Chapter 9 #2
“She was, I think.” Morgan pushed the plate toward Nimble and didn’t regret it, watching Nimble’s pleasure as he chomped through the strip.
“For that last couple of years, at least. I didn’t come to visit.
Maybe once or twice when I was a kid. I never knew her very well. She was an aunt by marriage.”
“Then why are you here?” Nimble asked. “I mean, you don’t look like a feed and grain guy. Not with those hands of yours.”
Morgan considered this, looking down at his hands, fingers spread, not letting himself be irritated that Nimble had noticed anything about him. He knew a bit about Nimble, so perhaps now it was time to share in return.
“She left the place to me,” he said. “I plan to sell in the spring. I have to fix it up first and take care of the books, which are a mess.”
“The books?”
“All the accounting,” Morgan said. “There’s a box of papers, an old file cabinet full of information.
Half of the accounts are still in written ledgers.
The other half are a mess on the computer.
The old computer.” He added the emphasis, not expecting the low chuckle he received from Nimble, lovely and soft and so different from Mabel’s rant about how his aunt had done things the old-fashioned way and that was just fine with the people of Hysham.
The conversation felt easy, as if he’d known Nimble a while and could share idle thoughts with him without coming under a barrage of questions, the answers to which would lock him in like a hundred-year contract, the fine print too small to read.
You said you’d get those cages, those humane cages.
You said you’d clean this place up. And from the geezers: Oralee always had free donuts and coffee for us, every day like clockwork.
It was almost as though with Nimble he didn’t need to have any emotional filters in place. No shielding bubble.
Nimble got up, and Morgan thought he was leaving the table, but he came back with the three amber pill bottles and a glass of water, all of which he placed in front of Morgan, on the other side of his now-empty plate but within reach.
“Looks like you need them.” Nimble sat back down to drink his coffee, a fluid motion that caught Morgan’s attention as much as the pills did.
“I was pretending that I didn’t.” Morgan’s morning aches all sprang to life, and he took the pills, grateful for the hot breakfast so he wasn’t taking them on an empty stomach.
He was also pretending that he didn’t need his cane when he got up from the table, but he did. When he wobbled and Nimble shot out an arm to steady him, he realized that Nimble, dressed in his own clothes, up close still smelled like diesel fuel.
“You could wash your clothes, you know,” Morgan said, leaning against the counter, where he placed the pill bottles.
“I did last night.” With a flick of a glance, chin ducked, Nimble added, “Hope that’s okay.”
“Sure, of course,” Morgan said.
The pills were kicking in, and while it felt nice to be pain-free, he needed to stay active and focus on what he could get done: finish going through the store’s accounts and mail off those forms and invoices that couldn’t be emailed, all while drinking more coffee than was probably good for him.
And he needed to keep his mind off the memory of Nimble, standing there in overly large, borrowed sweatpants, the slide of skin, the soft—
“I’ll get the dishes,” Morgan said quickly.
“I can do them,” Nimble said, offering as if he felt he needed to earn his keep and then some.
In the face of that energy, Morgan sat back down and turned his attention to the remains of his coffee and the list in his head.
He did his best to ignore Nimble at the sink, humming under his breath, happy as a clam, up to his elbows in suds and hot water.
And looked out at the snow coming down hard.
The sheriff and Mabel had both said it’d be a three-, maybe four-day blizzard. Today was day two. Which meant he had one or two more days to stay indoors with a guest in his house who probably wouldn’t steal from him but who couldn’t be entirely trusted.
Still, it was oddly nice to have company.
Morgan had finished his coffee by the time Nimble was done with the dishes. Foam flecked the thighs of his worn blue jeans as he turned and leaned against the sink, looking at Morgan as though for more orders.
“I’m headed down to the office to get some paperwork done.” Morgan stood up slowly, gripping his cane. “My aunt left piles of it.” It might be better to focus on that, rather than linger in the kitchen where Nimble was such a pleasant eyeful.
“I’ll make another pot of coffee later,” Nimble said. “I saw a package of cookies in the groceries I put away, too. Want me to bring you some?”
Morgan paused, flexing his fingers around the handle of his cane. Everybody in town had been friendly, but in a busybody kind of way: poking their noses into his business, wanting to share memories of an aunt and uncle he’d barely known. Welcoming him to a town that he had no desire to be in.
But here was Nimble, dark-haired with his sweet smile, offering to bring Morgan coffee and a treat. Not, it seemed, in an effort to encourage Morgan to let him stay, but just to be kind.
Getting the accounts in order was the top priority. The second being the mice and potential raccoon problem, but that was in the storage room, so that task could wait for another day.
“Yes, thank you,” Morgan said. “If it isn’t any trouble.”
“No trouble,” Nimble said easily.
Morgan hobbled down the stairs and into the dark office. He opened the blinds partway and shivered as he looked at the thermostat on the wall.
It wasn’t modern and electric like the one in his apartment back in Denver; rather, it was a mechanical one with a slider and faded lines for each number. There was one like it in the parlor upstairs, and both operated a furnace in the small cellar.
He slid the temperature to sixty-nine and leaned his cane against his hip to blow on his hands and rub them together. The room would warm up, even if a bit more slowly than he’d like.
Maybe he could even guide himself to the floor to make another fire in the pot-bellied stove. Which, he noticed, was tightly closed, and it was only then he remembered that he’d been watching the flames when he’d heard Nimble coming in the back door.
Nimble must have put the fire out and closed the vents, as careful as could be. Now that Morgan thought about it, he’d mentioned it the night before, when he’d been half out of his mind with too much Percocet. And Nimble had taken care of everything.
Above him, the floorboards creaked. It was Nimble moving around, making coffee, being domestic in a house not his own. Morgan thought he heard the washing machine going.
Now that Nimble wasn’t in the room with him, it was easier to be irritated, felt more normal to want his visitor gone.
Which was pointless. Nimble couldn’t go anywhere until the storm ended.
As to where he would go then, Morgan had no idea.
Nimble had been closemouthed about where he’d come from and why he was hopping trains across the country like some kind of modern-day hobo.
Well, come the evening, when Morgan’s work was done, he was going to get Nimble to tell him more about himself. And then make arrangements to get Nimble back to where he came from, wherever that was, so he could do laundry and make coffee and bustle about there and not here.
He sat at the broad, heavy wooden desk, leaned his cane against the wall behind him, and booted up his laptop.
In an effort to delay tackling his aunt’s old PC, he flipped on the desk lamp, pulled out the next file in the cardboard box on the card table next to the desk, opened his spreadsheet, and wished himself the best.
He’d ordered a scanner, of course, so he could input all the information, but the blizzard had put the delivery behind. Meanwhile, he was making sense of Aunt Oralee’s filing system and getting all the pieces of paper and receipts in order.
It was a pleasant way to spend a morning, with the whirl of white outside and the room warming up inside.
And when Nimble brought that coffee down, he didn’t just bring it in a mug, no. He had a wooden tray with the coffee, sure, but also a small pitcher of milk, a little bowl of sugar cubes, and a white plate with three gingersnaps on it.
“You don’t have to do all this,” Morgan said as Nimble placed the tray on the only empty spot on the desk. “Go to so much trouble.”
“I wanted to,” Nimble said. “I found this stuff when I was putting the dishes away. The cookies taste great, by the way.”
Morgan picked up one of the cookies and wondered when the last time was that his Aunt Oralee had used the little set to serve coffee to guests. It felt rather morose to be thinking that, so he didn’t mention it to Nimble. Instead, he asked, “Are you doing laundry?”
“I just switched it to the dryer,” Nimble said. “Some towels and dish towels. Hope that’s okay.”
“That’s fine.” Morgan shrugged, wincing as he sat up straight, as if part of him wanted to demonstrate how ready he was to finish his task.
“Do you need more pills?” Nimble asked, hovering as though he were Morgan’s personal pill minder. An idea that didn’t bother Morgan as much as it might have.
“I think I should take some after lunch.”
“I can make whatever,” Nimble said. “There’s steak and more soup and all kinds of things.”
None of those sounded good, and neither did the idea of Nimble waiting on him hand and foot. The surgeon and the physical therapist had both told Morgan that his knee would heal fully, but that it would take time and that he needed to do his exercises. Needed to move about.
But since his aunt’s passing, the exercises had gone by the wayside. He hated being dependent on anyone, but if Nimble was taking care of all the things that took Morgan ages and ages, then maybe he could squeeze those exercises in and feel like he was on the road to recovery.
On the other hand, he should be the one waiting on his guest, not the other way around. Except Nimble wasn’t really a guest. He was someone who’d gotten stranded by the blizzard, and Morgan was doing him a favor.
Once the storm was over, Nimble would be on his way. Morgan would send Nimble on his way, because the last thing Morgan needed was a housemate of uncertain origin with nothing to his name but the clothes on his back.
Surely Nimble had somewhere he’d rather be, right? And surely Morgan shouldn’t get too used to his company, or anyone’s, since his plan was to head back to Denver as soon as was humanly possible.