Chapter 6 #2
Under the hood, Kell clamped the new hose in place in under five minutes, the way it should have gone yesterday. He topped off the antifreeze, just in case.
A glop of superglue on a piece of the frame made him chuckle and flex his left hand. It ached like hell, but his injury was nothing compared to poor Rachel.
A pang of emotion hit his heart, surprising him. In the frenzy of yesterday’s fiasco, he had worried about her, but now he wondered how she was, his own pain eliciting a connection to her that wasn’t fading with time.
Not one bit.
“Allen’s loading my truck up with twelve rolls of duct tape as we speak,” he said, lowering the hood. He climbed into the driver’s side and started the car right up. It smelled lightly of Rachel’s perfume and strongly of pineapple air freshener.
Leaving it running to warm up, he walked back to Luke. The car had squirrel tracks all over the fresh layer of snow, and a few small dead branches littered the top.
Using his arm, Kell cleared the windows and most of the roof.
“I’ll follow you back into town,” Luke said.
“It’s fixed fine.”
“Still following you.”
“This is the protect part? You already served.”
“This is the ‘I don’t trust Kell to know his way around a hose’ part.”
“C’mon, Luke. You’re never going to let me live down the washing machine incident.”
“You ‘connected’ a hose,” Luke said, using finger quotes. “Then it flooded my entire house.”
“I’m sorry! Geez! That was four years ago.”
“I still step on wet spots on the hallway carpet sometimes.”
“That’s just Jester marking his territory.” Jester was Luke’s six-year-old golden retriever.
Luke grunted. Discussion over.
Kell got back in the now-warm car and did a three-point turn, happy to have enough clearance that he didn’t have to back down to the main road on such an icy stretch. Soon, he was settled into the drive, Luke’s pink car behind him.
Only then could he breathe.
And every breath smelled like Rachel.
The twenty-minute drive back into town was the first real solitude he’d had since the whole mess unraveled yesterday.
After dropping her off at her trailer, he’d driven home, eaten a huge piece of lasagna his mother had put in his freezer last week, drank half his weight in water to rehydrate, and fallen asleep bingewatching some documentary about how to build an earthship home.
And dreamed about Rachel.
In the dream, she was swimming with him in the hot springs, smiling with the seductive lure of a mythological siren. That was the entire dream, a few seconds that stretched into eternity.
He’d woken up with a start when his five a.m. alarm went off. Calamine had curled up against him on top of the covers, and he lay there, staring up at the beamed ceiling, wondering what on earth he was doing.
Five years ago, between Rachel and Alissa, he had come home in pain, too stupefied to speak.
Alissa was cunning. She’d lied to him and taken a job with a huge petroleum company, and used him to get a meeting with his uncle, the commissioner of Maine’s Department of Agriculture, Forestry, and Conservation.
And Rachel had helped her.
The thing Kell had worked so hard to avoid after moving to the city was the thing that happened:
He’d been played for a rube.
Because he was one.
Dreams don’t die easily. For Kell, the idea that he would work in the city and live his life shaping society and nature was so big, it took a lot to kill it off.
Alissa and Rachel dealt the mortal blows, but it took him a long time to bleed out emotionally. Finally, he’d put that dream to rest, buried in an unmarked grave where no one ever visited.
Especially not his pride.
Lost in his thoughts, he found himself revisiting the last five years.
Alissa had tried one more time to connect with Uncle Ted, but she’d been rebuffed.
Rachel had vanished. He’d searched them out on social media a few times, finding Alissa’s incredibly perfect-sounding LinkedIn profile and, once, a mention of Rachel in the Stanford alumni magazine.
In disgust, he’d forced himself to stop looking them up.
Turning down the job he’d been offered in the California governor’s office, a coveted spot that several of his co-workers were vying for, had been easy in the moment but painful in the long term.
But it had definitely been the right thing to do.
Not one part about the backbiting was appealing to him. Having Rachel here was nothing more than a reminder that he’d made a stellar decision coming home. Working for his dad had gotten boring the last few years, so he’d started pulling poison ivy, of all things.
And it was because of Rachel’s mother.
When Portia Starman appeared in town to film the reality television show Love You Springs Eternal, there had been a huge problem: poison ivy all over the areas they were using as a set.
Crew member after crew member got the horrible rash–one had to be hospitalized–but no one wanted to spray poison anywhere near the town’s beloved hot springs.
Kell offered to hand pull it. Fifteen percent of the population isn’t allergic to urushiol, the chemical that makes people itch, so Kell had thrown on a Tyvek suit, gloved up, worn a face shield and gone right in, pulling the poison ivy out from the shallow vines, following each one to the end.
After the series was done filming, the next year, there was less poison ivy. The town clerk hired him to pull even more, and word got out.
Pulling For You was born.
Now, he spent a fair amount of time from late April through early November traveling all over New England, organizing a small crew that included Allen, to help pull poison ivy.
People who wanted to avoid traditional commercial poisons were willing to pay top dollar, and so far, Kell had escaped ever getting the dreaded rash.
As long as he created a careful protocol and his crew stuck to it, all was well.
Business thrived.
A little too much, according to his dad, who groused about Kell’s lack of availability at times. Pulling poison ivy wasn’t glamorous, but it kept him busy, and customers were so grateful.
Film crews were his most lucrative clients, though, and his dad had no idea how much business he was turning away these days.
That was going to have to change soon.
As with any business, as demand grew, he needed more workers. An office manager. More trucks. Kell was the third generation to run Luview’s Tree Service, so his father had never had to create a business from scratch. Dean had taken over from his own father, and grown the business, sure.
Yet he’d never taken something from zero to more.
Even now, in the dead of winter, Kell’s business kept him busy.
Winter was the perfect time to attack what were known as grandfather vines, thick, hairy climbers that wound themselves around trees like boa constrictors.
Some of them were twenty, thirty years old, and the concentrated oil in them was so dangerous, one simple touch was enough to cause third-degree burns.
Which was why Kell was so determined to find them anywhere in town and kill them off.
It took a combination of skill, guts, and a little insanity to go after them, a machete often the best tool for the job. Machinery could splatter the oil, and one or two good, satisfying whacks from a big blade was often more efficient.
Mulling over his poison ivy company was a useful way to avoid thinking about Rachel, and soon he was stopped at a red light, caught up in his own thoughts.
Loud honking snapped him out of it. He looked up to find Nadine, the police station admin, pulled up next to him, waving wildly. She rolled down her window and shouted, “NO LAP ORNAMENT TODAY?”
The light turned green.
He drove off without a word.
Luke was behind Nadine, who at some point wove in between them. Kell swore he could hear Luke busting a gut even this far away.
Soon, Kell turned right to cut over to Kenny’s, while Luke made a left, headed in the direction of the small ranch he shared with Harriet. Being a small-town cop helped in terms of being able to see her in short little visits here and there.
Honk! Honk!
It was his mother laying on the horn behind him, her beat-up old silver F-150 with the Luview Tree Service logo on it a nearly iconic sight around town.
Oh, boy.
No use fighting it. He pulled over, his mom right behind him, her truck stopped and turned off before he could even get out of gear.
“Kell!” she shouted. “You’re ignoring my texts!”
“Yep,” he said, rolling the window down.
“This your girlfriend’s car?”
“Rachel is not my girlfriend, Mom.”
“Hah! I know, honey. I just said that to tease you.”
A flat look was all she got in return.
Deanna Luview was one of the most caring people he’d ever known. When it came to her family, she was loyal, generous, loving–and a bit intrusive.
But only because of the loving part.
“Rachel Hart’s in town, huh? Did you know she was coming?”
“No. And stop pretending you don’t know what happened yesterday. I’m sure Luke and Colleen filled you in.”
“On their parts. Now I want to hear yours!”
“I don’t have a part, Mom. I fixed Rachel’s rental car. I’m driving it to her place. That’s the whole story.”
Luke appeared behind their mom, pulling over, flashing his police lights exactly once.
Show off.
“Hey!” he called out his open window to Kell. “How’re you getting home from Rachel’s?”
He shook his head. “Hadn’t gotten that far.”
“Can’t expect her to drive you anywhere, right? She has that meeting with Lucinda at eleven.”
Their mom wasn’t a huge gossip, but she loved to know more than she told.
“Lucinda? Rachel’s working with Lucinda? Is Portia coming back to do a new show? Ooo, something to do with chocolates?”
“No, Mom. Rachel’s here to broker some deal where Lucinda and Boyce sell out to Markstone's candy company.”
“I love their Easter peanut butter toffee eggs!” she exclaimed. “They want to buy Love You Chocolate?”
“Yep.”