Chapter 9 #3
“Do me a favor, Kenny,” Kell said. “Put the word out. Someone might have a room to rent for those last couple of days.”
“You don’t have to do that!” she protested.
“I know I don’t. But it’s how things are done here. Someone might need to make a little extra money and not mind having a guest stay with them for two nights.”
“I don’t know about staying in someone’s house,” she demurred, but then reconsidered. Being here through February 15 was crucial to the deal. “But,” she added, “let’s see. Maybe something will work out. I’m all ears.”
“I would think you’d want to stay somewhere without a lovesick moose humping your dwelling,” Kell said, giving Kenny a meaningful look.
“Awww, Randy? He been poking you?”
“He’s destroyed my ability to sleep and damaged my car.”
“Your car?”
“He tried to, you know...” Rachel thrust her hips forward twice.
Kenny blushed. “Oh, I know. And I’m real sorry. I thought we got him to stop.”
“You didn’t put that in your notes about how to use the place.”
“Please don’t leave a bad review! Randy hasn’t done it for a while. We’ve been working on cleaning the pheromones off.”
“Pheromones?” Kell and Rachel said together.
“Yeah. The moose juice,” Kenny said with a chuckle. “Me and the guys were out here with a fire, having some beers, and Jerry Butalli spilled a bunch on the hitch. Didn’t think much about it until poor Randy came along and nearly broke a nut on the bar.”
“Thanks for that mental image,” Kell said dryly.
“You knew you had moose pheromones all over the trailer and didn’t tell me? I thought Maine was having an unprecedented earthquake the first time Randy attacked the trailer!” Rachel hissed.
“Attack is such a harsh word,” Kenny said softly, giving her a hangdog look. “Randy’s just looking for love.”
“In all the wrong places,” Kell muttered.
“This isn’t funny! He just did it again! Kell had to make him go away. If I’m stuck in this trailer for another week, you need to promise me you’ll do everything possible to make him stop!”
“We tried peeing on it,” Kenny said sheepishly.
“Why?” Rachel asked, aghast.
“Because male urine can keep animals away.”
“That’s bullshit,” Kell said. “Human male urine perimeters won’t keep moose away.”
“Maybe a bear, sure,” Kenny mused. “What does keep a moose away, though?” Kenny asked. “’Cause Jerry said if we all took a piss on the hitch, it’d be fine.”
“Jerry’s a blowhard and he’s always wrong. What you need is cougar urine.”
“Huh. My sister Darlene is in her fifties and she just got divorced. I’ll give her a case of beer and she can come over here and trickle out a nice perimeter.”
“Not that kind of cougar,” Kell rumbled.
Kenny’s phone buzzed. He looked at it.
“Yikes. My other rental’s got an ice dam and water leaking in through the kitchen window. Gotta go.”
Without another word, he stomped off, then shouted, “I’ll get you more wood before noon!”
“What’s an ice dam?” Rachel asked Kell.
“It’s when a gutter fills with snow, then the sun melts it, and dripping water off the roof creates a big, long row of ice. It all refreezes, and the ice can make its way into the house wall, between any seam in the siding, the drywall, the window frames, you name it.”
“There are so many ways snow and ice can hurt people. I had no idea.”
He shrugged. “Every part of the country has its weather problems. California has plenty.”
“Sure. I know what to do in an earthquake. When Randy started attacking the trailer, my mind immediately went to latched cabinets and any shelves that might have valuables that could fall off and shatter.”
“Huh.”
“At home, I have a fireproof zip pouch for important papers. And plenty of air purifiers for wildfire season,” she continued, thinking it through.
He made a face. “I don’t know how I’d function living somewhere with so much forest burning constantly.”
“You work around the smoke.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean it would hurt to see so many beautiful trees destroyed in huge numbers like that.”
She nodded. “I’ve driven around some areas in Sonoma County after the fires. Nothing but charred ground and half-burnt trees. The worst is all the dead wildlife. You don’t see them, but you know they died. And the sound is creepy. No birds. No rustling. Just… silence.”
He shuddered. “No place is perfect. You have to adapt to whatever you’re dealt.”
“That sounds very philosophical.”
“I think it’s more practical.” He smiled at her. “But I can see how it’s both.” He turned the two Adirondack chairs right side up and brushed off some clinging snow. “Come have a sit,” he said, patting a red camp chair.
“Are we doing this? Actually talking and hanging out? Not glued together, not fighting and going for an impromptu swim,” she joked, eyeing the fire with a longing that didn’t have words to match.
“Sure. Welcome to Maine. Our favorite pastime is burning wood while gossiping.”
“Let’s add some coffee to that,” she said with a laugh, going back in the trailer.
“His coffee sucks. Remember?”
Rachel found two little pods that were different, and inserted one in the coffee maker.
She went to the door and called out, “I found some without chicory!”
“I’ll take it, then. Thanks!”
“You still drink it black?”
“You remember?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
While the coffee dripped, she pulled on a knitted hat, then picked up the mugs.
The coffee’s heat tickled her nose and she smiled, the domestic comfort of this simple task filling her with a contentment that caught her off guard.
As she walked to the fire pit, Kell stood halfway, taking the mug out of her ungloved hands, his own encased in ski gloves.
“You need to cover your hands. Cold out here.”
“The mug is keeping me warm.”
“It won’t in about one minute.”
She sat, feeling the intense heat from the new fire. Her back was cold, but her front was warming quickly. A gulp of coffee went straight down her sternum and she pulled the jacket’s zipper up higher.
“How do you live with this kind of cold all the time?”
“We just do. It’s all I’ve ever known.”
“D.C. must have been tropical to you.”
His smile was nostalgic and contemplative. “D.C. was foreign in a lot of ways. The weather was only one of them.”
They were headed into prickly emotional territory. Rachel chose to go quiet, wanting to stretch out the sense of grounded peace that was seeping into her pores. If she could have more moments like this, her life would make more sense.
If she could have more moments like this with Kell, her life would be so much happier.
Sitting in silence with another person was an art form.
And Kell had perfected it.
The steady hum of the woods surprised her, a white noise made by nature that she didn’t notice in regular life. Then again, in L.A., when would the city ever be quiet enough to hear the backdrop?
As time passed, she watched Kell look up at the sky, a large hawk circling high, wings wide and looping in circles.
Each breath brought a sharp, crisp feeling to her forehead, the coffee tickling her nose with decreasing heat as each sip brought her closer to done.
Pausing, she listened to the woods and heard distinct sounds.
Squirrels chattered.
Leaves rustled.
And Kell’s steady breath continued through it all, his hand bringing the mug to his mouth, his ability to be at ease filling her with a rush of something pleasant and settled.
As the coffee grew cold, he was right–her hands were turning to ice. Shoving her free hand into her coat pocket helped. Inching closer to the fire helped, too.
Two minutes passed. Then five. At roughly ten minutes, a deer stepped into the clearing behind Kell’s truck, big and graceful.
“Look,” she whispered, breaking the stillness. Kell leaned toward her to follow her gaze. Woodsmoke filled her nose and the fire’s warmth made her knees tingle, her muscles shifting down to a state of quiet relaxation she’d never felt before, as if her whole body were encased in a calm joy.
“Doe,” he whispered back. It moved slowly, hooves popping through crunchy snow, sniffing around. Then it noticed the two of them, looked up and froze.
“Hi, deer,” she said softly.
It sprinted away, leaving a few bare branches swaying as it disappeared into the woods.
“So beautiful,” she murmured.
“Yes,” he said.
He was looking right at Rachel.
Phone messages, emails, documentation, meetings–all of it piled up in the sector of Rachel’s brain where expectations and responsibilities lived rent-free, taking up space that wasn’t real but felt more real than reality itself.
It was oppressive. The constant need to do better was an inner pain she lived with, something that was just there.
Only… right now it was less.
Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to her that she could live without it. That was an option?
“You said you watched the show about Svalbard, huh?” he asked, poking the fire with a stick. A piece of wood propped up on another burning log dropped suddenly, the resulting poof of embers making an artistic display.
“Yes. Super weird. It felt almost like watching a reality show, only in fiction form. The American was a bizarre twist. I’m not used to Americans on these shows.”
“Yeah. Everyone in the show was an immigrant. Did you cheer when they killed the Finnish dude?”
“Of course. He was the killer.”
“I just found him annoying.”
“Justice was served, then. He deserved to die because he was the killer and because he was annoying.”
“Yeah, but Sigrid didn’t need to do it by taking his gun away and letting a polar bear eat him.”
Both shivered at the memory.
Rachel shut her eyes tight, giggling suddenly.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re the only person in the world I can talk to about these shows. I’ve missed this.”
“You don’t know anyone else who likes murder mysteries set above the Arctic Circle where death by polar bear is a thing? I’m stunned.”
“I know, right? You’d think they’d be the newest TikTok sensation, but noooooooo,” she joked back.
“Made me want to visit Svalbard, though,” he added.
“Me, too!”