* * *
An hour later, I mopped at my beaded forehead and sat back on my haunches. I was dutifully removing all the area topsoil with a spade and no one had showed up to help me. Thank God. This was going to be an all-day job, and I didn’t know if I wanted Chet Browntooth to be an all-day neighbor.
“You’ve done a great job,” Chet’s voice rang out behind me and I jolted.
“Thanks, Chet.” I twisted and greeted him with an unenthusiastic wave. He approached down the driveway with his arms loaded in tools. Great. “You really don’t have to come over and help me,” I went on. “This is going to take all day and I—to be honest—I enjoy the solit—”
“No problem at all,” Chet insisted brightly. He dumped his tools at my feet and added, “You know what would really set your fountain off and give it some flair? River rocks.”
To be polite, I asked him, “Oh?” and kept chopping at the topsoil.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve got a few bags of those,” Chet said. “I just found them in my garage the other day. You can have them. For free,” he added heavily.
I slanted my mouth to the side. Woohoo, free stuff that you forgot you even had in the back of your garage. What a gesture, Chet.
“I was actually going to go to the store and grab a few pounds of stone dust,” I told him.
“Oh, no, you don’t want that,” Chet assured me. “River rocks are the way to go.”
“Oh, um, no, I don’t—”
He upended the first bag and sent a thick stream of river rocks over my yard. I coughed and brought my forearm up to my mouth.
“So classy,” Chet went on. “Where’s your pump and your basin? Let’s get this show on the road.”
“The base has to be level for the basin,” I reminded him, packing down the river rocks with my spade. They shifted and collapsed wherever I touched. “I just tried to tell you that.”
“Aw, shit, I’m sorry,” Chet murmured, scrubbing at his hairline and separating the sprayed front line. “We’re gonna be out here all day now.” He paused as I began slowly but diligently removing the river rocks from my hole. I quelled the urge to snap at him because he hadn’t known what he was doing. When I looked up, I caught the way his eyes bore hungrily into me, and I wished there was a way to garden without bending so much.
“Is it insanely hot out here, or is it just you?” Chet asked. “Let me go grab us some cold drinks. I’ve got soda, lemonade, tea. What’s your poison?”
“Lemonade,” I called over my shoulder. He was already jogging toward his house when I looked again.
He was still in his kitchen when Andrew’s truck jostled into my driveway, even though he had already dropped my car off yesterday. Technically, there was no reason for us to talk. A hot bitterness rose up in my heart as my eyes tracked his shadow, leaning and ducking from the interior. Sunlight poured over him as he swung down onto my driveway. He wore slate gray jeans and a green, plaid, sleeveless button-down. My lip almost quirked in a welcoming smile. This was the most countrified I’d ever seen him look. I forced myself to look stern.
“Hey,” I called to him, scooping more river rocks from the hole.
“You’re installing a fountain,” Andrew deduced, nodding firmly as he surveyed the scene.
“Yes.” I kept shoveling and my eyes were trained on this pile of river rocks. I wondered how shitty I looked. Our fight last night threw off my whole routine, and I hadn’t washed my face before bed or drank any water when I woke up. All I’d had to drink was coffee and I felt hideous.
“What are you going to do with all the river rocks?” he wondered innocently, like he assumed I had a good answer for that. “Bury the basin?”
“Actually—”
“Okay, call me old-fashioned, but I found a little gin in the back of the liquor cabinet,” Chet’s voice filtered through the hedges. He broke across the barrier between our yards with sweating glasses of bright yellow and dark brown, one in each hand, looking down to make sure he didn’t trip and spill them. “I made myself a whiskey and Coke, and you—” His eyes tipped to us and caught on Andrew. “Ace,” he said, though it didn’t read like a greeting. It sounded like an accusation as Chet’s eyes flashed over him. “What are you doing here?”
“I have business,” Andrew assured Chet coolly.
“It’s a little early for me,” I told Chet, looming over me with those sweating tumblers. “And we’re going to be working out in the sun.”
“Welcome to Texas!” he called down to me.
“No thanks, Chet,” I told him.
“Well, I’m not going to drink alone,” Chet pouted.
Andrew easily snatched the two glasses from Chet’s hands and poured them onto the ground. “Problem solved,” he announced brightly. “Miss Harper, I’ve got the invoice ready from the work I did to your Volvo over the weekend. You never called me back, so here I am.”
I gaped up at Andrew as he extended a folded piece of plain white paper toward me. I took it out of his hand and swallowed dryly and squinted against the sun and didn’t look at the number on it.
“Doorstep delivery,” Andrew said overhead. “I couldn’t count all the services I offer a woman on one finger.”
My heart pounded hard. Wasn’t this what I wanted? Why did I feel like I was strangling alive? Was it just me, or had he emphasized the word “finger”? Did he still want me, or was this—it?
Ace’s Garage logo was up at the top of the paper. The itemized expenses were only for twenty-five dollars. There was no way that was right. “What is this?” I spat out, folding it over again.
“His garage is notoriously overpriced. Are you overcharging this woman, Ace?” Chet added with a macho sniff.
“Cost for the belt,” Andrew answered me, ignoring Chet entirely. “You can pay that whenever is convenient for you.”
“Oh, like I might need another payment plan?” I noted caustically.
Andrew furrowed his brow at me. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Are you patronizing me?” I fired back. “Charge me the full amount.”
“Fine.” Andrew snatched the bill from me and yanked a pen from his pants pocket, scratching out a new item on the receipt. “Now it’s 115 dollars.”
Damn it.
“Great!” I yelled. “I’ll get it to you as soon as possible!”
“When you and Gomer are done fully submerging your fountain in quicksand?”
“Hey!” Chet barked after him, but Andrew was already swaggering back to his truck.
“You should have gone with stone dust,” he called over his shoulder, not looking back at us.
“I love the submerged idea!” I yelled after him as he swung back up into his truck. “I know what I’m doing!”
Andrew didn’t say anything back to me, and his truck jostled back down the driveway and onto Mayhew. Everything was exactly the way I had said that I wanted it to be—I was finally a professional lawyer, carrying out my promise to the people, finally installing this damn fountain in the front yard I could finally call my own—and I should have been happy.
But I stared after Andrew’s truck with my heart in my throat and a crumpled bill in my hands and felt like I had nothing at all. All the effort had put me back on square one.
“You really like the river rocks?” Chet wondered, standing there sweating in the noon sun with an empty tumbler in each hand.
I answered simply. “No.”