didn’t know that I was coming.
I limped back into the store and followed the sound of Nana’s voice. I should have guessed she’d head straight to the kitchen, her favorite room in every house.
When I opened the swinging door, she was standing in a neat little kitchen with a MoonPie in each hand. The under-the-bed monster sat less than two feet from her, reaching his big, dirty hand for one of the pies.
The noise I made sounded more like the squeak of an untied balloon than a scream, but it was enough to make the intruder twist around to face me.
The bluest eyes in Texas stared at me. For a moment, all I saw was their color. They were the twilight sky during a storm. Dark, rich, and sparked with lightning.
“There’s Allie,” Nana said as she handed him the MoonPie. “I told you she was around. She’s an artist, you know. Does strange things now and then, like tells me to lock the door against spiders, but I love her anyway.”
My grandmother had been introducing me like that for as long as I could remember. Telling everyone I was talented, but strange. To my knowledge no teacher from the first grade through college had ever agreed with her, about the talent, anyway. I might love art and try from time to time to paint or draw, but I seemed to be missing one small necessity: skill. I seemed destined to only show at refrigerator-sized galleries.
My grandmother continued, “Luke, I’d like you to meet Allie Daniels.”
Grateful the dirty man with the bluest eyes didn’t offer his hand, I stared at him for a moment before he turned back to Nana. He could have been anywhere from thirty to forty. His face was too square to be handsome; his dark brown hair needed cutting. His body rounded in the chair as if he tried to take up less space than his big frame required. I thought of asking him why he’d been under the bed but I wasn’t sure I was ready for the answer.
“Luke was just telling me he lives next door.” Nana pointed toward the wooded area. “He says he can help out around the place if we need anything done.”
“We don’t need help.” More honestly, I couldn’t afford to pay anyone. I didn’t realize my words might seem unkind until they’d already exited my mouth.
The big man stood to go. His clothes hung around him. He was more tall than thick.
“I’ll be going then,” he said without looking at me as he slipped out the open back door and vanished.
“We don’t need help, Nana,” I repeated.
She nodded, understanding more what I hadn’t said than what I had. Without a word, she began cleaning the kitchen. The counters were worn, the sink had a chip the size of a quarter out of one side, the refrigerator light blinked on and off while the door was open, but other than that, the place looked better than most where we’d cooked. There was no food, but all the pots, pans, and knives seemed to be there along with a working double oven.
By late afternoon, we had both the kitchen and the two rooms upstairs at least livable. I tossed out all of Uncle Jefferson’s medicine bottles along with the fishing magazines. Guessing from the full bottles, it looked like he quit taking his pills about six months ago. My detective brain cells reasoned that a man not taking his medicine wouldn’t drive into town to pick up new prescriptions, so someone must have been bringing them to him. Someone who didn’t bother to make sure he took them.
Another fact nagged at the back of my mind while I worked. Why would a man who’d stopped taking medicine leave the bottles around?
Nana’s take on Uncle Jefferson was slightly different. She noticed that it appeared he didn’t leave a clean stitch of clothing. According to her, he hung on to life until everything was dirty, then he kicked the bucket rather than do laundry.
I suggested maybe Blue-Eyed Luke stole the clean clothes, but after a quick inventory we discovered my uncle Jefferson was a small man. His clothes would almost fit me so he couldn’t have stood over five-feet-five and, judging from the piles of dirty things, he owned no underwear or socks.
Once we found an old ringer-washer in a shed out back, Nana wanted to wash his clothes, but I convinced her to burn most of them. The fabric was too worn to even make good rags. I saved back the few flannel shirts in good condition for myself and dropped the rest out the window. We carried them down to a campfire pit close to the water and poured enough gasoline over the pile to get a good fire going.
An hour before sunset, Nana went to the kitchen to fix our supper. She’d had me move the two old wingback chairs down from the apartment. We shoved them into what must have been built as a breakfast nook in the kitchen. She added a table big enough for two and a little black-and-white TV. Then she pulled out her sewing basket that she hadn’t unpacked from the van for two moves and placed it in front of one of the chairs as a stool.
I hadn’t liked the idea, but once she’d spread a cloth over the table the little space seemed to welcome us, a private little parlor in the corner of the kitchen.
Climbing the stairs, I wished we had enough furniture to make the apartment above as livable. My grandmother might not ever be able to change her environment, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t rearrange it. I hoped the outbuildings we hadn’t gotten to yet contained furniture, otherwise we’d use boxes for nightstands by the beds.
“Allie,” she called up from the kitchen. “You want catfish for supper?”
“Sure,” I answered, thinking she was kidding.
A few minutes later I smelled fish frying. The aroma drew me down the stairs. I hadn’t had my grandmother’s catfish since we’d left the farm.
“Where’d you get fish?” I asked as I came into the kitchen.
“Found it in the sink, so fresh I swear it was still wiggling.” Nana giggled. “Maybe it swam up the drain.”
I wouldn’t have been surprised, but I wasn’t about to look a gift fish in the mouth. I carried in the box of cooking supplies and combined them with the few staples Nana discovered stored in the freezer near the back door. We had enough to serve fried potatoes and hush puppies with the fish.
After we were both so full we could eat no more, Nana covered the leftovers with a tea towel and set them in the oven as she’d done every night of my childhood. Grandpa’s supper left to warm.
I started to mention her mistake, but a forty-year-old habit must be hard to break. The year after he’d died, many a morning I’d scraped dishes that she’d left in the oven, but since we’d been traveling she’d stopped the practice. Maybe because we usually didn’t have leftovers. Or maybe because she never felt at home…until now.
She waved good night and headed upstairs without a word.
I cleaned up the kitchen and walked out back to make sure the fire I’d built with old clothes hadn’t gotten out of hand. It might not look too good to burn down the property on my first day at the lake.
I was almost to the campfire before I noticed a shadow sitting close to the dying flames, his back to the house, his shoulders rounded forward.
“Luke?” I whispered. If he planned to kill us, he’d had all day to do it.
Blue Eyes turned around and stared at me. In the smoky firelight I swear I saw an intelligence in his gaze that would miss little. “Allie Daniels,” he whispered as if testing his memory.
I moved closer. “Thanks for the fish.”
He nodded so slightly I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. “I figured Old Jefferson would have wanted you to have fish your first night on the lake.”
“You knew him?”
Luke nodded again. “I came out summers to fish as a kid. He served with my granddad in the army. They’d fish all day and tell war stories half the night.”
“Know much about him?”
Luke shook his head. “I hadn’t been out in years. After my grandfather died, I always planned to drop by, but I only made it once in the past ten years.”
He looked out over the lake and I waited him out.
Finally, he added, “I know his mother’s relatives founded this place over a hundred years ago. Worked a ferry service across the creek. He was named after them, and this dock has been called Jefferson’s Crossing since the first settlers passed by here.”
I liked the name. I liked having a place with a name and not just an address. Before I thought to stop, my fears babbled out. “I think he made a mistake leaving it to me.”
