Chapter 8 Tennessee Whiskey
Tennessee Whiskey
Eve
Later that afternoon, Eve was sitting in her cabin, now fully functional, stocked, and redecorated, waiting for inspiration to strike.
She had yet to come up with anything specific to write about, which was why she spent the week prior renovating her little summer space.
She’d removed the ugly mint-green window treatments, replacing them with sleek, light-filtering shades.
She traded the mustard-colored couch for a more modern sectional, the color of oatmeal, to complement the floors.
She’d even assembled it herself, along with a square taupe cocktail table, which all seemed near impossible when she started, then became an unexpected point of pride once it was done.
With electricity, water, and Wi-Fi in place, her grandmother’s cabin had turned into somewhere she didn’t mind living.
Of course, upon completion, Eve wished she hadn’t finished so quickly, because redecorating had been exactly the diversion she needed.
The only cure for her listlessness so far.
In fact, if she went back to New York anytime soon, she was seriously considering signing up for one of those apps where she could complete tasks for other people.
She welcomed the idea of being useful to someone—especially if it kept her mind busy.
This was precisely why she’d spent the bulk of the day considering and reconsidering Jamie’s dinner invitation.
Thinking about all the things that could go wrong if she spent a significant, concentrated amount of time with this man.
What she would do when he brought his son around.
If the kid was anything like his father, he would most certainly show up at her door uninvited, and Eve would have to try not to spontaneously weep at the mere sight of him.
Perhaps, at worst, Jamie would get a full grasp of just how weird and sad she was and stop trying to befriend her. At best, maybe he’d make her laugh. He had a way of doing that that she wasn’t used to.
She just hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
For that matter, she hoped he wouldn’t regret it.
And so, without much thought to her tatty leggings and flamboyant pink Beychella hoodie, Eve marched down the hill and over the bridge and trespassed into her neighbor’s yard, much like she’d done the first day she was here.
She followed the grass path along the pond until she reached his driveway.
Unsure where to go next, she opted for a rather steep flight of steps that she hoped led to the entrance.
Once she got to the top, she knocked tentatively at the door and gazed out to the water as she waited for Jamie to answer.
In a matter of seconds, he greeted her, sounding nonplussed by her appearance. “Uh…hey…”
“There’s a deer,” Eve remarked, answering a question he hadn’t asked. It seemed to be limping, which troubled her more than it should’ve, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. “I think it’s injured.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s Buckley,” Jamie said, stepping onto his porch to join her.
He smelled of pine, like his car, and it made Eve smile internally.
But then she gave him a strange, obviously perplexed look, wondering what kind of Sleeping Beauty arrangement he had with the animals around there if he knew this deer’s name, and Jamie grinned. “Jack named him,” he said.
Eve tried not to visibly react at the mention of Jamie’s son. “So this deer comes around often?”
“Not often . But enough for me to still recognize him,” he said, leaning against his balcony’s railing to watch with her. “He’s kinda squirrelly, so we don’t get close. But he seems to think he’s safe around here.”
“Or maybe he knows you’ve got his mom in your freezer,” Eve said wryly. After mowing her lawn the week prior, Jamie mentioned that he was preparing venison, and she never quite let it leave her mind.
“Did you need somethin’, or did you just come over to judge me?”
“I…came for dinner,” Eve said. “If the offer is still open.”
“?’Course it is.”
Jamie headed back inside, leaving Eve to follow; she did so guardedly, hesitant to go beyond the threshold, scanning his place from where she stood.
It appeared that his vast home was just an open-concept room—kitchen, living area, and bedroom all in one—and standing in Jamie’s bedroom was a bridge farther than she was ready for.
“You can come inside,” Jamie said, chuckling when he caught her gawking from the doorway.
Eve gradually moved farther inside, studying the space like she was at an open house.
Wood paneling covered every inch of the room, but it was a deep, dark wood that didn’t bother her here as much as it did at her grandmother’s.
The kitchen sat at the far end of the house, partitioned from the rest of the room by a chic high-top dining set for two.
The table was rectangular, and its matching chairs seemed to fit underneath it like puzzle pieces.
The appliances were white, matching nothing else in the room, and NeNe Leakes’s voice echoed in Eve’s head, melodramatically bemoaning the very existence of a white refrigerator, honey .
Nevertheless. Jamie’s cabin was quaint and charming, warm, and a little dark—a bit like Jamie.
As Eve finished her exploration, she moved back toward the door, a bar sitting adjacent to the exit.
It was beautifully designed, made of a rich wood she could only assume was mahogany, its surface boasting a shine so impeccable she was scared to mark it with her fingerprints.
Everything in his place was like that, all the pieces elegantly crafted.
Even the floating television stand was splendid.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” she asked, running her finger along the smooth edge of the cabinet, almost magnetically drawn to it. “It’s beautiful.”
“Oh, thank you. I um…I actually made it,” Jamie said.
Eve was a little bit stunned and a little bit skeptical. Then again, it made some sense that the guy with the Jesus beard was a carpenter. “Really?”
“I figure why buy it when you can make it?”
“Indeed,” she agreed, still meandering around the open space.
She was unable to ignore his stunning bedframe—partly because it sat so prominently at the front of the room, but mainly because it was just gorgeous.
It was a tatami platform bed in a dark, almost black wood, flanked by matching miniature nightstands, their sleek design not really fitting the image she had of Jamie.
“You made these, too?” she asked. Likely a silly question, but she was bewitched by the idea that he was this good with his hands.
“All of it,” he confirmed with a laugh. “I made all of it.”
Genuinely impressed, Eve went ahead and made herself a drink at his instruction.
He’d offered wine, but she was going to need more than that to get through the foreignness of prolonged one-on-one interaction.
She helped herself to the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, figuring it appropriate for the locale, and poured it neat.
She turned and watched Jamie at work in his kitchen, looking different to her in the glow of the evening.
He wore a nice denim shirt that managed to bring out the already striking blue of his eyes, with dark jeans that fit his trim frame well.
She discovered that it was a chore to tear her eyes from him.
“So Miss Hazel told me you’re a college professor?” Jamie asked, not looking up from his task of chopping vegetables.
“I’m a playwright, actually,” she said, illogically annoyed with her grandmother—and so, with him—for not knowing.
He stopped chopping long enough to cock his head, regarding her with a confounded smile. “Really?”
His disbelieving tone echoed hers when she learned of his job.
But it was a familiar response. Most people, when they said, Really?
were asking whether she was successful. You write plays…
for a living? “Really,” she said. “Without going into a lot of boring details, that’s my day job.
But I do teach at NYU to keep the lights on. Not this year, but usually.”
Jamie resumed work on their dinner, seeming to ignore that a stranger was making her way around his home. “What if I wanna hear the boring details?” he asked.
“You don’t,” Eve said. “People’s eyes tend to glaze over when I talk about my plays.”
“Well, now I’m really interested.”
“Fine.” She sighed, already knowing how this conversation would end. “By any chance, do you know who Sandra Bland is?”
“Of course I do.”
She replied with further disbelief, her eyes narrowing before reflexively roaming downward until they landed on his forearms. “Who is she?”
“She was a young Black woman in…Texas, if I recall correctly? She was arrested after a traffic stop, and then she died, supposedly by suicide, in jail.”
Eve was waiting to find fault with his account, to detect some hint of bias that she could use as an excuse to get out of there as soon as possible, but he was simply accurate.
It eased her apprehension, even if only slightly.
“Well, my most recent play is about her. It’s called Gamba Adisa , which is the Yoruba name Audre Lorde adopted before she died, and it means ‘the she-warrior who makes herself clear,’ which felt apropos for Ms.Bland.
It’s about her life before that arrest.”
“You don’t include that part?”
“I’ve had many debates about it, but I was adamant that this story be about her life.
The sort of mundaneness of it. Not the tragedy of its ending,” Eve said.
“We tend to martyrize victims of police brutality. But we don’t have to be extraordinary to have value.
She was in jail because of a police officer with a superiority complex and a history of pretextual traffic stops.
I didn’t want that to be the totality of her story. ”
“I see.”