She had been right—it was perfect. It was the missing piece their living room needed, another way to give their new house a sense of history.
“But we don’t need a mantel,” Nate had said when he’d first seen it. He walked away from the mantel in the back of the truck and looked in the cab. “Where’s the deer food?”
“Shit, I’m sorry. I forgot it.”
He sighed, rubbed his face. “What are we going to do with a mantel? We don’t have a fireplace.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Helen said. “Maybe we should have one built—put a big brick chimney right in the center of the house. That would make it more of an authentic saltbox design and add thermal mass—”
“Helen, that’s not part of the plans! That is not a do-it-yourself project—do you have any idea how much a skilled mason costs? As it is, we’re over budget!”
“Okay, okay,” Helen said. “So we go with the woodstove and metal chimney for now. Maybe later, we can talk about a real brick chimney? For now, we put the mantel on the wall behind the woodstove.”
Nate squinted, trying to visualize it, and shook his head.
“But the stovepipe will run in front of it. It’ll look weird.”
“Maybe we can run the pipe out the back of the stove, through the wall, then run the metal chimney up behind the living room wall,” Helen suggested. “That would look better anyway, right? Instead of a shiny metal chimney running straight up to the ceiling?”
Nate blinked at her. “I don’t know, Helen. I’d have to look at the plans, see what might work. It might involve rethinking the pantry behind that wall. I don’t think we want warm stovepipe running through the pantry, do we? We’d lose storage space, and that heat would be wasted. It wasn’t part of the original design.” He gave a frustrated sigh.
“The mantel’s over a hundred years old, Nate. And it’s solid maple,” she said. “I got a great deal on it. Once I clean it up, you’ll see just how beautiful it is.”
“I just wish you’d checked with me,” he said. “A mantel isn’t in the plans.Orin the budget.”
“It was seventy-five bucks, Nate.” Her voice came out a little sharper than she’d meant.
“But now that’s seventy-five dollars we don’t have for other materials, things we really need, like roofing materials.” His voice was slightly raised. “I thought that’s what you were doing today. Going to check out a lead on old metal roofing.”
She looked away, took in a breath, told herself to be calm. Just one more little white lie. “It didn’t work out. It was in rougher shape than the ad described.”
He looked at her quizzically. Could he tell she was lying?
When had it gotten so easy, lying to her husband? She would have never considered lying to him back in Connecticut. Back then, they’d told each other everything. It was only a few months ago, but it felt like lifetimes.
She looked at him then, his full beard, his tired eyes, and thought how different this man was from the man she’d been married to back in Connecticut—how different everything was.
“I’m sorry, Nate. If I don’t find anything that’ll work soon, we’ll just go ahead and order the shingles you want from the home center.”
Nate nodded, still frowning at the mantel.
“Nate, can’t we just bring the mantel in, put it against the wall, and see how it looks?” she asked. “Please?”
“Fine,” he said, and she got that little ping of satisfaction she got when she’d won a round.
Nate had agreed it did look great in the house, done some figuring, and decided they could put the stovepipe behind the stove, go straight into the wall, and then run the chimney up through the pantry so the mantel would not be obscured. They’d laid the mantel out on a tarp and Helen had cleaned it up, used some lemon polish on it, rubbed at the scuffed and scratched places, trying to imagine all the mantel must have seen: the years of Christmases, birthdays, celebrations; the coming of television; the decline of the farm; the fights; the murder and suicide.
. . .
Now, tonight, the mantel seemed to shine, to almost glow, in the dark of the empty house.
But the house was not empty. Helen understood that.
She held perfectly still and waited, listening. She heard footsteps on the plywood subfloor, felt the air grow colder around her. Her skin prickled. Keeping her eyes fixed on the mantel, she stared without blinking until her eyes teared, until a figure moved into view, came to stand beside her. Helen raised her eyes slowly.
The woman was wearing jeans; her dark hair was cut in a bouncy bob, the front of her pink sweater soaked with dark red bloodstains. Helen could smell gunpowder and the rich iron scent of fresh blood.
This isn’t real,Helen thought.I’m dreaming it.
