Page 17 of Love It or List It
Their eyes met.“She said it might have been a coyote.A coyote?”He put the phone back to his mouth.“Linda, I don’t do coyotes.I’m a city boy.”
Joe and Starling looked at each other and held back their laughter.
“I don’t think it was the right size,” Starling said placatingly.
“Or the right color,” Joe put in.As much fun as it was to watch Austin freak out, he didn’t want the poor guy to have a meltdown.
Austin gave them a grateful look.“Okay, so probably not a coyote.”He waited while Linda spoke once more, then hung up.
Apparently Linda didn’t know the dog, but she told them to bring it to her if they did find it.“Turns out she’s a vet.”
Austin stepped into his boots and shut the door of the trailer behind him.“Any thoughts as to the best way to find a stray dog?”
Chapter Five
THEY DIDN’Tfind the dog.
Austin wanted to keep searching, but dark set in, and Joe called a halt.
“What if she’s hurt?”Austin couldn’t take the idea of an injured animal alone at night, especially now that it was getting colder.
But Joe refused to give in to his pleading.“It’s too dark to keep looking,” he said sternly, like Austin was one of his children, and dragged him into the house.
For the hour or so while they were unloading and sorting through boxes, Joe almost succeeded in getting Austin’s mind off the poor dog somewhere out in wilderness, but when Austin made his way back to the trailer after Joe drove away, he couldn’t help but look around for sightings of a furry tan animal hiding somewhere.
So when he got back to the trailer, he sat down at the tiny decrepit table and continued the slow task of cleaning and oiling the typewriter they’d found, until his eyes started to sting and he fell into the tiny bed.
The early drive from the house to his shop was definitely preferable to the late drive, and Austin had no regrets about the trailer that day.
A few days later, Austin made his way up to the second floor for the first attempt at a declutter.
He decided to start with one of the smaller bedrooms, as it was, surprisingly, the least horrifying—perhaps because DeeDee hadn’t wanted to fill up the room that might have been a child’s or perhaps had acted as a guest room.Either way, there was actual visible floor space, unlike the third bedroom to the right, which was so full Austin couldn’t tell if it even held a bed.
Hours later Austin sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by the usual three piles—garbage, sentimental, decide later.
“Find anything good yet?”Joe asked from the doorway, and Austin jumped.
He looked up from his spot to see Joe leaning casually against the frame, arms crossed and hip cocked.Austin took a moment to appreciate the sight of the man’s legs in jeans, then looked down at the object in his hands.He’d found a small bookshelf that might have belonged to a child and promptly gotten distracted by the contents.
“Found stuff for Meg and her family,” he admitted.
“Oh?”Joe lifted an eyebrow, and for some reason, Austin blushed.He hadn’t been doing anything wrong, but now that Joe was standing there, he felt caught out.
“Yeah.Old kids’ books, school books, a couple of journals, mostly empty, I think.And a photo album.”
“Oh!”Joe lurched forward and dropped down beside Austin in the only spot of empty floorspace, apparently unconcerned that it meant their thighs were all but glued together.“Lemme see.”
So Austin flipped back to the beginning of the small album, and together they leafed through.The shots were mostly from the ’80s and ’90s, and some featured a woman Austin guessed was a younger DeeDee, but he couldn’t say any of the other faces were familiar.Well, beyond a passing resemblance to Meg, suggesting a familial link.
“Definitely Meg’s dad,” Joe said with a laugh as he pointed to a picture of a young man in baggy clothes, looking artfully unimpressed by the cake before him with fourteen candles.
“Cute,” Austin said sarcastically.Then he looked back to the bookshelf for any more finds.He didn’t want to look at pictures of strangers rejecting the sort of happy childhood hallmarks he would have begged for at that age.
“Fourteen-year-olds,” Joe said.“I can’t say I miss that stage.The kids are definitely cooler now they’re approaching drinking age.”
“Harsh,” Austin said as he flipped through an aged copy ofThe Fellowship of the Ring.
“Nah.Talk to me when you’ve got kids in the preteen, early-teen stage and then you can judge.”He bumped their shoulders together to take the sting out of the words.Not that Austin was stung by the reminder that he didn’t have a fourteen-year-old at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.
