Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn
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smile down at him, charmed by his sudden concern. “It’s okay. Small world, though, or else your salvage yard gets around.”
His shoulders slouch in relief. “We do all right. These older neighborhoods, we get to a lot. And I went to high school with Jeff.” He nods up at the house. “So this is your place, yeah?”
I look back at it, stupidly, like I’m checking to see if it’s still there, or if I’m at the right address. But really it’s just me trying to make sense of how my house must look to Ben. Probably not good. I think of Zoe’s shithole-to-ten scale. I am still definitely at a four. “Yep,” I say, turning back to him, conveying a confidence I don’t really feel. I try to redirect. “How’s everything? Your dad, and…that kid?”
“Oh,” he says, looking a little surprised I’ve asked. “They’re okay. My dad’s busting my balls, of course. You saw a bit of that.” I have to laugh a little at the way he says this, the genial embarrassment he has at his father’s teasing. “And the kid—his name is River—he’s around. My dad’s making him work off his debt at the salvage yard.”
“Really?” I’m more glad than I thought I’d be to hear this. The boy’s pale, stricken face had come back to me more than a few times since Thursday. “That’s—that’s really good.”
“It’s really good for him, probably. It’s not so good for me, since I can barely get him to say four words sequentially. I think on Friday he called me ‘mister,’ but maybe sarcastically? He makes me feel like I’m a hundred years old.”
I snort. “That’s a teenager for you, I guess.”
“This is…” He pauses, looks up again at the house, then restarts. “This is a really beautiful place.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I say. “It’s not beautiful now, but it will be.”
“You forget that I have a unique appreciation for old things,” he says. “It’s in my blood.”
Ben is wearing almost the exact same thing I saw him in on Thursday: t-shirt, dark blue this time, faded jeans slung low on his hips, a brown leather belt that’s so worn I can see cracks along the edge from where I stand, and shit-kicking worker’s boots that are covered in dust. He’s got a ball cap on, low over his eyes, his dark blond hair curling with sweat around the edges.
“Would you want to see inside?” I blurt, and then, in my mind, I dump the entire glass of ice water I am holding over my head. What is wrong with me? First I ask him to my lab, now my house? I certainly hope my vagina doesn’t have a mind to issue invitations, but honestly the way Ben looks, it’s not entirely unlikely that she’ll speak up in the next five minutes or so.
His grin should look cocky. It probably is cocky, but somehow he wears it well, without malice or intention. He looks—pleased, like, what a treat to be asked, what fun to have a crazy almost-stranger invite you into her hot mess of a house to look around. I start to tell him that it’s no big deal, he doesn’t have to, but he’s already opened the wrought iron gate and is coming up the walk, up the steps. “Yeah. I’d love it.”
I turn back to the door and for the first time recall that I am currently wearing a pair of old hiking boots, cutoff shorts derived from my most unflattering pair of jeans, and a Harry Potter t-shirt. My hair’s too short for a ponytail, so before I’d gone outside I’d pinned some of it back with a few old barrettes. My glasses are probably dirty too, so pretty much I look very similar to the way I did on the playground in elementary school. Awesome.
I open the front door and wave Ben in ahead of me so I can quickly remove the offending barrettes. I need a mirror to know if this was a mistake or not, but I do my best to ruffle my hair and make some kind of sense of it.
“Wow,” he says, standing in the living room, his hands set low on his hips. He reaches up to take off his ball cap, runs a hand through his hair. It’s sticking up everywhere, and this comforts me, given that I’m probably rocking something similar. “This is great. Look at this woodwork,” he says, crossing to the fireplace. I’m ridiculously pleased he’s noticed this, because it’s my favorite thing about the house too.
“It needs a lot of work, I know.”
He nods. “Quite a bit on your hands,” he says, but I appreciate that he’s not patronizing me about it. He walks around, peering under windowsills, crouching to look at the back of radiators, reaching up to run his hands along doorframes, the plaster walls. I’m transfixed watching him, how tactile he is, how focused. It’s the hardest thing not to think about what those traits might be like in another context.
I take off my glasses, swipe them quickly on my t-shirt. When I put them back on, he’s standing under the archway between the dining room and living room, hands back on his hips, looking at me. “You do need a lot of stuff for this place.”
“Yeah. Probably going to give your dad a lot of business, huh?”
He smiles, crooked. “Let’s make a list,” he says. “Of all the hardware you’ll need.”
“Really?” This is what I’ve been thinking about doing since Thursday, but the prospect of doing it with someone, someone who knows a lot about it, makes it seem achievable, exciting.
“Really,” he says. “Grab a notebook. We’ve got work to do.”
* * * *
I make a quick stop in the bathroom to pick off the worst of the landscaping that’s stuck to me, grab a notepad, and head back out to where Ben is. We start in the kitchen, probably the worst room in the house, me rushing to tell him I’m planning a total redo, happening this fall according to my contractor’s timeline.
He gives me a quizzical look, as if he’s about to ask a question, but he seems to rethink it, and taps at a bay of lower cabinets along the house’s back wall. “These are probably the oldest ones you’ve got in here,” he says. “Maybe 1930s? Too bad about the paint on them.” He crouches down, opens a door to peer in.
“I’ll probably have to scrap everything. So this room will probably look—you know. Not historical. Maybe I don’t really need hardware for this room.”
Ben stands and shrugs, looking around. “Maybe. But you could look for antique cabinets. It’s a hassle, but possible. Even if you don’t do that—those older cabinets are pretty small, not really suited for newer dishes and stuff—you could still get some nice antique drawer pulls, knobs. That stuff’ll go on most of the newer cabinetry, no problem. A light fixture, maybe?” He’s turning in a slow circle, nodding as he looks around, as if he can see it in his mind. I want to be in there, to see what he’s seeing.
“Okay,” I say.
“This wall behind the stove was probably exposed brick at some point. You could try and go back to that.” Exposed brick? I love that idea. I wish I’d thought of it myself.
It’s this way for the next hour, Ben and I moving through each room in the house. He’s curious, asking lots of questions about what I know about the house, what I like about it, what I wish were different. He knows a lot, but he’s not a know-it-all, and he’s got a good sense of humor—he laughs easily, especially when I tell him I put a padlock on the door to the crawlspace because of spiders. But it doesn’t feel as if he’s laughing at me. He’s just—I don’t know. Enjoying me.
We’re up in the empty extra bedroom, the one I want to turn into a home office at some point, and I’m sitting on the floor, cross-legged, making a note about how many doorknobs I’d need in here—two for the small closets, one for the door to the room, when it hits me that Ben has been here for a while now, and this can’t be what he had planned for the day. “Oh!” I say, a bit more exclamatory than I’d intended. “What about your dad?”
He looks down at me, and I almost lose my breath—he’s so tall, so good-looking. I hate it. “What about him?”
“Well, I mean,