Brassard was far out across the lower fields, flinging manure; Lynn had gone back to her place. But I found Earnest on a ladder in the main shed, up installing a new ventilator fan where one of the old ones had gone defunct. It was a job that would ordinarily require at least two people—the fans are about five feet in diameter and heavily built. I wasn’t there to see him bring it up the ladder, but I didn’t doubt he’d carried the thing with one hand, like a lady’s purse.
I gave him the parts he’d ordered, then sat on a stanchion to watch him as he continued to work.
I tried to calm myself. With the cows still outside for another few weeks, the floors pressure-washed clean, it was a spacious and pleasant space. The open doors and side windows were open so daylight flooded in and a breeze came through, carrying the woody scent of a billion leaves just starting to turn. Really, a beautiful day and a tranquil place, comfortably upwind of the manure spreading. And there I sat, feeling ill with anger and resentment.
Always happiest in high places, Earnest whistled as he clanked away. I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, long enough that he was startled when he turned his head and saw me still there.
“So, how’s your day going?” he ventured cautiously.
“There’s a stupid, shitting, stupid thing about to happen, and it’s making me sick. I’m embarrassed that you or Lynn or Brassard have to witness it.”
Startled, he dropped a socket wrench. “I can hardly wait,” he said.
I retrieved the wrench and met him halfway up the ladder to hand it to him.
Back on the stanchion, I told him the situation: fucking Cat, conceiving of this fucking crude subterfuge to bring some Romeo all the way from fucking Boston.
Earnest, balanced easily half on the ladder and half on a horizontal beam, drove in a screw with his impact driver, bra-a-a-a-a-a-t, drove another, setting the brackets I’d brought him. He examined the result, experimentally spun the big blades by hand, lifted and dropped the louvers. A few more rattles and clanks, another bra-a-a-a-a-a-t, and he climbed down. He came over to me, wiping his hands on the bib of his overalls. Back on earth, standing in front of me wearing his tool belt laden with drill driver, wrenches, pliers, coils of electrical wire, he was a broad and firmly planted presence.
“You guys ever done this before? I mean, set things up—”
“Yeah. In fucking seventh grade.”
He nodded thoughtfully, then leaned back against the ladder. If I had expected some pearl of wisdom, I was mistaken. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say ‘fucking’ so often in such a short period of time.”
I was able to smile slightly.
But then he went on to say that maybe I should give Cat the benefit of the doubt, maybe there was something here. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it or was baiting me, being ironic, but if it was a joke his timing was bad. When I interrupted to tell him to fuck off, he just made a check mark in the air, still counting each “fuck” and “fucking.”
I remembered the groceries sitting in the truck. We left the shed and carried things inside and put them away. Earnest made a sandwich for himself. I tried to drink a cup of coffee, but it struck me as bitter and I put it aside. My stomach was full of bile.
The September sun slanted through the windows and cast a band of brightness across the dining room table. Earnest was clearly upset by my distress. “We could turn the tables on Cat,” he suggested. “Call Lynn, go get Jim, four of us stand in a row, scowling, arms crossed. Make him run the gauntlet of our disapproval. Intimidate this little bastard—who must have a lot of brass himself if he’s letting Cat do him the same way she’s doing you.”
“He may not know the whole plan. Probably doesn’t. Long way to drive for a blind date.”
He nodded, chewed thoughtfully. I checked my watch.
We improvised schemes to discourage Cat and this guy and after a while got pretty absurd, which helped considerably. Earnest suggested that if Brassard parked the manure spreader in the driveway and had it accidentally start spraying, that would put a crimp in the guy’s style. We laughed and my hackles went down a few degrees.
Another weak brainstorm struck me: “Earnest. Could you be my boyfriend for, like, ten minutes?”
He tipped his head, puzzled, biting his upper lip as if waiting for the punchline.
“I mean, when they come, you and I go out there holding hands or otherwise being, you know, ‘demonstrative’ in a way that says—”
The humor left this face, and he said, “That would require quite a stretch of their imaginations, Pilgrim—a guy almost twenty years older? Just meet this twit, pretend you never heard Cat’s pitch. My two cents, there’s absolutely no reason for you to bullshit anybody, no reason to play any game at all. Just tell them to go to hell if that’s how you feel.”
That last cheered me. Of course he was right. We sat for a bit, then went out to do some raking and cleaning up of the porch and lawns, waiting for Jim to get back and the bull and my unwelcome guests to arrive. Making it look good in
