6
“So you’re moving back this way?” Savannah’s father asked from her speakerphone.
Savannah shook her head and rotated the white instruction manual in her lap, hoping the pictures would make more sense upside down. “I didn’t say that, Daddy. I said I told Dr. Timson I would be interested in a possible job in Huntsville. That doesn’t mean anything will come of it.”
“Oh, well, still. We wouldn’t complain about having you closer to home.”
She growled in frustration and squinted at the diagrams in front of her. “It looks like the screws go in at an angle . . . but that can’t be right!” she exclaimed, turning the conversation back to the coffee table she’d been trying to assemble for the last thirty minutes.
“I don’t know what to tell you, honey,” her daddy replied. “If I were there, I could help, but since I can’t see what you’re asking, then I’m afraid I’m not much good.”
“If you start driving now, you could be here at, like, one in the morning,” Savannah pointed out.
“I do love you enough to do that, but I also have to work tomorrow,” her dad replied. “Why not ask a friend over to help? Pay her in dinner; make it fun.”
Savannah tilted her head back against her living room wall and stared up at the plastered ceiling. That wasn’t a terrible idea. “I could see if Drew’s busy,” she said, thinking out loud.
“Drew?” he asked, his voice tinged with dismay. “Is Drew a girl?”
“Is Drew that guy you used to crush on so hard?” her mom chimed in.
She sounded farther away, like maybe she’d just walked into the room.
Savannah could picture her crossing her dad’s office and wrapping him in a hug from behind.
It was an image as familiar to Savannah as her own face. “Honey?” her mom prompted.
Savannah jolted out of her memories and back into her tiny apartment. “Mom! I didn’t crush on Drew . . . that hard,” she replied, muttering the last part for her own benefit.
“Is this the Drew that made you cry all the time?” her dad demanded.
“He didn’t . . . I . . . okay, things are different now,” Savannah stammered. “We’re all grown-ups, and all of that is behind me, and we’re just friendly people who live in the same town. Nobody is making anybody cry.”
“But this is the same Drew?” her mother prodded.
Savannah closed her eyes and blew out in an exasperated breath. “Yes, it is the same Drew.”
There was a long pause, and even from three hundred miles away, she knew her parents were having one of their silent conversations where only their eyes spoke.
“Honey . . .”
“I know! I know,” Savannah jumped in, cutting off her mother’s words. “You’re about to tell me not to dive in without checking how deep the water is, right?”
Another pause.
“I’m just a little concerned is all. I know how you can be sometimes, and I know how hard it was for you before. I don’t want you to put yourself in a place where you could get hurt again.”
“I’m not, Mama,” Savannah insisted. “Drew lives here in town, yes, and we are friends, but I am not chasing him or making him mixed CDs or begging for attention in any way, alright? I’m a big girl. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Well, I’m never not going to worry about you, but okay,” her mother conceded. “If you say everything is fine, I’ll believe you.”
“But if it’s ever not fine, I’ll come up there and put his head on straight,” her daddy growled, and Savannah smiled without meaning to.
Her father was the mildest mild-mannered person she’d ever met, and there was a part of her that would love to watch him “put somebody’s head on straight” just to see what it would look like.
“Thank you, Daddy,” she said fondly. “Now I’m gonna go order a pizza and build furniture. I’ll talk to you later.”
“We love you!” her parents chorused together.
“Love you, too!” Savannah replied. Then she hung up the phone and huffed out a tired breath that moved the wisps of hair around her face.
She surveyed the collection of wooden pieces and metal hardware strewn across her living room carpet and groaned.
She’d been trying to build a coffee table, but she’d really just made an enormous mess.
She scrutinized the assembly instructions again, but no matter how many times she flipped through the booklet, she could not find a section in English, and what was there was written in some kind of hieroglyphics.
Then she reached for her phone and weighed it in her hand, her mother’s warning whispering through her mind like a summer breeze.
“Don’t dive in,” she mumbled to herself.
For a brief moment, she faltered, wondering if maybe she should ask someone else; maybe she shouldn’t tempt fate. Maybe—
Her fingers moved before she gave them permission, and before she could change her mind, the line had connected. “Drew?” she asked when he answered. “Do you think you could help me with something?”
Drew stood outside Savannah’s apartment and yawned. It was only nine o’clock, which for most people wasn’t late, but he’d been awake since five a.m.
Couldn’t this have waited? a voice asked, and Drew shook his head. Probably, but harvest would last another eight weeks, and he wasn’t going to be any more available than he was at that moment. He dragged a hand over his face and did his best to wake himself back up. Then he knocked on the door.
“Just a minute!” Savannah called from inside.
Drew scuffed his boots against her welcome mat and hoped they weren’t too dirty. He had taken a shower after leaving the field, so at least he didn’t smell like he’d been in the sun all day.
At last, the door opened, and Savannah appeared wearing a T-shirt with the clock from Beauty and the Beast on it and a pair of comfortable-looking shorts. Her legs and feet were bare, and it wasn’t until Drew noticed the bright-pink polish on her toenails that he realized he was staring.
“Hi!” she said brightly, either not noticing or not minding the obvious once-over he’d just given her.
“Thank you so much for coming. I know you’ve probably had a long day, but I’ve tried finishing this myself and it’s just not working.
I gave up hours ago.” She turned away and moved off through the room, leaving the front door open for him to follow.
Drew stepped inside the small space and shut the door behind him before taking his boots off in the corner, just in case.
“It’s no problem,” he told her, looking around.
Her place was bright and happy, with yellow paint on the walls and blue knobs on all the kitchen cabinets, but there was still a sense of barely controlled chaos everywhere he looked.
Magazines piled on the floor, too many pillows on a short love seat, what looked like a half-finished art project on the kitchen table.
It suited her, Drew decided. Anything scrubbed and spotless would have felt unnatural.
“I didn’t even know there were apartments up here,” he added. Savannah lived in a loft above a thrift store called Back on the Rack; it had taken Drew an extra five minutes just to figure out how to access the upstairs living units.
“Most people don’t!” she said. “I’ve made chocolate chip cookies, and there’s still some pepperoni pizza, if you’re hungry,” she added.
Drew’s mouth watered; he’d already had dinner, but nobody said no to warm cookies. “That sounds great,” he told her. Then his gaze landed on an assortment of wooden boards stacked haphazardly under the room’s only window. “Is this the table?” he asked, remembering why she’d called.
“Yeah,” she replied. She turned around holding a plate piled high with cookies. “Well, it’s supposed to be a table, but right now it’s just a constant reminder that I shouldn’t be allowed to shop online after midnight.”
Drew crouched down and took visual inventory of the pieces in front of him. It seemed fairly straightforward.
A moment later, Savannah sat down cross-legged on the floor. “I know what you’re thinking, hotshot. ‘It’s a table, how hard can it be?’ Well, the answer is very, especially when the instructions were written in an ancient language by the devil himself.”
Drew felt a smile tug at his mouth. That wasn’t exactly what he’d been thinking, but it was close enough.
He settled onto the carpet and picked up the instruction manual without looking at her.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever called me hotshot before,” he said.
“Somebody did call me a plowboy once, and I’m still trying to figure that one out. ”
Savannah laughed, and Drew soaked up the sound like a sponge.
“Well, think about it, a cowboy rides a horse, which let’s just admit is weird because a cowboy really should ride a cow, but that point aside, a cowboy rides a horse.
But you don’t ride a horse, at least not that I’ve ever seen. You ride a plow.”
“Combine,” Drew corrected, his brows raised.
“Ergo,” she went on, ignoring his comment, “you are a plowboy. Case closed.”
He shook his head in dismay. As adorable as her logic was, it had major flaws. “First, I don’t ride the combine, I drive it,” he insisted. “And second, if you don’t know the difference between a harvester and a plow, then we have some serious issues to work through.”
“Semantics aside, the name stands,” Savannah replied stubbornly.
Drew finally opened the booklet in his hands and peered at the pages, turning them first one way and then another.
“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” he muttered.
Whoever had drawn these diagrams had clearly hoped to inflict pain on the poor souls who had to decode them.
He compared the screws in front of him to the ones in the picture and picked up the largest wooden panel.
Twenty minutes later, they were still fitting pieces together like some kind of life-size jigsaw puzzle.
“It’s probably a good thing you’re here,” Savannah admitted around a bite of chocolate chip cookie. “The last time I went all DIY, I ended up superglued to the bathroom counter.”