Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Dennis
The internet was a blessing and a curse.
Because it damn near turned him into a stalker.
Finding out where Ms. Ana DaSilva lived and worked was easy. Too easy. Didn’t need to be a private investigator to access way too much of her personal information.
And her mother’s. And her stepfather’s.
Holding back from contacting her was the thin line of decency Dennis forced himself to stand behind.
She’d ghosted him back at the hotel, only talking to him when they were trapped in the elevator. Had he misread her signals a second time? The way she kissed him as the elevator bumped down to the first floor hadn’t been fake.
No way.
Nothing about how her body responded to him said she was placating him to get away. The way she leaned against him. Looked him in the eye. Flirted with her elegant hands.
She’d made love with a tender eagerness and a hot streak that he could still hear, feel, and taste when he concentrated hard enough, in the fitful dark, body throbbing for her.
He hadn’t misread their night together, not by a long shot.
So what had changed?
I was told it’s customary to wait three days to text someone so you don’t seem desperate. It’s been exactly 72 hours since I last saw you, so…
Sending her that first text had left a smile on his face for hours, and he’d been elated when she’d finally replied back with:
You don’t seem desperate. How are you?
Better now that I’ve connected with you. How’s life? His simple reply was meant to be polite and keep the conversation going.
But then hours turned into a half a day, then a full day, and now here he was, two days after texting her, and…
Nothing.
A big, fat nothing.
“Hey.” Kell tossed a toolbag into the back of the Luview Tree Service truck, then opened the passenger-side door and climbed in. Dennis looked up from his phone.
“Hey, what?”
“You look a million miles away,” Kell said, peering at him. When Dennis left home and joined the Army, little Kellan was just that: little.
Ten years younger than Dennis, his brother was now about twenty pounds heavier, though it rested differently on his body. Military posture really was a thing, and Dennis had it.
Kell didn’t.
Rafe called Dennis’s build “super medium,” and hated him for it.
“You have zero body fat, man,” Rafe frequently bitched, but his buddy managed the same hundred-pound loads Dennis carried on five-mile climbs, and matched him on his ten-mile runs.
Barely.
Kell wasn’t fit in the same way Dennis was, but no way did Dennis want to get into an arm wrestling match with the Paul Bunyan impersonator his brother had grown into. Getting used to the beard was a struggle. Absorbing the change in the brother he remembered was turning out to be a paradigm shift.
Like everything in Luview, Maine.
“Just thinking.”
“What’s her name?”
“Huh?”
“You have a look on your face I’ve never seen before. Has to be about a woman.”
"Why does everything have to be about a woman with you? Just because you're completely besotted with Rachel doesn't mean that the rest of us live our lives daydreaming about our partners."
Kell's eyes narrowed.
"So it is about a woman." He carried a big travel thermos printed with the words Love You Coffee, where love is caffeinated.
"Not talking about it." Dennis shook his head.
Kell finished taking a sip, pulling his upper lip in right after.
"I think it's great if you've already got someone. Make it easier on yourself."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You kidding me, bro?” Kell snorted. “You are a hot commodity on the Love You meat market."
"Meat market," he repeated. The words conjured an image of Kendrill's Market for Dennis, nothing more, until he realized what Kell meant and groaned.
“Annabeth Khouri is already imagining the engraved wedding invitations.”
"Oh, come on. You think I'm going to find someone to date here? That's Mom's dream. She probably has a china pattern picked out for some imaginary bride she thinks I'm going to find in Luview." Dennis sighed. “I knew this would happen if I came back.”
“Mom would try to run your life?”
“That there would be expectations.”
Kell snorted.
“Where do you get to live without other people’s expectations? You want that, bro, go be a monk on a mountain.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
Dennis checked his phone again. Still no text.
“She ghosted you?”
“Not talking about it.”
“Sorry.”
Dennis closed his eyes slowly, as if even his eyelids needed to show restraint.
“Where are we going?” He opened the GPS on his phone, though it wouldn’t do much good on many of the back roads. Cell signals were the very definition of intermittent reinforcement here in the mountains of western Maine.
“Mel’s.”
“Mel Chassi?”
“Yep. Tree got hit by lightning, pretty close to her big barn. Happened about two years ago. We’ve been watching it for a while, and now it’s got to come down.”
Kell handed Dennis the work order. Half typed but with added notes in their mother’s neat penmanship, it detailed the job. He looked at the price estimate.
“That’s half what we’d normally charge,” he grunted.
“Mel’s animal sanctuary is a non-profit. Dad gives her a break.”
“Dad’s a softy.”
“Yep. Just like you.” Kell’s grin made his beard spread, showing off teeth that were perfectly straight after two years of braces when he was a tween.
When Dennis joined the Army, those braces hadn’t even been put on yet.
“Me?”
“You and Mel have a thing for animals.”
“It’s called compassion.”
“I have compassion! I love Calamine.”
“Your cat is bigger than most five-year-old humans.”
“Better behaved than most of them, too. And don’t say anything negative about Cally in earshot.”
As if she were eavesdropping, Cally’s orange head popped up from the backseat of the truck’s cab.
“See?” Kell said with a laugh. “You hurt her feelings.”
“It was a compliment! She’s objectively huge.” Growing up around Maine Coon cats meant Dennis had gone out into the world and found regular-sized cats weird.
And it wasn’t just cats, either.
Like bowling. The first time he went bowling during post-boot camp Army training, he referred to what he saw as “big-ball bowling” and was howled out of existence, cursed with the nickname Big Balls for the next three weeks, until training ended.
All because he’d only seen candlepin bowling in his corner of Maine.
“So are you,” Kell said, eyes appraising him. “I thought I was the biggest guy in the family.”
“You’re taller than me.”
“By half an inch.”
“Still counts.”
“But we still both beat Luke. He’s the puny one.” Kell grinned.
“Luke is anything but puny,” Dennis said drily, navigating the dirt and gravel camp road that took them down to the numbered state route.
It was a steep hill, layers of snowstorms mashed into the dirt and stone, with a few ice patches in there for good measure.
“Anyone who can defuse Lyle Morgenstern in person without a single blow has mad skills. And he’s trained in hand-to-hand self-defense. ”
“So?”
“So am I. Which means we’re both stronger than you in that arena.”
“Is that how it is? We’re going to rank the three of us in different ways?”
“No. You started it. I don’t need to compare myself to you two. I already know I’m superior.” He couldn’t finish the sentence without smirking, knowing how ridiculous the words sounded.
The right turn out of the camp’s entrance took them closer to town, though Mel Chassi’s place wasn’t downtown. As he drove, Dennis assembled a dossier in his head about Mel. Only back for a week now, this was happening increasingly often, a psychological tool to re-orient himself to his hometown.
While he’d been coming home once a year since he enlisted, and he knew the comings and goings of half the town because Deanna wouldn’t stop delivering gossip, he still felt a temporal unreality about his new life.
Sure, Mel Chassi was now a grown woman, divorced from Darren, and had a son. But Dennis remembered her as a camp counselor, then director, and local horse-riding specialist.
“Want to grab something from Greta’s before we head over to Mel’s?” Kell asked.
“No.”
“Come on.”
“You asked whether I wanted to. If you want to, just say so.”
“I want to go get a croissant at Greta’s.”
Dennis took the left fork ahead, instead of the right toward Mel’s animal sanctuary. Kell shifted his weight in the front seat, brow knit together.
“I never thought of it that way,” he said, scratching his hairline under the thick, red wool cap he wore.
“What way?”
“I wasn’t asking permission. But it’s how we ask for stuff like that.”
“It’s not direct. I’m used to direct communication.”
“Do you expect everyone here to change to your style?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean I won’t point it out.”
“You spent a lot of years in the Army. It’ll take a long time to get out of those habits.”
“Why would I want to change those habits? They’re functional.”
When they reached the outskirts of town, Dennis widened his eyes, then chuckled.
“This place. So much red, pink, and white.”
“I’m so used to it, I don’t notice.” Kell frowned. “Rachel comments on it all the time, though. You’d think she’d adjust after living here for a few years, but so far, no.”
“Hard to adjust to something so ludicrous.”
Dennis paused at a stoplight, looking at the library, a big red-brick building with a heart-shaped sign.
When he was a kid, their mom took them to story hour, then summer reading clubs, with an almost military regularity.
Dennis enjoyed reading as much as the next person, but as an adult, he preferred non-fiction. History and biography.
Anything but Jane’s Intelligence case studies.
“Is that why you get up at four every morning? Army habit?” Kell asked as Dennis moved through the now-green light, finding a parking spot within ten seconds.
Small-town life meant not fighting for the daily needs that were challenges in more urban and populated areas.
Easy parking was taken for granted here in Luview, at least in the off season for tourists.