Erica left the clinic promptly at six on those hot days, she still had a couple of hours of daylight to work on the outside of the house, which she had started to paint. She had scraped and brushed flaking paint off, had primed bare spots, and now she was putting on the final coat. Later in the year, when the season changed, she would concentrate on the inside, she had decided, and try to get as much done outside as possible now. In the mornings she worked on the west side, out of the sun. In the evenings she moved the ladder to the east side. Gradually the house was getting painted. That evening she set up her ladder, got her brush and paint and climbed up. It was a two-story house with high eaves, a stretch from as high on the ladder as she dared to go.
She had not yet hung the paint can on the ladder when she felt the ladder starting to shift, to tilt. She dropped the brush and grabbed a gutter for support. It wouldn’t hold her weight, she thought wildly, as the ladder shifted again. It wouldn’t hold her and she didn’t dare let go and start climbing back down.
Then she heard Darren’s voice from below. She recognized the voice instantly from listening to him at the clinic; the same easy cadence, not laughing, but not taking the situation very seriously either. They had not met, but she had seen him with patients, with the interns, talking to Greg Boardman, and she had stopped to listen to him more than once. Looking down she saw his broad face grinning up at her.
“Drop the paint and hold on to the ladder,” he said. “I’ll keep it steady for you.”
“The can’s open,” she said, hearing the words as inane. “You’ll be splashed with paint.”
His grin broadened. “Just drop it. Let it go.”
She dropped the can and it splashed paint like a geyser. Then she climbed down the ladder as Darren held it steady.
At the bottom, on solid ground again, she looked at him in dismay. “Oh, Lord, I’m sorry! Thank you. I think you saved my life.”
He was spattered from his shoes up, with paint on his jeans, his shirt, arms and hands, and some even on his face. He laughed. “Maybe just your neck. You set the ladder over a hole in the ground. Got a hose?”
She shook her head. “Come on around back. You can wash up a little bit at least. I’m Erica Castle.”
“The book lady,” he said. “I’d offer to shake hands, but it’s probably not a good idea. Darren Halvord.”
She led the way around the mountain of trash to the back porch, where he hesitated. “I’d better leave the shoes outside,” he said. “I’ll track up your floor.”
He took off his running shoes, then followed her into the house, where she got out towels and a washcloth and pointed him toward the bathroom. “I could wash your clothes,” she said, “but I don’t have anything you could put on.”
“They’ll keep until I get home.”
When he returned, with a clean face, hands and arms, she held out a glass of iced tea. “It’s about all I have to offer. Or some pretty cheap wine.”
“This is good,” he said, taking the tea, then gazing about the kitchen. About five feet ten or eleven inches tall, he didn’t give the impression of being large, but his arms were corded with muscles and his shoulders were very broad. She had thought his eyes were black, but now saw that they were dark blue, with pale lashes, pale eyebrows. His hair was straight, cut short, probably a dark blond, sun-bleached. Laugh lines at his eyes looked as if they had been drawn with white ink on a russet background.
“How did you just happen to come by in the nick of time?” she asked, moving to the table to sit down. He sat opposite her and sipped the tea.
“I always come this way or a block or two over. My place is behind that mall on Coburg, four blocks from here. I didn’t know you lived in this house. I thought it was vacant, going to ruin.”
“Well, it was going to ruin, that’s for sure. I inherited it from my grandmother.”
She talked about the shape the house had been in when she arrived, about teaching in Cleveland, the trip out. He was easy to talk to, and, she realized, she had been starved for male company. That was a surprise; she had been so tired by bedtime day after day that her thoughts of men had been rare, easily ignored. The few times she thought of Ron, her former fiancé, she had felt only satisfaction of being done with him, done with that endless, go-nowhere engagement. After the first date or two, there had never been any excitement in that relationship. She had never felt the least bit threatened or exhilarated, but rather an unexamined acceptance of her role in his life, one of accommodation to his twice-a-week need for sex. They had been engaged for six years.
“After I start teaching in the fall,” she said, “fixing up the house will go faster. I’ll hire someone to help out, repair or replace the roof, do a number of things.”
“Will you rent out the apartment? It is a separate apartment, isn’t it? I noticed the outside stairs.”
“It is. That’s way down on my list of things to get to. I haven’t even started on it yet.”
“Can I have a look at the upstairs?” he asked then. “See, I have a three-room apartment over by the mall, and the traffic’s getting worse and worse. I suspect that the owner of the building will sell out to a developer for a big box store or something in the coming year. I’ll be house hunting then.”
“It might be that long before I get things in shape upstairs.” She started to say that her plan was to fix up the house and sell it as soon as possible, but she didn’t.
“Let’s have a look.”
It was worse than the downstairs had been when she’d first arrived. She had cleaned out the refrigerator and left the door open, but had done nothing else. There were mats on the floor, rags and paper bags, fast-food boxes, pizza boxes, bottles, broken chairs and a wobbly table, and the whole place was horribly dirty. She was ashamed, humiliated to think that she owned it, more humiliated to think her mother had lived like this for years, until her death from a drug overdose.
Darren examined the apartment carefully, then nodded. They went back down to her kitchen. “Let’s talk rent,” he said.
“I told you, that’s last on my list.”
“Would $750 a month be okay? That’s more than I’m paying now, but it’s a lot bigger, closer to work and not being crowded by a mall.”
She poured more tea, got out ice cubes and shook her head. “Next year maybe.”
“I thought we might make a deal,” he said, accepting the freshened tea. He sat down again. “I could start cleaning it up and do some of the other things that need doing, like hauling away the trash, replacing the glass in those windows. In return I get a free month’s rent, and I get to park my truck in the garage. And have my son with me some of the time. He’s eleven and part of the reason I need more space.”
She stared at him, at a loss.
“I can furnish pretty good references,” he said, and then grinned.
“Oh boy, can you! I just hadn’t considered even trying to rent it yet, not for months and months.”
“Okay, think about it and let me know.” He drank more of the tea and put the glass down, then stood up. “See
