Page 33 of Drawing Home
“Hey. Emma, right?”
“What are you doing here?” she said to Bea Winstead’s friend. Or relative? She had no idea why the guy was with Bea. Nor did she really care. She just didn’t want him inherbar.
“Drinking, like everyone else.”
“Can’t you do that at the hotel?”
“I’d like to get drunk away from my employer.”
Employer? “What do you do for that woman, exactly? Never mind—I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to spend time with Bea Winstead’s evil henchman. So, please, find someplace else to drink.”
“No offense, but I think you’re overreacting,” he said. “Let me buy you a beer.”
“I already have a beer,” she said, retrieving it from the bench where she had all but forgotten it. She took a long swig.
“I’m Kyle Dunlap, by the way. Evil Henchman is just my stage name.” He held out his hand. She ignored it.
“She’s trying to get me fired, you know.”
“She doesn’t want to get you fired. She just wants the house. Actually, what she really wants is the art. She worked with Henry Wyatt his entire career. She’s known him for, like, fifty years. This whole thing doesn’t make sense to her.”
Emma set down the bottle and said, “You know, I see people like you and that woman every summer. You waltz into town with your sense of entitlement, your greedy need to make this place your playground. And the second something takes a little too long or doesn’t go right, you attack.”
“First of all, I don’t know why you’re lumping me in with Bea Winstead. I just work for her.” He looked around the bar. “I’m basically the same as you.”
“Oh, is that right?” she said. “Do you have a kid?”
Kyle shook his head. “No. No kid. But I did get an earful from yours earlier today.”
That got her attention. “You saw Penny? Where?”
“I was waiting at the—it’s a long story. I was on the street and she came up to me. She said you weren’t going to take the house because Bea Winstead was hassling you and she wanted me to tell her to back off.”
“Penny said that?”
Kyle nodded.
Emma bit back a smile.She has more nerve than her mother, that’s for sure.Maybe it was time to change that. “I’m not backing down,” Emma said. “Bea Winstead is wasting her time.”
“Look, I can see things from your point of view, okay? One minute you’re busting your ass catering to these rich assholes, and the next minute, you’ve got a multimillion-dollar waterfront house. What a windfall.”
“I never asked for this,” she said. “But it could be life-changing. I’m a single mother. I work seventy hours a week to support my daughter, save for college, and pay rent on a house I’ll never be able to afford to buy.”
“So you’re not married?” he said.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “That’s none of your business. But no, I’m divorced. Long divorced.”
“Yeah. I’ve never been married.”
Emma shook her head. She couldn’t care less about his marital status. Was he missing the point of this conversation? “Do you have any idea what even a tiny house costs in this town these days? This used to be an affordable place to live. I was born here. My parents were born here. But it’s like…you know the old story about putting a frog in boiling water?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“If you put a frog in boiling water, he’ll jump out. But if you put him in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, he won’t realize what’s happening and he’ll be cooked to death.”
“Why are we talking about frogs?” Kyle said, picking up a dart.
“Because I am the frog! All of us who have lived here a long time are the frogs.”
