Beginner's Luck. Kate Clayborn

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СКАЧАТЬ morning.

      So if my friends are a little skeptical, it may be because I’ve made them that way. And also because this house—it probably is a four.

      Greer tsks, nudging Zoe in the back. “Kit, it’s beautiful, really. And don’t listen to Zoe. Her mother called this morning and you know what that means.”

      Zoe waves a hand dismissively. “I’m fine. It’s just that my garlic necklace doesn’t work through the phone. Anyways, Kit-Kat, I’m totally kidding. This is a great house.”

      I smile at their gentle approval, but I need, today, to press for more. There’s two dudes carrying my mattress upstairs, after all. I am in this thing. “You really think so?”

      It’s a little tough, standing in this kitchen, trying to recapture the calm, joyful feeling I’d had when I’d first seen the house. Then, I’d taken in the flaws, understood the need for many renovations—but I’d somehow known. I’d felt a certainty unlike anything else, except for maybe the first time I’d solved a thermodynamics equation. Now, though, I only see the mismatched cabinets, some painted so many times the doors won’t shut, the peeling laminate countertop, the floor covered in stick-on tiles. It’s like the lab, but worse.

      Zoe wraps her arms around me, gives me a smacking kiss on my head before pulling away and heading into the dining room, where Greer and I follow. “I really think so. It’s perfect for you. You can make it exactly what you want.”

      “I can see it now,” Greer says, turning in a slow circle around the room. “The light coming in through all these windows, the fireplace in the front room, all this woodwork cleaned up and repainted. You could put this place in a magazine once it’s all done.”

      That idea—it does not appeal, not in any way. This is going to be my safe place, for me and the people I love. Watching Zoe and Greer move through these rooms, pausing over the big, gorgeous bay window at the front of the house, I feel suddenly choked up. I’ve really done it, I think. I’ve got a home.

      I lived in sixteen different apartments from the time I was born to when I left home at eighteen. They were all, every one, varying degrees of awful. The first one I remember had no heat, and some nights my older brother, Alex, would light a small campfire grill he’d found in a dumpster and we’d huddle around it, falling asleep leaning against each other. Six of them had communal showers; when I’d go down the hall, clutching a bar of soap and a towel to my chest, Alex would walk behind me, standing outside the door until I’d finished, not letting anyone in. For my entire thirteenth year, I had bed bugs that were impossible to get rid of, no matter what we did. For six months when I was sixteen, we lived next to a mentally ill man who would knock on the door at all hours of the night, shouting that he hoped my father went blind, that he knew I was a whore, that Alex worked as a spy for the Russian government.

      The easiest moves were the ones that kept me in the same school district, the same few-mile radius. By the time I started high school, Alex was working, and he could do more to control where we went—but for most of my childhood, I learned to anticipate the upheaval of meeting a new teacher mid-year, a new set of students, a new route to school, everything. My teachers praised me, complimenting me on my adaptability, or, on the occasions when I’d come in having learned more than where the current class was, on how patiently I waited for other kids to grasp concepts I’d mastered.

      With each move, my father, stinking of booze and cigarettes, would make promises, telling us this would be the last time. But for the most part, we were mostly invisible to him, especially me—a living reminder only of that desperate time after his first wife, Alex’s mom, had died, and he’d tried to recreate the love he’d had for her with a young, quiet waitress he’d met on a riverboat casino.

      Good free counseling services in college helped, but it was moving here—working with Dr. Singh, meeting Zoe and Greer, falling in love with this town—that made me feel as if I’d found my stopping place, the place where maybe I wouldn’t always have to work so hard at staying put, the place where I could stop obsessively counting sidewalk cracks between my bus stop and whatever crappy apartment building I was sleeping in. To be here, in my own home—to me, it’s a miracle.

      “God, you’re so lucky,” Zoe says as one of the movers comes in, hauling another two boxes upstairs. “You’re going to have hot contractors here all the time. Can I come over? I could hang out while you’re at work. I could supervise.”

      I laugh at the way she waggles her eyebrows up and down. “No. You’re not going to sexually harass my contractors.”

      “Spoilsport,” she says, watching as another mover climbs the stairs.

      “My favorite thing about this,” Greer says, leaning against the bay window’s ledge, “is that it’ll give you something to focus on other than work.”

      “Yes!” Zoe exclaims, clapping her hands together.

      “I’m still going to work, you guys.” This is a common refrain, the concern about my working too much. I don’t think either of them really thinks I’ll ever change, but I suspect it’s turned into a sort of shorthand for us all, them expressing affection for me this way, and me secretly relishing their concern. Meeting Zoe and Greer, keeping up with the traditions we’d built over the years we’ve known each other, probably protected me from what might have been a worrying inclination to work too hard, to let my research consume me. I’d seen the single-minded focus that had overtaken some of my peers, had seen the way work had dictated the lives of many of my professors. One of the reasons I’d made the choices I had—to stay small, to stay on as a lab tech—had been to avoid that fate. Of course, there’d been other reasons too, reasons like the ones I’d told Ben Tucker yesterday.

      Unexpectedly, I feel my face heat at the thought of him. That dimple. Those eyelashes for days.

      I clear my throat, ignoring these stray, unwanted thoughts. “I am going to do some of this myself, though,” I say. “Easy stuff, maybe some of the yard work. And working with the contractors is sort of a job in itself.”

      “We’ll help,” says Greer. “Anything you need.”

      “Anything that doesn’t involve me wearing a hazmat suit,” Zoe adds, looking suspiciously at a patch of moldy wall near the radiator. “But everything else, obviously.”

      Right then, there’s a little creak and Greer tips forward a bit from where she’s sitting. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, leaping up from where the sill has separated a bit from the window. We all three look at it, at where the wood is rotting a little, at where another repair will have to be made.

      But I have to smile. A problem in my own house, one that I can solve, with my best friends here to help? I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a millionaire.

      Chapter 2

      Ben

      I’ve got a job for you, he’d said.

      I pull another stack of slate from the bed of the truck, trying not to slam it down onto the pallet, which is what my hands are itching to do.

      It’ll be easy, he’d said. Won’t even take a full day.

      Another stack, another half-hearted attempt not to be aggressive with it. We’ve already made contact several times, he’d assured me. The groundwork has already been laid.

      I straighten the pieces I’ve put down and turn back to the truck СКАЧАТЬ