Page 58 of Love You
“Let me give you the tour.” Reggie started with the property, including a huge vegetable garden near the road where the property got the most sun. There was a nice shed where he kept supplies and an elaborate sprinkler system. Win would kill every plant sure as shit. His thumb was as green as his bank account.
“You take care of all of this?” Win asked.
“I do.” Reggie bent over to pull a blade of grass from a row of leafy greens. Lettuce or cabbage, Win couldn’t be sure.
He took off his sunglasses and hooked them in the collar of his T-shirt to get a better look. Reggie did a double take.
“Ooh-wee, that’s some shiner.” He motioned at Win’s black eye. “This the young lady you were fighting over?”
Win let out a chuckle because the story had taken on a life of its own. “Nah. Don’t believe everything you hear in town, Reggie. This”—he pointed at his eye—“was just a small misunderstanding.”
“If you say so.” Reggie winked at Darcy and continued the tour, which ended at a dock with a gazebo.
Some of the wood looked rotted and a few of the boards were warped but it wasn’t anything a hammer and nails and elbow grease couldn’t fix. Win liked the feel of it and could visualize himself sitting out here in the evening, skipping rocks and watching the end of the day go by. He’d build a rack to store inner tubes and a boat, maybe put in a rope swing for jumping into the water.
“I’ll warn you now that the house is on the messy side,” Reggie said. “I didn’t have time to tidy up.”
Messy was an understatement. It turned out that Reggie was a bit of a hoarder. Stacks of newspapers, books, and magazines were piled everywhere Win looked. The house had plenty of space but Reggie had managed to fill every nook and cranny with stuff.
“You have a lot of books,” Darcy said, staring at the rows and rows of shelves crammed full of hardbound tomes that reminded Win of a reference library. “Are you a botanist?”
It took Win reading a few of the book titles to figure out why Darcy would ask such a question. Most of them were about plant life and science, which explained Reggie’s extensive gardens.
“I’m a plant geneticist,” he said. “My claim to fame is discovering how to make a tomato taste good again. Not mushy and bland, like most of the supermarket varieties.”
“Seriously?” Darcy seemed impressed. “Do people know about this discovery?”
Reggie grinned. “The entire world of biochemists, botanists, and academia. Exciting stuff.”
“My grandmother, Hilde Wallace, would find it very exciting.”
“I know Hilde,” Reggie said. “We’re in the Glory Junction Master Gardeners Club together.”
While the two of them chatted, Win poked around. The kitchen was just as cluttered as the rest of the house but it had one of those big, stainless-steel professional stoves and a refrigerator as large as a restaurant’s. The cabinets were a honey-colored pine that looked top of the line and the countertops—at least what Win could see of them between the piled-up periodicals—were soapstone. There were so many windows that despite all the trees, the room was bright and the views endless. And the vaulted ceilings made everything feel airy.
There was also a lot of disrepair.
Wood floors that needed to be refinished. Windows that needed to be sealed. Bathroom fixtures that needed to be replaced because they leaked. And from what Win had seen of the roof, the house needed a new one. These were all things he found from a brief walk-through. Who knew what a bona fide inspector would discover?
All these fixes would cost money. Lots of it. But the good news was Win, with the help of his dad and brothers, could handle the labor.
“Hey, Reggie,” Win called downstairs. “What happens with the road in winter? Who plows?”
“River View is a county-maintained road. They cover it.”
That was at least something. Darcy climbed the stairs and checked out the rooms. He couldn’t get a read on what she thought of the place but he supposed it didn’t matter. He’d be the one living here.
“You see the kitchen?” she asked.
“Yup. You?”
“I did.” That was it? That was all she was going to say? Really?
“What do you think?” Reggie called up.
“I think it’s amazing. I can’t believe you built this place.”
“We hired out some of the work but for the most part it was Elsie and me. We did it with our own two hands.”
