Caron Todd - Small Town Cinderella

“You mean the overall creaky floor, crooked walls, cobwebs in the corners kind of atmosphere?”

He smiled. “If that’s what you’ve got, that’s what I want.”

Emily began in the living room, pointing out the characteristic lumber used at the turn of the twentieth century, three-inch strips of tongue-and-groove British Columbia fir, applied vertically up to a chair rail and then horizontally. Julia continued to clean, ignoring them.

“My great-great-grandfather gave parcels of land to his children when they married, so there’s the original place, where my grandmother lives now, and a number of houses built for his children, like this one. My cousin Tom and his wife Pam built their own place.” She smiled. “Pam didn’t want to soak up anybody else’s atmosphere.”

“The houses have changed hands by inheritance?”

“Sometimes. My grandfather bought this place for my parents from his sister—”

She stopped. Matthew had stepped over Julia’s barricade of books and was examining the shelves. After one startled glance, Julia stared at the book she was holding as if she had discovered mold on its cover.

He tapped the backboard. “That’s not the original wall, is it? It’s not tongue-and-groove like the rest of the room.”

It was the one thing Emily had asked—that he respect her mother’s territory. “My dad built it out a few inches. He didn’t think the books should rest against an exterior wall.”

“Temperature differences, condensation?”

“You never know.”

“He did a nice job.” Matthew ran his hand along one of the shelves, feeling the tight joins where boards met boards, apparently unaware of the disapproval around him. “Beautiful work.”

Stiffly, Julia said, “My husband liked carpentry.”

“I can tell. Did he put the shelves up in stages as your library grew?”

“All at once.”

“He had an idea you’d want a whole room full, did he? The wood’s dried out. He must have done this a long time ago.”

“In the fall of 1980. After harvest.”

“It’s a big job for one person to take care of a library of this size.”

“You can’t let the books get dusty,” Julia said. She still frowned at the one she was holding, but she had relaxed. “You have to give them air. You have to think of an organization that makes sense, so you can find what you want.”

She began telling Matthew about Sinuhe , everything she had learned at the library that morning. That it came from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom—1940 to 1640 BC—and that Sinuhe was the name of a clerk or scribe who worked in a palace. He ran away during a time of conflict and spent his life in exile until his king pardoned him. It was pieced together from papyrus fragments and carvings on limestone, and it was the reason she was cleaning—to make room for a section of books about and from Egypt.

When she ran out of facts she fell silent. Matthew rejoined Emily outside the circle of books.

“I wasn’t supposed to do that, was I?” he said quietly, as if he had just remembered.

“No, you weren’t.”

“I’m sorry. Your place is so different from where I grew up. My parents liked the minimalist look.”

She opened a door at the front of the house. “This is our only minimalist room. It’s supposed to be for company.”

There was no bed, no furniture at all. Only rows of plastic containers piled on top of one another. “I call it the Robb-Moore Archives,” she said lightly. “At first my mother kept everything in cardboard boxes, but I put my foot down. Too much of a fire hazard.”

Matthew read one label out loud. “‘School reports, Emily Moore, grade 1-12.’ It’s nice that your mom wants to keep things like that.”

“Until you know she wants to keep everything. Wedding invitations, birth announcements, obituaries, sales receipts, newspaper clippings, livestock papers…”

His gaze deepened into something she was afraid might be sympathy so she quickly added, “Which is great. If someone in your family had done this you could have found all the information you wanted in a day.”

She backed out of the room and led Matthew to the second floor. When they reached the landing he looked at a trapdoor overhead.

“An attic?”

“Not a usable one. It’s rafters and cobwebs and the odd chipmunk.”

He reached up, easily touching the door. “Could I take a look?”

“There’s nothing to see. The last time I opened it a whole load of dust and little bits of gray insulation poured down.” She wasn’t going to clean that up again.

Her mother’s room was on the left, with the door shut, and hers was on the right, overlooking the front yard. As soon as she saw her twin bed, so childish under the window, she wished they had stayed downstairs.

Matthew took in the bed, the photos of horses and dogs, the books and the dolls and teddy bears left out because they had too much personality to be shut away. “Cozy.”

“But not very helpful for your family history.” “It is. Really. I’ve never been in a big old prairie house.” He knocked on the wall. “When I was a kid I always thought old houses had secret rooms.”

“Hang on.” Emily pushed her bed to one side. Behind it was a small door held shut by a block of wood. She turned the block on its nail and the door swung open. “It doesn’t qualify as a room, and it isn’t a secret. It’s just so we can access the space under the half-roof.”

Matthew knelt beside her and peered in. “Great place for hide and seek.”

“My father was firm about that.” It was one of the few things Emily remembered about him, he’d warned her so often. “He told me I’d crash right through to the room below.”

“Scary thought.”

“I hid things, though. Notes to Susannah and Liz. Or Halloween candy once. That was a mistake. A whole family of chipmunks moved in that time.”

Matthew laughed, and she immediately wanted it to happen again. It made his face so warm and open.

“Mind if I take a closer look?”

“It’ll be dusty.”

Brushing past her, he leaned deeper into the crawl space. It was a long time since she’d been so close to a man who wasn’t a relative. How did her body know? There was quite a divide between its point of view and her own. It was always tingling and softening and perking up when he was around. She couldn’t seem to impress on it how short a week was, and how quickly it was passing, or the fact that she didn’t know anything about him, not even if she liked him.

No, she knew that much. The question was whether she should like him.

As his head and shoulders came back into the light his knee knocked against hers. She edged away. He was out of place in her room, with her old teddy bears staring from the shelf. Through the warm air grate in the floor she could hear her mother working. What she was feeling didn’t belong here. John had called it her nun’s cell.

She stood up quickly. “You wanted to see outside? The barn, you said? The outbuildings?”

“If you don’t mind.” He went around to the other side of the bed and pushed it back into place.

BETWEEN THE TIME he stuck his head under the roof and pulled it back out, something had changed Emily’s mood. Did thinking about her father upset her? Or was she worried about having someone snoop around the house?

As helpfully distancing as the name was he hadn’t been able to think of her as Ms. Robb for very long. Only until the third or fourth time her mother had asked which relative had made the quiche or the salad or the chicken and she’d looked as if one word of appreciation would go a long way. Then she’d become Emily in his mind.

He followed her downstairs and out the kitchen door. The dog, back in the shade of the hedge, gave him another baleful stare. No growling or biting so far. That was good.