The word came doubly, through the dusk and through the receiver at my ear, and for the next few minutes, all I could say between laughter and kisses was “You turkey!”
“Surprised?” he asked again, his forehead touching mine.
“Totally and utterly.”
There was a waste of more valuable airtime before we finally remembered to turn off our phones.
Arm in arm, we walked around to the back of the van. He lifted the hatch and I saw that the space was stuffed with camping equipment: tent, sleeping bags, cookware, a cooler full of cold beers and a big chilled steak that made me hungry all over again.
We pitched the tent at the edge of the pond near the pier and I pumped up the air mattresses while Kidd started a fire. We had camped twice before, once in the mountains, once on the Outer Banks, so I knew the drill. Mostly, it was to keep out of his way while he laid out the gear as efficiently as Aunt Zell putting away groceries in her own kitchen.
A Tupperware bowl held tossed salad greens and there were crusty rolls, tin plates to put then on and real knives and forks to eat with. When the meat came off the grill, charred on the outside and atavistically rare on the inside, it was the most delicious steak I’d put in my mouth since the one he’d cooked at Blowing Rock.
I popped the tops on two Heinekens and we ate sitting on the pier with our bare feet dangling in the water.
Our plates were soon clean, but other hungers still raged as we turned to each other. The smell of him—his aftershave, his clean cotton shirt—the taste of his steak-smeared lips against mine, the heat of his hands that ignited all my senses as they slipped beneath my shirt and unhooked my bra.
He wasn’t wearing a belt and when I undid the buttons, his jeans slipped easily from his slim hips.
The planks on the deck were still warm from the hot June sun and after all our appetites were finally sated, we lay on our backs looking up at the stars. The moon was halfway to full. It sequinned the pond as we slid into the water and glistened on our wet bodies as we twined around each other like silvery eels in the moonlight.
That night, we zipped our sleeping bags together to form a double mattress and we slept on top of them with only a light sheet for cover. The sun woke us a little after five and it seemed so natural for Kidd to be there beside me that I didn’t care how awful I must look: tangled hair, fuzzy mouth, no makeup.
“You look beautiful,” he said, pulling me down on him.
By the time Will and his crew arrived at seven, we’d already had breakfast, put the camp in order and were clearing the floors of debris so that Sheetrock could be delivered on Monday as scheduled.
Kidd is good with his hands (no double entendre intended) and under Will’s supervision, we installed the doors for my two-car garage and built a workbench along one wall. I hadn’t planned on a garage at all, but Will talked me into it.
“Open carports let the whole world know at a glance if you’re home or not, or whether you’ve got company,” he’d said with the sly smile of one who’d slipped his car into someone else’s garage a time or two. “Besides, you’ll be glad for the extra storage space.”
Now, as Kidd and I built shelves over the workbench, I could appreciate Will’s reasoning. I would never own enough stuff to fill these shelves, but in months to come, it might cut down on my family’s raised eyebrows if Kidd’s van were discreetly stowed behind thick aluminum doors, so I hammered and sawed with a will despite the sweat trickling down my face.
At noon, Will paid the men their week’s wages in cash and I wrote him a check that covered his time, too.
“Everybody keep their act together, you could be moving in by the end of July,” Will said.
“It’s looking real good,” I told him, but he frowned as he gazed out past the pond to the dilapidated greenhouse.
“We sure do need to get Haywood to pull that ugly thing off. You speak to him about it?”
I nodded. “He says he’s going to fix it up.”
“I’d stick a match to it,” Will said, “only there’s nothing there to burn.”
After he’d gone, Kidd and I drove over to Seth’s and borrowed a couple of horses and spent the afternoon riding along back lanes, catching up on a week’s worth of small talk. By the time we’d unsaddled the horses and turned them back out to pasture, I was feeling truly gamey and sat on the far side of the van’s front seat as we drove in to Dobbs.
“Kidd! How nice,” said Aunt Zell as she opened the screen door for us. “Y’all are just in time for drinks.”
The back porch was deep and shaded. It ran the full width of the house and was a cool place to sit on a hot afternoon. The beds of bright flowers just beyond the screen echoed the crisp floral chintz on Aunt Zell’s new patio cushions. A bowl of peanuts and a plate of raw vegetables sat on the glass-topped table.
Uncle Ash set his glass down and walked over to the door of his den. “Bourbon for you, son, or gin-tonic? Unless you’d like to shower first, too?”
I left Kidd in their capable hands and went upstairs.
My rooms on the second floor had begun as an apartment for Uncle Ash’s elderly mother years ago. Although connected to the main house, it had its own separate entrance and had been a convenient place to perch while trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. I could even feel virtuous about staying on after I was earning enough to get my own place because Uncle Ash’s job as a tobacco buyer meant lots of travelling both here in the States and in South America and he didn’t like to leave Aunt Zell alone. But now that he would be retiring at the end of the summer, the time was more than right for me to move out.
Nevertheless, I was starting to feel nostalgic already as I moved through the cool, pale green rooms, undressing while I went till I stepped naked into the shower.
I lathered with scented soap and shampoo and decided that hot water on tap has to be one of civilization’s greatest luxuries.
