Page 12 of The Fix-Up

“No undercover missions,” Mae said, going for a second brownie.

I dropped my forehead to the table. “Ollie, what the heck were you thinking?”

Three years ago, when I moved to Two Harts, a small Texas town west of Houston, I hadn’t had much to my name except for a three-year-old, a twenty-year-old car, a thousand-dollar loan from Chris, and about five hundred bad decisions weighing me down.

I’d been on my way to my parents’ home in Oklahoma when I’d made the decision to stop off in Two Harts to meet the girl who’d stolen my brother’s heart. Except instead of leaving, I got a job at Sit-n-Eat, the café in town owned by a curmudgeonly man with wild eyebrows named Oleander “Ollie” Holder who,like the café, was small, rough around the edges, and completely set in his ways.

My interview had gone something like this:

Ollie:You been a waitress before?

Me:Sure.

Ollie:You start tomorrow.

It took months for Ollie to say more than five words to me in one go. But he’d given me a job without batting an eye, even though I’d brought my preschooler to the interview. He hadn’t said a word when Oliver trailed along with me to work every day for two weeks because I didn’t have the money for daycare and didn’t know a soul who could watch him.

Oliver latched onto Ollie almost immediately, first delighted they almost had the same name, and then fascinated with the man himself. It felt like a sign. Somehow, someway, Oliver and I were meant to be in Two Harts.

Ollie had offered me two rooms to rent in his house, one for me and one for Oliver. The rent was dirt cheap, so pathetically low I knew he wasn’t doing it for money. I tried to thank him, but that was only received with a harassed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not a favor. I need the extra cash.”

But I knew. There’d been something about Ollie that drove me to make him proud and I found myself working harder than I ever had. It had felt…good and right.

For the first time, maybe in my entire life, I’d found my place.

Then six months ago, I found Ollie slumped over in a booth at the Sit-n-Eat.

It was a Monday morning and like always, he’d arrived before me. As was his custom, he’d sat down with the first cup of coffee of the day and a newspaper before the café officially opened at 6a.m. A heart attack, I’d been told. It had been quick; he hadn’t suffered. But my heart ached with sadness because he’d been all alone at the end.

We buried him four days later.

I’d stayed on at the house, paying rent to the estate and taking over the utilities until the attorney had worked everything out. I was grateful for that. Besides the grief of losing Ollie, the constant anxiety of not knowing what the future held hung over my head constantly. Ollie had been the source of both my job and home. So, I kept going. I opened and closed the café each day. Under Ollie’s sink-or-swim tutelage, I’d learned to keep the books and pay the bills and order supplies and everything else. I did that, too, even though I hated the business-y side of things. But I loved the café and this town and these people, and I wanted Oliver to grow up here. Ollie’s house was the only home he remembered.

For the first twenty-two years of my life, my dream had been to be an actress. I hadn’t been a great student. If I was interested in the subject matter, I learned everything I could. But if I wasn’t interested, I spent a lot of time woolgathering, as Grandy called it. After I had Oliver, my dreams changed and, looking back, giving up the fanciful dream of a teenager and replacing it with a son I adored and a job I loved was the best decision I could have made.

Moving into Ollie’s house hadn’t been smooth sailing at first for any of us. Ollie had lived alone for most of his life and getting used to a woman and a child all at once hadn’t been easy for him, or me. But sometimes things work out in the most unlikely of ways. Ollie helped us out and I think in a lot of ways, we helped Ollie out. Not just with cleaning and fixing the things we could and making the house more livable. But in even more important ways like companionship and the feeling of knowing someone was looking out for you.

I’d be the first to admit that Ollie’s house was a hundred years old, and it showed. The hot water didn’t work sometimes. The wooden floor was warped and a little soft in some places.Something had fallen on the roof—Ollie had never told me what—and it had been boarded up with plywood. I lived in fear it would fall down and fatally wound me during a storm.

But this house could be something, I could see it. It just needed a little TLC and elbow grease and duct tape and prayers and money to get it into shape. I had so many ideas, things I wanted to do and paint and change.

All I wanted was to make a home for Oliver, keep the café going, maybe one day fix my broken man picker. I wanted simple. I wanted contentment. I wanted peace. That was the dream now.

Gilbert Dalton was threatening that dream.

Chris patted my shoulder. “It’s gonna work out.”

I lifted my head. “No, it has to work out.”

FIVE

[Love is]…a relationship, I guess. I don’t know.

—ABBY L., AGE 12

Douglas Carmichael, the estate attorney, was a tall, spindly kind of man with gangly arms and legs and enormous hands. With his long face and rather oversized nose, he reminded me of a horse.

“I don’t know what you put in these muffins, Ellie, but they’re something else.” After brushing away the crumbs from his first muffin, he took another from the plate in the middle of the table.

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