Two Family Home (5 page)

“Hi, Mr. Harris,” she said as she approached and gave him her arm. He looked at her, confused.

“I'm the new Nurse Ratched,” she reminded him.

“Ah. Good.” He patted her hand paternally. “Call me Myron. I don't like when beautiful women call me Mr. Harris. Makes me feel old.”

“That's because you are old!” shouted Mr. May from the fireplace.

“So what have you been up to this afternoon?” she asked, but Myron had pulled away and embedded himself in the ladies' poker game. Good thing it was a rhetorical question—Hope told her Myron frequently went to lunch with a family friend. Still, Lindsey didn't like his lack of focus. She made a mental note to review his chart more carefully and to talk to his family about any possible memory loss.

For now, though, he seemed happy to help Gladys Kilburn cheat at cards. She left him to it.

 

Where did these people go all day? At first, he'd wanted the place all to himself, but now he was starting to get worried that they weren't coming back at all. Good thing his legs were fast and his nose was strong. He would find the lady, no matter where she went.

F
our hours of sleep. That must have been a mid-project record for him; usually he went for days on four hours of sleep. But he didn't feel refreshed or rested at all. Probably because he'd spent all night dreaming about a nurse, coming into his room and making him feel all better.

Sexy nurse dreams. Was he twelve?

The worst part was, they were not just sexy nurse dreams, no matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise. He was having sexy nurse dreams about Pollyanna. Of course she worked with the elderly and infirm. Walker had seen her the day before when he'd dropped Myron off at Shady Grove. He saw her through the glass doors, waiting in the foyer for Myron to come in, and he peeled out of the parking lot so she wouldn't see him. So he was a total chicken, and she was freakin' Mother Teresa.

Which, unfortunately, did nothing to deter his sexy nurse dreams.

Everything about this is wrong,
he told himself as he poured an extra scoop of coffee into the coffeemaker. He needed diesel fuel this morning. He needed a lobotomy. Or, he thought as he trudged upstairs to throw on some clothes, he just needed to get to work. Everyone has an inappropriate sex dream every now and then. When he was fifteen, he had a sex dream about his history teacher, who wore orthopedic shoes and cat sweaters.

She was pretty cute, though.

At least in his dream.

He didn't do so great in history that year.

It didn't matter. Mother Teresa was his tenant. She was also in charge of the care of his only friend. An entanglement with her would mean nothing but complications, and he didn't need complications. His dealer wanted him to be part of a group show in New York, and a New York show meant he had to have new work, and new work meant he couldn't spend all night having weird sex dreams about nuns with bad taste in couches. It would take months to create the piece. Even with a clear idea of how he wanted it to look, the actual end product was up in the air. He hated that fluffy sort of artist talk, but it was true: he just had to feel it.

Before he could feel anything, though, he needed coffee.

Jeans on, boots on, mug in hand, he headed out the back door to the garage to wait for inspiration to strike.

Instead of inspiration, though, he got a dose of Mother Pollyanna in shorts and a tank top, hands on hips, glaring at the remains of Myron's garden.

She must have heard him step stealthily off the back porch (damn work boots), because she turned to him.

And smiled.

God, she had a great smile.

Walker took a sip of his coffee.

“Morning,” she said. He gave a little wave and headed toward the garage.

“Oh, hey,” she said, holding out a hand to stop him as he passed. “I'm really sorry about the other day. About waking you up with that couch?” she added when he looked confused.

“That's okay,” he said, trying hard not to remember the different ways he had considered murdering her and Josh McGuire.

“I used to work nights. It totally messes up your sleep schedule, right? They did not make blackout curtains strong enough to convince me that it was possible for me to sleep during the day.”

She was being sweet. She needed to stop being sweet. Or he needed to remember that he didn't do sweet. He liked a woman with a hard edge and a mean streak. He didn't like women who apologized for their mistakes and wore purple short-shorts.

“Anyway, I'll try to be more quiet.” She gave him that million-dollar Pollyanna smile again. “I'm Lindsey, by the way.”

He shook her hand, then retreated quickly to the coffee.

“You're Walker, right? I mean, I'd hate to think this whole time I've been . . .” She trailed off.

This whole time she'd been what, exactly?

“It's just funny that we haven't met since I moved in, is all. You'd think with sharing the number of walls we share that we'd run into each other more often. I guess our schedules are really different.”

Walker eyed the garage door. He was so close . . .

“So . . . Mary Beth tells me you're an artist. That's so interesting. I saw some pictures of your work online but I'd love to see . . .”

He didn't hear the rest of it. He never talked about his art in progress with anyone. Anyone except Myron, and barely that. He didn't even talk anything beyond vague concepts with Madison, and she was the one who signed the checks. So he definitely wasn't going to suddenly start talking about it with Pollyanna in her purple shorts and her messy ponytail and her great legs.

He grunted, which meant good-bye, and stalked into the garage to hide from the pretty lady, and, hopefully, to get some damn work done.

 

Lindsey watched Walker's retreating back as he stalked into the garage. It was a nice back. The whole view was nice. Too bad he was such a . . . what was he? Maybe he just wasn't a morning person.

Or maybe he was a jerk.

She didn't like that. They didn't need to be besties, but a cordial relationship would be nice. Maybe, over time, he'd mellow out and just be unpleasant.

But, man, she wanted to get into that garage.

No. It was none of her business, and he had made it abundantly clear that she was not welcome.

Or had he? Maybe he was just shy! Maybe he'd had a rough life on the streets and didn't know how to accept people's kindness! Maybe he secretly wanted to show off his work, but his fear of rejection was so great that it paralyzed his social skills!

Or maybe he wasn't making art at all. Maybe he was making meth.

Okay. Now we're getting crazy,
she told herself. Detective Lindsey could sometimes go into overdrive and become Crazy Paranoid Lindsey. What she really needed to do was respect his wishes, and if Walker came around to wanting her in his studio, he'd invite her in. She could be patient. She could wait, and she could accept that it might never happen.

She could!

That's why she was shouting at herself! Because it was totally true, and not at all because she needed convincing!

Whatever. At least she had a cute apartment, and she was getting to try her hand at gardening. As long as Walker didn't mind. She should go into the garage and ask him.
No, stop,
she told herself.
You're just being nosy. Just stalk him on the internet like a normal person.
Besides, the lease said she had access to the garden, which to her meant she could tear the whole thing up if she wanted to.

She did not. When she wasn't researching her landlord for her own peace of mind (she told herself), she'd been all over the internet looking for gardening tips. The Willow Springs Public Library had a great list of online resources that gave her hope that she wouldn't have to start the garden from scratch. In fact, that was a bad idea. She even downloaded a free gardening app that Gladys turned her on to. Since she was going to leave Walker alone, she stood there with her phone out, trying to identify various green things poking out of the dirt. According to her research, some of it might be salvageable. With her starting kind of late in the season, she wanted to save all that she could.

She practically jumped up and down with glee. Late in the season. She'd never had a season to be late in before!

It was not too late for tomatoes. Zucchini would be fine, eggplant maybe. She couldn't tell if she had melon or pumpkin, which was embarrassing, but fortunately no one was there to see her squat down and try to figure it out.

She wished she could talk to the man who'd planted the garden. She imagined he'd have some good advice for her. But more than that, the garden was clearly a labor of love. Beneath the weeds—she was pretty sure those were weeds—she could see neat rows laid out inside a border of wildflowers. She wanted to show him that, just because he'd moved away, a part of him remained in Willow Springs. Maybe, once she got it whipped into shape, she could invite him over. Make him some apparently terrible iced tea. Or maybe Walker was still in touch with him, and he could keep the guy updated. Or she could ask Walker to invite him over and the three of them could have lunch. And, if Walker spoke actual words to her, it might be more fun than a root canal. That would be an amazing step forward in their relationship.

Not that they had a relationship.

A girl could dream.

And this girl maybe did dream. About an angry man in boxers.

Oh, Lord, those boxers.

She shook her head. No. No no no no no. She was on a Fresh Path to Independence, not a Do-Dumb-Stuff-with-Your-Landlord-Even-If-It-Looks-Super-Fun Path. And taming that angry bear who lived next door would definitely be trouble. She didn't want trouble. She didn't want to reform a bad boy. That stuff was not for her. If the bad boy wanted to change, he'd change. A person can only be who he is. That's how she'd ended up getting anxiety hives when her last boyfriend talked about marriage. She was not a homebody. She was not a stay-local kind of gal, and she'd been living her whole life as if she were.

She had enough trouble trying to figure her own stuff out; she didn't need to try to figure out someone else's.

No matter how tempting it was.

No amount of head-shaking could convince her that she did not want to see what those flexing muscles looked like up close. Fortunately, he was clearly a jerk.

But what a hot jerk.

A hot jerk with a secret.

Not only was he a jerk, but he was clearly disgusted by her. Which was not really fair. He hadn't exactly seen her at her best. She looked down at her worn cotton shorts. Definitely not her best. And the last time he saw her, she was wearing different old shorts and being bested by blue velvet. But that shouldn't matter. Dad always told her not to judge a book by its cover. “Wait until someone gives you a reason to dislike 'em,” he always said.

All she had to do was pay her rent and stay out of his way. What was she trying to do, sleep with him?

That had her pausing over a squash blossom.

No, of course not. That would be a terrible idea. He was her landlord. That was like sleeping with your boss, she told herself. Bad bad bad idea.

But he wasn't really her boss. What was the worst that could happen? He could evict her if it didn't work out. That would suck.

But that back. Those hands.

There were other apartments in the world.

No, no. No sleeping with Grumpy Walker. She was here to be independent, to work hard, and to make her own mistakes without a parental safety net. She had a big, demanding job that would take up all of her energy. She would be way too tired for ill-advised sex.

She also had a mess of a garden.

Lindsey bent over the plot and pulled out a weed. There were a lot of weeds. That was okay. She wasn't afraid of a few weeds. Or a few thousand weeds. She kneeled down at the edge of the plot and started pulling.

 

What was she doing out there? From his hiding spot under the porch, he could hear her making noises. It sounded like she was playing in his jungle. He started to wag his tail. He wanted to play with her! He started to wiggle his way under the boards, and the cold dirt floor felt so good on his belly he almost gave up his mission and sat there wiggling. But then he got a good look at what she was doing. She was pulling his jungle apart! She was tossing big green pieces over her shoulder into a pile!

Actually, that pile looked like it would be fun. He'd just wait down here until she was gone, then he'd have the pile all to himself. In the meantime, this dirt wasn't going to roll in itself...

L
indsey woke up restless. She was a morning person, and she was used to being at her most productive when she got out of bed. But she wasn't used to feeling like this. Antsy, her old boss would have called it. She lay there, admiring the clean paint job on the ceiling, making a mental list of things to be anxious about.

Job: so far, so good. Still a lot to learn, but she was okay with that. Friends: could use some work. Mary Beth had invited her to join her book club, and this month's selection sat on her nightstand. It wasn't exactly the raucous honky-tonkin' she secretly hoped for when she moved to Kentucky, but she was willing to give that some time. Family: all in Arizona, all healthy, all starting to worry about her a little less, which was progress. Home: . . .

Maybe that was it. Despite her efforts over the past few weeks, Walker still remained a grumpy mystery. And the mystery was beginning to get really deep under her skin. She wanted to know what his deal was, and not just because she wanted to know what his deal was.

Why was he so quiet? What was his art like? Did he think she wouldn't be able to just Google him to find out? Because she had, and it was cool. Very masculine, but somehow delicate and beautiful at the same time. They were landscapes, of a sort, metal that seemed to be flat or stamped with images, but when the photographer zoomed in, it was actually shaped and . . . carved, maybe?

Of course, there was practically no information included, except that it was steel and copper, and there were six of them hanging in a gallery in New York City.

Seeing images of his work made her even more curious about him. What kind of guy has the patience and vision to create what he created?

And why did he apparently hate her?

Maybe she'd been coming on too strong. Maybe what she thought of as a normal, neighborly level of friendliness was a creepy, stalker-level invasion of privacy to him. Maybe he was sensitive. He was an artist, after all.

Right. Okay. Things looked a little brighter if she thought of her neighbor as sensitive and shy rather than a grumpy hatemonger. She could live with sensitive and shy. She would just tread a little more lightly. She'd avoid any unnecessary contact. She would let him come to her, if he wanted to. And if he didn't want to, well, that would be okay too. They would just be two strangers who inhabited the same general space but had no kind of relationship whatsoever.

She could live with that.

Ceiling and life fully examined, Lindsey hopped out of bed. She had some time before work—she could weed in the garden a little. Looking out the window, she changed her mind. She was beginning to love her garden, but not enough to work on it in a steady downpour. She was also starting to miss the desert.

She drew the curtain closed before she could notice if the light in the garage was still on, which meant that Walker either got up earlier than she did—unnatural!—or spent all night in there working, which she shouldn't notice because she was trying to keep a healthy distance from her sensitive and shy neighbor.

Who was she kidding? She had noticed. And in the time it took her to close the curtain, she considered, then rejected, bringing him a mug of coffee for energy and maybe also to enable her to sneak a peek at his work. And his shoulders. No, mostly his work.

But, no. Healthy distance. Sensitive and shy. Let him make the first platonic move, if there was a move to be made.

But since he was in the garage, that meant he wasn't in his house, which meant she wouldn't wake him up like she had all those weeks ago with The Great Couch Disaster. And as much as she would like to see him all steamy and mad in his boxers, that was not in her Healthy Distance Plan, so she banished the image (mostly) from her mind.

Exercise. She needed exercise to burn off some of this excess mental energy. Rain meant this would not be the morning she took up running—hooray. But she was well equipped to deal with unpleasant weather interrupting her exercise plans. She threw on a sports bra and a pair of shorts and padded down to the living room. This morning felt like a Bollywood Blast morning. And if Walker was in the garage, she could crank it up and sing along, which was her preferred method of Bollywood Blasting. The extra diaphragm work was good for her abs. And she was a dork who couldn't help but sing along, even though she didn't know the words, or even the language.

Whatever. Who was going to see her? She popped in the DVD and started Blast-ing.

 

Walker was climbing through a window and his head kept hitting wind chimes. He hated wind chimes. Only jerks put up decorations that would jangle and crash in a place where they were the only ones who could not hear it, while they sat in comfortable silence behind a door. Why were there wind chimes in his window? But then he went inside, and there were more wind chimes. And some of them had a serious bass line. He reached up, determined to rip one of those jangling death monsters out of the ceiling, when—

Walker sat up like a bolt. After a second of adjusting to reality, he rubbed his hands over his face. He had to stop falling asleep on the couch. He barely remembered stumbling through the back door, although he did recall looking in despair at the insurmountable flight of stairs leading to his bedroom.

He was acting more tortured than artist, and he was starting to piss himself off.

But the jangly bass wind chimes were not a dream, after all. They were coming through the wall. And they sounded like music. And—was that singing?

Or was someone murdering a turkey?

He weighed his options. He could ignore what he guessed was Lindsey singing and stick a pillow over his head and continue to emit only grumbles in her presence. Or he could go over and confront her, ask her nicely to turn down the music, and start to develop a civil relationship.

He looked at his pillow.

Then he heard Myron's voice in his head, telling him to “Man up. Are you afraid of one little woman?”

He wasn't afraid. Walker was not afraid of Lindsey! And she wasn't that little. She was short, but she wasn't little. She was curvy, a perfect handful . . .

Either way, he was not afraid of her.

He would go over and confront her.

Nicely.

The start of a beautiful friendship.

 

Lindsey was totally lost in the music, which was why she loved the Bollywood Blast routine. She could get her dance on and get her workout on at the same time. All in the privacy of her own little living room. It was very efficient.

She was feeling the bass, flicking her hips on the downbeat. First right, then turn, then left.

On the second turn-then-left, she saw a shadowy figure standing in her doorway.

She screamed.

She was so startled out of her Bollywood Blast reverie that it took her a long, screaming second to realize that the shadowy figure was Walker. And that he looked pissed.

Surprise.

“What are you—” she started as she threw the front door open. Then she watched his eyes blaze an angry trail down her body. She quickly covered up her sports bra with her hands. Then she uncovered it and put her hands on her hips. It was her apartment. She could walk around in a bra if she wanted to. Hell, she could walk around without a bra.

He shook his head, focused back on her eyes. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

“What am I—? This is my apartment! What are you doing in here?”

“Well, I
was
trying to sleep in
my
apartment, but then it sounded like someone was murdering a turkey over here, so I came over to investigate.”

“No one's murdering—” Then she got it. He'd heard her singing. Ha ha ha. She was a terrible singer. She took a deep breath. He was just mad because she'd woken him up. And because he was a jerk. But in this case, his jerkitude was possibly justified. “I thought you were in the garage.”

“Why would you think that? It's barely six in the morning.”

“Because the light was on in there!”

She saw him pause, saw the corner of his mouth try to hitch up into a smile. “You were watching me in the garage? Are you spying on me?”

“Says the man standing in my living room. Uninvited.”

She thought she saw him blush, then drop his eyes. Well, whatever. It was just a sports bra.

Oh my god, she thought. Walker is embarrassed. He was embarrassed by her sports bra! Her glee at that idea totally erased any residual embarrassment she felt at being caught singing loudly and badly in an unfamiliar foreign language.

“Can you just . . . keep it down?” he spat. “Please?”

She cocked her hip and smiled. “Since you said
please
.” Then she turned toward the kitchen. She was done with her workout. She needed a glass of water.

“Show yourself out?” she threw over her shoulder, and stuck her head in the fridge.

Boom. She heard the front door close, and smiled.

 

This was getting ridiculous. She wasn't
that
hot. She was . . . it probably didn't matter what she looked like. Whenever Walker saw Lindsey, he wanted to touch her. Just to see if her skin was as soft as it looked.

And . . . he was officially a creep.

It wasn't his fault that he kept running into her while she was wearing short shorts and sports bras and other things that showed off a lot of probably soft skin. Just because he always saw her in the yard or, you know, inside her own apartment. Just because this was the twenty-first century and, fine, she could wear whatever she wanted. He didn't have to like it. He didn't have to like that he liked it.

But seriously, would it kill her to put on pants?

By the time he reached the garage door, though, Walker was all out of steam. He was just going to have to accept that he was renting to a very annoying woman to whom he was unfortunately attracted. He would have to get Mary Beth to help him re-word the lease next time. No hot people. Only quiet people who wore lots of clothes. Maybe an Amish person. That would save on the electric bill, too.

Yes, of course. The only answer to his problem was kicking Lindsey out and getting an Amish neighbor. Why hadn't he thought of that earlier?

Oh, because it's a dumb idea, his inner Myron told him.

Shaking his head, he unlocked the garage, eager to get to work. Or, more likely, eager to stare blankly at a pile of scrap metal and hope inspiration struck.

Looking at the stuff he'd salvaged from the junkyard, he waited. And waited.

It wasn't that he couldn't see what was intrinsically interesting about the shapes and lines of an old muffler, a set of lead pipes, a spider's web of different colored wires. He knew that once he polished up the fender and the hubcaps, they'd look cool. But he wasn't seeing . . . anything beyond the pile of potentially shiny crap in the middle of the garage.

And that's what scared him. Because his gift had always been seeing a pile of crap like a puzzle. And not just like a set of pieces to put together; he could look at the puzzle and see what it would look like finished. It was easy.

Not that welding and smashing and shaping things into the finished product wasn't hard work, but the vision always came easily.

It was all Lindsey's fault.

Ever since she moved in, he had no interest in hard lines and sharp surfaces.

Ever since she moved in, he was obsessed with softness and light.

Dammit. He didn't do softness and light.

He didn't like compromising. He knew it made him sound like a pretentious jerk, but he didn't want anything clouding his vision. He had to see something clearly to be inspired. He could see the tree, see how it had managed to defy nature and grow out of that isolated rock, see the tenacity in that little seed to cling to whatever it could to reach for the sun.

And now the tree was dead. It had reached the sun, and then it had died.

Even though that idea made him want to put on a black turtleneck and smoke French Gauloises cigarettes, that was what he had seen as he stood on the top of the hill. That was what had drawn him to that one tree—the beauty in the tragedy, the embodiment of the truth that everything comes to an end. It had moved him.

But as he stood back and looked at the bones of the stretching branches, he wasn't feeling the same power. It was just . . . a tree. Or, it wasn't a tree. It was a set of welded-together metal rods that vaguely formed the shape of a tree.

He closed his eyes, turned away from the sculpture. He had to shake this off. Everyone had their moments of doubt. He'd had them before: the fear that he would never be able to capture what he saw in the metal.

Was this just the usual self-doubt and anxiety? Could he shake it off? He'd never felt quite so . . . disheartened before.

It was the pressure. There were three artists in this show, as opposed to a dozen. The next step was a solo show, then a show in London, then art fairs. This was big. This was what he wanted, to make his living creating. When he'd finally had enough to buy a house, the duplex had seemed like a great idea—the rental income would get him through lean times.

These were definitely going to be lean times if he didn't get his head out of his butt. Staring at the walls of his studio was not going to help matters. He needed to get his mind off things, come back with a fresh perspective.

He thought of Lindsey, soft and light and wearing shorts and a stethoscope.

No. Bad. He needed the kind of distraction that did not involve creeping on his tenant. He needed the opposite kind of distraction.

He'd visit Myron. An old man in a nursing home who would tell him the exact, specific kind of idiot he was being. The best medicine for what ailed him.