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"She has muffins," he pointed out.
"I made those," I said, taking the muffins from Drea. "They're for your mom."
"Aha," he said. "I'm Noah," he told Drea.
"Drea," she said, her voice sweet and light. Not the voice she used with me.
"Uh, Noah, what's going on here? The place looks a little rough." Parts of Aunt Nattie's house were laying on the ground, and other parts seemed in need of paint. As if they were taking it apart and reassembling it like a Lego house. There was a toilet and a stove in the center of the lawn.
"We're renovating. Mom has this crazy idea that she can turn this place into a bed and breakfast."
"I thought she was buying an inn or something?"
"Or something. It's a little bit nuts, man."
Aha. Not buying an inn, then. Making her own house into an inn. The place did have like four million rooms, or it had seemed that way growing up.
"Hey, come on in," Noah said. "I think Mom's around here somewhere."
Noah led us up the porch and through the front door, and the familiar scent of Aunt Nattie's place washed over me, hitting me with a dose of nostalgia big enough to rattle me a bit. I'd been happy here as a kid. Life was always better at Aunt Nattie's.
"Mom?" Noah called, his voice echoing through the cavernous front entry way and up the staircase to one side.
"This place is amazing," Drea said, looking around.
"Ohh, it will be!" Aunt Nattie's voice came from around the corner of what she had always called the drawing room, and she emerged, her silver hair tied up in a bandanna, and white smears across her cheeks and down her arms. "A lot of paint and elbow grease required!" She smiled widely as her eyes landed on me.
"Hello, Aunt Nattie."
"Rock Stevens! You're a sight for sore eyes." She threw herself at me, giving me a hug that made me feel like a kid again, except that I was about two feet taller than my aunt, so I had to lean down to return it.
Aunt Nattie stepped back and turned to Drea. "Oh! And you've met Drea!" Her smile widened further, and her light eyes danced. "Are the two of you... an item?"
"No!" Drea practically shouted it, and if I hadn't had such a healthy sense of self-esteem, it might have hurt my feelings a bit. Was it so far-fetched that she might go out with me?
Would I go out with her?
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't noticed the way her sexy little smile teased at the side of her pretty pink lips, or the way her tight little waist gave way to a very voluptuous backside that I might have thought about a little more than I should.
"We are actually here to settle a dispute," I told my aunt. "But first, muffins." I nodded at Drea, who had taken back the basket of muffins and held it in front of her, and now she held them out to my aunt, her eyes narrowing at me.
"Ooh, are these from the Muffin Tin, Drea? Did you make them?"
"No, they're from my house, actually. Rock made them." Noah gave me a questioning look at this news, and Drea muttered, “and wouldn’t let me have one and then didn't bother to clean up after himself."
"What happened to Wanda?" I asked my aunt.
"Oh dear," she said, seeming to understand a bit more than we'd told her about the situation at hand. "Let's take these into the kitchen and figure this all out, shall we?"
"If we had a kitchen, that would be easier," Noah said.
"We have a kitchen," Aunt Nattie said, leading us down the hallway and taking a left turn into what I remembered as the kitchen. Only this room had been gutted almost completely. A refrigerator stood to one side, and a sink was still hooked up beneath the window overlooking the backyard and the riverbank. Everything else seemed to have been removed, and there were piles of discarded tile and a bank of disassembled cabinets on the floor. In the center of it all was the kitchen table I practically grew up at, eight chairs flanking the enormous wooden structure.
"Sit down!" Aunt Nattie instructed us. "Coffee?"
"Uh, sure," I said, wondering how she planned to make coffee. Aunt Nattie went to the discarded cabinets leaning against the wall and scrounged through one until she emerged again with a coffee machine, which she sat on the floor and plugged into an outlet that looked a lot like a fire hazard.
"That'll just be a minute," she told us, taking a muffin and then seating herself next to Noah. "Now, to what do we owe the pleasure?"
