I’d pay a price for that, I knew, but there were some points that, for me, were non-negotiable.
Willie, having spotted Lara over by the donkey rides, had set his tools down for a break and gone across to see her, and the wheelwright was explaining to an interested family how to fit a metal tire on a buggy wheel. But Sam had time to spare me. He’d been working on one of our old upstairs windows, I noticed—efficiently killing two birds with one stone as he demonstrated old techniques and tools while getting necessary work done.
They weren’t the first windows the Wilde House had known. In our weeks of sifting through the excavated soil, although we hadn’t turned up any more French buttons, we’d found twisted fragments of window lead and a few broken bits of blue-green glass from the diamond-shaped quarrels of the casement windows that would have been on the house originally when it was first built, but at some point in the eighteenth century—possibly when Zebulon Wilde had returned to the old house from Newtown to raise his own family here—those casement windows had been taken out and replaced with twelve-over-twelve double-hung windows, and one of these now lay supported across two old sawhorses while Sam refitted its muntins.
I felt ashamed for ever having doubted his ability to do such specialized repair and restoration. I couldn’t imagine any sub-contractor doing a more expert job. His hands kept up their movements, sure and certain, even as he raised his head. I think he’d only meant to smile and nod and say hello. Instead he looked more closely at my face and asked, “Is something wrong?”
“I just came to apologize for Harvey. He can be so . . .” Words failed me. “Culturally insensitive” seemed too tame and too polite, but what I wanted to say wasn’t very professional.
Sam’s smile showed briefly. “Yeah, well. I’ve dealt with guys like Harvey my whole life.”
“You shouldn’t have to here, though.” I could feel my own frustration breaking through a little as I noticed Harvey, in his flashy costume, heading back towards the barn and Eve and Sharon. “It’s not right,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to just stand here and take that kind of—” Once again the word I needed wasn’t one that I could say while working.
Sam seemed capable of filling in the blank. “Are we still talking about me?” he asked. I looked at him, and met his understanding eyes. He said, “Don’t let them make you crazy.” Then, as if he knew I needed to make light of it, he added, “Or is it too late for that?”
I smiled back. “It’s a little late.”
“Then here.” He handed me a hammer. “Help me put this frame together. You’ll feel better if you hit something.”
I did feel better, though I had to give my hammer up five minutes later to a little girl who, stopping with her family to observe what Sam was working on, was keen to help. For someone who’d been called in at the last minute to demonstrate, Sam did a decent job of it. He knew how to explain things, how to keep people’s attention—how to teach, and make it memorable.
I was as absorbed in his talk as the little girl until a hand brushed the back of my neck and I jumped.
“Hey,” said Tyler, surprising me more just by being here than he had done with his unannounced touch.
“Hey!” Recovering from my initial disbelief I leaned into his hug. “What are you doing here?”
“Since you won’t let me take you somewhere fun this weekend, I thought I could bring the fun to you.” He flashed The Smile. “You do have restaurants here, right? We can go to dinner, maybe catch a movie, then tomorrow we—”
“Tomorrow I’ll be here,” I told him, “cleaning up. But you can come and help with that.”
“Since when do you work Sundays?”
“Since you’ve known me. When we have special events, I work the days and hours I’m needed, Ty. You know that. And this is our big Fall—”
“—Harvest weekend. Yes, I know.” He looked around at the activity. “Good crowd. You’ve got good weather for it.”
I didn’t bring up Don Petrella’s scar and its prediction that a storm was on the way, because he’d already changed focus. With his left arm still around me, Tyler held his right hand out to Sam, who’d finished with his demonstration. “Hi,” he said, and introduced himself, and added, “I’m the boyfriend.”
Sam, above the handshake, said, “I gathered that. Sam Abrams.”
“You’re the contractor.”
“That’s right.”
I always found it interesting watching men meet other men. It was an almost primal and subconscious thing, the way they took each other’s measure, marking out their relative positions in the hierarchy. I’d watched while Tyler did this countless times in business and in social situations, but this was my first time watching Sam. While Tyler used his tone of voice and body language and his posture, Sam achieved the same thing with his eyes alone—his level gaze that held a quiet confidence and knew its worth and wasn’t all that easily impressed. He didn’t change how he was standing and his voice remained polite.
But it was Tyler—taller, dressed in more expensive clothes, and speaking with more force—who broke the contact first and looked away, then asked me, “How much longer do you have to stay here?”
When I told him we’d be done at five, he pulled his phone out. Checked the time. The last time I had done that, not too long ago, it had been ten past two. I was about to offer him a tour when he said, “Tell you what, babe. Let me have your house keys. I’ll go down and get unpacked and take a shower while I wait for you.”
I’d thought he’d stay on site awhile—he’d heard me talk so much about the Wilde House and the work that we were doing, but he’d never seen it. But he was already holding his hand out and I knew if he didn’t want to stay, there wasn’t any point in trying to convince him to. I handed him the keys and deftly hid my disappointment.
Willie, returning to take up his tools just as Tyler was walking away, remarked, “Either that lad’s a fast worker or you are, if he’s got your keys.”
Sam said, “That was her boyfriend.”
“Ah.” Willie grinned. “What does he sell, then?”
The sun speared my eyes and I shaded them. “What makes you think he sells something?”
“Well, does he?”
I admitted, “Yes. Insurance.”
Willie’s grin broadened, and taking his mallet in hand he said, “There you go.”
He winked and got to work, and left me wondering what it had been that tipped him off. I didn’t get a chance to ask, because by then another group of visitors was gathering, and Sam and Willie and the wheelwright started with their demonstrations. And I was distracted by Frank’s whistle.
Frank had one of those distinctive whistles—sharp and short and through his teeth—that carried right across the clearing. When I turned my head to look towards the barn he raised his hand to call me over.
In the grass around his antique cider press the wasps were hovering with stealth, attracted by the pungent apple pulp that clung to all the working wooden pieces and collected in the sloping tray below that caught the cider. A few wasps had also laid claim to the apples still stacked in round bushel baskets up against the barn wall in the shade beside Frank’s chair, but with a careless hand he brushed them off and chose a few more apples to run through the press.
I chose my steps more carefully, not wanting to be stung.
Frank acknowledged my arrival with a short nod. “Keeping me a secret, are you? From your boyfriend,” he said, when I looked at him blankly. “You didn’t bring him over.”
I knew Frank was a watcher. He noticed things. And that meant he would have noticed that Tyler had only been here a few minutes, so I didn’t need to explain. “Sorry. Next time.”
“It took me a minute to figure out that’s what he was. Thought at first he was selling you something. But listen—” he began.
I interrupted him, the opposite of listening. “What is it about Tyler that makes everybody so sure he’s a salesman?”
Frank paused. “Isn’t he?”