Page 38 of The Fundamentals

“You really should go home. I don’t have any place you’d be comfortable sleeping here.”

He nodded and stood up, stretching as much as he could under the ceiling that had never seemed low before. “I’ll let myself out the back. Funny enough, it seems like your front door is nailed closed.”

“I heard someone angrily hammering before.”

“Not angry. Worried,” he told me, and stepped out onto the patio.

“Will you text me when you get to your apartment?”

He turned back and nodded. “I will.”

Good. And I’d see him the next day, too, which was even better. I went back to the living room to wait for my dad and imagined scenes of carpentry rather than crushed glass and car parts on the highway.

Chapter 7

“Screw?”

I removed one from a pouch on my toolbelt and held it out.

“Thank you.” Bowie smiled at me. “It’s so much easier to have an assistant. Do you feel that way when you cook and I hover around?”

“You don’t hover. You’re observing and learning,” I corrected him. And I liked having him there when I cooked, just as I liked being his carpentry assistant. He’d shown up this afternoon with a door in a frame resting in the back of his truck. The rest of the bed was filled with a lot of tools like saws and hammers, a new toolbelt for me, and many bags of groceries.

“I thought maybe we could have lunch before we work,” he’d suggested, so we’d done that first. My dad had wandered in partway through giant sandwich preparation and I’d made one for him, too, and then we’d all sat on the patio to eat together. He and Bowie got along pretty well. My dad had been surprised and unhappy to find the entrance to his home nailed closed, but he was glad to get the free door that would replace it and free labor to install it, too. He’d arrived home the night before not too long after Bowie had left, and I’d subjected him to a sniff-test and hadn’t detected anything except a faint floral odor. I had no idea what he’d been doing, which still worried me.

“Drill?” Bowie requested now.

I picked it up from the ground and passed it over.

“Thank you.” I got another smile, too, and more conversation. He’d been explaining the fundamentals of carpentry as he worked.

“You have to learn the basics and then build from there.” He paused. “That was a joke. Get it? Screwdriver.” I passed it over and took back the drill. It really wasn’t taking him very long to install this door because the rest of the wood hadn’t been as rotten as he’d feared it might be.

In other good news, the sun was shining but it wasn’t too hot, and it was just a beautiful day. I was thinking that after we finished this job, we might go swimming and maybe we could even try out some of the swing dance lifts in the water, if he wasn’t tired due to the game the day before. I wasn’t really looking for anything overly strenuous, either, but a relaxing swim with him in his bathing suit would have been nice. When he’d texted me last night to say that he’d arrived home safely, I’d reminded him to bring it to wear today so he wouldn’t have to go in the water in his clothes again, charging in because he’d been worried about me.

He’d sent another message this morning, asking if I liked turkey or ham and saying that yes, he was going to bring groceries. He asked me not to tell Martha at the NGS about it, because he wasn’t shopping there but he definitely wanted to partake in the cookies I’d mentioned that she made. “I don’t want to mess up my good bagger rep with her,” he’d explained.

It had made me laugh and my dad had asked if I was mumbling to myself again. The answer had been no. No, it was just that a friend had sent something funny. And that kind of thing had continued, the laughter thing, the ease and relaxation thing, the whole time that Bowie had been over here. Yeah, it had been a great day and I was looking forward to the swim, and then maybe we could make dinner, too, and watch that dance show or just turn out the lights and sit and stare at the fireflies.

“Level?” he requested.

I wasn’t sure what that was, since we didn’t have one of those in our own meager tool collection. Nothing in our house was level, anyway, but he showed me what he was talking about, a metal stick with the yellow bubble of liquid, and then he attempted to see if I was level by balancing it on my head.

“No, sorry. You’re definitely crooked,” he informed me.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“I’m looking right at it, and my instruments don’t lie.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s a bitter pill for you to swallow.”

“I’m not swallowing any pill. No, my head isn’t flat but—” I broke off as I turned it toward the road. “Good Lord. Oh, no. Oh, no!”

“What? What’s wrong?” he asked as a car jerked to a stop in front of the cottage. “Who is that?”

“It’s Ward. Stay back,” I said. I stepped in front of him, knowing it was too late to run.

“Sissy?” my boyfriend yelled. He got out of the car and stood next to the driver’s side, shock on his face. Shock, and a lot of anger.

“It’s ok,” I told Bowie. “I’ll handle this.”

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