Page 18 of The Cadence
“You’re not from around here,” she noted, and I also heard the differences in our accents.
“No, ma’am,” I answered. “I just moved from Tennessee and I plan to stay. I don’t really have a place to go back to.”
“Oh.” Now she frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, don’t be! I have a great job here, where I don’t have to do much…never mind. I’ll be happy to have this and thanks for putting it out for free.”
She was back to looking pleased. “You seem to be about the same age as my granddaughter. How do you make friends?”
“Uh…” I was a little stymied. “I suppose you should be kind and generous? You would want to be someone interesting to hang out with, like you could be a great pool player or know a lot about music.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear,” she told me. “I know how I would make a friend. I would get your phone number and call to say, ‘Why don’t we have lunch?’ But my question is, how would a girl your age go about it?”
“Oh! Well, I might meet someone for coffee.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” she approved. “My granddaughter is here for the summer and she isn’t enjoying herself very much. You two might hit it off.”
“Great!” I answered enthusiastically, and I did give this woman my number so she could pass it along. She waved and I continued to push the chest into the cargo space, feeling much better about how this long, empty day had gone.
I was in the driveway vacuuming Will’s nice car when he got home, and it hadn’t been a conniving plan to see him. I’d had to clean out the dirt since the chest of drawers had apparently been outside in a shed or up in a very dusty attic, and it was a happy coincidence that I was in his way when he arrived. It was mostly a coincidence.
“Hello, Calla,” he said, as he walked out of the garage. It attached to the main house and he could have gone right inside, but he came to talk and I was so glad. It wasn’t like he’d been ignoring me, but I could understand how it felt awkward to have a stranger around all the time.
“Hi, Will,” I greeted him back, and I tried not to be overly enthusiastic. I couldn’t help smiling a lot, though. “How was your day?”
“Not too bad.” He sounded a little cautious. I was trying to be more aware of his tone since I was fairly unable to read his facial expressions. “You don’t have to clean the car.”
“I do, because I made it nasty,” I told him. “Look what I got today!” I gestured and he followed me around to the patio in front of the guest cottage, where I’d finally managed to move my new furniture piece. “It was free on the side of the road, and I’m going to redo it.”
“Huh.” He grabbed the top and shook it, and it did seem a little rickety.
“I’m going to fix all the problems,” I assured him.
“When did you learn carpentry? What tools are you going to use? I have a hammer and a screwdriver, but that’s about it.”
I brushed aside those concerns with a wave of my hand. “I thought you might be able to put this in your house, since you don’t have a lot of stuff.”
“Huh,” he said again. His tone told me nothing. “Did you carry it by yourself?”
“I dragged it. The hardest part was lifting it into the car,” I said, and then also explained about meeting the lady who wanted to connect me with her granddaughter. “Isn’t that nice?”
“I’ve been thinking you might want to meet some Woodsmen people,” he mentioned, and I said yeah, I sure did.
“It’s funny because in high school, I didn’t have many friends my age that I hung out with. After the first year, I did eventually find classmates that I liked,” I explained, “and they seemed to like me back. But I was so busy that I didn’t have much time to spend with them. Now I have time. A lot of time. A whole lot.”
Will frowned, an expression that I definitely caught. “Have you had dinner?”
“Not yet. I got involved in doing this,” I said, pointing to one of the dusty drawers. He frowned at that, too.
“Do you want to go eat?” he asked and before the words finished emerging from his mouth, I was already answering.
“Absolutely! I definitely want to go.” But first, I would have to change out of the dirty t-shirt I had worn to scrub the new furniture item and vacuum out the car. “Give me five minutes.”
I let myself into the main house a little more than five minutes later, just as he was walking out from what I knew was his bedroom. When I was in here, I spent most of my time in another room that he’d set aside as the office, which was the most furnished area. It had a lot of bookshelves (full of the non-fiction that he enjoyed) and a big desk with a chair that was large enough to fit his oversized frame. The desk, by the way, was mostly empty, due to the lack of stuff for me to do.
“That’s nice,” he complimented me, and I looked down at my dress.
“Thank you. My grandma made this. You can only tell because of the high neckline for modesty, because otherwise, it looks like something from a store.”
