1503951243 by Laurel Saville Page A

conversation with anyone for months. Once he started talking, it seemed hard to stop.
    “How the hell did you find the place?” the woman on the other end of the phone finally interjected into his steady flow of words.
    Darius sputtered to a stop and laughed, relieved to be interrupted.
    “There was a sign,” he said.
    “I’ll be damned,” she said. “I haven’t been out there in ages.”
    “Your house?” he asked.
    “No, my grandmother’s. She died, oh, five, six years ago. We put it on the market, but no one was interested. Figured the place would just rot back into the ground.”
    “Well, I’m interested,” Darius said firmly.
    “Seriously?” Her voice was full of amusement and incredulity. “I mean, why?”
    “I’m looking for something I can work on. Get my hands dirty. Make it my own,” Darius said with a newfound and totally manufactured confidence.
    The voice on the other end of the phone guffawed. “Well, you’ll get all that and more with that place,” she said.
    They made plans to meet out there in a few days. She said her name was Sally. Darius went to the library and checked out some how-to books on carpentry, gardening, and homesteading. He went to the hardware store and stood in the tool aisles, staring at the implements there, daydreaming about their uses, imagining how they might feel in his hands. He was not ready for tools, he knew this, but he bought an ax and a hammer—heavy, useful things that he’d never owned before. He set them by the door in the cabin and picked them up from time to time, ran his hands up and down their shafts, picturing the potential for useful work each tool seemed to hold in quiet abeyance. He went back to the store and bought a tool belt. He put it on in the bathroom of the cabin and looked at himself in the mirror, turning this way and that as if he were a high school girl trying on a prom dress. He admired the way the leather strap sat on his narrow hips.
    On the day he was to meet Sally, Darius gave himself extra time to get to the farmhouse, remembering how lost he’d become when he’d left it and trying to retrace his steps home. He had no trouble this time and got there fifteen minutes early. There was already another vehicle there. A truck. Small, dark green, with rust eating away at several places on the panels. Darius was suddenly, sharply, jealous. He wanted a beat-up truck instead of his low-slung Saab. A woman was there, too, standing in the front doorway. A compact, sturdy presence, her hands stuffed into the back pockets of her jeans, work boots laced up on the outside of her pants, her hair tossed into a tumult around her face by the gusty winds of an increasingly brisk September. She raked her hair out of her eyes with her fingertips and stuffed it through the opening at the back of a ball cap. She didn’t smile as he got out of the car and moved toward her. He was surprised to find that he couldn’t read her expression. Her lips parted in a way that could as easily be mocking as welcoming. Her teeth were a little crooked and overlapping. He wondered why she’d not had braces. It never dawned on him that dental work, for some people, was a luxury rather than a necessity. She was not conventionally pretty, but there was a rough-hewn handsomeness to her face. She stuck out her hand and gave his a couple of firm pumps.
    A handshake like a man’s, he thought. She appeared to him not unlike the farmhouse itself—good bones, but a fixer-upper.
    Sally showed him in and they wandered the half-dozen dusty rooms. Even Darius could see that the house had little to recommend it. There was chipped linoleum where he’d thought he’d find scuffed wood floors, and garish wallpaper where he’d pictured wainscoting with layers upon layers of paint. There was no fireplace, just black spots where sparks had jumped from a long-gone woodstove onto the matted orange carpet. It smelled like cat pee and an old campfire.
    Still, he liked it. He’d been