, cukes, a few herbs. Next year, when they weren’t busy with building, they’d expand to a proper garden, put in berry bushes, a few fruit trees. They’d laid it all out on paper: their grand plan with year-by-year goals.
“And I really want to get into town and do a little research. See what I can find out about the history of our new land.”
“Sounds good,” he said.
Nate cleared the dirty plates, pizza box, and empty wine bottle off the table, pulled out the house plans they’d carefully designed, and laid them out.
It was strange to see them here now, to realize that they’d actually begun to take shape—this house they’d planned, constructed on paper and in their heads and conversations.
The saltbox was a simple design. Helen loved the namesaltboxand the history of the design. It had been popular in colonial New England and named for the lidded box people had kept salt in. Classic lines, a chimney at the center, the rear of the house a single story, the front a full two stories.
Helen thought back to the actual saltbox they’d looked at in New Hampshire at the beginning of their search; that house had sparked something deep inside her, had made her feel instantly at home. It was right in the village, down the street from a charming town green and a Congregational church. She found herself playing the what-if game—What if they were there instead of here? What if she’d found a way to convince Nate to buy that house, to not move to this land on the bog in the middle of nowhere?
Helen squinted down at the plans Nate had worked so hard on for months: the open kitchen and living room, a large pantry beside the kitchen, a woodstove in the center of the house, a half bath downstairs that shared a wall with the mechanical room, where the furnace and water heater would live, along with an eco-friendly low-energy washer and dryer. Upstairs would be the bedroom, the bathroom, and a library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Later, as time and finances allowed, they’d add a screened-in back porch. “I took everything you loved about that New Hampshire saltbox and just made it even better,” Nate had told her with a proud smile when he brought her his first sketched design.
What she’d loved most was the history of that first house: the smell of the old wood, the creak of cupboard doors and floorboards, the warbly imperfections in the old single-pane windows.
