“Dad.” Harry rolled his eyes and then skidded toward the door, the duvet—Felix’s duvet—dragging behind him. Trailing on the floor. Wash the sheets was definitely going on today’s to-do list.
Harry flung the front door open and pulled a little old lady inside. She was wearing a hat with earflaps, a huge puffy jacket, what appeared to be denim overalls (he would have called them dungarees two decades ago), and men’s work boots. And she was carrying purple gardening gloves and a pair of secateurs.
“Hey, Eudora,” Harry said in a stage whisper as he eased the front door closed. “We’ve got a rodent infestation. Wanna come hear?”
“Harry,” Felix said through gritted teeth.
“Lovely to meet you. You must be Felix. Eudora Jenkens.” She took a step toward him in her boots, her muddy boots. Her very muddy boots. On his pale oak hall floor. She held out her hand and Felix shook it. A leftie, and she didn’t wear a wedding band. “I sure am sorry to hear about your charming wife. Another two weeks in the hospital? My, my.” She shook her head.
How did this unknown person find out about Ella—the jungle telegraph?
“Now, I don’t want y’all worrying about the garden”—Felix hadn’t been—“I’ll keep an eye on it. I was fixing to cut back your hellebores, but I see they’re quite fine.”
“My hellebores?” Felix said.
“How silly of me. You probably know them as Christmas roses. Should you need references, I’d be more than happy to provide them, although I am an ambassador for the Blomquist Garden at Duke Gardens and a former president of the Chapel Hill gardening club.” Her voice was slightly breathy and her r’s soft; her tone dripped with old-fashioned southern hospitality. She gave a slow, genteel smile that said, I bite.
“But Lord have mercy, did you mention rodents? It sounds as if you need my expertise in other areas.” She took off her jacket—not her boots—and rolled up her shirtsleeves. “Now. How can I help?”
Brilliant. Not merely a nosey parker, but a nosey parker do-gooder. Felix ranked do-gooders at the same level as Jehovah’s Witnesses. “Thank you, but we don’t need any—”
“To hear them, we have to go into the bedroom.” Harry looked from Felix to Eudora with a shaky smile. “You might want to take your boots off first.”
“Of course, child.” Then she put the secateurs on top of the shoe cabinet and sat on the floor like an agile twenty-year-old. Her socks were neon orange.
Harry, jiggling from foot to foot and still mummified in the duvet, turned his back to Eudora and gave Felix a wide-eyed look that made less sense than a semaphore. Felix couldn’t think of a response. Quite simply, his life was no longer his own. There were rodents in his bedroom, a pair of rusty clippers on his ash shoe cabinet, and some mad old biddy with hideous socks sitting on his floor like a limber yoga master. He’d heard a news report once about frozen waste from a transatlantic jet hurtling down through the sky and crashing into someone’s house. Had frozen shit fallen on him right at that moment, it wouldn’t have surprised him. At all.
Harry waved for them both to follow. Wordlessly, they did.
As they filed into the bedroom—his bedroom—Felix remembered something from the night of Harry’s birthday sleepover. Scrabbling. Scrabbling was coming from the linen closet in the master bathroom.
“What do you think it is?” Harry’s voice squeaked with excitement.
“Since there are no holes in the walls of our house and we have bird-proof cages over the outside vents”—Felix paused to inhale—“I can only assume the creature or creatures responsible chewed through the cedar siding.”
“Squirrels,” Eudora said.
“In my linen closet?”
“Nesting, if I had to guess.”
Squirrels making babies in his clean linen. And he needed to change the sheets. “I hate squirrels.”
“He does,” Harry said helpfully. “Loathes them. They ate the back of one of our outside chairs in the fall, and they dug the plants out of Mom’s pots. Made a terrible mess on the porch. Dad’s at war with them.”