Chapter Two
AUSTIN ALMOST missed the driveway, the rain was coming down so hard.
At the last safe moment he spotted the little green metal numbered sign—implemented to help emergency services find rural addresses—next to the slash of gravel, and hit the brakes.
The car slowed enough to make the turn without ending up in the ditch, and Austin pulled into the long, curved driveway.
Even on a clear day, you couldn’t see the house from the road.
It was blocked by a tall stand of cedars.
After all the Sundays Austin had spent out here having lunch with DeeDee, he should’ve recognized he was almost on top of the place, but sometimes it snuck up on him.
Today he was blaming the rain. Everything looked different in the rain, and he hadn’t been out here since the early days of summer.
The pole barn came into view first—a long flat gray building with three single-car doors, trimmed in red.
To its right was another garage, this one white-sided and attached to the house via a sort of enclosed breezeway—a drafty hallway with many large windows and little insulation—that had to be an addition.
Austin didn’t think hundred-year-old brick two-story farmhouses usually had attached garages, but he hadn’t asked DeeDee much about the house’s history either.
He wished he had the garage opener. It would be nice to park out of the wet, and the slate-gray October sky promised nothing but misery for the next several hours. But he didn’t, so he parked as close to the house as he could without being on the patio and settled in to wait for Joe.
The whole thing was still weird. Austin never expected to own a house.
He was proud of himself for pulling together the funds to buy the garage and had spent six weeks more or less squatting in it while he outfitted the space above it with a kitchen and bathroom he acquired piece by piece from the Habitat ReStore downtown.
It was ugly as fuck, sure, but it was his.
In a couple years he figured he’d renovate and get some better appliances and bathroom fixtures that were white instead of their current eighties mixtape of style.
He could move that timetable up significantly if he had the proceeds from half a house to work with.
Or, said a tiny voice in the back of his head, you could keep it.
He squashed that thought viciously as headlights illuminated the garage and a shiny green pickup pulled in next to him.
Austin couldn’t keep this house himself. He didn’t have the money to buy Joe out. He could barely afford the mortgage payments on the garage. So the only way he could keep the house was if Joe wanted to keep it too. And who’d want to keep a house with a complete stranger?
Joe parked the truck. White lettering on the side read Romano Tree and Landscape Service. Austin wondered idly how much equipment he had and whether he already had an agreement with a mechanic.
Before he could reach for the door handle, Joe rolled down his window and gestured for him to do the same.
Austin wrinkled his nose at the raindrops spattering against the sill of his car.
Joe quirked up one side of his mouth in a wry half smile. “At least we won’t have to wonder if the roof leaks, I guess.”
Jesus. Austin hoped not.
He didn’t know what to make of Joe Romano.
At first he’d taken him for a jerk, what with his snarky remark about Austin’s punctuality or lack thereof.
Then he thought he was a homophobe, the way he’d reacted to Austin’s joking house husband remark.
And then the guy turned around and started flirting.
Austin couldn’t figure it out. Maybe he was trying to win Austin over only to screw him on the home thing.
Austin was leaning toward a different explanation: he was just kind of a disaster.
Speaking of disasters.
They both ran for the front porch, and after they stood a moment to shake the rain off themselves, Joe took out his key and unlocked the door into a house worthy of reality-TV intervention.
Well, shit.
“This is gonna take a while,” Joe said as they stood in the front entryway, eyeing up the contents of their house.
“Did she ever throw anything away?” Austin wondered. From their current vantage point, it certainly looked like DeeDee Mitchell had never found an object she couldn’t keep.
Joe sighed. “Okay. I hate to say this, but we should probably start in the kitchen. As much as I want to tackle that stack of mystery boxes”—he gestured to the living room and a pile of mailing boxes, some apparently yet to be opened—“we should probably deal with the food before we regret… not dealing with the food.”
Austin swallowed and tried not to think about the mold or rodents that spoiled food could attract.
Fortunately, DeeDee’s hoarding hadn’t reached the stage of crowding the hallway to impassibility, so they were able to make their way to the kitchen without excavations.
On their way through the dining room, Austin tore his attention away from the solid wood furniture pieces that were the stuff of interior design dreams and the box stuffed with paper and topped with a teal Pyrex bowl from the 1960s.
He locked his eyes on the kitchen doorway and followed Joe inside.
They were quiet for a handful of seconds.
Then Joe announced, “This is just depressing.”
Austin had to agree. The space was minuscule.
In front of them to the right as they stopped in the doorway was the fridge, sandwiched between pantry cupboards and the old chimney.
To their immediate left was a pink stove from the 1980s, complete with chrome handles and analog dials.
The oven sat at the end of a set of U-shaped cupboards that ringed most of the kitchen, which was so tiny the oven door would actually block access to the lower cupboards when opened.
Nearly every available surface was covered with stuff—canned goods, boxes of pasta, a jar of pens.
“Where should we start?” he asked faintly. The prospect of trying to organize this tiny, cramped kitchen made him want a nap.
Joe, apparently, wasn’t as daunted. He told Austin to avoid the fridge and waved at the countertops. “I’ll be right back.”
He backtracked to the front door, and Austin figured it wouldn’t hurt to follow directions just this once.
The countertops were crowded with jars, tins, and dishes, but at least all the horrors were out in the open.
He wasn’t looking forward to seeing what the cupboards had in store. Opening one might cause an avalanche.
Since the stovetop was mercifully clear, he figured it was a good place to start sorting—once he made sure all the dials were turned off.
He’d assessed a half-dozen lidless mason jars as undamaged and opened three tins to find tea, a package of unopened cookies, and several mismatched buttons by the time Joe returned with a plastic crate.
“I figured we’d need a few things.” He set the crate on the floor. Inside were a couple of folded boxes, some respirator masks, work gloves, rolls of packing tape, and an unopened box of garbage bags.
“We should start with three piles—garbage, donate, and undecided-slash-keep.”
Joe nodded. “Sounds good. Though I suspect the garbage pile is going to outweigh everything else.” He tore open the box of garbage bags, then shook out an extra-large, extra-strength black bag.
“So, what have you already found for donation?” He held the bag out like he thought Austin might start throwing.
“Uh.” Austin hesitated. “Is food a donation item?”
“From this kitchen?” Joe asked, and, okay, that was a valid point. “Who knows how long some of this stuff has been here? Do you want to check expiry dates on everything?”
That wouldn’t be a good use of time. Austin knew that. But the idea of throwing away food that could still be safely eaten when he knew how many families went without made his chest feel tight.
“Maybe we need a fourth pile,” he said after a moment. “Food items to sort through later. Anything that’s open or partially consumed can go out, otherwise we put it in a box to look at in, like….”
Joe’s lips twitched. “In, like, four more months when we’ve finished going through the junk in the rest of the house and it’s had that much more time to expire?”
Austin huffed but stood his ground. “Humor me.”
Joe shook his head, but he built a box and helped Austin start packing unopened boxes of mac and cheese, Rice-A-Roni, and more cans of tuna than Austin had seen at one time outside of a Costco.
Between that and getting rid of all the open food, they had a whole four square feet of counter space after only twenty minutes.
“Okay, that was a good idea,” Joe admitted.
He pulled a Sharpie out of his back pocket and marked the box with FOOD, then carried it out to the dining room, where it would probably get lost in the pile of other crap, but it wasn’t like they could put it outside in the rain.
“Let’s go with ‘other things that are obviously trash’ next. ”
Stacks of old bills, decaying rubber bands, and bread tags were easy enough to agree on. But Austin protested when Joe dropped one of the tins of assorted screws and nails into the bag.
“Hey! Those are still usable.”
Joe cocked an eyebrow. “You want to reach in and grab them, be my guest.”
One of the things they tossed was a jar of grease from beside the sink.
Austin was plenty familiar with getting greasy, but rancid cooking grease that had been sitting in DeeDee’s kitchen for at least four months—and probably way longer, given the state of the house—was a whole other category of gross than run-of-the-mill WD-40.
“Everyone needs a good can of hardware,” he grumbled sulkily.
“Maybe, but”—Joe gestured around them—“in case you haven’t noticed, we have our work cut out for us. It’s not like we’re not going to find another six tins of random crap. We can’t save them all. We’ll be here forever.”