High Plains Hearts (58 page)

It had been a lovely Fourth of July. In the distance a lone firework went off, and she smiled as the sound and the light spread across the Badlands.

This was the best Independence Day she’d ever had. Ever.

“I told her that we never locked the door,” Gramps said, pacing back and forth as Hayden knelt and examined the situation.

The key had snapped off and was now embedded in the lock.

“It’s all right, Gramps,” he said. “I’ll just get a new one.”

Gramps shook his head. “It’s the same lock everywhere, Grub. Replace one, replace them all.”

“What do you mean?” He rocked back on his heels and looked at his grandfather, who seemed oddly agitated. He spoke slowly, hoping to calm the older man down. “Each lock is different.”

Gramps stopped his pacing. “Well, of course they’re different. What kind of fool idea would it have been to put locks on all these doors and have the same keys for all those locks? You think I’m a bozo?”

“You’re not a bozo. I’m a bozo.”

His grandfather shook his head. “Bozo Senior and Bozo Junior. What I mean is that if this key breaks, that means they’re all wearing out, and whether we’re talking about the keys or the locks, the smartest thing would be to replace them all so this doesn’t happen again. Because it will, and you know it will. That’s the rule of home ownership. Remember it?”

Hayden grinned at Gramps, and together they recited it. “If it can break, it will break.”

“And what’s the corollary?” Gramps prompted.

“And it will break in the middle of the night on a weekend.”

“That’s my boy.”

“You’re right, Gramps, about these locks. They’re all as old as the doors, which are as old as the buildings.” Hayden stared at the lock with the key stuck in the hole. If he had to replace all the locks, it would mean—he did a quick mental count—seventeen of them. And assuming each one was as difficult as this one, he’d be doing this until September.

Lord, this would be a great time to dose me with patience
, he thought.

The faceplate of the assembly came right off—entirely too easily, he realized, as he examined the door and found that the wood had gone bad under the metal.

The doors would need to be replaced, too.

Dollar signs danced in his head as he performed another calculation. Seventeen doors. With seventeen locks and seventeen keys.

“Gramps, you’d better get Livvy out here.”

The old man scrambled off to get her from behind the house, where she was clearing a bramble-infested patch in the hope that it might be a garden area the next year.

“What’s up, doc?” she asked cheerfully, pulling off her pink and yellow work gloves and wiping her hands on her jeans.

“Well, the cost of repairs, that’s what’s up. This door is rotten under the lock plate. See?” He showed her the damage. “I think we might end up having to replace all the doors and all the lock assemblages.”

She frowned. “That’s a lot.”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“I have my book. I think it might explain how to do it.”

He shook his head. She wasn’t understanding what he meant. “Livvy, I’m afraid we’re going to have to buy new doors.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned. “Wow.”

“Definitely wow. So what should we do?”

She shrugged. “There’s no point in borrowing trouble. Let’s take a look at the other doors. Maybe they don’t all need to be replaced. And if they do, then I guess we need to go somewhere and buy a truckload of doors. And locks.”

“Good idea,” he agreed.

They walked around the property, checking each door, and he was relieved to discover that the cabins and outbuildings that faced east had no damage. It was only those that faced into the wind that came off the Badlands that needed help.

“That’s good.” She smiled happily, pulling her work gloves back on.

“Well, it’s better. There are still quite a lot of them.”

“Oh!” She stopped and clapped one hand, still in the silly pink and yellow flowered cotton glove, over her mouth. “I see. Well, I have the book. I can do it. How hard can it be?”

Those were, he knew from experience, famous last words. The sun was setting by the time he’d gotten back from the building supply store in Bismarck, and she’d gotten one latch replaced, and the door at least leaned against its building.

“Tomorrow is another day,” she said, “and another door, and by the time I finish it’ll be another year.”

He laughed. It wasn’t that bad. Not quite.

Livvy wiped her forehead. The heat was relentless. She felt as if she were living inside an oven. The only breeze that came through was the occasional hot wind off the buttes, and it didn’t improve her temperament one bit.

If this was July, she could only imagine what August would be like.

The doors were done. At least that was taken care of. Now she was doing her least favorite thing in the world: cleaning.

She made a deal with herself. If she could finish scrubbing out the cabin, she would take a break and go wading in the lake. There wasn’t too much to do, just some work on the sills and prying the accumulated crud out of the corners of the mopboards.

She took a swig out of the water bottle she kept on the little table shoved up against the window. The ice in it had long since melted, and the water was very warm.

The windows were flung open, but the air inside the cabin was still and motionless. Sweat rolled down her face and dripped onto her T-shirt. She tried to think of pleasant things—mountaintops covered in snow, ice skating, making snowballs—but her mind kept reverting to the same phrase: “I’m hot.”

In self-defense, she wrenched open the bottle of water and poured it over her head. For a few moments, it actually helped. She felt a smidge cooler.

She knelt and tackled a corner of the room, digging away at the stuff that had built up in there. “One day,” she said through gritted teeth, “someone, probably a woman, will get smart and make a room without corners so no other human being will ever have to do this again.”

“A round house isn’t impossible,” Hayden said from the doorway, “but it’s a lot of extra work to build.”

She swabbed her face with the back of her hand. “Typical man,” she said. “Worrying about a few extra minutes of work.”

He laughed. “We’ll not fight that one out today. I thought you might be broiling in here, so I brought you this.”

He held out a large plastic mug with a straw sticking out of it. “It might be a bit melted but I kept the AC on full blast on my way back from Obsidian so it would have a chance.”

She took it from him and practically inhaled the contents. “Oh, this is heavenly. I haven’t had a root beer float for ages.”

“Yup. I got it from the drive-through on the edge of town. Take a break. You look like you could use one.”

Livvy laughed. “Thanks for the compliment—not!”

“You’re always beautiful,” Hayden answered, and almost immediately he flushed bright red. “I mean, well, when you’re clean, or not, but then, actually, um …”

He looked so miserable, stammering in the heat in front of her, that she took pity on him. “Thanks, Hayden. Beauty is as beauty does, and this is a mighty beautiful root beer float!”

S
hoo! Shoo! Go find a hollow tree, or wherever it is you live!” Livvy swept the chubby raccoon out of the lean-to near the house where she was stacking firewood. Indian summer was in full swing this October day. She was sweating, and having to get wildlife out of the building wasn’t improving her mood one bit.

The raccoon waddled away as quickly as it could, stopping for one last snarl before vanishing into the woods, and she leaned on the woodpile, feeling for all the world like a Wild West woman.

Every day she went through cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and wooden crates. Most of it was disposed of immediately. She had learned to recognize when mice—or raccoons—had been in containers. Unfortunately they were destructive creatures, and almost everything they’d gotten into was taken to the dump.

Some of it was interesting, especially the memorabilia from Sunshine’s heyday. That she put aside. Hayden and Gramps could go through it during the winter and see what they wanted to keep and which pictures they could identify. She hoped they’d let her keep some of it at Sunshine to use as a reminder of its past.

And some was sad, like Gran’s clothing, which Gramps had put aside when she passed away. He’d been unable to take care of it, and unwilling to let someone else do it for him.

Now, with his permission, her clothing had gone to a charity.

There was just so much of everything.

She was trying to get each outbuilding finished before the snow came. Hayden had warned her that the first measurable snow could fall any day now, even if the days were still in the fifties and sixties, although today had climbed into the seventies. The forecast predicted a drop the next day, with the evening temperatures plummeting to the thirties, and the next week the first hard freeze was a possibility. At night, she thought she could smell snow in the distance.

Hayden and Gramps were sharing Hayden’s apartment in Obsidian, and she’d moved to Sunshine with Leonard. Jeannie had decided that she wasn’t coming back from Africa—her house had been sold to a young couple in town—and suddenly Livvy had become a dog owner. It was fine with her. Leonard kept her company, and she felt safer at night when the land became alive with sounds she couldn’t identify.

So much had changed. She’d never been really overweight, but the labor had built up her muscles and tightened her frame. Now she could lift a box without having to empty half of it first, or call upon Hayden or whoever was handy to help her out. Her skin was tanned—naturally, without benefit of a tanning bed or a spray or a lotion.

She glanced at her arm. Not only was it tan, it was scratched from a recent run-in with the chicken that had tried to peck a bug off of Martha Washington’s back. The cat had tangled with the chicken, and when she tried to separate them, they’d both clawed her.

And next to those scratches were two cuts from a run-in with a broken window, and a bruise that came about when an old radio had fallen from a high shelf and she’d foolishly tried to catch it.

She shook her head as she thought back to that morning in Boston, when a stray newspaper had changed her life. She was no longer the same person she was that day.

But the greatest changes were internal. As much as she’d always considered herself to be independent and self-sufficient, she knew now how dependent she’d been on others. If her car needed an oil change, she took it in to a mechanic.

Now she knew how to do it herself—and she did it. Plus, with her initial plumbing adventure behind her, she was able to change washers in a faucet and reseat a leaking toilet.

She began to tally what she knew now that she hadn’t known before.

She could replace a light switch. Change breakers. Even bait her own hook—with a worm.

Her confidence was stronger than it had ever been before.

As much as Sunshine was responsible for this newfound strength, she knew that the majority of credit went to the peace and guidance she’d found in the church. Every week she came away from the services knowing herself better. She was truly a child of God, and just knowing that had made her feel like a new, improved Livvy.

Every evening she set aside time for her own private vespers. With her Bible at hand, she’d read and then study the passages, using the guides that Reverend Carlisle had lent her. Even though she had watched programs on the Travel Channel about Israel, it still seemed alien to her, but with this reading, she was able to get a better sense of the historical context.

What was most important though was that she was able to bridge those years, two thousand of them, and take the lessons of the past and bring them into the present day, and use them to guide her through the time yet to come.

She especially though found understanding through prayer. Talking to God helped her clarify what her life was about, and more importantly, what it could be about.

If she could only get the cloud of the future to quit hanging over her head, she’d feel much better. It still kept her up at night, tossing and turning, with sleep eluding her. She prayed and prayed her way through those wide-awake hours, asking for an answer, for a solution.