He smiles, crooked.“Let’s make a list,” he says.“Of all the hardware you’ll need.”
“Really?” This is what I’ve been thinking about doing since Thursday, but the prospect of doing it with someone, someone who knows a lot about it, makes it seem achievable, exciting.
“Really,” he says.“Grab a notebook. We’ve got work to do.”
* * * *
I make a quick stop in the bathroom to pick off the worst of the landscaping that’s stuck to me, grab a notepad, and head back out to where Ben is. We start in the kitchen, probably the worst room in the house, me rushing to tell him I’m planning a total redo, happening this fall according to my contractor’s timeline.
He gives me a quizzical look, as if he’s about to ask a question, but he seems to rethink it, and taps at a bay of lower cabinets along the house’s back wall.“These are probably the oldest ones you’ve got in here,” he says.“Maybe 1930s? Too bad about the paint on them.” He crouches down, opens a door to peer in.
“I’ll probably have to scrap everything.So this room will probably look—you know. Not historical. Maybe I don’t really need hardware for this room.”
Ben stands and shrugs, looking around.“Maybe. But you could look for antique cabinets. It’s a hassle, but possible. Even if you don’t do that—those older cabinets are pretty small, not really suited for newer dishes and stuff—you could still get some nice antique drawer pulls, knobs. That stuff’ll go on most of the newer cabinetry, no problem. A light fixture, maybe?” He’s turning in a slow circle, nodding as he looks around, as if he can see it in his mind. I want to be in there, to see what he’s seeing.
“Okay,” I say.
“This wall behind the stove was probably exposed brick at some point. You could try and go back to that.” Exposed brick? Ilovethat idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself.
It’s this way for the next hour, Ben and I moving through each room in the house. He’s curious, asking lots of questions about what I know about the house, what I like about it, what I wish were different. He knows a lot, but he’s not a know-it-all, and he’s got a good sense of humor—he laughs easily, especially when I tell him I put a padlock on the door to the crawlspace because of spiders. But it doesn’t feel as if he’s laughingatme. He’s just—I don’t know. Enjoying me.
We’re up in the empty extra bedroom, the one I want to turn into a home office at some point, and I’m sitting on the floor, cross-legged, making a note about how many doorknobs I’d need in here—two for the small closets, one for the door to the room, when it hits me that Ben has been here for a while now, and this can’t be what he had planned for the day.“Oh!” I say, a bit more exclamatory than I’d intended.“What about your dad?”
He looks down at me, and I almost lose my breath—he’s sotall, so good-looking. Ihateit.“What about him?”
“Well, I mean, aren’t you needing to get back to him? Or to work? I can’t believe I’ve taken up so much of your time.”
“I’m off-duty for the afternoon. Sharon thought my dad and I could use a break from each other today, so she’s with him at the yard while I took care of this delivery and got some errands out of the way.”
“Oh.Is Sharon your stepmom?” I don’t know why I’m asking, why I’m so curious, but—Iam. I want to know things about Ben, maybe because he’s here in my house, getting to see something so important to me. I want to even the scales.
He laughs.“No. She’s my dad’s neighbor.” His brow furrows for a minute as he looks out the window.“Then again, I guess she has qualities of a stepmom. Or of a mom, really.”
“Your mom is—?”
He turns back to me, leans against the wall with his hands in his pockets.“She’s around, sort of. My parents got divorced when I was nine, and my dad and me, we’re a team, I guess. My mom’s not a bad person, but she wasn’t much up for being a mom. So I’ve pretty much always been with my dad, even before the divorce, I guess. Sometimes he messed up, and I definitely did, but we made it work.”
“That sucks about your mom.” Before I can think better of it, I add,“My mom wasn’t around, either. She left when I was, I don’t know, three months old, I think? Maybe a bit before.” I keep my eyes down, scribble some nonsense in the margins of the notebook, look busy.
“That’s young,” he says, and though he hasn’t moved, I feel somehow that his posture has changed, that it’s coiled a bit more tightly than it was before.
“Yeah. My brother was around, though.” That sounds sad, sort ofOliver Twistsad, so I say,“I mean, you know. My dad too.” That’s a can of worms I can’t believe I’ve opened here. It’s bad enough I’ve mentioned my freaking absentee mother. I’ve always been the kind of person who talks, who opens up, who tries to connect with people, somehow. But bringing up my father? That’s pretty new, even for me. He’s such a source of terrible guilt and sadness that I hardly ever talk about him, not even to Zoe and Greer, who just think he’s kind of garden-variety distant, instead of so screwed up and damaging that I have to make actual, professionally coached efforts to control the way I interact with him. Thinking of it, it strikes me that I’d loved the salvage yard so much in part because I’d liked seeing Ben and his dad together.“I think we’ve got everything in here, right?”
He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. He’s still looking at me, but I’m determined to let this pass.“Right,” he says, and brushes past me out the door, to the bathroom.
I stand and follow, feeling awkward and inappropriate. It’s one thing for someone to be okay answering questions about themselves, but it’s another when you make them feel weird by laying out your own crappy baggage when they didn’t ask for it. But when I get into the bathroom, Ben’s already talking.“This toilet runs.”
“Better go catch it,” I mumble, unable to stop myself.
He’s smiling as he lets out a dramatic groan.“That is theworst, Kit. That’s a dad joke, right there.”
“You know, what’s everyone got against ‘dad jokes’? I think they’re funny. A toilet running? That’s funny! Just picture it.”
“What? You’re not supposed to picture it. It’s just a pun. What is wrong with you?” He’s laughing now, and it’s so infectious that I start laughing too. “I can’t believe a person as brilliant as you laughs at a toilet running joke.”
He called me brilliant.I can feel the way my smile changes, from laughing pleasure to flattered surprise—and he’s watching it, watching that transformation. I’m standing so close to him in this small room that I can see an answering change in his eyes, and is it—is that something likehungerthere, something new I haven’t seen in his expression before? He’s got one hip leaned against my sink, looking down at where I stand in the doorway, neither of us laughing now, and I think,oh, what if I pushed up onto my tiptoes here,what if I lean right into him, and then Ben straightens and says,“I’m going to fix your toilet.”
And thank God for that, because I was maybe a hair-trigger away from making a fool of myself, stunned stupid by that dimple and those blue eyes.“Oh, no, that’s all right,” I say quickly. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch a YouTube video or something.”
