Chapter 11

Elle

“So how are you getting on with Heathcliff?” Mrs. Wheeling asks me.

I’m unloading groceries into her fridge. It’s three weeks since Heathcliff—Sawyer—and Jonah moved in.

Whenever I go to Safeway, I check in with Mrs. Wheeling first to see if she can use anything. She’s mobile and can get there on her own, but I figure by the time I’m in my eighties I’ll want to save my energy for something other than pushing a grocery cart around a poorly lit store. There are a couple of delivery services around here, but if I can save her money by tossing a few extra things in my cart every time I go to the store, I’m happy to do it. Besides, talking to Mrs. Wheeling always makes my day better.

“He seems like a nice guy.” Even if our encounters invariably end with me making a fool of myself. “Did you know he makes furniture?”

“Yes! Do you want to see what he built me?”

“Built you?”

She rises from the kitchen table and headed for the stairs, obviously assuming I’m going to follow her—which I do.

Her bedroom sports newly installed built-in bookshelves on both walls.

“So I can keep more books!”

“That’s wonderful.”

The shelves are simple but beautiful, painted white, filled with her romance novels.

“You know what the best part was?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“It took him a day and a half, and the whole time he was working I got to bring him things. Glasses of water, and plates of food. And I never wanted to interrupt him, so I just would stand behind him or off to the side and watch him work for a little while. That man. He is—” She smacks her lips.

“Mrs. Wheeling, you are a dirty old woman.”

“I know!” she says gleefully.

I don’t mention that I take every break from interviewing and writing to study him while he works on the side fence, taking in the glint of sunlight on his black hair, the way he backhands sweat from his brow, the way he scowls at an uncooperative board.

I don’t want to draw her laser focus to my inappropriate obsession with my neighbor’s broad shoulders or make her suspect that I am now regularly fantasizing about inviting him in for a glass of cold water and a plate of cookies…

Also, stalker much?

Since Jonah and Sawyer moved in, Jonah and Madden have been inseparable except when they’re asleep in their own beds and during the two weekends that Madden was with his father.

And yet somehow, although I’ve seen Sawyer outside plenty of times at work, I have avoided conversation with him, except for that one interaction the day he started demolition of the fence. The one where we were, briefly, kind of—friends.

Seems like you might be better off with Trevor’s money than with Trevor.

Isn’t that something you’d say to a friend?

Except then I had to go and push too far about his wife.

Big mistake. He shut down completely.

I rewrite that conversation frequently, imagining that I had left well-enough alone. Although I don’t really know what I would do if Sawyer and I were friends.

Spend even more time lusting, I suppose.

Mrs. Wheeling has resumed her new favorite topic, her gaze dreamy, looking for all the world like a moony middle-school girl. “He really is a work of art. A renaissance sculpture. His forearms alone are worth the price of admission. Well, that’s kind of a given, since he didn’t charge me for the shelves.”

“He didn’t charge you for the shelves?”

She shakes her head. “He said he has a senior citizen price, and it’s free.”

I’m sure that’s not true, but Mrs. Wheeling is holding on to her house and her independence by the skin of her teeth, and there’s no way she could afford the going rate for built-in bookshelves. Still, to give a day and a half’s labor to her, when I know he has all that furniture to build—and maintenance to do on his own property—it’s pretty damn admirable.

“He’s a good guy,” Mrs. Wheeling says.

She’s watching me with a calculating expression.

“I’m sure he is.”

“He’s a good guy, and he’s a good dad—”

“How do you know?” I say it teasingly, but I’m not fooling either of us: I’m insanely curious.

“I see him with Jonah. He’s always showing him how to do things. Measure, cut, join. You have to have patience to show a kid how to do things. Me, I used to try to teach my girls to bake, but I’d end up ripping the measuring spoons out of their hands because they were so slow or they’d do it wrong and spill stuff or they were sloppy and I was afraid they’d ruin the recipe. I think it takes a saint to teach a kid to cook or build.”

I’m smiling, because I’ve been there with Madden—trying to teach him something I know he needs to learn, but desperately wanting to wrench whatever it is away from him so we can get it done sometime this century.

“I’m just trying to tell you, Elle, Sawyer Paulson is a good guy, a good dad, and a damn fine specimen of manhood.”

“But I’m not in the market for any of those things.” God knows it will be a long time before I’m ready to believe anything a man tells me, other than that he wants to have sex.

Mrs. Wheeling raises one sparse white eyebrow. “So you say, my dear. So you say. But sometimes you need to ride a different horse before you can be ready to sell the old one.”

My mouth falls open. “Is that actually a saying?”

“No.” She laughs—somewhere between a giggle and a cackle. I find myself hoping I will be as uninhibited in all respects as Mrs. Wheeling when I am in my eighties. “I made it up! But I think it fits, don’t you? No pun intended.”

“Mrs. Wheeling.”

“Just saying, as my grandkids are saying these days. Just saying, my dear.”