29. Saturday
CHAPTER 29
SATURDAY
T eddy showed up early Saturday morning unannounced (unless you counted the informal announcement, from Parton, immediately before Teddy knocked, which Maggie did not).
Maggie was glad for a timely reminder of why she’d been so eager to put an ocean between herself and the rest of her family at twenty-one. Ignore a few (days worth of) texts and, if you’re accessible by car, oh look! Here everyone is! Of course, ten years ago, it had been her mother, with her father occasionally in tow, showing up at her shitty off-campus two-bedroom and waking her roommates at an ungodly hour. Turned out the showing up unannounced thing was apparently genetic. Although, nature versus nurture…who could say?
Teddy managed to slip inside and shut the door behind himself before Parton pounced, paws on Teddy’s shoulders, tail wagging his entire body as he slobbered all over Teddy’s beard. To Maggie this seemed deeply unsanitary, but it appeared to delight her brother to no end. Between Parton’s beard slurps, Teddy called over, “Hey M&M, how’re you feeling?”
Maggie was actually feeling significantly better. She was still crampy and bleeding, but the nausea was gone. It was like the first almost-warm day after a long winter. The weather wasn’t actually perfect, but it was such a relief that it wasn’t grey and sleeting that you called fifty degrees balmy, put on shorts and a tank top, and headed out for a r?—
“Wait, what do you mean how am I feeling?” She hadn’t told her brother she was feeling anything less than great. What looked like guilt flashed briefly across Teddy’s face before, very conveniently, Parton’s weight finally knocked him all the way to the floor. By the time Teddy rolled out from under the dog and pushed himself to standing, the innocent smile was back on his face.
“What do you mean ‘what do I mean?’ I mean hey, how are you?” He raised his voice to a pitch that was close to a squeak. “I’m fine, Teddy, thanks. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Teddy, thanks. How are you?” Maggie repeated, dutifully, because she was not her mother. She could let a diversion divert her. Happily. With pleasure. She was extremely diverted. “You’re here shockingly early.”
“I’m pretty good, thanks,” her brother said, deliberately ignoring her comment about the hour. He bent, fished a rope toy out from under the edge of the couch, and crossed to one of the kitchen’s wooden chairs. “So,” he said, sitting down and easily luring Parton into a game of tug.
Maggie watched what was an evenly matched contest, trying to figure out what exactly he was prompting her to say. She had no idea. So she went with an echoing, “So.”
Teddy looked up from the game, letting Parton win on a final tug and retreat to the couch with his spoils. “You didn’t read it, did you?”
Maggie didn’t know what “it” was, but unless it was a dog-eared copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles she was pretty sure she hadn’t. “I’ve been…kind of swamped,” she offered, weakly.
He just nodded, didn’t hassle her at all. Suspicious. “Check your email. From Monday.”
Maggie grabbed her phone from where she’d left it next to the coffee maker and tapped over to the email application. The little envelope emblem indicated an appallingly unprofessional number of unread emails. One of which, subject line: Ye Newe Plannes, was from Teddy. There were several attachments.
As she read through the email and then the appended documents, she heard Teddy help himself to the rest of the pot of coffee. When she was partway through the second attachment, he set a second mug down on the kitchen table in front of her and pulled out the chair she’d been hovering next to. She sat without looking up and kept reading.
She’d asked Teddy for a consult and a ballpark quote about what she’d need to do to make Blue Harbor an all-season destination. She’d given him pretty vague parameters, and she’d been so distracted for the past week that she’d completely taken her eye off the ball. She’d asked him two weeks earlier and hadn’t wondered once why he hadn’t sent her anything yet. Although, as it turned out, he had sent her something. Five days ago. He must have called in a lot of favors, because he’d actually sent over not one but two separate proposals, complete with sketches. The first was much larger in scale (and correspondingly larger in cost). The second would allow for fall and spring activities without shoring up drafty cabins for full winter use. He’d also attached his resume to the email. It was titled Ye Formale Resume of Theodore B. McArthur, Bachelor of the Arts, and was typed up in an Old English style font.
Maggie took a sip of the coffee he’d left for her and began to skim her brother’s credentials. “You started your own company?” Her tone was sharply surprised and betrayed her somewhat unflattering assessment of his competence. When she looked up, she could see that he’d been braced for it. His bearded chin jutted out toward her, although his pose was otherwise relaxed, right leg bent, calf resting across his left thigh, some long hair escaping carelessly from his top bun.
“McArthur Construction, LLC. I wanted to call it ‘Theodore’s Door Emporium,’ but someone pointed out that we do plan to offer more than doors. Plus, there’s already a ‘Theo’s Doors.’ Great minds.”
Maggie just nodded. He was so exactly her same idiot little brother and so completely different at the same time.
“We haven’t actually done a project, yet, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time around here working on schmancy vacation homes for the rich and aspirationally famous, so I know all the good subs. And I’ve been thinking of moving out West for a while. I’m not really a city boy at heart. And The Hulk needs room to roam.”
Considering that his dog weighed all of eight pounds, Maggie doubted she was a primary motivator.
“Look at you, Teddy Bear!” Was she impressed, against her better judgment? “Let me go through this all more carefully, and I’ll give you a call?” She realized, belatedly, that it was probably rude to kick him out since he’d presumably driven more than two hours to get there and was, you know, her brother. “Or, did you want to stay? You didn’t come all the way down here just to tell me to check my email, did you?”
“Nah.” He downed the rest of the contents of his mug and stood to put it in the sink. “Gotta get going. You should probably give Mom a call, though.”
“I don’t think I’m quite ready to pitch this to her,” Maggie said, following suit.
“Well, that, too. But mostly I think she’s about to send out a search party. She said she hasn’t heard from you in weeks.”
Maggie had been conscientiously saving her mother’s texts and voicemails for careful review at a later date, but—“It hasn’t been weeks. It’s been like a week , maybe.”
“Potato, potahto, M&M.”
The man had a point. “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll walk you to your truck. We can stop in the kitchen and beg some vegan biscuits off Chef Chuck.”
“That’s alright. I have breakfast plans.” Teddy flashed her a mysterious grin and strode to the door. “Bye Bud,” he called to Parton, who was still happily sprawled across the couch gnawing on the rope toy. “Bye M&M.” Then, with maximal gravitas, he added “I look forward to your call and the opportunity to further discuss my qualifications for the position.” And he was gone.
Maggie moved to the front window to watch him go. She wasn’t snooping, exactly. She was just…interested. And she only became more interested when Teddy took a left at the end of the path leading up to the cottage. He knew very well that the parking lot was to the right. He’d just come from there…hadn’t he? The left branch only led to the nurse’s cabin.
And it was April’s day off.
Maggie knew that she needed to take it easy the rest of the day, even if she was no longer feeling like death warmed over. She was feeling more like death fresh from the oven. Her goal for the following day was to not feel like death at all.
Fortunately, lying on the couch certainly counted as taking it easy. And if she happened to lie with her laptop on her stomach? Well, that was basically a weighted heating pad. And if her laptop happened to be open to the plans Teddy had pulled together? And maybe also to a series of browser tabs about adult summer camps and rustic time shares and cozy destination weddings? She was literally lying on the couch READING. Maggie McArthur was excellent at self-care.