Chapter 9
L enore stood in Brandon’s arms, surprisingly comfortable within the strength of his embrace. She wasn’t surprised that she had broken down into tears, only that it had happened within the first five minutes on the first day of having him there.
He simply had no idea how much it meant to her that he had come. That he had stayed. That he had signed that contract. Even that he wanted to start early.
She finally managed to compose herself enough to step away. Brandon released her easily, and Lenore quickly wiped her eyes again. They seemed to be leaking so much, and she couldn’t get rid of the wetness. She lifted the hem of her shirt and quickly dried her face.
Brandon said nothing and barely gave her any room to breathe.
After a moment, as Lenore took a deep breath, her emotions stormed through her in the strangest of ways.
He switched the clipboard to his other hand and turned to face the chicken coop.
She did the same, startling as his hand brushed hers.
A moment later, he slipped his fingers between hers and said, “Just hold on to me for a minute.”
Lenore’s chest tightened all over again, as if someone had wound a rubber band around her body and kept twisting and twisting and twisting . The only thing preventing her from spiraling into sobs was the warm, steady strength of Brandon’s hand in hers.
She drew another breath, her throat tight but her chest relaxing. With one more breath, she was able to open her mouth and say, “I’d love it if we could fix up the chicken coop and get more birds here. That would be a top priority for me.”
Brandon nodded, and Lenore caught the movement in her peripheral vision.
“I think it’s smart to have the barn be one of our very top priorities,” she said. “I know it needs to be weatherproofed and cleaned out. There are probably some supplies in there that we can use for other projects.”
“I definitely want to make a list of supplies,” Brandon said, but he didn’t lift his clipboard to write anything down.
She turned and walked to the end of the chicken coop, her hand trailing behind her, still in Brandon’s, as he followed.
“All of this needs to be cleaned out,” she said. “I think there’s some lumber out here and various other things.”
Brandon dropped her hand then and surveyed the land. It had literally been used as a dumping ground for pallets, buckets, lawnmowers that didn’t run anymore, and anything else that Lenore didn’t know what to do with or that wouldn’t fit in the barn.
“I’d love for all of this over here to be livestock pastures and enclosures with strong fences to keep predators out.”
The scratching of his pencil moving across the paper almost soothed Lenore.
“What’s the soil like?” he asked. “I can see it grows grasses and weeds. But what about alfalfa, potatoes, carrots, radishes?”
“I don’t know,” Lenore said. She did a one-eighty and faced the house. “I have that small greenhouse that my daddy started up against the side of the cabin. I’m only growing kale, lettuce, and some herbs in it right now, but I have good success with tomatoes when it’s warmer.”
She swallowed and told herself not to be embarrassed. “I have a hard time growing anything outside the greenhouse.”
“Not enough water.” Brandon cut her a look, asking but not really asking.
She shook her head because she couldn’t argue with him. There wasn’t enough water to cultivate rows of potatoes and carrots and corn—all things she knew she could grow in the proper season, if she could get the things she needed.
“That greenhouse is on the wrong side of the house,” he said. “We need to move it to the south side. I think we should set up your whole garden area over there.”
She switched her gaze to the south side of the cabin, which was the area between the two houses.
“You can do outdoor gardening year-round here,” he said. “We can make some hoop beds, and we’ll be able to control the temperature in both the winter and summer. Can we go look at that?” He nodded toward it with his hat but didn’t take the first step until she did.
“Absolutely,” Lenore said, praying with every step she took that he would find at least one good thing about the homestead. Just one.
Admiral, as usual, led the pack. Susie-Q stayed right at Lenore’s side. She let her fingertips brush the dog’s head every so often as a gentle reminder that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t a terrible person. She could do this.
“My dad started building it before he got hurt,” she said, opening the door and letting Brandon go in first. “I did my best to finish it. I know it’s not airtight. I struggle to keep it warm enough in the winter.”
“Why’d you build it on this side of the house, if you don’t mind me asking?” Brandon peered around at the hanging parts in the corner and the beds down each side of the twelve-by-eight-foot greenhouse.
“It’s too windy on the south side,” Lenore said. “And these panes kept getting ripped out of the frames.”
“Are they polycarbonate?” Brandon asked.
“Yes,” Lenore said.
“What we need to do is build a wind blind,” he said. “Instead of using the cabin as one.” His pencil scratched, and a couple of minutes later, he tilted the clipboard toward her. “Like this.”
She stared at the drawing, recognizing the roof of her cabin and the rain gutter there. Her eyes drank and drank, and she couldn’t believe he’d sketched this out in only a few minutes.
Heck, she couldn’t believe this idea existed inside his mind.
He pointed with the tip of his pencil. “We should be collecting all the rain that falls,” he said.
“All water right off the roof. We feed it into the greenhouse with a tube. It’s powered by gravity—as the rain comes down onto the roof, it naturally flows down into the greenhouse, where we can distribute that along the beds. ”
He looked around. “I don’t see a watering system in here.”
Lenore shook her head. “I come out and water it every couple of days.”
“With the bottled water you’re buying at the store?” he asked, such incredulity in his voice that a new round of stupidity burned through Lenore.
“Yes,” she said tersely. “I have no other way to do it.”
“Right now,” he said. “You don’t have any other way to do it right now .” He looked down at the drawing again, and Lenore didn’t love the bite in his voice. She didn’t hate it either, because he wasn’t here to sugarcoat anything.
“In front of the greenhouse here, we bring in those tires and stack them up. They’ll absorb heat during the day and provide that heat to the greenhouse at night. It’ll help regulate the temperature.”
“Really?” Lenore asked.
“Absolutely,” Brandon said. “And it works year-round. I helped Libby and Mister Glover put a greenhouse behind their place a couple years ago.” He offered her a blindingly handsome smile.
“We painted barrels black and filled those with water. Black absorbs the heat, and the water holds it for a long time. Then, it releases it slowly as temperatures cool. It’s extremely regulatory. ”
He moved the tip of his pencil to another part of the drawing.
“Along this side is where we stack your firewood. It could be right along the back deck. Then, in the winter, all you have to do is go out and grab it. It can be sheltered by a roof extension that cuts the wind from the north and allows you easy access to your firewood at the same time.”
“Okay,” Lenore said, the word falling from her mouth.
“Down here.” Brandon took a breath and kept on going.
“We create low-level beds, only a foot or so off the ground. We shelter them with railroad ties that are three or four feet up. That will help block the wind, and the railroad ties help keep the soil warm in the winter. We can cover them in the summer to keep the sun off and help reduce evaporation. We can run irrigation lines out of the bottom of the greenhouse here to each of these beds.”
He made broad strokes with his pencil, indicating where the water lines would go. Lenore heard the words coming out of his mouth. She saw the drawing. Everything seemed to make perfect sense—yet she had no idea how to execute any of it.
“How much will this cost?” she asked instead of admitting that she had no clue how to even move the building attached to the side of her cabin. Move a building. Who would know how to do that?
“I don’t think it’ll cost us anything,” Brandon said. “Just our time and energy.”
“Really?” Lenore asked. “That can’t be true.”
“You’ve got the tires here, don’t you?” he asked.
“I saw several pallets over there. Those just need to be chopped up and stacked as firewood. Bam. Wind blind. You’ve got the greenhouse right here.
Maybe we’d need a hose, but I bet your barn is gonna have some hosing in it.
I think we’re going to be able to find so much on this land, Lenore, to use any way we want. ”
“What about the beds?” she asked. “I don’t know if I have railroad ties.”
“We’ll upcycle and recycle anything we find,” he said easily, as if the supplies and materials they needed would simply materialize out of the weeds. To be honest, Lenore thought they might. Brandon was that magical, that magnetic.
He nodded toward the door of the greenhouse, and she went out first, as it was a one-way in and one-way out situation. She waited for him, and he went around the greenhouse to the back of the cabin.
“You’ve got a nice back deck like mine,” he said. “Good roof here. I can extend it on this side.”
He walked the entire width of the cabin, his eyes searching the rain gutter.
“We’ll put a roof extender here. We’ll put the greenhouse over here where it gets more sun in the winter.
We can put the beds all along here. I bet we can do five, uh…
probably five three-by-ten-foot beds. That’ll give you an additional one hundred fifty feet of gardening. ”
He walked out past the deck another fifteen or twenty feet. “And we’ll build a new wind blind right here,” he said. “Between the cabins.”
“What will that be?” she asked.