Молли Харпер - And One Last Thing...

“I think I should call an ambulance,” she said, backing away.

“No, don’t let go of me,” he pleaded. “Laurie, I -”

“Just hold on, okay?” Laurie ran into the next room, hoping maybe she could shove him back through the wall from the other side. But there was nothing to push. There was no damage on the other side of the wall.

From the hail, there was a dull, cracking sound, stalks of celery snapping. She heard Greg scream. She scrambled back to the hall to find him doubled over and sucked back into the wall, his face folded against his shins. She yelped and fell back against the stairs.

“Help me,” he wheezed, his lips wet with blood. “Laurie, help me!”

She reached out to take the arm stretched so unnaturally over his head, and then hesitated. She tilted her head and asked, “Why?”

Comprehension skittered across Greg’s features. “You fucking bitch!” he screamed and was pulled farther in. His head twisted at an odd angle and the rage drained from his blue eyes. There was a series of crunching noises, like chewing, that twisted her stomach. She winced and squeezed her eyes shut. The hungry snapping stopped.

Laurie opened her eyes. And saw nothing. There was no damage to the wall. No blood. No trace of anything that had just happened. She fell back against the steps and convinced herself for half a second that she’d imagined the whole thing. That she was going crazy…

And for the next few hours, I just wrote. I didn’t know whether it was a dark fantasy or an extended plea for counseling. I just knew I liked it. Of course, I could have been completely nuts.

Given that I’d just made a house eat a thinly disguised version of my husband, I was going with nuts.

They say you should write what you know. And at the moment, I knew what it was like to have your whole life turned upside-down by a man who couldn’t control his urges. Some strange part of me wanted to share that with people, to show them how it felt - the dizzying tumble of humiliation and hurt, the soul-sucking effort it takes to pick yourself up and keep going. Maybe a woman who had been through the same thing would read what I’d written and feel some sort of justice had been done.

Sam’s notes for my divorce case could have translated very easily into a hyperbolic comedy. But something made me want to stick with this new dark direction. It felt a little hypocritical, considering I couldn’t sit through most of the horror movies Emmett had given me. But divorce was a scary thing. And losing control, losing your options, those were elements in any horror story. This was what I knew.

There would be no shocking first-chapter revelation for my poor protagonist. Well aware of her husband’s “extracurricular activities,” Laurie had chosen to ignore the affairs, to hold her head up and pretend she was fine. She couldn’t bring herself to admit she married the wrong man. The fact that he was cheating wasn’t nearly as shocking as the fact that Greg expected Laurie to step aside. She’d been trapped, by pride, by embarrassment, by mortgage payments she wouldn’t be able to make without Greg’s income. But when she was replaced, kicked out of her home, her home fought back.

I wondered if it would be too much of a stretch to make the house eat Greg’s girlfriend, too.

Grizzled, greasy, and smelling permanently of Skoal chewing tobacco, Hap Borchard took care of all manner of odd jobs for Buford locals and the long-established summer people. A jack-of-all-trades/master-of-Budweiser, Hap was honest to a fault, but tended to get distracted by his own long, winding stories or shiny objects if you didn’t keep him on task… which was why I was in my sweats, wrestling fifty-year-old waterlogged dock wreckage to Hap’s flatbed.

Unfortunately, my yard was still soaked from the deluge, so I was ankle deep in mud, trying to drag heavy timbers uphill. I can’t say I was thrilled when I heard Monroe’s voice as I slipped in the muck and fell on my butt.

“So many ‘dirty’ joke opportunities here,” he said, shaking his head and stretching his hand out. am not above throwing a fistful of this at you,” I told him as he pulled me to my feet

“Why do you think I’m helping you instead of going for my camera?” Monroe asked, taking the wet, damaged timber and tossing it onto Hap’s flatbed

Without being asked, Monroe just started working. He was not afraid of getting his hands dirty, or his shirt, his jeans… We were both pretty filthy by the time Mr. Borchard finished collecting bits and pieces of the dock from the shoreline. He seemed thrilled at the prospect of meeting Monroe, because here was a person who had not yet heard his story about catching a fourteen-pound large-mouth bass on his grandson’s Snoopy reel.

“Mr. Borchard, this is my neighbor, um, Mr. Monroe,” I said as Monroe shook Mr. Borchard’s hand. “Mr. Borchard helped my grandfather build this dock when he was eight years old.”

“Her granddaddy paid my brother and me a quarter a day, plus lunch. Hector blew his on Bazooka and comic books, but I saved up all summer.”

Monroe grinned. “What did you buy?”

Hap looked insulted. “I didn’t buy anything. Saved it all, probably still have it in a coffee can somewhere.”

“Mr. Borchard doesn’t trust banks,” I told Monroe, who nodded in sage agreement.

“Sad to see this old thing go,” Hap said, swiping his forehead with an old red bandanna he kept in his back pocket. “Back then, we didn’t know to put foam floaters underneath, so the dock would just float up if the water rose. It’s been swamped so many times over the years, the water flushed it right off the bottom during the storm.

“Miz Lacey, have you given any thought to replacing it?” Hap asked. “Doesn’t make any sense to have a house on the lake and no dock.”

“Why don’t you put an estimate together for me and we’ll talk about it,” I said.

Sensing a sustained job to keep him busy through the fall, Hap offered to put the estimate together that very minute. I gave him a legal pad and a glass of iced tea and he settled into the porch swing to start scribbling.

“Shouldn’t you be up there with him?” Monroe asked when I found a reason to help him round up bits and pieces of wood.

“No, if I stay up there, he’ll start telling a story about a fish he caught in 1972 and six hours from now I’ll have no estimate and a profound death wish. I’ve been through this before, the summer we had to replace the window screens. I learned more about gig lines that I ever thought possible.”

“Well, surely that knowledge will come in handy someday.”

“Kind of doubt it,” I told him. “I appreciate the help, by the way. It was mighty neighborly of you.”

“Well, when I see an attractive woman doing solo mud wrestling, I’ve got to get a closer look,” he said as he rubbed drying mud from my jaw. The warmth from his fingers seeped into my skin and it was all I could do not to lean into the caress like a cat. “The good news is you’d probably pay fifty bucks for this at a spa.”

“Gross,” I groaned, wiping at the itchy patch of skin to cover the shiver that wracked my spine.

“No, wait, I’ll do the other side,” Monroe said, holding his own grimy hands up as if he was going to swipe them across my face.

I laughed, backing away carefully as he advanced. “Stay away from me, you lunatic, or I’ll injure your good butt cheek.”

“Oh, come on, it’s all-natural,” Monroe said, lumbering toward me like Frankenstein’s facialist. He caught me around the waist as I struggled to keep my face away from his muddy hands.