The Way Life Should Be (12 page)

“I don’t know why you think you’ve got me pegged.”

“You’re not as complicated as you think,” he says.

“Just tell me something. Honestly,” I say. “You never had a dog, did you?”

He smiles, and we both know he’s only pretending to be sheepish. “Does it matter?”

CHAPTER 12

I am sitting at a table in the coffee shop, trying to figure out what to
do. When I think about what would make me happy, I am struck by how basic my desires are. I want to feel that I’m progressing through life; I want a meaningful relationship and an engaging career. I want to live in a place that feels like home. What I want is what everyone wants—so ordinary as to be clichéd. Why is that so hard to find?

“So what’s going on in that pretty little head?” Flynn calls over during a lull.

I shake my head. “Ugh. Complicated.”

“Try me.”

“I don’t want to bore you,” I say, pouring milk into my coffee.

He makes a sweep of the empty shop with his hand. “I have a high tolerance for boredom, as you can see.”

“All right. I’ll try to make it short.” I run through the highlights: Lindsay and Hot4U, the circus-themed gala, kissandtell.com, MaineCatch, haikus, Boston, the fire-eater’s vendetta, a topiary in flames, the cover of the
New York Post,
Blueberry Cove Lane…

“You’re right, that’s a yawner,” he says.

For the next hour we sit at the table talking. My coffee goes cold. By the end of it, he is shaking his head.

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” he says. “You’re stay
ing with Rich Saunders at his town house on Blueberry Cove Lane, but he’s not your ‘love match.’ You need to get out of there, but you don’t know where to go. You should probably head back to New York, but your apartment is rented and you got fired from your job. You don’t want to move in with your father and stepmother, uptight cow, in New Jersey, though you do miss your grandma. But you don’t really have a reason to stay in Maine.”

At this frank appraisal of my situation, I burst into tears.

He puts his hand on mine. “Honestly, I’m not surprised about Rich Saunders. Everybody knows he’s a player. I’m sure that’s what drove him online in the first place; the local girls are on to his game.”

“Except Becky. Whoever that is,” I sob.

“Oh, Becky. Well. Her.” He hands me a napkin. Drums his fingers on the table.

“What?”

“I was just thinking.” He pulls a cloth from his pocket and wipes a coffee stain off the little table between us. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
Tat-a-tat-tat.

I wipe my eyes with the napkin. “What?”

“Ah, well—a friend of mine owns a place over in Dory Cove, a little cottage on the shore drive that he rents by the week in the summer. I don’t think anybody’s in there now.”

A cottage? “A cottage?”

“Well, he
calls
it a cottage in the adverts; it’s a shack, really,” Flynn says.

“Oh.”

“It’s got running water and all that,” he says. “The only thing is, I’m not sure there’s heat. I know it has a woodstove.”

“A woodstove.”

“Yeah. I think it’s one of those Scandinavian deals where a stick of wood heats the entire place. Gotta love those frugal Norwegians.”

“I don’t know anything about woodstoves,” I say. “Except that burning to death is supposed to be incredibly painful.”

“Well, let’s not start planning your funeral just yet,” he says. “Why don’t I call him first and see if it’s available. I mean, if you’re interested.”

An unheated shack with a woodstove.

In the winter.

“Let me think about it,” I say.

I like Rich better now
that I’m not trying so hard to like him. He seems relieved, too. He gallantly offers to sleep on the couch, but really—the bedroom floor, the couch, what’s the difference? I take the couch. It’s only for a few days, anyway, until I figure out what I’m doing.

Still—though we have tacitly agreed to be “friends,” in the dark of night it’s hard to stay downstairs on the narrow couch. When I slink upstairs he says, “I wondered when you’d come.” He lifts the sheet like a bat lifting its wing, and I slide down the length of his body as he welcomes me back. I’m a little surprised, not to mention appalled, at my self-abasement, my lack of moral fiber—as well as my capacity to endure humiliation and come back for more. I didn’t know how much I could take, but apparently, as it turns out, I can take plenty. His body is so warm, after all, and his hands are so welcoming.

After several days
of this shameful behavior, I pull myself together.

“Okay, I’m interested.” I toss my keys on a little table in the
coffee shop and shrug off my coat. “Who do I need to call?”

“Excuse me?” Flynn says from behind the counter, hands on his hips. “Do I know you?”

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

“The unheated shack,” I explain. “In Dory Cove. Your friend’s place.”

“Aah.” He nods sagely. “So Sailor Boy tossed you out.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Out on your keister,” he says.

“I don’t think you know me well enough to be talking about my keister.”

“You may be right,” he concedes.

“So listen,” I say. “My car is parked out front with all my stuff in it. I’m going to be sleeping there tonight unless you give me that number.”

“All right, hold on. You Jersey girls are always in such a hurry.” He lifts the phone receiver next to the toaster oven, punches in some numbers. “Lance? Yeah. You know I mentioned that bird for the apartment, Angie? Yeah, yeah. She is. Right here.” He holds the receiver against his chest and calls over, “How long are you going to be here?”

“Is he talking minutes or days?”

“If you don’t get over here soon, this chickie is going to roost on my floor,” Flynn says into the phone. He hangs up. “He’ll be right over.” He fills a paper cup with coffee and holds it out in my direction. “Now don’t get your hopes up. The place is bog standard. Four walls and a dirty floor, that’s about it.”

“As long as it’s heated, I don’t care what it looks like. Oh yeah—I forgot.”

“That’s the spirit,” he says.

Lance is tall,
rangy, and, it turns out, Flynn’s former lover. “Small town.” He shrugs. “What are you going to do?”

“Too right,” says Flynn. “Even if Sailor Boy is a complete wanker, you’ll have to get along with him ’cause you’ll run into him on every bloody corner. Like I do with this mongrel.”

Lance nods in agreement. “Or learn not to give a rat’s ass.”

“That could work,” Flynn says.

“Does for me,” says Lance.

“You two seem made for each other,” I remark.

“Yeah, we’re made for each other—like cats and dogs,” Lance says.

“Original,” says Flynn.

Dory Cove is
a small inlet comprised of a paved loop that runs from Spruce Harbor to Mollusk Point. From this loop, tributary roads lined with houses lead to the water and into the woods. Part of the loop runs along the coastline, an eclectic mile-long sweep of shorefront dwellings, a bed and breakfast, two restaurants, and a boatbuilding company.

We pull into the driveway of Lance’s house, down one of the tributaries, and any secret hope I harbored that Flynn was exaggerating is promptly crushed. Lance’s house is not the cottage of my dreams. There is no trellis, no stone path, no wood-shingled roof. Instead, the squat one-story structure sports peeling hospital-smock green paint and cheap gray roof tiles. The windows are small and ill-fitting, as if stuck in place years after the house was built. Spidery cracks run through a number of panes, and several layers of paint flake off the muntins.

Is it my imagination, or does the roof sag in the middle?

“It presents better in the summer,” Lance says as we park in the rutted dirt drive, stiff dead grass poking up everywhere.
“See those pots of dead flowers? They actually looked quite nice when they were alive.”

We walk around to the back, an untended lot of dried weeds. Two dirty white plastic chairs are stacked on the rickety deck. I run my hand along the rail and lift it off quickly; the rough wood grain is a dozen splinters waiting to happen. Some planks on the deck still have the numbers from the woodlot stamped on them.

The creaky back door is slightly ajar. Lance pushes it open and we enter a cold, musty living area with a sagging green couch, a bargain-basement table, and a couple of wooden chairs. Broken venetian blinds splinter the meager light coming in. When I pull up the blinds, the windows are covered in grime.

“Cheery, huh?” Flynn says.

I wander through the small house, struggling to imagine its potential. The living room floor is made of wide pine planks which, though grimy, appear in pretty good shape. The dingy walls don’t have any obvious problem that a little spackle and paint wouldn’t solve. The only bedroom is a low-ceilinged little hole with no closet and a dank smell. A navy polyester curtain—or is that a sheet?—is pulled tight across the only window. Soiled mauve wall-to-wall carpeting covers the floor. As it turns out, there is baseboard electric heat in the little bathroom; Lance explains that he had to install it so the pipes wouldn’t freeze in the winter. So that’s good. And there are no leaks, from what I can see. Get rid of the venetian blinds and horrid curtain, give the place a scrubbing…

“I think there might be storm windows,” Lance offers. “Not sure where, exactly, but I’ll try to hunt them down.”

In the middle of the living room sits a gleaming, red woodstove, as out of place as a spaceship in a cornfield.

“It’s so—glossy,” I say.

“I know. Right?” Lance says.

“It’s from one of those northern countries.” Lance peers at the metal manufacturer’s tag. “Denmark.”

“Let me explain something about Lance,” Flynn says, putting his arm around me. “When he got this place, he had grand ideas about fixing it up. But the problem is, he wants top-of-the-line this and fancy that, and won’t do anything halfway. So he gets overwhelmed—it’s too expensive, too much bother, whatever—and ends up doing nothing.”

“Hey,” Lance says.

“Am I wrong?” Flynn asks.

“It’s a little harsh.”

“Then last summer he had renters in June,” Flynn continues, “and it was cold, and they complained. So he got this stove. Which looks ridiculous here, doesn’t it? But he had to get the best one on the market, even though the rest of the place looks like shit.”
Sheet.

“How do you light it?” I ask. “And where’s the wood?”

“Don’t ask me, I have central heating,” Flynn says.

“It’s pretty easy, actually,” Lance says. “And a few logs will heat the whole place for hours. There are matches in the kitchen and there’s some kindling and wood out back, left from last season, but you should get more. That stuff takes days to dry.”

“Is there a—log store?”

Flynn sniggers.

“I don’t know why you’re laughing. You’re as ignorant as she is,” Lance says. “Yes,” he says to me, “there is a ‘log store.’ You can order cords of wood from a place in Spruce Harbor.”

I blush a bit.

“And people sell wood at the end of their driveways. Just look for the sign.” Lance pushes the latch of the stove shut with his foot. “So I rent this place for eight hundred a week in the
summer. I’d let you have it for a hundred a week through May, month to month. What do you think? Do you want it?”

I sit down on the sea green floral couch, sinking into its polyester depths. When I pat the armrest, a small puff of dust rises. And settles.

Virtually every aspect of this trip to Maine has turned out to be so far from what I thought I wanted that the question seems irrelevant. Do I want it? No. It is not quaint, or even cozy. It’s a freezing, depressing little hovel, close enough to the ocean to vibrate with a sharp, salty crosswind but far enough away that you can’t actually see water from any window. This place is to the cottage of my dreams as Rich Saunders is to my soul mate.

It is tempting to see each disappointment as part of a larger pattern, a trend. Do these momentary blows add up to a lifetime of regret? Or is weathering them part of the test one needs to pass, the successful resolution of which will make one stronger and more resilient?

To put a finer point on it: Am I moving closer to ruin, or building my character? At which point does optimism become ostrichlike foolishness?

Do I want to be alone in this Unabomber-worthy shack?

“All right. Yeah, I’ll take it,” I say. “But only if somebody teaches me how to start a fire. And stab an intruder to death with a knife.”

“No problem,” Flynn says. “Lance is skilled at both those things. Aren’t you, Lance?”

“I’ve never actually committed murder, but I can show you how to wound someone,” Lance says.

“Boy, can he ever,” Flynn says.

CHAPTER 13

It takes two days to move in. Actually, it takes three hours; I spend
the rest of the time shopping. At the Wal-Mart in Ellsworth I acquire a broom, a mop, a mammoth plastic jug of orange-scented all-purpose cleaning fluid, a gross of coffee filters, and a Mr. Coffee machine just like the one on Blueberry Cove Lane. Then I go down the road to the L.L. Bean outlet for two wool sweaters (sidestepping the matronly embroidered pullovers and floral dirndl skirts) and a puffy winter coat on clearance for $39.99 in a color they call “saffron,” which is actually Fiskars-scissors orange.

I drive to the store in Spruce Harbor for firewood. How many cords do I need, and do I want it delivered? I say ten, which sounds like a reasonable number, though I have no idea what a cord is. The man behind the cash register, with a wispy beard that extends all the way to his sternum, peers at me over his bifocals. “Ten cords?” he booms. “How many kids you got?”

“Uh, it’s just me.”

“A cord is four foot wide and four foot high. Eight foot long,” he says, chortling at the guy in line behind me. “Ten would fill up your whole house.”

“I see.” I feel my ears redden. “Well, then, let’s start with one.”