Page 9 of Keepsake
The guest room was on the right as you entered, and the bathroom on the left. Straight ahead was the bunk room, where five twin beds were built into the walls. I had the one under the windows, while the others were double decker on the side walls. There was a big old closet on the final wall of the room, and we each had a trunk under the bottom bunks.
When this place was full, there was barely enough space for five guys. But it was roomy enough with just the three of us. And Griff’s temporary presence wouldn’t overcrowd us. I liked his company.
Dropping my books on my bed, I grabbed my towel and headed for the shower. On my way to the big bathroom I passed the door to the guest bedroom, which was half open. Lark must have brought some music with her, because a twang of guitars and a female vocalist drifted out into the hallway. I heard May giggle. Lark answered in a husky voice that seemed to resonate in my chest.
Hell.
I closed the bathroom door and turned on the shower, giving the ancient plumbing a chance to heat the water. It was time to strip, but for once I hesitated. It was a little weird getting naked if a woman could just walk right in here. I was used to the all-male environment, where I didn’t have to think before taking off my clothes.
After hurriedly tossing my clothes onto the wall hook, I stepped under the warm spray. After a hard day’s work, it was blissful. My muscles were tired in a satisfying way, and I enjoyed the rhythm of the water hitting my bare skin.
Like food, hot water was scarce where I grew up. I hadn’t known you could indulge in a hot shower at the end of the day without feeling guilt over it.
There had been plenty that Isaac and Leah had needed to teach me after my nineteen years living at Paradise Ranch. When I got to Vermont, I’d never touched a computer or a telephone. I’d never eaten fast food. I didn’t know what Red Bull was, or a Quarter Pounder. I didn’t knowStar Warsor the Black Keys orGame of Thrones.
Some of my ignorance was even more embarrassing.
I’d never forget the time when Isaac had first told me the story ofhisearly days in Vermont. He and Leah had run off from Paradise Ranch together, basically camping their way across the country, from dusty Wyoming to Vermont. “We liked it here, and it was August. So we picked apples all season and then stayed on.” Living as frugally as two humans can, it had taken the two of them only five years to scrape together a tiny down payment on a failing farm. Even now, Isaac and Leah worked like dogs to make the place pay them a living wage.
I had listened admiringly to this story, impressed by both the pluck and luck it had taken to go from teenage cult members to landowners in the span of ten years. “It’s lucky that Maeve wasn’t born until after you could buy the farm,” I’d said. My entire young life, I’d watched the responsibility of too many children weigh down the young mothers at Paradise Ranch.
To Isaac’s credit, he never laughed at my frequent displays of ignorance. Not once. “That wasn’t luck, my man. That’s birth control.”
“What’s that?” I’d asked. I’d been almost twenty years old, and I hadn’t even known there was a way to avoid getting your wife pregnant.
The next week, Isaac had given me a book about sex ed—the kind that preteens are handed by modern parents. And just to make sure I got the message, he explained birth control to me one night after Leah and Maeve had gone to bed.
And even though we lived in the middle of nowhere and I lacked any kind of social life, Isaac had put a new box of condoms in my dresser drawer. “Just in case, right? It’s different here, Zach,” he’d said, which was the understatement of the century. “Nobody is going to give you a beating for having sex. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to be careful.”
I still had the box. It was unopened.
The reasonI always tried to get the first shower was that it left time for reading. I had a clip-on book light that the Shipley twins had given me for Christmas. And even though I only had twenty pages left ofLord of the Flies, I opened the sixth Harry Potter book while everyone else took turns in the bathroom.
Once in a while some well-meaning person in my life would point out that after living the first nineteen years of my life on a dusty property in Wyoming, I still rarely left the farm. But they were wrong. I’d been to Middle Earth and Hogwarts and Dickensian London all in the past month or so. The difference between living on a ranch where books were banned and a farm where books were freely discussed and traded could not be underestimated.
It was almost lights-out by the time I heard May wish Lark a good night. “Sleep tight. Breakfast is at eight thirty. We do everything pretty early around here. It’s not like those long brunches we used to take in Boston. Those were the days.”
“I’ll get up and help with breakfast. Goodnight, beautiful girl. Thank you so much for bringing me up here!”
“We’re lucky to have you. Now go to bed. You look like you haven’t slept in a year.”
There was no soundproofing at all in the bunkhouse, so I heard the whole conversation. Then I heard Kieran come out of the bathroom and wish Lark goodnight, too. “Is it okay if I shut off the hallway light?” he asked her.
“Sure. Hey, Kieran?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I lock the front door?”
We never locked the bunkhouse. Nobody would ever trek out onto the Shipleys’ property to bother three or four big guys with nothing more valuable than a couple of iPods. “Go ahead, sweetie,” Kieran said after a pause. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
I curled the pillow under my right ear and closed my eyes. When I closed my eyes in this room, I did so without worry. The sounds of people settling in to sleep were always reassuring to me.
I didn’t mind staying in the bunkhouse—not at all. The grunts and snores of my roommates were nothing new. In fact, the two years I’d spent at Isaac and Leah’s place was the only time in my life I’d ever slept in a room of my own.
Living in the bunkhouse and eating free meals meant that I had virtually no living expenses. Everybody under this roof was well-fed and rooming here as a way to save money—not as a necessity.
