Dance Away with Me(3)

“Ian!”

Ignoring the sprite, he strode across the narrow bridge, his steps rattling the wet, wooden planks so ferociously Tess expected the whole thing to crash into Poorhouse Creek.

“Don’t mind him,” Bianca said. “He’s being a prick.”

Next to the stormy mountain man, the sprite underneath the red umbrella was a dewy rainbow, and Tess twisted the lock on her internal Pandora’s box, the place where she stored her emotions when she needed to get through the day. “It was my fault,” she confessed. “I didn’t know anyone was living up there.”

“We moved in three days ago. Not my choice, but my husband thought the mountain air would be good for me. At least that’s what he said.” Bianca handed Tess the umbrella and whipped her gauzy cotton gown over her head. She was naked underneath except for a tiny champagne-colored thong. “Oh, god, I’ve been wanting to do that all morning. It’s like I have a furnace running inside me.”

The rain had become a light drizzle, and Bianca gazed into the dripping trees. She was thin, with slender thighs and light blue veins tracing small, porcelain breasts. Comfortable in her nudity, she stretched, going up on the toes of her sandals and letting her long hair cascade down her back in a silky waterfall. “It’s so peaceful here. But boring.” She glanced toward the cabin. “Do you have coffee? Ian freaks out if I even look at a coffee mug, and I have another two months.”

Tess had come to these Tennessee mountains to get away from people, but the novelty of talking with someone who didn’t view her as a tragic widow drew her in. Besides, she didn’t have anything better to do other than stomp her feet or stare out the window. “Sure.” She gathered up the ballet flat she’d kicked off. “Fair warning. It’s still a mess.”

Bianca shrugged and closed the umbrella. “Organized people freak me out.”

Tess managed one of those smiles she feigned to convince everyone she was fine. “No worries about that.”

Back in the old days, it had been different. She’d been organized. She’d believed in structure, logic, predictability. In the old days, she’d believed in following the rules. If you did your homework, stopped at stop signs, paid your taxes, everything would be fine.

The cabin’s rough-hewn log exterior was solid, but ugly. Moss grew on the roof, and two thin tree trunks, long ago stripped of their bark, supported the overhang above the back door. The still-bare branches of the hickory, maple, and black walnut hovered above the old house, their branches scratching the roof like witches’ fingernails.

The main room held both the kitchen and living area, with a wooden staircase leading up to the two bedrooms. The walls were technically whitewashed pine but had yellowed with age. The dusty curtains had fallen apart when Tess tried to take them down to wash, so she’d had to replace them with plain white ones. A big front window offered a glimpse of the valley below and the small town of Tempest, Tennessee. The back windows looked out over Poorhouse Creek.

Bianca draped her cotton gown across the armchair and used the back to steady herself as she pulled off the sandals pinching her feet. Straightening, she gazed from the soot-blackened stone fireplace at one end of the cabin to the old-fashioned kitchen at the other.

The cast iron farmhouse sink was original, as was the fifties gas stove. Open shelving, now divested of the crumbling paper that had lined it, held the sparse collection of dishes and canned goods Tess had brought with her from Milwaukee. “This is a fixer-upper’s dream,” Bianca said.

Only as Tess’s teeth started to chatter did she realize how cold she was. She stuffed her damp legs into the jeans she’d abandoned next to the back door and pulled Trav’s ancient University of Wisconsin sweatshirt over her wet tank top. “I’m not much of a fixer-upper.”

Trav hadn’t been, either. He was the one who’d held the flashlight while she crawled under the sink to fix a leaky pipe.

“Did I ever tell you how hot you look with a pipe wrench?” he’d say.

“Tell me again.”

Tess rubbed the finger that had once held her wedding ring. Taking if off had ripped out her heart, but if she’d worn it here, she would have had to endure too many questions. Even worse, she’d have had to listen to others’ stories of loss.

“I know how you feel. I lost my grandmother last year.”

“. . . my uncle.”

“. . . my cat.”

No, you don’t know how I feel! Tess wanted to scream at all of her well-meaning friends and co-workers. You only know how you feel!

She unclenched her fingers. “The best I can say is that the place is clean.”

She’d scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom, taking steel wool to the stove and scouring powder to the sink. She’d mopped the old pine floors, dragged the threadbare Turkish rug outside to beat the grime from it, and fallen into a sneezing fit when she’d done the same with the couch cushions, which were slipcovered in a monumentally inappropriate English foxhunting scene. Her only significant purchase was a new mattress for the double bed upstairs.

Bianca glanced over her shoulder and wrinkled her small, perfect nose. “Do you have to use an outhouse?”

“God was merciful. Indoor plumbing upstairs.” She zipped up Trav’s sweatshirt. She’d worn it for months after he died until it had gotten so filthy she’d had to launder it. Now, it no longer held his familiar scent, the combination of warm skin, soap, and Right Guard deodorant.