“If we see anything with two heads, I’m burning this place to the ground,” Rosie said shakily.
Tom got the sense that she was avoiding the kitchen, but eventually they cleared all the other rooms. Rosie hesitated before pushing that door open, but she gathered herself and pulled it wide, ducking her head preemptively.
The smell assaulted them as soon as they looked in. The chill meant there were no bugs, but Tom winced at the sight of the countertops as the light of Rosie’s phone illuminated the area.
“Jesus Christ.” He coughed through the reek of trash. “Did Seth just leave everything here?”
It was hard to tell in light of the time elapsed, but it looked like someone had laid out breakfast for two dozen then simply walked away from it. There was the desiccated bone of a spiral ham on one counter and the rinds of several melons still visible amid a pile of what looked like fruit decay experiments.
“I guess they felt like they couldn’t come back after the storm shut it down?” Rosie half-heartedly defended her cousin’s company, though her face had fallen.
The trash cans were full and unemptied, and dirty dishes were moldering in the sink. When Tom turned a faucet, nowater came out. He crouched to peer under the sink, but it looked as though the pipes hadn’t frozen at least, despite the lack of heat to the building.
Tom had worked in food service long enough to have a cast-iron stomach in the face of the worst of smells, and it would take more than a few mice and some rotten food to put him off, but Rose looked pale and green. She pressed her hands to her cheeks as she took in the piles of organic waste.
Even though they’d lived less than five miles away, Rosie hadn’t invited him home with her until Easter weekend of their freshman year. He’d thought she might be embarrassed of him, but her family home, with its full ashtrays and stained carpet, had done a lot to rewrite his idea of the kind of people who produced someone like his Rosie, who ironed her pillowcases and mended the rips in his blue jeans with embroidery stitches. She had to hate this.
“Hey,” Tom said, finally giving in to the impulse to rub her back.You can’t fool me, Rosie.He knew that the taller she stood up, the more vulnerable she felt. “I’ll toss a bucket of bleach on this and it’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse than this at kitchens I’ve worked in.”
“Which ones?” Rosie asked, voice wobbly. Her gaze bounced around the various health and safety violations.
“Don’t worry, I’ll only take you out to places that are too nice to hire me,” he promised. He held his breath, but she didn’t reject the idea out of hand.
Instead, she drifted toward the walk-in refrigerator as though planning to open it, but Tom intercepted her, seizing her by the shoulders and turning her toward the door. Shedidn’t need to meet whatever intelligent life had blossomed in a low-oxygen, high-nutrient environment over a few months with no power. He marched her back out of the room against her weak protests.
“I need to make a list of what needs fixing,” she said.
“Everything needs to be thrown out and all the surfaces need to be disinfected. That’s it,” Tom said firmly.
Rosie squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then nodded. Tom would have suggested they take a moment outside, but she turned and proceeded up the main staircase.
“Let’s just get it over with,” she said.
There were a dozen rooms on the second floor, all doors shut on either side of the long hallway. The first two rooms they checked were full of stale air and dust, but there was no obvious water damage until they checked one at the end of the hall. One pane of the original window had popped out, and the ceiling and floor were discolored where rainwater had flowed in from above and through the window.
She took out a checklist and handed him a binder of his own. “I don’t think anything structural needs to be fixed in the dry rooms. Can you check the rooms on the other side of the hall?”
Tom nodded, beginning to sing under his breath. Following Rosie’s lead was as easy as it had ever been. He poked through musty rooms, a couple of which had been slept in since they’d last been cleaned, but as everything in the whole place needed to be laundered, that wasn’t much of an issue. He wrote downclean everythingon his paper just to look productive.
“Zombies,” Rosie said when they met back up in the hall.
“Hmm?” Tom said, having momentarily forgotten what he was doing.
“You’re doing three songs about zombies. You should have saved the Cranberries for last though. Dead giveaway.”
Her face was neutral as she delivered her verdict—and a pun he was sure she’d intended—but Tom barely suppressed a victorious smirk.There you are.Rosie was excellent at Three Songs. He bet she’d gotten it after “Thriller.”
“Anyway, let’s check the suite, then we can bring our bags in,” Rosie said, looking more settled. “You can pick whichever room you’d like. I figured I’d take the suite, if that’s okay.”
There was only one suite at the inn, which featured a kitchenette, a living room and dining area, and an en suite whirlpool hot tub. On their honeymoon, Tom had considered it serious luxury.
He was swept up in the memory of opening the door eleven years ago: trying to convince Rosie to let him carry her over the threshold, Rosie not sure her dignity and his upper body strength would allow it. God, he’d felt like a superhero. Twenty-two and married. He’d thought they could do anything.
The funky smell was stronger when the door opened, putting him back in the present, where their left hands were bare and Rosie was keeping a careful distance between the two of them.
“Oh no,” Rosie said, pulling her blouse back over her nose. “What are the mice even eating in here?”
The big four-poster bed was unmade, and there were mouse droppings visible on the turned-over bedspread.
