Carolyn McSparren - Over His Head

He’d decided to feed them a catfish dinner at the Log Cabin. Now he’d have to find someplace else nearby, assuming there was another restaurant this side of Memphis, fifty miles away. They’d be a captive audience. He’d tell them some more stories of his wonderful summers. Tomorrow maybe they’d all go for a long walk. He really wanted his children to love this place, too.

But he was willing to have them hate it if it kept them safe from crime and gangs and drugs and alcohol and drive-by shootings.

He would even fight his own children to get them to twenty-one sound of mind and body.

“OH, NUTS. That’s all I need,” Nancy Mayfield muttered as she turned the corner by the village green into her lane. A huge moving van blocked not only the lane itself, but her driveway. There was no way to reach her garage except by driving across her lawn. Even though the ground was July hard, she preferred not to smash what little grass had survived the drought.

She pulled to a stop a couple of feet from the rear of the van. A large man who seemed to be dripping wet stood on of the tailgate with a psychedelically painted chest of drawers balanced precariously on a dolly.

“Hey, lady, move it!”

She glared at him.

“What’re ya, deaf? Back it up. Move it.” He waved her back with one hand.

Slowly and carefully she climbed out of her Durango, shut the door softly so as not to wake up Lancelot, snoring softly in the passenger seat, and turned to the man with a sweet smile. “No, you move it, buddy. You’re blocking my driveway and I would like to park my car.”

“Aw, jeez.” He yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mac, lady out here wants us to move the van.” He laughed. “Lady, ya got to be kiddin’.”

“Not at all. Blocking access to a private driveway is a crime in the state of Tennessee. If you remain where you are, I will have a sheriff’s deputy here to give you a nice, big citation before you can get that thing down the ramp.”

“It’s a chest of drawers,” said a baritone voice from behind her.

“It looks as if it’s been trapped in a riot in a paint store.” She tamped down her temper and turned slowly to look at the newcomer. This must be the “Mac” the mover had been calling. No doubt the driver of the van.

This Mac certainly looked as though he could move refrigerators without much effort. He was wearing dirty jeans, equally dirty sneakers and a soggy Chicago Cubs T-shirt that needed a good bleaching. He wasn’t quite as tall as Dr. Mac, but he was probably at least six-two.

He might be even brawnier than Dr. Mac. Moving refrigerators no doubt built muscles. His light brown hair was soaked with sweat, and his eyes were concealed behind fancy mirrored sunglasses. Nancy hated not being able to see people’s eyes.

He strode up to her as if to make her back down. After everything that had gone wrong today, she was spoiling for a fight. Just let Mr. No-Eyes dare to invade her space and see how far those muscles got him. Heck, she could always sic Lancelot on him.

Behind her she heard the wheels of the dolly begin to roll down the ramp.

“Hey! Heads up! I can’t hold her!” shouted the voice behind her.

As she started to turn, the brawny guy with no eyes grabbed Nancy around the waist and swept her to the side. The chest of drawers trundled to a halt on the road where she had been standing seconds before.

The man held her against his chest. She could hear his heart beat. Hers sounded like a trip-hammer. He smelled of male sweat and felt as though he was built of concrete. She struggled out of the circle of his arms.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Fine, thank you.” She wriggled her shoulders and realized the beating of her heart came not so much from the near miss with the furniture, but from the feel of this male body against her. Damn, when a semiliterate roustabout could raise her pulses, she really had been entirely too long without a man. “Now, move your van.” She pointed to the gravel driveway across the lane that led up to her small cottage. The heck with please. Time to start issuing orders.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize that was a driveway.”

“Well, it is, and I want access to it.”

“Look, miss—um—we’re almost finished unloading. If you could see your way clear to park your car where it is for an hour or so, the van will be gone.”

Reasonable. Only she didn’t feel like being reasonable. She was hot, she was tired, before morning she and Dr. Thorne would probably lose the mastiff they’d operated on this afternoon. She had a blinding headache over her right eye, her neck ached, and she was so sick over losing her dear old neighbors to that nasty man from Chicago that she felt like crying.

On top of all that, she was foster mother to Lancelot for the foreseeable future until the Halliburtons found a place to live that had room for him. And now this truck driver had disturbed her equilibrium in a way she didn’t like. It was the final straw.

“Please find the man who hired you,” she said as imperiously as she could. Not easy when she had to look up at Mr. No-Eyes.

He smiled. It was a nice smile, no doubt he practiced it frequently on irritated customers. This time it wouldn’t work. “I’m afraid I’m the culprit. I’m Tim Wainwright. My family and I are moving in. We’re going to be neighbors.” He pulled off his leather work glove and offered her his hand.

She felt a wash of heat even greater than the July afternoon. Great. Thank God she hadn’t actually called him a semiliterate roustabout. She’d considered it. He’d let her make a fool of herself. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Screw the moving van.

Without a word she climbed back into her car, reversed it and drove across her lawn to her driveway and pulled up beyond her dusty azaleas.

She went around to Lancelot’s door, grabbed his leash and helped him down. Alarmed by the irrational fear that that Tim person would follow her and try to apologize or explain, she hurried inside the back door.

She unhooked Lancelot’s harness, went straight to the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of white Zinfandel. As she raised the glass, her eyes lit on the huge yellow cat who sat on top of the refrigerator. “Sorry we woke you, Otto.”

The cat leaped down and padded over to welcome Lancelot. Thank God her cats had known him since he was tiny. She felt fairly certain Lancelot thought he was a cat.

The two old friends trotted after her into her bedroom. A second cat, black and white and even larger, lay curled in the center of her pillow. She kicked off her running shoes and sat on the edge of the bed. The cat on the pillow watched her without moving its head. As she pulled her socks off, he reached out a long arm and swiped at one.

Obligingly she held it out for him. “Okay, Poddy, here you go.”

He grabbed the sock, mauled it for a second, then abandoned it and went back to sleep. Yellow Otto crept up on it, pounced and dragged it under the bed. Lancelot tried to follow, but couldn’t fit. “You bring that back, Otto,” Nancy said without much hope.

She set the glass on the side table and leaned back against her pillows with one arm across her eyes. She heard Lancelot thud onto the rag rug beside her bed. For six whole years this little house had meant peace and comfort, a place of her own, where nobody intruded on her privacy unless and until she wanted them to. The first house she’d ever owned.

The moving van was a symbol—a big monster that got in her way and disturbed her tranquility the way that monster man got in her face with his big sweaty forearms and his ingratiating grin.

And no eyes.

She sat up. His family? He’d said family. How many? Wife, undoubtedly. Children? Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents? The house was big enough to hold a small army. Just because the Halliburtons hadn’t used the upstairs didn’t mean it wasn’t there to be used. Williamston was going to be overrun by no-necked monsters, sure as shooting.