Chapter 8
They never got around to discussing the plans to restore the Wood Room.
Lee flipped through the pages of one legal pad. “This has to be a first draft,” he noted. “Look at all the corrections. Somebody
copying from the book wouldn’t make all these mistakes.”
“It looks that way,” Thora said. She’d been compelled to read the whole set of notebooks for their heartfelt story. Now she
wanted to read them again, to search for clues about George’s inner life that he kept all the way inside. For every petty
urge she had to gossip and eavesdrop and be nosy, she experienced the flip side of the coin: a deep, genuine curiosity to
know more about someone. She could understand George better with these notebooks. She could also understand Lee better.
“I know I said we should make a plan for this room, but I think I want to spend some time reading these notebooks if that’s
okay with you.”
Thora didn’t mind. She’d already read the notebooks once and could wait a bit to dive back in. The real plan was to keep him out of her hair and off her mind so she could focus on writing, and the notebooks could do that perfectly well.
“Of course,” Thora said. Lee sat on the velvet settee.
Thora’s mind buzzed as Lee read. George and Thora loved storytelling, but they were both writers, too. More than that, George
had written something that connected with readers so intensely that Lee was named for it. His very life paid tribute to words
that originated in her favorite uncle’s mind, here at Juniper.
“Did George know your name is Leaf?”
Lee’s eyes became shiny with tears. “He didn’t. Now I’m ashamed I didn’t live up to the name. I hid from it.”
“It seems George hid from his own story, so I think he would understand.”
Lee’s eyes, sad but thankful, peered into Thora too deeply and with too much honesty. The flutter she felt when he looked
at her that way was dangerously exciting. Suddenly, she deeply understood the need to hide. “I’ll leave you to read,” she
said, retreating to the Bird Room.
The quail was looking at her knowingly.
“Only one of us is taxidermied, friend, and it’s not me,” she said. “Keep your judgments to yourself.”
To keep herself from dwelling on that flutter, or heaven forbid acting on it, she pulled one of Bryony Brook’s novels from
the early 1980s called Schuss from the room’s stuffed bookshelf. She could rely on the familiar cadence of Bryony’s prose to pull her in. This was a cocaine-fueled
jaunt into the world of high fashion, with characters trapped in a Swiss ski chalet, where the snow was really coming down,
in both senses. The book straight up felt like drugs, and it was only when Thora’s eyes were stinging that she finally set
it down and shut off the quail lamp.
Immediately, her mind returned to Lee. How the tattoo artist must have loved the vast canvas of his bicep. People rarely had only one tattoo, and she was curious where else he had been inked. Her encounter with him in his towel had been too brief for a thorough inspection.
Snap out of it, she told herself. The recalcitrant part of her brain offered a different suggestion. Climb him like a tree. She imagined sweeping back into the Wood Room, pushing all the legal pads into the floor, and pinning him to the settee.
Cody, her one and only partner, thought anything beyond standard missionary was uncouth, leaving her with a limited experience
of sex. She’d never once had sex where she was on top, but she could envision it, holding on to those broad shoulders as she
went for a ride. By the time she finally slipped into sleep, her imagination had conjured Lee bending her over the desk and
calling her filthy names.
She woke up feeling oppressed by the pile of blankets she usually found comforting to sleep underneath. Waking up sweaty was
never the best way to start the day.
Her instinct, once again, was to pull out her phone, see if something was up with the weather. But the addictive device was
still powered down. She threw open the window, and the air outside was balmy. Something was obviously up with the weather.
She smelled coffee brewing.
Well, neither of them got hatcheted to death in their sleep. No mysterious phone calls. And probably nothing freaky in the
fridge, or if there was, it didn’t scare Lee badly enough to be loud about it. An unseasonably warm day was a welcome variety
of weird.
It was too hot for her robe. She couldn’t greet Lee with her tits on display in her pajamas, so she shucked off the top, threw
on a bra and T-shirt, and made her way into the kitchen.
Lee was only wearing his boxers. Damn.
Meaty thighs, her brain proclaimed, absolutely unbidden. Calm the fuck down, she told herself.
“Oh, sorry,” Lee said. “I didn’t mean to be indecent.”
Could she believe him? She ducked into the pantry bathroom as he scurried off.
She noticed the shower head was detachable. Perfect. That could help her deal with these unwelcome horny feelings before she said something irreversibly unwise. After coffee.
Lee had already set for the table for breakfast. She poured her coffee over a glassful of ice and waited for Lee’s return
to find out what they were having for breakfast.
His notebook was on the table again, but the page was not blank.
Under her request to draw a possum, he made a little cartoon depicting a room in a possum funeral home. The possum funeral
director sat opposite two possums, one agitated and one sheepish.
The caption read, I simply can’t keep waiving these cancellation fees. I’m losing business thanks to your husband’s games, Mrs. Possum.
He still had it. She always liked his goofy sense of humor. When she was working on her gossip column at the Townsend Times, he would sometimes run one of his comics by her, to see if she could punch up the language a bit. She never recognized it
as his way of showing how their humor overlapped, or that he liked her input specifically. But she never saw him do that with
anyone else. She turned the page and wrote Draw a skunk at the top.
He came to the kitchen back fully clothed, jeans and a Red Sox T-shirt.
Despite growing up in Western Mass, Thora hated the Sox. Mostly because people were insufferable assholes about them. Like they didn’t love the team more than they hated everyone else.
“Go Sox,” she said in her most exaggerated Boston accent.
“Yankees suck,” he replied. “Did that sound believable? I don’t give a shit about baseball, not that my season ticket-holding
grandmother has noticed. At least her Christmas gifts help me blend in on a job.”
While Thora came from a family that drove its reputation and wealth off a cliff, Lee’s family was merrily sailing along. Despite
the unlikely coupling of his old money dad and his hippie mom, all of Lee’s siblings went to private schools, attended fancy
colleges, and became lawyers and businesspeople. If Lee had stuck with architecture, he’d fit in reasonably well at any of
his family gatherings. As it was, he and his mom were probably the black sheep. And to hear it from Cody, Lee wasn’t trying
to find a wife to link two New England dynasties like the rest of his generation. Two strikes. He had to at least feign Red
Sox fandom, apparently.
“Tough life, college boy,” she said.
“You’re close. When I first got into painting houses, the contractor I worked with the most called me Harvard.”
“You didn’t go to Harvard.”
“Didn’t matter. I went to a fancy college, and it was the first one that came to his mind. Correcting him would have only
made it worse. How do you like your eggs?”
She wondered if calling him Harvard now would get under his skin. She could save it for a time when she wanted to piss him
off. Right now, she wanted breakfast. “Over easy.”
She drank her coffee and watched him bustle around the kitchen, cutting bread for toast, drinking his own coffee, slicing
up fruit for a salad. She could have offered to help, but she didn’t.
When the food arrived at the table, she dipped the eggs in the toast and sighed. This was the kind of breakfast that presaged a good day of work.
Lee was quiet, predictably, and let her eat in peace. She had to pipe up after a few bites of the fruit salad.
“Why is this the best fruit salad I’ve ever had?” she asked. “Most of these fruits aren’t even in season.”
“The fruit is macerated with a syrup I made. Muddled mint, lime juice, sugar.”
Muddled? Macerated? “Where did you learn to cook like this?”
“I had a nanny growing up. Denise is a great cook, and she loved teaching me.”
Thora knew Lee’s family had money; she didn’t know they had live-in nanny money. Cody had never mentioned it. He came from
a humble family that valued education, making him the scholarship student at every school he attended with Lee. Lee never
made Cody feel less than, but Cody probably harbored some jealousy. Lee didn’t have to worry about maintaining scholarships.
He wasn’t the child his parents were pinning all their hopes on. It made Cody a little brittle, but only in private, when
he vented frustrations to Thora.
“Are you still in touch with Denise?”
Lee scrubbed his hair. “She still lives with me, actually.”
Thora was flabbergasted. “You pay for a nanny as an adult?”
“Good grief, Thora, no. My mom kept her on after I went to college because my grandfather moved in and Mom needed all the
help she could get.”
This must have been the grandfather Lee wrote about in his letters. The one who loved Tree & Leaf.
“Is he still with us?” Thora asked gingerly.
Lee got a faraway look in his eyes. “No. He had a nasty, incurable degenerative disease, and he wanted medical assistance in dying. My dad wouldn’t allow it.”
“But wasn’t he your mother’s father?” Thora inquired.
“Yes, but my father held the purse strings. He thought it was too taboo, and he wouldn’t allow any of his money to pay for
it. The compromise, such as it was, was for my grandfather to move in with us, and my mother watched her beloved father slowly
turn into someone unrecognizable. After he passed, Denise was certainly ready to retire. She didn’t have any family nearby,