Page 69 of The Treasure House

“Running a bed-and-breakfast is retired?”

“Blame Roger for that one.”

To thank him for all his help, I gifted Alan with an art deco wooden clock he’d been eyeing. He put it on their mantel in the B&B and sent me a photo of it immediately. Divine, he captioned it. Not thanks enough, I wrote back. I seriously didn’t know how I could have done it without him. By late October, we’d cleared the biggest objects from the tent and the house.

As we worked, the sound of Jake’s power tools was a steady purr and whir. He’d put his hand up to help me repair the porch, which I was paying him for. I wouldn’t let him do it for free. He’d ripped down the corrugated iron walls of the laundry in a single day but had balked at pulling out the heavy concrete trough.

“That’s staying,” he told me, stepping back and wiping sweat from his forehead. He pushed his safety goggles up. “I mean, it could come out, but it’s not an easy job.”

I considered the old trough with its cast-iron water pump. “Does the pump still work?” I asked.

“Nope. It’s too old. Hasn’t been maintained.”

I considered it. It wasn’t without its charms. Much like the old range, it gave off Anne of Green Gables vibes.

“You could turn the trough into a water feature or something,” Jake said. “Or fill it with dirt and make it a planter.”

I nodded. “Sure. It can be like the range in the kitchen. A big, weird feature.”

He grunted, apparently pleased.

Jake had an odd relationship with the house on Tinker Street. He was both attracted to it and repelled by it. At least that made more sense now that I knew the house had been in his family. People got sentimental about things. I imagined what it must be like to be attached to a place. The only place I’d ever been attached to was Suni and Wayne’s. The driveway of lilacs, the perfect lawns, and the soothing eggshell blue of my room. I’d been staring at Elton’s cheery lemon-drop yellow front door lately and thinking that it would be nice to have a colored door too. Maybe I could paint mine eggshell blue to remind me of Suni and Wayne… make them part of the house, the way I’d become a part of theirs.

I was missing them dreadfully. I’d always known they were important to me, but I hadn’t realized how much they were in the fabric of my days until they weren’t anymore.

Jake had designed screened frames for the porch and while he was at it, and I’d asked him to order vinyl panels to winterize it. “By the time I get this done, we’ll be looking at snow weather, so you might as well do it all at once,” he’d said approvingly.

He disappeared on weekends, as did Roger and Alan, because October was the month of what they called “leaf peepers”—tourists coming to admire the fall leaves. I didn’t need to leave my own yard to go leaf peeping. Our garden and the woods were ablaze. Elton pointed out the tree species to me and Flo as he helped us harvest our crabapples and we helped him harvest his McIntoshes. Hardly any of our crabapples had survived the birds, but Elton’s trees were covered in nets, and he had a bumper crop.

“The oranges and yellows are maples,” he said, pointing to the bright pops of color in the woods that lapped at our backyards. Flo was up a tree, snapping off apples at pace, but I was paying close attention. I wanted to know the names of everything.

“Most of those there are sugar maples,” Elton told me, his finger outlining them. “The mountain maples go red as red can be, and the white ash turns purple.”

In our yard, the white oak was turning a rich dark burgundy, the moosewood was festive yellow, and the hornbeam was sunset shades of gold and pink and scarlet, each leaf seeming to glow from within. The bushes that had scratched at us the day we arrived were mountain holly, otherwise known as catberry (which seemed apt, given all the cats we kept finding, both porcelain and real). Hud had excised them from the path beside the house, and from the yard in front of the porch, but those that remained had turned a burnished orange-red, the red berries still hanging thickly in their boughs.

“Elton, I think we should turn some of these apples into apple pie,” Flo announced from up high.

“Do you now?”

“I do.”

“Do you have a recipe?”

“No, but the internet does.”

“Do you know what’s better than the internet? Gary Laughton’s secret recipe. Back when the bakery still made pastries and the like, the leaf peepers came from all over to buy Gary’s apple pies.”

“Can we do it in our kitchen, so I can keep an eye on the kittens? They get upset when I’m gone too long on weekends.”

“I’m sure they do, and I’m sure we can.”

Flo and Elton cajoled Gary to take an afternoon off from the store, which Doris only allowed because Flo asked the Laughtons to dinner after the pie baking.

“You can eat the pie,” she’d promised Doris.

Flo was big on asking people to dinner. On the Sunday of the pie baking, she also asked Elton, Jake, and Colleen.

“Colleen’s going to show me how to properly whip cream,” she told me. “By hand.”