“I didn’t know you were bringing a date,” Roan said stiffly.
“If you had a telephone up here I would have called you.” Tris was waiting for an explanation.
Roan looked Tris in the eyes for a moment. They’d been kids together, climbed the same trees. In the fifth grade they’d been in love with the same girl. They knew each other well. “You think you’re in love with her, don’t you?”
“Be quiet! She’ll hear you.”
Roan lowered his voice. “That girl comes from a city. It’s all over her. That jacket she has on cost thousands. She’s not going to stay in little backwoods Edilean. Tristan, that woman is going to break your heart.”
“Jecca isn’t like what you’re thinking,” Tris said, and he dropped his attitude of hostility. He couldn’t be angry at Roan for looking out for him. On the other hand, Roan thought that since he lived in big bad California, he knew more about life than Tris, who still lived in Edilean. “And yes, she’s going to go back to the city, and yes, I’m going to be devastated.”
“Why put yourself through that?” Roan asked. “Take it from me, from my experience, don’t stick your neck out there when you know it’s going to be chopped off.”
“I’m more of the philosophy that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
“Spoken by a man who’s never had his heart ripped out and stomped on,” Roan said.
Tristan began to pick up firewood. “Don’t you think it’s time you got over your ex-wife and her young boyfriend?”
“A man never gets over something like that. Wait until it happens to you.”
“It’s not going to happen to me. Jecca isn’t sneaking around behind my back. She’s been honest with me from the first day. Roan, so help me if you do anything to make Jecca feel unwelcome I’ll make you sorry for it.”
“Just don’t come crying to me later,” Roan said as he took the wood from Tris and started for the cabin.
“You can bet I won’t,” Tris called after him. He well knew that he was angry because Roan had said what Tris was thinking. With every day that he spent with Jecca, he knew the parting was going to hurt more. If he had any sense at all, he’d leave Nell with Roan, take Jecca back to Edilean, then he’d return to spend a week . . . What? Fishing? He knew that he’d never be able to stay at the cabin if Jecca was in Edilean. However long they had, he wanted to spend it together.
He picked up a heavy cooler, winced at the pain in his left arm, but then smiled. Jecca had seen what he thought he’d concealed completely. No, he wasn’t going to be “sensible” and spend even a minute away from her that he didn’t have to. Tonight, sharing a bedroom with Roan, with Jecca right next door, was going to be difficult enough.
Inside the cabin, Jecca put the box down on the kitchen counter and looked around. It was all one big room, with three doors at the back leading into the two bedrooms, a bathroom between them.
All the furniture looked like it had been castoffs from different people’s houses. None of it matched, all of it was old and worn out. Two sofas and two giant chairs looked toward a huge stone fireplace that had a foot-deep pile of ashes in the bottom.
What interested Jecca the most in the room was that the dining table was covered with a thick layer of newspapers, and on it was a chainsaw that was in pieces. Jecca couldn’t help smiling, as machines in pieces was something she’d seen her entire childhood. One of the ways Layton Hardware stayed in business when it had to compete with the megastores was that they repaired equipment.
Jecca had spent nearly every Saturday of her childhood at the store with her father and brother. That’s when women and weekend handymen came in with a cheap power tool they’d bought for a bargain, plopped it on the counter, and said, “It quit working.”
Joey had always been a whiz at repair. For years it had irked Jecca that he was better than she was. Since repair didn’t come naturally to her, she’d worked harder at it. When her homework was done, she’d read machine manuals.
“Give it up,” Joey used to say. “Girls aren’t good with power tools.”
“All I want is to be good enough to beat you,” Jecca used to say. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
Sometimes their dad had to break up the ensuing argument.
Jecca never did get as good as Joey, so she left the intricate things for him. But still, she knew enough that her dad often put her in charge of the maintenance desk. When a contractor brought in a malfunct
ioning machine, she would just fill out the ticket and leave the repair to her dad or Joey. But when the homeowners came in with their tools broken, she sometimes fixed them herself. At night she’d entertain her dad and Joey with what they called “Stories of Stupid.”
“So you were trying to make a hole through quarter-inch-thick steel?” Jecca had learned to say with a straight face. She’d take the power hand drill the person had paid twenty dollars for and gently explain that it was made to drill wood not steel. Many timtee.
es, the customers went away with a good machine bought from Layton’s.
One time a woman brought in a good quality drill that had stopped working. “I don’t understand what happened to it,” she said. “I was hanging pictures with it two days ago and today it sounds like this.” The motor could barely turn over. Jecca couldn’t resist having a look inside. The minute she opened it, out came a sticky liquid. The woman’s two-year-old had poured maple syrup inside the drill.
Jecca had taken apart routers, sanders, and power handsaws. She’d been handed rototillers that people had run through rocky fields and piles of barbed wire. In fact, she nearly always had a tiller on the repair desk. In between customers, she’d used a roofing knife with its inward curved blade and wire cutters to disentangle the blades.
And then there were the chainsaws. People loved to cut up logs, but they rarely bothered to check if there were nails in the wood. She got good at putting dislodged chains back on, then she’d explained how to properly use a chainsaw.