Dance Away with Me - Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page 0,3
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.
What the hell, Trav? How many thirty-five-year-olds die from pneumococcal pneumonia these days?
She tugged her long, tangled hair from the neck of the sweatshirt. “I bought the place sight unseen. The price was right, but the photos were misleading.”
Bianca waddled toward the kitchen table. “It could be really cute with some paint and new furniture.”
Once Tess would have risen to the challenge, but not now. Not only couldn’t she afford new furniture, but she also didn’t care enough to buy any. “Someday.”
As Tess made coffee, Bianca chatted about a biography of one of Picasso’s mistresses she’d just read and about how much she already missed Thai food. Tess learned that Bianca and her husband lived in Manhattan, where she worked as a visual merchandiser in the fashion industry. “I design windows and pop-up stores,” she explained. “It’s a lot more fun than modeling used to be, although not as lucrative.”
“Modeling?” Tess turned from the stove to stare at her as she finally put it all together. “That’s why you seem so familiar. Bianca Jensen! We all wanted to be you.” She hadn’t made the connection between Bianca’s name and Tess’s own college days, when that face had been on the cover of every fashion magazine.