Chapter 2 Magic Hour
Magic Hour
LUCA HATED to admit it to himself, but he was anticipating Magic Hour more than usual today.
It had started when the job he and his guys had shown up for that morning had been cancelled, because the price of their materials had gone up so much that their client hadn’t been able to afford the project.
It had only been a mother-in-law cottage—he and his boys could have done it in a week or two—but the average Joe only had so big a cushion, and in this case, Joe decided mom-in-law could continue to live in the guest room.
Luca had met the old bat, and he had his doubts—and from one glance at Mrs. Average Joe’s face as her husband had given them the news, he thought she did too.
Since it was her mother-in-law, she should know.
But hey, he was neither marriage counselor nor old-bat remover, and he and his guys were just trying to get by.
He’d let the guys go home and had driven to his trailer on the tiny warehouse lot—the “location” of his business, where he kept materials for upcoming jobs as well as the trailer office—to see if he and his office assistant (also known as his little sister, Allegra) could juggle up another job for that week.
They managed to move their next job up a week—but only a week—and he had to tell the guys he had no work for them until next Monday.
So that had sucked.
And then as he and Allegra had been settling gloomily into their lunch—a big triple portion of Chinese dumplings to share—Allegra had confessed tearfully that her shitty boyfriend had broken up with her and asked her to move her stuff in the next two days or he’d dump it on the lawn.
Because she was pregnant.
She was pregnant, alone, and wholly dependent on the income Luca was trying to provide with the company that was getting more and more frayed shoestring by the day.
Aces.
But Allegra had been scared, and their parents weren’t speaking to either of them (judgy assholes), and he’d been all she had.
So what had started as a quiet lunch where Luca could get his head on straight had turned into an angst fest during which he had to hold his sobbing sister and help her pull on her big-girl pants so they could get through the next couple of weeks of figuring out what to do.
Of course the obvious solution—temporary—was to move her into the spare room of Luca’s apartment, but Luca knew that wouldn’t last. Even without the baby, Allegra liked to spread out, and Luca needed somewhere—a yard, a den, a study, somewhere—to himself in his own home.
His last boyfriend had called him “withholding.” Luca had called himself “recovering from a childhood with parents who wouldn’t let me poop without checking to make sure I wasn’t doing something the Bible says I shouldn’t.”
His last boyfriend hadn’t thought that was funny, and Luca had, and that’s why his last boyfriend was his last boyfriend.
So by the time Luca got to his grandparents’ place to see what new horrors awaited (he’d had to replace the subflooring and drywall in both bathrooms and the adjoining bedrooms, and don’t even get him started on the dry rot in the kitchen), he’d really been looking forward to Magic Hour.
His grandparents’ neighbor, Mr. Browning, was a quiet man—but cute.
So cute. He’d probably been quite a twinkie delight in his twenties, but now, at not yet forty, he was quietly pretty, with pale brown hair and kind eyes with the crinkles at the corners that said he smiled more than he frowned.
Luca knew (because his grandmother was a terrible gossip) that the man had lost his husband not too long before they moved to the villa, so Luca had been trying to respect the man’s grief, but oh, that didn’t stop him from enjoying Magic Hour.
Every evening, weather permitting, Mr. Browning would come out and sit on his front porch and knit or crochet.
He had a heater for cold days and a light for the fall and winter days when it was dark by six o’clock, and he would simply sit quietly, listening to something on his EarPods, and create… magic.
Luca knew knitting and crocheting because his grandmother still did it.
Hell, he’d been the one who’d been responsible for moving half her yarn to storage, with the promise that he’d take her “yarn shopping” from her stores once a month.
His parents had told his grandmother to throw it away, and Luca could forgive them for cutting him off for being gay, but he would never forgive them for the tears of hurt and devastation in his grandmother’s eyes when she told him, “Bianca says I have to throw it away. Your father agrees with her, and now….”
Luca could have cheerfully killed them both.
He didn’t do either craft, but when he was a kid, he used to ask his grandmother, in wonder, what she was going to do with all the pretty yarn.
“Anything, Luca,” she’d reply with pride. “This yarn can be anything in the world.”
Allegra puckishly referred to the yarn stash as “Schrodinger’s Hats,” because until you opened the box, anything was possible.
Luca knew that nice Mr. Browning and his grandmother used to plan projects all the time.
Sometimes she’d buy yarn for him, because she said his husband had put him on a “yarn diet” (which sort of sounded like an asshole move to Luca, but hey, wasn’t his relationship, right?), but they’d trade patterns and all the neighborly things that most people probably associated with cooking.
As far as Luca knew, they’d traded recipes too, but what he really loved was how much his grandmother enjoyed having somebody to talk about yarn with.
He knew Mr. Browning still visited his grandmother, which made him like the man even more, and his grandma told him that they used to “yarn” on the porch together sometimes, but Luca had never seen that.
What he’d seen in the last six months as he’d been working on the house to get it ready to sell had been Mr. Browning himself, a soft-handed miracle, a quiet, self-contained rainbow maker using deft movements and brightly colored fiber to make useful, beautiful things—mostly for other people—and infusing the world with a sort of silent happiness by the act of creation.
Luca really needed that quiet happiness this evening.
But the minute Mr. Browning sat down, Luca knew there was something wrong.
The man was chilling in the shade on his white-cushioned porch swing in a pair of Dockers and a button-down that looked oddly formal for a man in his late thirties.
He often dressed like that, Luca knew, because those were his teaching clothes, but the effect was still…
old. Stuffy. Stodgy. Which didn’t match what his grandmother said about the man at all.
But it wasn’t his clothes that struck Luca wrong. It was the project in his lap.
For one thing, it wasn’t… bright. Luca was used to seeing him work with bright colors—solids or variegated miracles, woolly rainbows—and loving them. Stopping often to appreciate their effect against each other and smile.
But this project was… well, brown.
Not that Luca objected to brown—some people looked quite fetching in it. But this guy—that bright yarn stash seemed to be where all his excitement lay, and now it had been dampened to… well, brown. Plain brown.
It didn’t sit well with Luca, although it wasn’t his place to say anything. God forbid he try to change the man’s yarn choice, right?
But the sixth time he watched Mr. Browning glance down at the project in his hands and then crumple his face like he was about to cry, something in Luca broke.
“Heya, Mr. Browning—can I help you with something?”
The man glanced up in surprise, swiveling his head wildly like he’d gotten caught picking his nose or something. His gaze landed on Luca, and he stopped abruptly and chuckled to himself, taking an earbud out as he did so.
“Oh my goodness, Luca. You startled me.” He gave a quick brilliant grin. “I thought I was at school for a minute. You don’t need to call me Mr. Browning, you know—my name is Isaac.”
Oh wow. This was like winning the lottery or something.
Luca grinned. “Really? See, my grandma, she only talks about ‘Mr. Browning’—I don’t think she ever mentioned your first name!”
Isaac’s laughter was really a balm to the soul.
“See, that’s weird. Grandparents are a gray area, right?
First name, or is that too formal, or do you just call them ‘Grandma’ and ‘Grandpa’ because that’s how the people your age know them?
” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m rambling.
Anyway, yes, you can call me Isaac, but if you don’t mind, I’ll keep calling your grandmother Mrs. Giordano, or things will get weird. ”
Luca chuckled with him. “Yeah, I can definitely see that. Okay, so, uhm, Isaac.” He sobered. “What seems to be the problem? I… I gotta admit, I’ve watched you come out here and yarn for a lot of days, and I’ve never seen you so unhappy.”
Luca had just finished hauling most of the kitchen cabinets out of the house and loading as many as he could fit into his truck.
He’d be back the next day with one of his guys, working for bennies and not much else, to load the rest and then to bring back the flooring in one of the company vans.
But right now he was pretty much done for the night.
With a quiet sigh, he moved toward the four-foot plank fence and leaned against it, taking in Isaac’s tidy if boring yard, and the white-painted farm-style house, two stories, with at least two master suites and probably two more smaller rooms, as well as a downstairs guest bathroom.
It was far too big for two men—he’d always thought that—but now, with only Mr., uhm, Isaac living there, it seemed way too large.
And Isaac, sitting cross-legged in his school clothes while staring glumly at the pile of brown in his hands, seemed even less substantial than he had all winter.