Tiny House on the Hill Read online

  She raced to the computer and looked up how to un-shrink a cashmere sweater. Even the Internet, with its trove of false promises, gave her no hope. But a DIY video showed her how to turn it into a funky purse. She hauled out her hand-me-down sewing machine and followed the video’s instructions. The purse came out a little lumpy, but she had to admit, it was pretty cute. Everyone at work wanted one. A tiny seed was planted that this might be something to explore.

  It wasn’t until she was at a viewing party for a colleague who had participated in a home renovation TV show that her new life plan materialized. Previews for the program Traveling in a Tiny House had everyone discussing the pros and cons of living this new vagabond existence. That night, Summer went home and started following several tiny travelers on Instagram. Within a week, she’d flown to Cobb, Kentucky, where the Internet said she’d find the perfect home. She met with Bale Barrett, who used to sell real estate and was now making small homes on wheels at Bale’s Tiny Dreams. Bale was a startlingly large man to be selling tiny houses. His shoulders took up the entire width of the front door—a fact Summer pretended not to notice. She also pretended not to notice his green eyes, long legs, sun-flecked hair, or his calloused workman’s hands. She was a sucker for a man whose hands felt like they knew how to earn a living. She sure wasn’t going to meet anyone like that in the lunchroom at work. But there was more to Bale than his looks. He was a man following his dream! Inspired, she picked out a tiny house shaped like a caboose—if she was going to make a statement, she was going to make a statement. Summer wrote Bale a check and promised she’d be back to pick up her house on wheels in a month. She was ready to put her plan into action.

  “If you change your mind,” Bale said, covering her hand with both of his. “You call me. This is a big decision and I want you to be happy.”

  As she sat in the airport for her flight home, giddy with possibilities, she worried the Bale-ness of the situation might have gone to her head. She took a deep breath and fired up her computer. Typing in “Buyer’s Remorse” with her manicured nails, she read article after article. According to the Internet, she had two choices: continuing with the purchase or renouncing the purchase. She looked at the situation as an impartial observer: assessing the risks, the rewards, and the financial burden. All her professional instinct said to cancel the check. But she remembered the sandpapery texture of Bale’s big hands and flew back to Hartford to detonate her life.

  Back in the kitchen, Shortie gave her a slobbery kiss, which startled her out of her reverie. Summer first saw Shortie on Facebook—a friend of a friend of a friend needed to find him a forever home. She drove the sixty miles to Danbury to take a look at him. It was love at first sight for both.

  Summer’s cellphone vibrated on the counter. She looked at the screen: It was her Grandmother Murray, known to everyone, family and townspeople alike, as Queenie. Summer had been avoiding her grandmother’s call for almost a week. Summer had sent Queenie an e-mail, letting her know that she was quitting her job and exploring other options. What she left out were the truck, the tiny house, and the idea of earning a living selling purses made from old felted sweaters. Shortie looked at her as if to say: “You can’t put it off any longer.” Summer took a deep breath and answered the phone.

  “Hi Queenie,” Summer said, bracing for the worst.

  “Clarisse, you need to come home,” Queenie said.

  Summer winced. Only her grandmother still called her by her given name.

  Even at seventy, Queenie had a stately authoritative voice. Anyone else who said, “You need to come home” might sound petulant, like a five-year-old refusing to share. But from Queenie, it sounded like a command.

  “I’m sort of busy right now…” Summer started.

  “You’ve been busy since you left for college,” Queenie said. “It’s been ten years. I’m beginning to take it personally.”

  “You’ve seen me…around,” Summer said lamely.

  She knew her grandmother didn’t mean family holidays with her parents. It was obvious to the entire family that Summer had avoided the town of Cat’s Paw her entire adult life.

  “Anyway, I need to see you,” Queenie said. “So whatever bee is in your bonnet, let him loose. The bakery is falling apart. Get yourself and your fancy college degree up here and straighten things out.”

  Her grandmother rang off abruptly. Summer stared at the phone.

  Simplifying her life just got very complicated.

  Chapter 2

  Summer stared at the phone. She commanded herself to call her grandmother back and let her know as gently as possible that she was not planning on coming back to the Murray family bakery under any circumstances. When her grandfather died after Summer’s graduation from college, she’d been backpacking in Eastern Europe and hadn’t been able to get back for the funeral. Summer loved her grandfather Zach Murray dearly. He’d named his bakery Dough Z Dough—the most fantastic name Summer, as a kid, had ever heard. As an adult, she wondered how Grandpa ever managed to convince Queenie to accept the Z.

  She would have made an exception to her boycott for his memorial, but if she were being honest, she was happy for the excuse not to return to Cat’s Paw. She mourned her grandfather and wept at the thought of never seeing him again. He’d died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving a family and a town devastated.

  Summer thought about the last time they’d seen each other. The two had been out walking only a few days before Summer was to return to San Francisco for her senior year of high school. She’d lost her footing in a tangle of soft ground. She grabbed for her grandfather’s strong arm, as one of her legs slipped into the earth and seemed to be dangling in space. Grandpa Zach righted her.

  “Ouch,” Summer cried, seeing blood trickling from her leg.

  “Careful,” Grandpa Zach said, studying the wound and the landscape. “You stepped in a patch of wild salmonberries. Lots of thorns.”

  Grandpa Zach gently removed a few thorns, then took out a handkerchief and cleaned Summer’s scratched legs. “Looks like you’ll live,” he said. “I think we should find out why you almost disappeared into the earth.”

  Summer loved that her grandfather turned everything into an adventure. She felt a little timid at the prospect, but, while she was too old to think they’d discovered a secret passage to the middle of the earth—there was something going on!

  They looked at each other for a few seconds. Gingerly moving some of the salmonberry branches aside, they started digging. They cleared enough branches to stare down into an old circular brick hole about ten feet deep. Summer got down on her knees and peered inside.

  “What is this?” Summer asked, sitting back on her heels.

  “An old well,” Grandpa Zach said.

  “It doesn’t have any water in it,” Summer said.

  “Must have dried up. Wasn’t any use to anybody anymore. That’s probably why somebody covered it up.”

  “How long do you think it’s been here?”

  Grandpa Zach said he had no idea, but it must have been there before he’d bought the property.

  “This is super dangerous,” Summer said. “We should fill it in.”

  He vowed to fill it in. He’d wait until next spring to tackle the project, he said.

  “But somebody could get hurt,” Summer insisted.

  “The salmonberries have done a pretty good job keeping people away from here,” Grandpa Zach said. “I’m sure we’ll be safe until next year.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Summer at the time, but Grandpa Zach must have known it was a job that was going to be too much for him. Summer wondered how long her grandfather knew he had a weakened heart. Her eyes stung with the knowledge that she could never ask him.

  There were all the childhood memories that made the summer so special year after year. But there was something else. She knew her grandfather was instrumental in
ending her romance with Keefe Devlin. She always thought she’d have time to confront him and ask for an explanation. Now she would never get the chance.

  Grandpa Zach was gone, but Queenie still loomed large. Summer rehearsed the conversation and realized the gentle approach would never work with Queenie.

  Summer would need to be firm!

  She practiced her firm approach, knitting her eyebrows fiercely. She stabbed at the keypad on her phone.

  “Hello, Queenie?” Summer said in a voice two registers higher than she’d anticipated.

  “Are you calling to let me know when you’re arriving?” Queenie asked.

  “No….” Summer could feel her resolution fading, but she tried again. “Not exactly.”

  “Well, you call me back when you have a date,” Queenie said. “I expect you’ll need to give work two weeks’ notice.”

  “I have something I need to say, Queenie,” Summer said, summoning her resolve.

  There was dead silence from Connecticut, up to the satellite that connected their calls and down to Washington.

  “Yes?” Queenie finally asked. “If you have something to say, say it. These cell phone minutes aren’t cheap.”

  “I’ll see you in about two weeks,” Summer said. She let out a sigh of resignation. Nobody could out-fierce Queenie.

  She looked at Shortie after she hung up the phone.

  “I didn’t actually lie to my grandmother. I didn’t say ‘I’ve already quit work,’ I said, ‘I’d see you in two weeks,’” Summer said to the dog. “I know you’re judging me. But you don’t know her! I need those two weeks to wrap my head around this.”

  Fierceness might just take some practice. She marched into the closet, reached into the KEEP box, took out the too-small black wool coat, and heaved it into GIVEAWAY. Shortie snorted.

  Summer continued packing through the night. She thought back to happier times at her grandparent’s lavish Victorian on the outskirts of town. When she was a kid, the house had been her haven. Both her parents were teachers, and from the time Summer was a newborn, they would drive her to Washington as soon as school let out in San Francisco and pick her up again in late August. Summer looked forward to the trip to Cat’s Paw as far back as she could remember. Family lore had it that her first two-syllable word was Summer, which she said as her father packed one last bag into the car and it was evident that they were on their way to her grandparents’. Summer became her nickname from then on.

  She surveyed her closet. After hours of decision-making, the GIVEAWAY box was still half empty. Summer shook her head—she deemed it half-full. Heading to Washington was going to require a change of attitude.

  From now on, more positive thinking.

  Summer curled up on the sofa with her MacBook Air and fired up her favorite search engine. She hesitated. What exactly did she want to research? Estrangement? Forced reconciliation? She clicked on a link or two, but all the articles were about families…and family wasn’t exactly her problem. She wasn’t sure how to define the difficulty facing her, let alone seek an answer on how to fix it.

  She stared at the screen. Running away from Cat’s Paw was easier than looking at the situation head on. Her parents, still living and teaching in San Francisco, were easy to avoid—either her mother or her father always had some type of research or other project that filled their time once Summer headed off to college. A few days at Christmas and a once or twice a year visit with them was always easy to manage. It wasn’t hard to find a legitimate excuse when one of her parents suggested they meet up at Queenie and Grandpa Murray’s place. Once Summer was in college, she could always summon a research project of her own.

  The day Summer drove away to college, she promised herself there was no going back to Cat’s Paw until her heart had healed. Or until Keefe Devlin no longer worked for her grandparents. It had been ten years. Much had changed over the years—her grandfather died, Queenie was getting older, the bakery seemed to be in some sort of peril, but two important facts stayed the same: Keefe Devlin was still in Cat’s Paw, and Summer had been true to her resolution that she would never go back.

  Until today.

  She typed in “reconciliation” on Google and clicked on a link: ARE YOU READY TO RECONCILE? 5 QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU DECIDE.

  She typed in her answers:

  1, Can I handle the possibility of being rejected a second time? (No. But I’ll never give him the opportunity.)

  2. Have we both experienced significant emotional growth since going our separate ways? (I can’t imagine he is capable of emotional growth.)

  3. Can I trust myself to set and maintain clear, respectful boundaries? (I think ten years’ worth of boundaries is a pretty good start.)

  She paused at the next question:

  4. Do I feel the need to confront the person from whom I’m estranged?

  Do I?

  She decided to skip the question.

  5. Am I still angry?

  This one was easy. She pointed the mouse to the top of the screen, changed it to thirty points, and then typed in the word YES.

  She submitted her answers and waited for the analysis. It came back in less than a minute.

  “You are not emotionally ready to resolve your issues. You have work to do in your emotional arena before engaging in a reconciliation. For more information, please send $59….”

  “You lost me at emotional arena,” she said as she closed the computer.

  She was always willing to believe that online advice was gospel—as long as it was free.

  Chapter 3

  Queenie expected Summer to be in Washington in two weeks and Summer was going to make the most of that time. As she made her final preparations to leave her old life in Connecticut, she tried to convince herself that her rising excitement was due to picking up her tiny house and starting a whole new adventure—even if the adventure wasn’t exactly what she’d planned. But that was the whole point of adventure, wasn’t it? She could make purses in Washington as easily as any of the other forty-nine states. There must be craft fairs in Washington. Keefe Devlin be damned. He was nothing more than a relic from her past. She felt her emotional arena was filling up just fine.

  There was another reason the thought of jumping in her new truck and heading toward Kentucky gave her goose bumps: Bale Barrett was waiting in the Bluegrass State with her custom-made house. If Keefe was yesterday’s news, maybe Bale would be tomorrow’s headlines.

  Summer dubbed her truck “Big Red.” The day she was leaving Hartford, she and Lynnie loaded the truck bed with everything Summer needed to set up her new household in the caboose—or at least, everything that would fit in the caboose. She had a small box of dinnerware. As much as it pained her, she only kept two plates, two bowls, two cups, four glasses (two large and two small), and two sets of utensils. She’d tried to only pack service for one but decided she didn’t need to completely give up on the idea that there might someday be someone else eating in the little dining area.

  All the research she’d read pointed out that when you lived tiny, you actually “lived in the world and less in your house.” Her first instinct was to get rid of everything else, but her discipline deserted her. The truck bed contained a few well-thought-out appliances—and her two Bernina sewing machines. Summer saw the sewing machines as the key to her craft-fair future, so they got pride of place in the truck.

  Summer tried to tune out Lynnie’s chatter as panic rose with every trip she took down the apartment stairs. But hard as she tried, snippets of Lynnie’s conversation worked their way into her brain.

  “Hey, Lynnie,” Summer said, interrupting the steady flow of Lynnie’s patter, “Would you stay with Big Red while I go get Shortie?”

  “Well, of course, I will,” Lynnie said, a look of solidarity replacing the maternal haranguing.

  Summer bolted up the stairs. She wanted to
be alone in the apartment for her goodbye. Lynnie had volunteered to call a local charity to come get the three huge GIVEAWAY boxes and all the furniture, so it didn’t have that final, empty appearance that always tugged at Summer’s heart during past moves. With all the furniture still in place, it was as if the apartment didn’t understand it was being left behind. She scooped Shortie into her arms and stared out at the river.

  Hard as she tried, Lynnie’s words still rang in her ears: Just because you saw this on television doesn’t make it a good idea…I don’t see how you expect to live with just a truck full of stuff…You can always change your mind….

  Summer had quit her job. She’d spent all her money. Her grandmother had summoned her. While mind-changing was no longer on the table, it was hard to ignore Lynnie’s other points. As she surveyed the truck bed from the window, she did wonder how she was supposed to set up housekeeping with so few things. And as far as making a life-altering decision based on a few televisions shows…well…it might not have been her smartest move. But she’d made decisions based on less. Case in point: the reason she was in Hartford with a career in insurance was because a school counselor told her she had good problem-solving skills. It occurred to her years later that the one who was good at problem solving was the counselor—one student had a problem with her life’s direction and the counselor pulled a career out of a hat. Problem solved for the counselor.

  Summer didn’t really feel she was very good at her job, anyway. She was too emotional. Even if one didn’t particularly like one’s job, one still wanted to be good at it. When she liked a particular businessman or woman, she found it hard to put the kibosh on his or her plans. She would often argue that a business could be classified as risk but just as easily be classified as opportunity. Her bosses were losing patience with her. That fateful day when Summer pulled her favorite sweater out of the dryer, found it miniaturized and decided to turn it into a purse—now that was problem solving.

  “I’ll be much better at making purses,” she muttered to Shortie.