“You ready for dinner?” the boy asks when we’re finished.
I pump a couple more shots into the hull of the boat, and then I pick up a few of the bigger rocks from my driveway and chuck them over into Masoli’s yard so they’ll fuck up his lawn mower.
“Now I’m ready,” I say.
The next morning I make biscuits and redeye gravy. Sandy and I started dating when we were working together at a diner in New Orleans called the HunGree Bear. She was a waitress and I was the cook. We lit out of there right before Katrina, grabbing everything we could and throwing it in the back of my truck. We got out of there just in time, but we couldn’t find our dog, McGruff, before we left. Sometimes at night I dream McGruff’s on one of those incredible journeys. In my dream, he always shows up on our porch with a bunch of burrs and sticks matted in his fur, thinner, but not all that worse for wear. I’ve been thinking about getting another dog for a while now, but for some reason I still think McGruff’s coming back. I don’t want him to be pissed that I thought he wasn’t.
“I trust your night was pleasant,” I say to Ms. Brunell as she sits down at the breakfast table.
“Pleasant enough,” she says.
She’s wearing a track suit. She still has on her sunglasses. I can’t tell if she’s got a decent body underneath her baggy clothes, but I’m leaning toward no.
“Are you going to look around town today or go hiking by the river?” I ask her while I stir the gravy. This is a good batch, thick enough to not run everywhere, thin enough to get into the nooks and crannies of the biscuit.
“I might lay low,” she says. “I’m not feeling the best.”
I put a plate of biscuits in front of her and she takes a bite. There’s a spot of mold on the wall above her head that I keep painting over but that keeps coming back.
“I wasn’t expecting much,” Ms. Brunell says, pointing at the biscuits with her fork, “but these are damn good.”
I wonder if she should be taking notes for her review, but maybe she’s got a better memory than me. I decide to try to be on my best behavior for however long she stays, drink less than usual. Maybe my breakfasts will be the thing that wins her over; maybe my cooking can make up for everything that’s fucked up around here.
I get the boy off to school and then I spend the rest of my morning napping under the dogwood. When I wake up, I see Ms. Brunell standing in the window with a pair of binoculars up to her face.
Great, I think, she’s into birds. Maybe we can take a stroll along the trail and I can point out where all the reticulated woodpeckers nest. Maybe we’ll take a walk through the marsh and I can show her that family of owls that lives inside that hollowed-out sycamore.
When I get back inside, Ms. Brunell is sitting in the living room in front of the fireplace, staring into its blackened mouth. I would love to light a fire for her, but a dead squirrel got stuck in the flue a couple of weeks ago. The smell isn’t that bad unless it gets really windy. Just in case she’s got a really sensitive nose, I light a scented candle.
“What other bed and breakfasts have you stayed at?” I ask her.
“I’ve been up and down the coast,” she says. “Tons of places.”
I mention a couple of other B and Bs around here — the Carriage House, the Mount Angel House, the Geffon-Buckley Bed and Breakfast. These places are clean and quaint, full of flowery wallpaper and potpourri, packed almost every weekend. Those places are how our place was supposed to turn out. I can only imagine what those places say about us if anyone asks. And I doubt anyone asks.
“All of those are on my list,” Ms. Brunell says. “I’m going to stay at the Mount Angel House right after this.”
“I saw you with your binoculars earlier,” I tell her. “There’s good birding around here. If you’re interested, I could show you some owls later tonight.”
I’m trying to go the extra mile for Ms. Brunell so she’ll give us a decent review, but I suspect she’s used to better offers than dumb-ass owls. The fancier places probably pull out all the stops; give her gift baskets full of fine chocolates and cheeses to help her remember her stay.
“Yes, owls might be nice,” she says to me as she lies down on the couch and closes her eyes.
I’m shooting some beer bottles off the back fence with the pump rifle when the boy comes home with his report card. The thing is perfect, straight As. His teachers have filled up the comments sections with great things about his attitude and work ethic. I hand him a twenty from my wallet. I tell him to spend it on something frivolous, like candy or fireworks, like I would’ve when I was young.
“Sure,” he tells me. “Okay.”
Even though he says this, I know he won’t spend it on anything good. He’ll tuck it away in the shoebox he keeps under his bed for household emergencies. If I want him to have fireworks or candy, I’ll probably need to buy them myself.
While we’re resetting the bottles on the fence, we hear a loud squawking noise near the house. The boy and I run over and see a hawk fighting with the raccoon that lives up in the soffit. A family of hawks nested there before the raccoons and now I suppose one of them has returned to find someone else has invaded their roost. The hawk and the raccoon are really going at it, the hawk flapping and screaming and the raccoon clawing and hissing. I fire my gun in the air to break things up, but it doesn’t do anything. I fire again, this time a little closer to them, and my shot scares off the hawk, but I accidentally hit the raccoon in the gut. It scrambles back inside my roof and then it starts to bellow. The boy and I watch as a shitload of raccoon blood starts to pour out of the soffit, a river of red running down the side of the house, right over Ms. Brunell’s window.
By the time the boy comes back with the ladder, the raccoon is dead and the house is caked in blood.
“Keep Brunell busy,” I tell him. “Don’t let her go back to her room until I can get this crap cleaned off her window, okay?”
I grab a bucket and a sponge and climb up the ladder. While I’m scrubbing, I can’t help but look inside Ms. Brunell’s room. There’s a black bra hung on the doorknob. Her bird-watching binoculars are lying on the bed. There’s other stuff there too, weird things. Laid out on the desk are a dozen pictures of Masoli’s daughter, April, when she was younger. There are also a few pictures of Ms. Brunell, Masoli, and April on the desk — one of them standing in front of the Grand Canyon. In another, the three of them are standing on the deck of a cruise ship with the endless blue of the ocean behind them. Ms. Brunell’s suitcase is open on the floor next to her bed and I can see now why it was so heavy — it’s filled with a couple of handguns, a tent, some cans of food. It’s taken me a minute to connect the dots — that Ms. Brunell is actually April’s mom, that she’s Masoli’s ex-wife, that she’s here to steal April — but when I do, I quit cleaning the blood off the window and scramble down the ladder to tell Masoli.
Before I can get over to Masoli, he starts up his lawn mower. And while I’m running toward him I hear a loud crunch, one of the rocks I’ve tossed into his yard hitting the blade. There’s a puff of blue smoke and his mower grinds to a halt. Masoli flips it over, sees a huge gouge in the blade and a rock that matches the rock from my driveway. When he looks up, he sees me coming toward him — drunk and out of breath, raccoon blood smeared down the front of my shirt. April is jumping rope in his driveway. When she sees me, she stops.