Chapter 5 #2
Fiona smiled where she could, tossing in occasional words of encouragement, but most of her attention stayed on Rhett.
He sat rigid in the passenger seat, hat balanced on his knees, one hand braced against the door.
Every curve of the road made his body tense; every stop drew the smallest shift in his jaw.
She wanted to tell him the car was safe, to reach across the console and reassure him with a comforting touch, but contact felt like stepping off a cliff she couldn’t climb back from.
By the time they reached Evergreen Springs, snowflakes started drifting, and when they pulled into her building’s lot, it came in flurries.
“Come on in.” She waved to Rhett, whose mouth tipped uncertainly.
At the door, he hesitated before crossing the threshold like a man entering foreign ground.
Jamie went straight to the television. He flicked on his favorite show, dropped to the floor, and arranged his toys just so.
The program’s theme song filled the apartment.
Rhett stared at the screen, his grip tightening on his hat brim.
Jamie noticed, glanced up, and patted the carpet beside him. “You can sit here.”
Rhett paused but eventually lowered himself beside him and settled his cowboy hat in his lap. Jamie named the characters and pointed to the screen. Rhett listened, awestruck.
Fiona lingered a moment, taking in the scene. Jamie calm, focused, inviting this stranger into his world. Incredible, really. Her son rarely warmed up to strangers so quickly. Rhett leaned closer as though trying to memorize everything.
Time to start dinner after her very weird day. She stopped to peer out the window to check on the snowfall, and already the streets were covered with white powder, and flakes danced from the sky in a heavy ballet. Lucky thing she was all stocked up. Mom and Dad made sure of that.
Opening the refrigerator, she stared at its shelves like it might tell her what to do next.
Pasta. Sauce. Salad greens she needed to use before they wilted.
It felt strange having Rhett here and yet comforting at the same time.
She put the water on to boil. When she glanced up again, Rhett stood in the doorway.
“Jamie showed me the picture box.” He nodded toward the living room.
“TV. Everyone has one.” She smiled.
“I’m sorry to put you out, Mrs. Walker.”
“Hey, I’m the one who brought you here. I should be apologizing to you. And please do call me Fiona, or Fi as my friends do.”
“Are we friends, Fiona?”
“I think we might be.”
His smile and the happiness in his eyes touched her heart. He must be lonely here, yanked out of his time. “Where is your man?”
“Gone.”
“You’re a widow?” The tone in his voice shifted, softened.
“No. Divorced.”
“Oh.” His eyebrows went up on his forehead.
“Do they have divorce in 1878?”
“Not often, but if a man is cruel to his woman, she can get away by divorcing him. Is that what happened to you?”
“Richard wasn’t cruel. He left because parenting Jamie was too much for him.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a man.” Rhett let out a grunt.
Fiona grinned. “My dad said something similar.”
“I heard you on that contraption telling people your Dad and Mom had to move to Arizona because he’s ailing.” He nodded toward her phone on the counter.
“Yes.”
“And they’ve been helping you with the boy?”
“They do.”
“I reckon I can do that for you until we figure this thing out.” He took the Christmas card from his pocket and peered at it.
“I appreciate that, thank you.”
The card went back into his pocket. “He’s a good lad.”
“He has some struggles.”
“Don’t we all?” His expression turned contemplative.
“I suppose we do.” She turned and dropped pasta into the boiling water.
Cocking his head, Rhett moved closer. “What’s that?”
“Dinner.”
He crinkled his nose. “Don’t look like any dinner I ever et.”
“Really? I never thought about it, but I guess they didn’t have pasta in your time.”
“No, ma’am. We mostly eat biscuits, beans, jerky, salt pork, beans and taters.”
“Twenty twenty-five will expand your palate.”
“Pardon?”
“The world is global now. We eat cuisines from all around the world. Pasta comes from Italy.”
“Are you funnin’ me?”
“No. For real. See.” She carried the package of pasta over to him and turned it so he could read the label: Product of Italy.
“Well, I’ll be. All the way from Italy. How do they get it here? Boat?”
“Airplanes.”
“Airplanes?”
“We can explore that topic later. Right now, it’s almost time to eat. Could you tell Jamie to wash up?”
“Yessum.” He ambled back to the living room.
She put the pesto sauce into the microwave to warm it, removed the pasta from the stove, and dumped it into the colander. Her phone rang. It was Mom. She scooped it up, steam rising from the sink, dampening the tendrils of hair around her face. “Hey, how was the drive?”
“Uneventful. We just got to the hotel in Salt Lake. Having dinner and going to bed early. How’s Jamie?”
Fiona hesitated, unsure what to say. “He’s watching TV.”
“Should we speak to him? I don’t want him to think we abandoned him, even though we kinda did. But we also don’t want to disrupt his schedule.”
She imagined Jamie chattering about Rhett to her mother. “I’ll tell him you called.”
A soft sigh escaped her mother. “We do miss you both so much. I wish there had been another option.”
“It’s okay, Mom. In the long run, it’ll be good for Jamie and me both to find some independence.”
Hypocrite. You’re so needy you called a cowboy from 1878.
“I suppose you’re right.” Her mother sounded wistful.
“It will all work out the way it should.”
“I know. Love you. Give Jamie a kiss for me.”
“I will. Love you too.”
She rang off just as Rhett and Jamie came into the kitchen. She served up the meal, and when she asked Rhett’s opinion on pasta, he said, “It’ll crawl through.”
That made Jamie howl with laughter; she’d never heard him laugh so much in one day, but Rhett ate every bite, so she took that as a compliment.
Later, after Jamie’s bath and bedtime rituals, three inches of water, blue pajamas, and two books, she pulled the blanket over him and tiptoed back to the living room where she left Rhett watching a documentary on Alaska.
“That’s a sure stunning place. You ever been?”
“No, I don’t get to travel much.”
“I like this picture box…er, TV. It’s interesting.”
“You can sleep out here on the couch and keep the TV going all night if you want.”
“For sure?” His eager expression was as earnest as Jamie’s.
“You can take a shower in my bathroom. I’ll show you how to use the plumbing. While you do that, I’ll make the bed.”
“Do I smell bad? I took me a bath on Friday night.”
“In 2025, it’s customary to bathe every night.”
He appeared stunned. “No foolin’?”
“It’s true.”
“Well, okay then. I wanna do what everyone else does.”
“Follow me. I’ll set you up.”
She led him down the short hallway to the bathroom. The space felt smaller with him in it, his shoulders nearly brushing the doorframe. Her own reflection hovered behind his in the mirror, two people who shouldn’t exist in the same century, crowding the same few feet of tile.
She pointed to the faucet handles. “Left’s hot, right’s cold. You’ll feel it warm up quick.”
He leaned closer, studying the metal fixtures like they were some new breed of machinery. He looked confounded. “All that from a turn of a knob?”
“Yes.” She reached around him to twist the handle, and steam rose. The heat rolled up her arm, catching her off guard. So did his scent.
The space between them pulsed with something she didn’t have a name for. Too much air and not enough all at once.
“I’m gonna make up the couch for you.” She hurried from the bathroom, leaving him alone to figure out modern plumbing.
Fiona pulled a sheet and blanket from the hall closet.
She shook them out and spread them over the couch, tucking corners and aligning edges.
Running water. A man from 1878 stood naked in her shower.
She told herself not to picture his broad shoulders under the spray, his hair dark with water, but her pulse didn’t listen.
She exhaled and went back to arranging the blanket as if neat corners could restore her balance.
A few minutes later, he emerged redressed in his trail-dusty clothes, hair damp. “Feels peculiar. Like standing in a rainstorm you can turn off.”
Injecting humor into her voice, she said, “You’ll adapt.”
“I reckon I will. Cade seems to have.” Rhett settled onto the couch, the TV flickering soft blue across his face.
“Goodnight, Mr. Kelsey.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Walker.”
With that, she turned off the lights and went to bed, but it was a long, long time before she fell asleep.