back into the ute at the earliest opportunity, I’ll give you the car key and unlock the Mystery Treasure Map before I go, which will mean you can find the car, too.”
“I said I was grateful. I’m just trying to help,” she said, lifting the bags like she was proving a point. She had some biceps. Impressive. Not quite as good as her thighs, but still—impressive, at least for a slim person with the bone structure of a sparrow.
“Well, quit trying to help and let me help,” I said, crunching over the walkway of white stones at the base of the porch and along the path through the trees.
“You say that,” she said from behind me, “but you did the exact same thing. When you wouldn’t let me climb in through the window.”
“Yeh?” I said. “I have news for you. I’ll never let you climb in through the window.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” she said. “How many more times are we climbing through windows?”
Fruitful said, “I thought you did a very good job climbing through the window, Gray.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And this is it.”
Behind me, Daisy stopped. I could tell, because her voice was coming from farther away, like she wouldn’t actually step on my heels in her eagerness to get to the next thing on her list.
Fruitful said, “It’s a tent.”
Daisy said, “No, it isn’t. It’s a yurt.”
“Oh,” Fruitful said. “It looks like a tent. A big green tent.”
I carried on with taking her up the wooden ramp and onto the deck, then set her down in a chair and got the key from under the pot. “It’s a tent,” I said, “and a yurt. A yurt is a Mongolian tent.”
“It has a spa tub on the deck,” Daisy said, as if I wouldn’t have noticed. “If this is an Airbnb, Gray, at least let me pay you for it.”
I sighed. “For the last time: I don’t want your money. I can also promise you that I will never have an Airbnb, so no worries. I like people to leave me alone, not come around crowding me and asking questions. It’s where I lived after I bought the place, that’s all, until I’d finished the big jobs on the house. Iris lived here for a bit, but she said it was too flash for her. So I’ve already heard that, and I don’t need to hear it again. It’s not too flash. It’s a yurt. It’s just not a home for the Mole People.”
“If you like people to leave you alone,” Obedience asked, “why did you invite us?”
I said, “Because you’re different.”
“Because he feels sorry for us,” Fruitful told her sister.
“That’s why,” Daisy said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not. Would you just … go inside, please? And have a look at this bloody yurt so you can decide if it meets your exacting standards? If you’re not at the house to get the car key within fifteen minutes, Daisy, I guess you can start your driving tomorrow, because I have to go to work.”
As a gentleman, I failed.
But then, gentlemen probably didn’t have these kinds of provocations. Like women who kept taking off their clothes around you and acting completely oblivious about it, and objecting to your perfectly reasonable offers of help even when they were in a desperate situation. Women who kept on being prickly even when the person who ought to be helping them seemed totally unaware of it, and just toddled off happily to his wife again, leaving his sister to fend for herself, because she was so good at it and she’d always done it before, so why not this time, too? Gentlemen probably didn’t leave their house single, and come back a day and a half later with three reluctant women, the threat of an angry, deserted husband turning up—the husband of two of them—and a dog. A female dog. Who was going to have to come in the truck with me again, because I was going to be late getting home tonight, and I really didn’t need to be causing distress to a dog. A worshipful dog. Who loved me. For whom I was now completely responsible.
I needed to go to work.
24
Never Say Never
Daisy
I stood in the doorway of my first-ever yurt and felt bad.
Fruitful said, “Do you really not have to be nice to men, Outside? Even if they’re nice to you, and help you when you’ve lost your car and give you a place to live and everything?”