5. Rhodes
FIVE
Rhodes
The Scope of Work: Every restoration opens with a written scope listing exactly what will be touched and what will be left alone. The work that ruins a house is almost always work that never appeared on the page.
Yesterday there were boxes in my spare room.
Today there is a person in it. A stack of cardboard doesn't change a house, but yesterday afternoon Tallulah came through my front door behind her brother with a backpack over one shoulder and a milk crate of books balanced on her hip, and she kicked her shoes off by the door like she'd been doing it her whole life.
Now her shoes are tangled next to mine on the mat, and a second bag slumps in the hall. I haven't had a roommate since freshman year, so this is going to take some getting used to.
Just having her here makes new sounds in the house and foreign, but admittedly better, smells. I don't love how much I notice that.
My phone buzzes on the counter. I pick it up to a text from Coop.
boarding in an hour. I forgot how brutal going through security is. she settle in ok last night?
She's good. Still asleep.
Three dots appear immediately.
good
He doesn't respond for a second, which is actually a relief. I want him to go on his trip and not constantly check in and worry.
if something feels off with her, you know you just need to call me. anything at all. just pay attention.
I look at the words. I don't need him to say the rest. We've spent more hours talking about Tallulah, about her addiction and how fast things went sideways, than about anything else. He isn't asking me to run her life. He's asking me to be close enough to catch a thing before it turns into a thing.
Dude, I've got it. Go learn about whatever you're supposed to learn, but more importantly, meet lots of beautiful Spaniards over lots of wine and cheese. Don't let me down.
Ha. Lots of wine and hopefully lots of beautiful women.
That's better.
A handful of texts, and the handoff's complete.
I stand there and let it sink in. In an hour, a plane lifts my best friend off the ground and puts a whole ocean between him and his sister, and the closest person to her isn't Coop or her father or even her twin.
It's me. I'm the one who keeps the bad nights, the worse guys, and her own worst instincts from knocking her flat.
I'm the one who has to notice early if she starts to go down.
I tell him I've got it, but I'd be lying to myself if I didn't worry a little about my ability to not fuck this up.
Coop gave me exactly one rule, and it is the same one she made me swear I wouldn't follow.
The whole thing almost makes me laugh. Me.
The Stone nobody hands anything that can break is the one who has to save this girl from herself.
This is Coop's kid sister, the girl who threw sand in my mouth when she was nine, and here I am drafting myself a code of conduct over her like I'm not the world's biggest fuck up.
The phone goes off again in my hand, and I look down to see it's Ridge.
I want thirty minutes with you. Just us. Say Saturday.
That's twice in a week, after twenty-two years of never once. I read it, but I don't answer. I tell myself I'll answer it later, which is what I say about most things.
I put my phone in my pocket and look down the hall.
Shit's real now.
I come in from the garage starving. I spent the whole afternoon out there on purpose, giving her room, trying not to crowd her in my own house. Now my stomach is about to eat itself.
"You want to order something?" I call out toward her room. She doesn't answer, so I keep going. "I'm about to order something for myself. There's that Thai place off Oak that isn't garbage. Or pizza. Either of those appeal to you?"
"I already ate," she says from the kitchen, not down the hall.
I walk in and see her at the counter with a fork, scraping the last of what looks like rice and vegetables and shrimp off the plate. Only after seeing her do I realize the entire kitchen smells like garlic and ginger.
"Oh, you cooked. Nice."
"That's usually how food happens." She takes another bite.
I set my phone down and open the fridge to see what I've got. The light comes on over a shelf that isn't mine anymore. A carton of eggs I didn't buy, a bag of spinach, two lemons, and a glass tub of yogurt cups sit next to my beer.
Shit. Do I need to get rid of the beer in my house? It didn't even occur to me.
"When did you go grocery shopping?"
"This afternoon. You were messing with your bike in the garage, and I didn't want to bother you."
I shut the fridge and go for the coffee. I reach for the same shelf it's lived on for three years, top right, above the toaster. My hand goes there without even looking, and it lands on nothing but a ring of dust where the bag used to sit.
"Where's my coffee stuff?"
"Cabinet by the coffee maker on the second shelf." She points with her fork, calm as anything. "Made more sense to keep it near the machine. You had it clear across the kitchen from the coffee maker."
"It worked fine."
"It worked, sure. Fine's a stretch." She stands, plate in hand. "You had cans of soup stacked three deep in front of stuff you forgot you owned. I needed somewhere to put groceries. Figured helping you organize your kitchen was the least I could do, seeing as you're babysitting me and all."
"Tallulah. Stop with that. That's not what this is. You're between leases, and your brother gave up his place. That's it. So knock it off with the babysitter shit, already."
I open the cabinet by the sink. My coffee, my filters, my grinder, lined up neat where none of it has ever been, and beside them her tea and her honey and some kind of oat something.
"And thank you for the reorg, by the way. This makes a lot more sense."
She crosses to the sink and rinses her plate. "Happy to be of service."
I don't offer to put it in the dishwasher, or tell her where the dish soap is. Hell, she probably knows better than me, anyway.
She didn't ask me where to shop or which bags to haul up from the car, didn't ask what she should eat or where a single thing went. She just did it, all of it, before I even registered what she was doing.
She dries her hands, picks up her water glass, and heads down the hall to her room.
Yeah. We're going to have to get past the weirdness fast, or it's going to be a long semester.
It's a couple of hours before I hear her in the kitchen again, water running. Then I hear a cabinet closing. The disposal grinds, and the pitch drops into a straining hum, metal on metal, then it's stuck.
I know that sound. I set my book on the arm of the couch and I'm on my feet before I finish deciding to be.
"That's jammed," I say, coming into the kitchen. "Kill the switch before you burn out the motor."
"I already turned it off."
She's standing at the sink with her hand hovering near the drain, not in it, and I'm momentarily impressed with her willingness to try to fix it. Of course she is. She's Tallulah, more capable than most of the guys I know.
"Don't reach in there. I've got a wrench for it." I go to the junk drawer by the stove, dig past the tape measure and the screwdrivers, and come up with the little hex wrench that came with the unit.
When I turn around, she's already under there.
The cabinet doors stand open, and she's flat on her back on my kitchen floor with her head and shoulders up inside the cabinet.
Her knees are bent, both feet planted on the tile.
The hex socket is on the underside of the disposal, so there's no other way to do it.
Knowing that doesn't remove the improper thoughts going through my head.
I look at the backsplash and count tiles until it passes.
When my eyes come back down, they land on her knee. The scar from her surgery is there, a pale line down the front of it and two small round ones on either side of the cap.
She grabs the plug and pulls it clean out of the outlet. She didn't stop at the switch. She cut the power.
"Do you have the wrench?"
I want to tell her to get the hell out of the way, to let me fix the damn thing, but I hand it to her instead. She grabs it without even looking, turns the wrench in the flywheel slot, and the motor cranks free with a gritty little pop.
"Hey, let me," I start. "Just slide out and I'll—"
"Turn on the water and flip the switch," she says, her voice muffled under the cabinet. I do it, and the disposal roars perfectly. Whatever it was chews down the drain.
She backs out from under the sink and stands, the plug already reseated, and wipes her palms down the front of her shorts.
"Had it," she says. "Bottle cap. Must've come off the counter when I was unloading. Wedged right against the flywheel."
"Well," I say. "Guess I'll cancel the plumber."
She huffs, not quite a laugh, and pushes her hair off her face. It's come loose from wherever she had it, damp at the edges from being crammed under the cabinet. Her sleeves are shoved to her elbows.
She sets the wrench on the counter. It clicks against the granite.
She wipes her palms down the front of her shorts. I follow the motion the whole way down, which takes about as long as it sounds like it takes. The kitchen has gotten warm. I decide that's what it is.
"I'm going to finish my chapter," I say, and I walk out of the kitchen.
After I finish reading, I head to the dining table with my laptop. The house is quiet. For a moment I think about her sleeping down the hall.
I open a Word document to make notes about the paper I have to write, half-noticing the fridge hum behind me. Then I hear footsteps come down the hall. I look up.
Tallulah crosses the front room with her jacket zipped halfway and her keys hooked over one finger. Her hair's pulled back now, clean of the pipe gunk, already reaching for the door.
"Where are you headed?" The words are out before I've thought about them. I have no right asking her that. Fuck.
Her hand stops near the knob. She turns and looks at me, says nothing, just looks, keys hanging off that one finger, held dead still.
And in the quiet I hear exactly what I just did. She doesn't respond, opens the door, and pauses.
I let my shoulders drop.
"Just meant to say, if you get locked out, text me," I say. "That deadbolt is sticky. I'll leave the porch light on."
Her face eases a little, and it's enough.
"You don't have to wait up."
"I wasn't planning to." I nod at the laptop like it proves anything. "I've got a paper to write, though, so there's a good chance I'll still be sitting here."
She almost smiles and turns back toward the door. I make myself go back to the screen.
The door opens the rest of the way, and humid air rolls across the room, stirring the papers by my elbow.
Then it shuts, the latch catches, and I hear her car door, the engine, the crunch of the driveway, and she's gone.
I have no idea where she is going and no right to ask.
The two of those things sitting next to each other are going to make up my whole spring.
I look back at the blinking cursor and read the same sentence three times.
The sound of her V8 engine disappears down the street. I walk out to the garage and grab the WD-40 off the shelf. I've been meaning to grease that lock for months.
Once I finally sit back down, I focus. I've got to get this damn first draft finished by class tomorrow, or I'm cooked.
After a few hours, I have a decent enough paper to turn in. I close the laptop, walk back to my room to take a shower. When I get out, I hear the front door close, and then the lock engage.
My bedroom door is cracked, so I can hear her as she takes off her shoes, walks into the kitchen, fills a glass from the filtered dispenser, and then walks down the hall in her bare feet. The door to the bathroom across from her room clicks closed.
When I walk out to turn off the front porch light, my eyes catch on her jacket on the back of the couch, thrown over the cushion where I usually drop mine.
The milk crate of books is shoved against the wall by the bookshelf now, spines out.
I kneel down to see what she has. They are mostly water and marsh and shellfish biology.
A hair tie's looped over the arm of the chair and a phone charger snakes into the outlet I never use, the white cord running the length of my baseboard like a vein.
None of it is a mess. It’s just different than what my eyes are used to seeing every single day. Every direction I look, something interrupts a room I've had memorized for three years.
I flip the switch by the front door and the living room goes dark. The old house answers the way it always does, a tick in the wall as it cools, and the ice maker letting go of a load in the freezer with that soft avalanche sound.
I go to the kitchen for water. Her glass sits upside down in the drying rack next to mine, still wet from her recent use.
I pass her room on the way to mine. The door's closed now, and a thin line of light shines underneath.
In my own room I turn off the light, sit on the edge of the bed and pull my shirt over my head before sliding in. The house settles around me, and I still can't quite sink into it. I had this wrong.
I volunteered because it seemed easy: give Coop peace of mind, loan out the spare room, be a body in the building. Nothing hard happened today, no crisis, no trouble.
And I'm lying here clocking one closed door down the hall like it's the only thing in a house I've known for three years.
It was easy on paper. That much I got right.
Living with Tallulah Maybank is going to be more of an adjustment than I had bargained for.