As You Wish (The Summerhouse 3)

She pointed at his bed, which was neatly made up and had one of his shirts tossed across the foot. Alas, he was wearing another one.

He was still staring at her.

Elise pointed at the bed. “Carmen?”

He shook his head and pointed toward the other bedroom. “Carmen there.”

For the second time, Elise thought that if she hadn’t known he spoke English, his unaccented words gave him away. “I get it,” she said. “Carmen the Coward. She’s knocked up by my boyfriend so she’s afraid to go to sleep in my presence.”

Alejandro shrugged, as though he didn’t understand what she was saying, but his eyes were sparkling.

“So how do I tell you what I mean?” She pointed at his bed and said, “Carmen,” then went to the bed on the far side of the room and pointed to herself. She pantomimed sleeping, then waking and tiptoeing to the other bed—where she put her hands around Carmen’s throat and started strangling her. Then she stabbed her. Then she pulled Carmen’s body off the bed by her ankle and slammed it on the floor three times.

When she stopped, she looked up at Alejandro and gave him a sweet smile. “Is that why she doesn’t want to sleep in the same room as me?” That needed no translation. Laughing, he nodded yes.

She followed him into the kitchen and watched as he pantomimed having to return to work. But no matter what he did, she acted as though she had no idea what he meant. After the fourth time, he narrowed his eyes at her and she smiled.

With a snort of laughter, he nodded at the dirty dishes in the sink, motioning for her to leave them alone. He opened the refrigerator door to let her know that she could help herself.

She pointed to her wrist, where she usually wore a watch, to ask what time he would return. He shrugged that he didn’t know, then he showed her how to work the dead bolt on the front door. But he still didn’t leave.

“Go!” she said. “I’ll be fine. As long as Carmen doesn’t show up, I won’t murder anyone.”

As he left, his eyes were twinkling.

Elise closed the door, bolted it, then sat down on the old couch. Now what? she thought. Where did she go from here? Yes, she had escaped marriage with Kent, but what had that accomplished? How was she going to do something in just three weeks that was so fabulous that it would change her life forever? When she got back to Olivia and Kathy, she wanted to tell them that she’d... What? Had a silly little thing with Alejandro where they pretended to not speak each other’s languages?

Or was this time in the past to be all about sex? Would she be able to tell Olivia and Kathy that she’d at last had some truly great sex? But they were four years in the future. How was she going to fill four whole years? Even the Kama Sutra wouldn’t take years!

For a moment she blinked back tears of self-pity. Out of one mess and into another.

She was in a dreary little house that had a dirty kitchen with the breakfast dishes in the sink. “Too bad I had to come back as myself,” she muttered.

Something they don’t tell you in college, she thought, is that when you get married you need a degree in domestic engineering. With what her father paid Kent, they should have had a lot of household help, but they didn’t. She hadn’t known that the cause was Kent supporting Carmen and their child. All Elise knew was that she’d done most of the work herself.

She got up and went into the kitchen. There are always choices and right now she knew that she could feel sorry for herself, roll in misery, or she could—

Make myself useful, she thought, then set about cleaning up the kitchen. There was an old washing machine inside a closet, and piled on it was a tall stack of filthy, muddy clothes from the men. She started a load.

The rest of the house needed dusting and sweeping. She found a broom but no vacuum cleaner. When the first load was done, she saw that there was no dryer. In the weed-infested backyard was a broken turnstile of a clothesline. Kent’s mother had insisted that all bedsheets be hung outside so that’s what Elise had to do for her husband. That his mother’s two maids hung out her laundry didn’t matter, just so Kent’s sheets smelled like sunshine.

Those thoughts made anger go through Elise. No doubt he was with Carmen right now, whining about how Elise had humiliated him. Poor man, everyone would think. Such a saint!

She picked up a rusty can that was hidden in the scrawny weeds, then another one. Within minutes, she had a pile. When she went back inside, she got some plastic bags, put another load in the washer, then went back outside and hung up the first load.

By the time she’d done enough physical labor to calm her anger, the backyard looked a great deal better. She swept the little patio area, pulled some weeds, then did more laundry and hung it out.

“Boxers,” she said aloud as she slipped a clothespin onto the line.

Inside, she made herself a sandwich and thought that she should sit down and relax.

And think about her life? Not something she wanted to do.

On the end of the kitchen counter was a laptop and a box full of papers. They were receipts for supplies and plants. Each one was marked with the name of the job they’d been bought for. Her parents’ name was on six bills. It looked like her mother had replaced the roses in the south garden.

Elise moved the box to the table and began sorting them into piles by job. That done, she wondered what Diego’s bookkeeping system was like.

She glanced at the laptop. A computer was as private as a woman’s handbag, but still...