“Evening, ladies,” he said with a nod in their direction and, picking up a paper bag of groceries in either hand, headed toward the front door of his house.
“Such a gentleman,” Izzie said, voice dripping with sarcasm as she pulled a backpack, computer carrying case, and shopping bags from the back seat of the car.
“Wouldn’t a gentleman offer to help with the heavy stuff?” Daphne replied, struggling a little with the weight of a heavily loaded duffle and an overnight bag.
“Yeah, yeah,” Patrick answered as he balanced one of the paper bags on his hip and unlocked the front door. He held the door open with his foot, stepping to one side to let Izzie and Daphne enter past him. “Put your stuff anywhere. I’ll clear out one of the rooms upstairs as soon as I get the stew cooking on the stove.”
“Don’t sweat it, we can handle the mess upstairs.” Izzie was already climbing the stairs to the second floor, and Daphne was depositing the duffle bag on the floor in the living room before following her up.
Patrick felt the same pang of embarrassment that he’d felt that morning when they’d gone to shower in the second-floor bathroom. He was self-conscious that anyone was seeing the sorry state of the rooms upstairs, and he was sure that Izzie must have taken him for some kind of hoarder. But the truth of the matter was that the “mess” up there, as she had described it, represented all that Patrick had left of his mother and great-uncle, and the only physical reminders he had left of his own childhood with them. He had tried many times over the years to tackle the almost Herculean task of clearing all of it out and making those rooms usable again, but each time he started in on it he ended up losing hour after hour lost in nostalgia, following a seemingly endless web of associations that led from one childhood memory to another, some pleasant and some less so, but all of them cherished in one way or another.
After putting the grocery bags on the kitchen counter next to the supplies he’d already brought inside, Patrick headed back to the car to get the next load.
He was carrying in the bottles of wine that he’d got at the grocery store and the rum he’d picked up at the liquor store when a Volkswagen Beetle pulled up beside him, with Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” blaring from the car stereo.
“Have I come to the right place for the zombie-hunter slumber party?” Joyce called out over the din from the stereo speakers, leaning out the open driver-side window. “I brought my fuzzy pajamas.”
“Very funny,” Patrick dead-panned. He hefted the wine. “I got your order.”
“Good thing.” She turned and lifted up a reusable bottle bag that had been sitting on the passenger seat beside her. “I picked up a few bottles, too, just to be on the safe side.”
She drove past Patrick’s car, rolling up the window as she went, and parked by the curb. Patrick waited on the sidewalk as she climbed out, leaning heavily on her cane. She was wearing her leather jacket over a Joy Division t-shirt, faded denim jeans, and a pair of bright-pink eight-holed Doc Martens boots.
“Want some help with that?” Patrick asked as she reached into the back seat.
Joyce straightened up and shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”
Leaving the rest of her things in the car, she pulled a single bottle of wine out of the bag from the passenger seat, and then turned and simply walked toward the open front door of the house, leaving her car door standing open. As she walked inside, she glanced back over her shoulder at him and smiled.
“Just be sure to lock it up when you’re done.” She held up the bottle of wine, waggling it back and forth. “I’m going to have a drink.”
Patrick smiled as he set his load of bottles down on his front steps and went to fetch Joyce’s things from the car. Then he felt a chill, and glanced up at the darkening sky overhead. He knew that they were probably safe here, but he didn’t want to be out in the open any longer than he had to be. He hurried to pull the bags from the Volkswagen so he could get back inside as quickly as possible. It was almost as if he could feel eyes on him, watching from the shadows.
As Patrick worked in the kitchen, browning the cubes of chuck roast before stirring in onion and garlic, he could hear the sound of Izzie and Daphne walking across the floor upstairs, back and forth, no doubt moving boxes and shifting old furniture. On the other side of the kitchen wall he could hear Joyce’s cane tonking on the floor as she went about unpacking her things in his bedroom. His intention was that he would offer to sleep on the couch while she took his bed, thinking it forward to assume that they would share a bed again just because circumstances had forced them to do so the night before in the abandoned lighthouse. Or maybe he was just overthinking things.
Patrick added diced potatoes, chopped carrots, tomato sauce, and chicken stock, then seasoned the pot liberally with salt and pepper. He was putting the cover on the pot when Joyce came in from the other room, holding a half-empty glass of wine in one hand, leaning heavily on her cane with the other.
“Smells good,” she said, sniffing the air.
“It’s my mom’s recipe,” Patrick answered, washing his hands in the sink. “Pretty standard island style.”
“My mother
