Livestock farming, weed-pulling... who’s the hick now, Mac?
But that wasn’t what she actually felt. She felt no triumph or vindication.
From all reports, the bones of the Coltrane family fortune had been picked clean and the marrow sucked out. Every single thing in every one of five grand homes was dismantled, carted away, sold to strangers, the proceeds dispersed to the victims of his father’s financial crimes. The houses had gradually been sold off. This was the last one.
She wondered if his Ritchey P-29 was sold off, too.
Something ferocious reared up in her at the thought. As if she could put herself between him and anything that might hurt him. It wasn’t rational. She wondered if that made her weak.
“Well. Um. You’re doing a great job.” Her voice had gone a little hoarse. “The grounds look so clean and pretty.”
His eyes went wide with amazement.
Then some emotion she couldn’t decipher, something so soft and so fierce her breath hitched, flickered across his features.
And then he pressed his lips together in what looked very like stifled hilarity.
He tugged his forelock sardonically. “Welcome to the neighborhood, Avalon. Guess I’ll see you around.”
When he bent to scoop up his cooler and turned to walk away, she knew a wayward, surprising stab of panic. As if she were an astronaut out for a spacewalk and her tether had just been cut.
That was how it was with Mac, she realized: together they’d somehow created an atmosphere of their own that felt both more real and more intoxicating than the mundane one here on earth.
His shoulder muscles moving beneath his T-shirt as he walked away were a poignant poetry. New, yet familiar. She fancied she could still see the outline of the boy he used to be beneath that big man. And she could still remember vividly how it felt to hold his body against hers.
And then he turned around and walked backward for a few seconds. Even from where she stood she fancied she could see that dimple, and for an odd moment, it seemed as significant as the first star in the night sky. Something you could wish on.
“Every two hours,” he called, and pointed to his head.
Mac stopped just short of his cottage door and stared at it with some surprise.
He barely remembered walking the hundred-some-odd yards up the road back home.
He dropped the cooler. He headed for his coffee pot and dumped the lukewarm brew he found there in a cup and slammed it into the microwave like he was wrestling a prisoner into a cell. The days when he was a snob about coffee were long gone.
Then he retrieved the cup and took a gulp. He literally felt as if he needed sobering after a bender.
And as he held on to it, he realized his hand was actually shaking a little.
He gave a short, half-astounded, half-scornful laugh at his own expense. But it wasn’t every day a guy time-traveled. That moment when realization kicked in his mind had felt scrambled like a satellite transmission at the mercy of a solar flare. No thoughts could get through, only a swarm of emotions, and he’d all but forgotten what to do with most emotions.
He supposed there was a certain poetry inAvalon Harwoodof all people buying that house out from under him.
He’d never been a big fan of poetry.
Well, sure, there were the ones about the Man from Nantucket that he and his brother had sniggered over when they were adolescents. But poetry often went hand in hand with that shell game people liked to call “romance.” It purported to illuminate, and in his estimation it often obscured instead. He was deeply suspicious these days of anything and anyone that didn’t come right out and say whatever the fuck they actually meant.
He took another hit of coffee. And winced.
In that article he’d found via Google, her boyfriend, that Tech Doofus who’d gone to Dartmouth, had said things like “The only thing I’m allergic to is the mundane,” and she’d said things like “Iloveworking all the time.” Mac had muttered, “You havegotto be kidding me,” when he’d read that. It was nearly impossible to imagine this was the Avalon he’d known, who’d reveled in her freedom and who had once slaughtered him in a burping contest and had once collapsed, crippled with laughter, when her brother Jude had accidentally farted in the middle of pontificating about some scientific principle.
But there was money in that game she’d helped invent if she could buy this house out from under him, so he had to hand her and the Tech Doofus as much.
She’d wanted to be a teacher because she loved kids and she loved telling people what she knew, and she’dlovedanimals and running around in the wild outdoors. But as it turned out she wasn’t a teacher and she had no pets and she was going to turn this beautiful place into a refuge for the kind of people most of the world needed a refugefrom.
So he’d laid that “I’m the groundskeeper” on her as a sort of little test. Because he was crafty that way. It was true, of course: he was the groundskeeper. But it wasn’t the only truth about him.
She could have shoved a snarky dagger right in if she’d wanted to. Her eyes could have registered shock at how far the mighty had fallen.