Page 10 of Freak
Every room he’d seen in this house had the same otherworldly atmosphere. Dark wood floors, covered with mismatched rugs, dark walls—in here they were painted a chocolate brown—plants hanging and sitting everywhere, eclectic collections of lights. In the dining room were a huge, dark china chest and a mismatched sideboard painted antique silver. In this Here she’d draped a big piece of funky fabric across the ceiling, drawn up in the center, around the light fixture, and swagging to the corners, so it was like sitting in a tent in the Sahara or something.
She’d spread a lace tablecloth over the table and set two places with her mismatched dishes and silverware. Two old-fashioned stoneware pitchers, one blue and full of ice water, and the other white and full of sweet tea, sat near the center, by the ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like kittens. The flowers in their glass jar and cutesy ribbon made a surprisingly nice touch, as if it had all been arranged for someone to paint a still life.
Everything about this woman was weird and beautiful in equal measure.
Why had he brought her flowers? He supposed the impulse might have been rooted in attraction, but he didn’t think he’d meant it, consciously or otherwise, as more than a nice thing for a friend. She’d certainly taken them like that. What would he have done if she’d thought they meant more? Would that have made an opportunity?
The light in the room changed subtly; a faint, flickering dimness. Mel looked up and studied the overhead light—a cut-glass bowl light that had probably been installed in the 1930s. One of its four bulbs flickered unsteadily—in a way he recognized as a problem in the wiring, not just the bulb dying.
Good thing Abigail had called an electrician over for supper.
“Mel, hon?” she called from the kitchen right then.
Mel grinned. Though he was pretty sure she’d been raised right here, she had a real mountain accent that closed off the vowel in his name and changed the sound to ‘Mil.’ She also dropped the word ‘hon’ like a period on half her sentences, whomever she was talking with. Though she was younger than him, she talked like somebody’s granny, and it was fucking delightful.
“Yeah, Abs? What you need?” He swung around and headed back to her witchy kitchen.
The food smells suddenly hit him like a drug, and he stopped and sucked in as much of them as he could. Roast chicken with rosemary, mashed potatoes with garlic and sour cream, fresh bread, sauteed green beans, no doubt fresh from her garden. He never ate better than when he ate here.
“What you do in your kitchen is fuckin’ magic, Abs.”
She turned from the stove, where she was scooping potatoes into a stoneware bowl. She always cooked for about six people and sent him home with three days’ worth of leftovers. Yep, she was like a squishy newborn granny pixie. Charmed the socks right off him.
“Sometimes, I s’pose, what I do in here could be called magic, but this here is just mashed taters. Will you carry the bird in, hon?” She nodded at the platter on the island, where a perfectly roasted chicken sat, bedecked with rosemary and gleaming under an amber-colored glass pendant lamp.
“Happy to,” he said and went to the island. When he saw her trying to tuck the bread basket under her arm and carry the potatoes and the veggies, too, he took the basket from her and added it to his own load. She smiled a thanks at him.
They took their usual seats at the table and Mel carved the chicken while Abigail filled their glasses with sweet tea.
She’d never served anything alcoholic with dinner, he thought she probably didn’t drink beer or wine, but with dessert, there was always a little glass of hooch—just one, in a little jelly glass. She made a hard cider that tasted like cinnamon applesauce and would absolutely put a grown man under the table in a couple glasses.
As usual, Abigail wouldn’t fill her plate first, so he served himself some chicken and passed the tray to her. Then he went for the mashed potatoes. If he ever ended up on death row, his last meal would be nothing but a great, heaping bowl of these potatoes.
“How’s the goats?” he asked, plopping a third big scoop of mashed magic on his plate. “You had a job in ... where again?”
“Labadie,” she answered as she selected some chicken for herself. “They’re a new client, and it went just fine. They had a real nice place for me to set up the trailer. I got one more job lined up this month, and then it’ll be the end of the season for the brushers.”
“I’ll be glad of that. I don’t like you being out on the road so long.”
She laughed at that while she spooned a significantly smaller portion of potatoes onto her plate. “I’m not on the road, hon. I’m just campin’. The goats and the dogs do most of the work.”
He stopped with a serving fork full of green beans (sauteed in bacon grease and seasoned with some kind of blend that tasted like something the gods on Olympus would eat—the woman should write a cookbook, seriously) halfway to his plate and gave Abigail a firm look. “After what those shitheads—‘scuse me—did to you, Abs, I don’t like you away from home so long. On the road means away from home. They’re still out there; we haven’t found ‘em yet.”
He’d grown increasingly frustrated as the question slipped down the list of the club’s priorities. They’d hit several dead ends in the search for the doers, they’d dug themselves a big hole trying to figure it out, and most of his brothers had lost the appetite for the fight. Pretty soon he’d be the only one who cared enough to even bring it up at the table. Maybe he already was the only one.
He had not shared that frustration with Abigail, however, and he would not. If he had to figure it out himself, so be it, but he meant to find those fuckers and make them pay. Anybody who’d hurt this sweet woman deserved a very hard payback. Bloody hard.
She flapped a hand at him. “Well, first thing, I wasn’t here to get hurt when they came by, because I was ‘on the road.’ Second thing, they didn’t do much to me. They made a mess, but that’s all cleaned up now, thanks to you and your club. They killed my chickens, and that was the worst of it. You know I’m not forgettin’ that. I just...” she paused, turned to stare out the window (through dozens of tendrils from the plants hanging there), and continued her thought. “I don’t like dwellin’ in the dark, y’know? Life is hard sometimes. Bad things happen sometimes. That’s part of getting’ up each day, puttin’ your shoes on, and movin’ forward. Sometimes it’s hard. But I don’t want other people’s demons dancin’ on my hearth.”
He chuckled softly and reached across the table to brush his fingers across her hand and catch her attention. She wore a big ring on the middle finger of her right hand, with an oval amber stone sizeable enough to fill the space between her knuckles.
Her hand twitched beneath his touch, almost like he’d brought a static charge with him. He felt something like that himself.
When she turned back to him, he said, “I like the sound of that, but I’m not sure I’ve got its meaning.”
“Other people’s demons dancin’ on my hearth?”
He nodded. “Yeah. What d’you mean?”
