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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

We couldn’t linger over the treat because Clara had to get home to wrap up tasks for her business as a virtual assistant to authors.

I should use the time to write.

We also both needed to change out of our dog park clothes before our lunch with Evan Ferguson.

Clara’s brows rose, but she didn’t say anything when she dropped me off, because Teague’s vehicle was parked in my driveway. This time he wasn’t leaning against it. He must have gone inside.

My heartbeat rattled. He’d used the key.

I was smiling as I ushered Gracie and Murphy in the back door, but I aimed for casual when I called out, “Teague?”

“Upstairs,” he responded.

Hearing his voice, the dogs thundered ahead of me to greet him.

I found him in my office — a definite disappointment—and not only fully clothed, but still wearing his jacket.

“What are you doing?” I could see what he was doing — using a tape measure on the inside of the closet. I should have asked why. But it’s hard to backspace-delete in a conversation.

“Measuring. Want to be sure I have the dimensions right. The supplies for Amy’s cabinet came in. Might as well get the material for this at the same time I pick those up.”

Amy Keckler lived kitty-corner across the street and had asked Teague to build a custom cabinet in a gap beside her stove.

The project in my office stemmed from a suggestion Kit made to fit shelves over the double-wide filing cabinet in the closet to free up more of the room’s limited floor space.

Bookshelves (some built by Teague), desk, desk chair, cushy upholstered chair for curling up in, then throw in a dog bed and you could barely tiptoe to the door.

The shelves Teague made would stay, but one, maybe two free-standing (and mismatched) bookcases could be liberated by the added space in the closet.

“You have time to work on any of this?” I asked.

He took a pen out of his mouth to write down numbers. “Waiting for some information to come in, so have a window to pick up materials. The case will wrap up eventually. Want to be ready to go when it does.”

“But by then school will be open again and last year you said it’s the busy season for a sub. Besides, I meant more generally... You’re going to keep doing carpentry, for other people, for me even though you’re substitute teaching and working for the sheriff’s department?”

He glanced at me on those final words.

Probably not because I’d said them any particular way.

He had no way of knowing I worried that the secret I carried about my past could hurt his future with the sheriff’s department.

“I’ll keep on with the carpentry as much as I can.”

“Why?”

He sat back, his heels coming up off the ground.

“I like carpentry. Makes for a nice change. It’s quiet.”

I side-eyed him. “Hammering, sawing, drilling? That’s quiet?”

He grinned. “In my head. It’s quiet in my head.

It’s neater and makes more sense than investigations and way more than teenagers.

It’s the next step and the next and the next.

Orderly. Instead of a dozen possibilities branching out with a dozen possibilities at the end of each branch and some of those branches crossing over to touch others, until they leave your head buzzing with the tangle.

“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy the challenge of teaching or investigating. But I don’t know if I would keep on enjoying them the way I do without the quiet of carpentry.”

“Huh.”

That’s all I said, but his brows rose slightly. He’d read my comprehension in that syllable. “Gardening’s like that for you? Because of the writing?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

The simple act of putting a plant into the ground or yanking a weed out of it blocked out the branching possibilities in my head from writing and investigating... and life issues. Too bad it was late December right now.

Yet it felt connecting to know he had branching possibilities in his head, too. Despite the fact that my secrets could further tangle his branches.

Then I thought of another antidote to branching possibilities. “And the dogs.”

“True.”

He grinned up at me. I grinned down at him.

He took my hand and tugged me down toward him.

He didn’t have to tug hard.

The result of the tugging didn’t last long — certainly not long enough. Teague had to get to the hardware store, then back to the sheriff’s department.

And I had to get ready for lunch and another session with those branching possibilities.

****

I decided to shower first.

Had nothing to do with avoiding writing.

Just better to make sure I was ready for lunch.

I’d think about my characters wrestling with their pasts, presents, and futures on Lattimore Mountain while I showered. Running water could do wonders for the writer’s brain.

...Except I found myself practicing the words I’d say when Teague and I could have our talk, hoping I’d find ones that would still have him looking at me as he had a little while ago and wanting to tug me to his side.

I was showered, dressed, and in front of the computer.

Words came to me. But not ones that belonged in this story.

A dozen possibilities branching out with a dozen possibilities at the end of each branch and some of those branches crossing over to touch others, until they leave your head buzzing with the tangle.

Teague’s words described exactly where I was. With him. With Derrick and Jaylynn. With the writing.

I couldn’t go out and garden. The dogs were curled into each other, sound asleep on Gracie’s bed, and that was cute, but not nearly distracting enough to quiet my brain.

Writing did that for Kit. Why not for me?

Did that mean I couldn’t be a writer?

No , I said staunchly to myself.

Then the staunch melted into the goo of doubt.

I’d started this work in progress with great hopes because I heard and saw the two characters having a disagreement.

My other efforts at writing started with a detailed outline. And each died before arrival.

Not only hadn’t I finished them, I wished it was the old days of typed manuscripts so I could bury them in the deepest, darkest bottom drawer of a cabinet relegated to the basement. Hiding computer folders didn’t have the same impact.

But now these characters had clammed up, refusing to even whisper their inner selves to me.

Shouldn’t a writer be able to pry open the characters?

And if I couldn’t be a writer, what was I going to do with myself?

Sure, Gracie thought a full-time petter was a fine occupation and, yes, it did reduce my blood pressure as well as those other branching possibilities.

But I feared it would be a race to see which happened first, my brain turning to mush or my blood pressure flatlining from being entirely stress-free.

Kit could help me with these wretched characters. As I said, she’s an accomplished career novelist. But I need to figure out how to do this on my own.

Somehow.

The phone rang.

I knew in my bones who it was. Still, I checked the screen.

“Hi, Kit,” I answered. “Afraid I don’t have anything new and exciting to tell you.”

“How about one or the other. Anything exciting?”

Figured she’d start there. “Well, Teague is going to go ahead with the shelves in my office closet.”

“How’s that exciting?” She’d told him to, so—. “Of course he is.”

“It’s exciting to me. Even if I am after my neighbor on his priority list.”

She snorted skeptically. It was as if she’d witnessed our post-tugging moments. “Not so hot on the exciting. Hope you can do better with what’s new.”

I told her about our morning.

She wasn’t impressed with the new, either.

Might as well add to that. “And I’m sitting here not writing. Again.” Before she could respond, I added, “Someone recently reminded me I needed to be more patient.”

She snorted with derision, then immediately said, “Oh, do you mean with characters? Stories? Writing? Then, yeah, you need to be patient.”

That surprised me.

“Really? I don’t remember you ever recommending patience under any circumstances.”

“I don’t recommend it. It’s a pain in the — well, I don’t know where it’s not a pain. But you don’t have a choice. You can’t push characters. If you do, they go stiff. You might move them, but it’s not pleasant for you or them or anyone watching.”

I had a sudden vision of my dog deciding she did not want to move and bracing all four legs, with her head ducked and her shoulders stiffened at the other end of a taut leash.

“I think I know what you mean,” I said slowly.

“Good. You don’t want to get your characters or your story into that state.”

“What if they already are?” I asked even more slowly. If the answer was toss out the story and start over—

“Back up,” she said. “Shake things up.”

I had a vision of gently shaking Gracie’s leash like a jump rope. I could do that.

“Throw something unexpected in, even if you don’t end up using it. Like And then a bus crashed through the wall. ”

I’d heard her say that, along with another phrase. And then they all died.

“Go on, Sheila. Back up in the story. Send a bus through the wall — figuratively or otherwise. Quit wallowing. From now until your lunch.”

She hung up.

I looked over at the dogs again. Still sleeping, still cute.

Without refocusing on the screen, I scrolled backward. Where my cursor landed, I typed And then a bus crashed through the wall.

I kept typing until it was time to pick up Clara. I hadn’t even run out of words yet.