All went well from there. Me being back in his Suburban. Deacon swinging into the Mexican Jumping Bean without my even asking. Deacon being relaxed and calm while driving, even when some guy cut him off to take a right turn, this making Deacon brake when he wouldn’t have had to if the guy wasn’t being a jerk.
Now all wasn’t well.
Now I’d had to leave my trolley with my carefully selected trays of flowers and spiky and tailing plants that would so work with my vision of floral beauty at Glacier Lily in the garden center because I had no idea where my man was and the big flat trolley I had was too unwieldy to shove through the store.
Someone was going to snatch my plants, I knew it.
And where could Deacon be? I’d looked through all the aisles in the garden center (three times).
He was just gone.
I’d called his number, but he didn’t answer (as usual).
Hurrying through the humongous store, then going through the back aisles and doing it again, I saw him standing at the far back looking at ladders.
Ladders.
What the heck?
“Dea…Priest,” I called.
He looked to me but said nothing.
I stopped two feet away. “You left me in the garden center,” I informed him of information he well knew.
“Need a ladder,” he replied.
I stared at him, looked to the ladders, then looked to him again. “I have a ladder.”
“Not tall enough,” he stated.
I felt my brows draw together. “For what?”
“Gotta clean your gutters,” he declared. “May have to replace some of ’em. Ladder in your shed won’t reach.”
“I don’t need to clean my gutters. I have evergreens all around my house.”
He turned fully to me. “They drop needles, woman. And you got aspens, some of ’em tall, not to mention those three big birches at the front of your house and the elms close to the river.” I was having difficulty processing Deacon’s knowledge of my trees as he kept talking. “Rain last night was fallin’ over the sides, not goin’ where it’s supposed to go. This means the gutters are probably caked.”
I’d noticed that but it hadn’t occurred to me my gutters needed cleaned, mostly because I liked that fall of rain. Of course, not when it was pouring down, then that heavy fall kind of freaked me out.
I still didn’t think about cleaning my gutters.
Deacon did and this explained him looking at what I thought were the trees last night. But it wasn’t the trees. It was the rain coming over my gutters.
I wasn’t sure how to take this conversation so I decided it was best to feel my way.
“Are you gonna clean my gutters?” I asked.
“Not buyin’ a ladder for my woman to do it.”
Okay, I knew how to take that, as in like it a whole lot.
Now to the tough stuff.
“Did you think of maybe telling me you were going to clean my gutters and needed a ladder to do it before taking off to look at ladders, leaving me talking to myself?” I asked.
“When I took off, you weren’t talkin’.”