Chapter 6
Six
Wren
Thursday, Cal keeps his promise about the alarm. He also brings Rhett, which I’m starting to understand is a package deal I never ordered.
They turn up at two, in the lull between the lunch rush and the after-school one. Cal’s got a toolbox and a boxed new unit. Rhett’s got nothing in his hands but that grin, already loaded.
“Ten-minute job,” Cal says, setting the stepladder under the dead alarm.
“You said that about the last one. It took an hour, and I lost four scones and my dignity.”
“Different job.” He’s already up the ladder, backing the old unit off the ceiling. “This one’s got Rhett to slow it down.”
“I’m supervising.” Rhett hops up and sits himself on my counter, boots swinging, right next to the cooling rack. “It’s a skilled position. Somebody’s got to make sure Cal wires it right and doesn’t take the whole block dark.”
“You couldn’t wire a lamp,” Cal says from up above.
“I could wire a lamp, trouble.” That last word’s for me, tossed over easy, like my name’s a joke only the two of us are in on. “I choose not to. Keeps me mysterious.”
“It keeps you useless.” I slide the cooling rack out from under his hip before he can help himself. “And get off my counter. People eat off that.”
“People are going to eat what I’ve been sitting on?” He looks delighted. “That’s unsanitary. You should have signs.”
He does not get off my counter.
For all the noise, though, his eyes never leave Cal’s hands.
When Cal fumbles the ground wire, Rhett says “other one” without breaking off tormenting me, and Cal switches it without a word, and the job goes right.
They’ve done this a thousand times. You can see the whole shape of six years in how little they need to say to each other.
Rhett Maddox is the real problem. Cal’s warmth I can brace for.
It comes at you straight on, a big open thing, easy to see and easy to hold off.
Rhett comes in sideways. He says something ridiculous, then watches to see if you’ll laugh.
The second you slip and do, he’s got you.
And his smell is no help to me at all. Where Cal settles a room down, Rhett’s smoke and pepper set a low buzz going under my skin that I’ve spent all week calling heartburn.
It is not heartburn.
I make myself busy. Restocking. Wiping down.
Being a woman with a business, and not a woman noticing every time the fireman on her counter shifts his weight.
Rhett keeps up a running commentary that has no right to be as funny as it is.
Half of it’s aimed at Cal. Half of it’s aimed at making me drop something. Twice I nearly do.
“You always this jumpy?” he asks, “or is it the company?”
“It’s the man using my counter as a park bench.”
“You invited me in.”
“Cal invited you in. You came attached to a toolbox.”
He picks a cookie off the rack I forgot to move again and holds it up. “Quality control,” he says, and eats it looking right at me, slow. I feel the whole damn thing land hot in my face, and I hate myself for it. His grin says he felt it land too.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” I say.
“Doing what?” All innocence, which on him is the least innocent thing in the room.
“The looking.”
“I look at plenty of things. Cabinets. Ceilings. The odd smoke alarm.” His eyes don’t move off me once. “You just happen to be the best thing in here, trouble. Take it up with the shop.”
I turn away so he won’t see it work. It works anyway. He knows it works. That’s the whole trick of him. He doesn’t need you to admit a single thing, he can read the back of your neck from six feet off.
“Wired,” Cal announces from the ladder, wonderful and oblivious, a chaperone with no idea he’s chaperoning. “Hit the test.”
Rhett reaches up without getting off my counter and taps the button. The new alarm gives one clean chirp and goes quiet. No screaming. Just done.
“See,” Cal says, pleased with himself. “Ten minutes.”
“It’s been forty.”
“Time flies.” Rhett’s eyes are still on me. “When you’re—”
The tones drop.
Three weeks in, I still don’t know what they say.
To me, it’s a wall of noise off the pager on Cal’s belt.
To them it’s language. Both of them go still and sharp in the same half-second, heads up, the joking gone clean off their faces.
And I get my first real look at what these men are under the lemon bars and the flirting.
Cal’s off the ladder before it stops squawking.
“Grass fire, county road. Small one.” He reads it off the pager, already gathering his box. “Rhett, finish her panel and lock it up. Catch up if we call for you.”
“Go,” Rhett says. All business now, holding the door. “I’ve got her.”
He means the shop. I choose to believe he means the shop.
Then the warmth’s gone out the door with Cal, and it’s the two of us, and the buzz under my skin has nowhere left to hide.
Mrs. Alder saves me. Nearly.
She comes through my door like a small furious weather system, ninety years old and moving like sixty, cane going ahead of her.
“The cat,” she announces to the whole shop, which is now just me and Rhett.
“Biscuit’s up the oak on Main and he won’t come down.
Last time this happened your aunt had to call the fire department, God rest her. ”
Rhett’s grin comes back like it never left. “Well, Mrs. A. You’ve got one standing right here.”
What comes next is the best twenty minutes I’ve had since I moved to this town.
There’s no ladder truck. It’s out on the grass fire.
So Rhett borrows my little kitchen stepladder, which is nowhere near tall enough for a full-grown oak, props it against the trunk, and starts climbing anyway.
By the time he’s reached the second rung, half the street’s come out to watch.
The Pelham twins. Della on the diner step with a dish towel over her shoulder.
Two kids on bikes. Mrs. Alder narrating the whole rescue in a voice built to reach the next county.
“He’s going to fall,” Della calls over, cheerful about it.
“I never fall,” Rhett calls back. “I descend dramatically.”
Then the ladder truck rolls back in early, the grass fire more smoke than flame, and now it’s a proper production.
Cal spills out first, and behind him, Eli.
Eli takes one look at Rhett up a two-foot stepladder under a thirty-foot tree and just quietly gets to work.
Backs the truck up. Runs the real ladder out.
Goes up after Biscuit slow and easy, talking to a furious cat like it’s the most reasonable creature in the county.
Cal works the crowd below, hoisting a kid onto his shoulders for a better view, telling Mrs. Alder her cat’s a hero.
Rhett stands at the foot of my useless stepladder and heckles both of them without a scrap of mercy.
“He’s only stuck because you scared him, Vance.”
“You couldn’t reach the first branch.”
“I loosened it for you. Teamwork.”
Up in the tree, Eli says a few words too low for the crowd to catch, and the cat, which has been hissing at the entire county for an hour, goes still for him.
Of course it does. Even Mrs. Alder’s cat can tell which one of these men to trust. It steps off the branch onto his forearm like he asked it nicely, and knowing Eli, he did.
Biscuit comes down furious and unharmed, tucked under Eli’s arm like a loaf of bread. The whole street claps. Mrs. Alder cries a little and pretends she isn’t. And I stand on my own front step, flour on my hands, wearing a grin I can’t get off my face if I tried.
That’s when Eli catches me at it. Across the whole crowd, over the top of a rescued cat, his eyes find mine and hold. He doesn’t smile. But his face goes quiet and open for a second, just for me, before he turns and hands Mrs. Alder her cat, and it’s gone again.
The crew packs up. Cal’s got paperwork on the grass fire, and Eli goes with him, both of them lifting a hand to me as the truck pulls away.
Which leaves Rhett. In my doorway with my stepladder over one shoulder, the low afternoon light behind him, in no hurry at all to be anywhere else.
“I still owe you a locked panel,” he says. “Won’t take a minute.”
“You finished it.”
“Did I?” There’s the grin. “Better come check with me, then. Wouldn’t want to leave you with anything half done.”
I should tell him I’ll check it myself. I know that. The shop’s empty. The street’s gone home to supper. My whole body’s been humming since two o’clock, and the one man in this town built to make it worse is standing in my door offering to stay.
“Fine,” I hear myself say. “Come check your panel.”
It comes out steadier than I feel. Inside, I’m a wreck of my own making. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I’m doing it anyway, which is a brand-new development for a woman whose entire plan for this town was to want nothing from anybody.
His smile changes. Slower. The joke goes out from under it, and what’s left underneath is a good deal more dangerous.
His scent reaches me from clear across the shop. Smoke, pepper, and under it, faint, a thread of sweetness I keep catching on him and can never place, gone the second I reach for it.
“Yeah,” he says, stepping back inside, pulling the door shut behind him. “Let’s do that.”