“Is it the whole block?”
“Gabby and Jessica aren’t home, so I don’t know.”
“Did you check the breaker?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
I shook my head with a smile. God, this was so her. She was this conundrum of a woman. Completely remarkable in every way, doesn’t know about breaker boxes or how to wash a load of whites or make a bed. I think I’d been cleaning since I was old enough to walk. One of Grandma’s favorite pictures of me was me, three years old, holding a toilet bowl scrubber.
“There’s probably an electrical panel in the garage,” I said. “Go look for it.”
“Okay, hold on.”
“It’s metal,” I said, putting my coffee cup to my lips. “Probably gray. It’ll have switches on it.”
“Like a light switch thingy?”
“Did you find a light switch thingy?” I asked, amused.
“Yeah.”
“Send me a picture of it.”
I heard shuffling. Then a picture message came through. I zoomed in. “Your main breaker is flipped off.”
She went silent on the other end for a long moment. “How does that happen?”
“It doesn’t. If you overload one circuit a breaker might flip. But that would be one part of the house, not the whole thing.”
“Soooo…”
“So someone probably switched it off. Did you have someone there working on the electrical or something?”
She went quiet again. “Yeah. It must have been them.”
“Just flip it back. The power will come back on,” I said.
I heard her flip the switch, and she made an excited little sound of relief. I smiled.
“So do I get to see you this week?” I asked.
I heard a car door slam. “I don’t know.”
My smile fell. I was about to push the subject, but I heard the restaurant door jingle. Brian and Doug were coming in.
“The guys just got here. I’ll let you get your coffee and call you later.”
We hung up right as they slid into the booth. “Hey.”
Liz swung by and set menus in front of us. “Hey, guys. Coffee?”
They both nodded, and Brian smiled at her, a touch too brightly.
The way he looked at her made me look away from him, like I was intruding on a private moment.
Brian had been in love with Liz since we were kids. She didn’t live here growing up. She only came for the summers. Brian looked forward to her visits the whole year. He’d be at my house so much in the summer that Grandma used to joke he was one of her honorary grandkids.
Then one summer we got a new sheriff—and Liz met Jake.
I watched Liz pour Brian a coffee. She had a brace on her little finger. My jaw tightened.
Jake was putting hands on her. Again.
He never did it in front of anyone. Whenever they were in public, he always put on some fucking show so everyone thought he was this doting husband. Such bullshit.
I almost knocked him out once after she came into the VFW with a split lip on St. Patrick’s Day a few years back. He denied touching her, and I almost got myself arrested—and she was mad at me afterward. Didn’t talk to me for weeks.
Sometimes when I saw this shit on her, I’d ask her anyway, even though I knew she wouldn’t tell me. She’d just say this was a fall or a slammed door or something and she’d say it looking me dead in the eye. I hated it.
He cheated on her too, another thing nobody bothered to mention anymore because she never did anything about it, and it just upset her. He loved dipping into the tourists. I don’t know why she put up with it. She could do so much better.
I looked away from her hand.
“How’s the saving-up thing going?” Brian asked.
“Good,” I said. “I haven’t gone down to the swap meet yet, but I sold a few pieces to Alexis’s friends. That helped.”
That helped a lot.
Actually, I’d been thinking about that. Those ladies didn’t even blink an eye. They just bought them, on the spot. Maybe Alexis was right, and I needed to cast a wider net. Get a website up, an Instagram page. Maybe put a few of the smaller pieces in some of the gift shops when they opened for the summer, see how they did.
Alexis made me want to be better.
If I’d never had to run the B & B, I think I’d be doing more with myself by now. Maybe I’d be practicing my carpentry full-time. I never got the chance to really explore it because my grandparents had died, and I’d had to change gears before I could figure out if I could make a go of it.