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I PLANTED MY HANDS in my hips and looked around the cluttered sewing room Ellie had just led me to.
“Wow,” I muttered, mostly to myself. I hadn’t expected this place to be quite as chaotic as it was. This would take some serious effort to clear out if we were going to turn this into a bedroom for Celeste. If she would even agree to it, that was.
“Yeah, I know,” Ellie agreed, as she picked her way through the piles of clutter on the floor towards a desk at the back of the room. “It’s...a lot, right?”
“A whole hell of a lot,” I agreed, casting my eye around the room in incredulity. I wasn’t sure I had expected it to be quite so crazy in here, but it looked as though a bomb had gone off in a craft store or something.
“I can get it tidied up, maybe we could take a look at it then?” she suggested. “It’s hard to get a feel for how this could be a bedroom when it’s so...chaotic, I know.”
“Let’s do it now,” I replied. She raised her eyebrows at me.
“You want to help?”
“I didn’t get out of bed that early to just sit around and do nothing,” I replied, pushing my sleeves a little further up my arms. “Come on. Let’s see if we can make some space.”
She got to her feet and looked around the room, as though trying her best to work out where the hell we were meant to start.
“Okay, and...where exactly do we begin?” she laughed. I pointed to the back of the room, where I could see enough space for a bed pressed against the window if we cleared the piles of fabric out.
“There,” I replied. “That’s where we start.”
She got to her feet, and the two of us starting going through the reams of fabric and other little scraps that had accumulated at the back of the room. It was clear this place had been in use for decades. It had the feel of a room which was piled high with memories, little pieces of life which had been brought back here with the intention of being turned into something special, even if it had never quite come to pass.
“Don’t throw any of this out,” Ellie warned me. “Mom’ll kill me. She always says she’s going to do something with everything in here.”
“Does she ever get around to it?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she replied, with a shrug. “She mostly gets distracted and winds up working on something else, but she always wants to have this stuff to come back to if she needs it.”
I grinned. It reminded me of my own mother, who collected old newspapers with the intention of one day putting together some sort of scrapbook about the neighborhood we’d grown up in. I wasn’t sure she was ever going to get around to doing it, but the thought seemed to make her happy, gave her purpose.
“We could move it upstairs, to her room,” I suggested.
“Or mine,” Ellie reasoned.
“You’re not going to be using it while you’re here?” I asked her, surprised. She glanced up at me.
“I might spend some time in the motel,” she admitted. “It’s just...a lot, being back here. A lot of memories. That’s all.”
I could hear a twinge of sadness to her voice, and I parted my lips, intending to ask her a little more about what was going on inside her head right now. But I thought better of it. It was none of my business, not really. If she wanted to keep her life to herself, I wasn’t going to go delving for more information. It was her business, and I didn’t like the thought of digging through it to find out something she might not want anyone else to know.
“You should try to be around your mother as much as you can,” I replied, as gently as I could. “I know it might be hard, but she really needs you around. Or somebody, at least.”
“I’m going to stay,” she replied, and it was as though she was mustering up as much sureness as she could from her own heart right now. “I will. It’s just going to take a little time to get used to it.”
“You miss the city?” I asked her, and she nodded.
“Oh, hell, yeah,” she sighed and smiled. “I was in Madrid before I came out here, and it’s like night and day, you know? That place, it has a nightlife, it has people, it has this...it has this energy to it. I don’t feel that here. Not in the same way, at least.”
“How long were you in Madrid for?”
“Most of this year,” she replied. “And I would have been there for most of the rest of it, too, if it hadn’t been for...this.”
Her voice seemed a little wistful, as though she could still almost reach out and touch her life back there. Madrid, from everything I had heard, was one hell of a city, and it must have been a major jump for her to come all the way out here after she had spent so long in a place bubbling with culture and energy.
“You were in New York for a while?” I asked. I was determined to find out what it was she did, but I didn’t want to come out and just say it—I felt like it was something I should have already known, given how much time I had spent with her mother, and I was sure she already assumed I understood.
“Yeah, that’s where I started out when I first left this place,” she replied. “Seemed like the best place to start, you know? Somewhere I could get on my feet and work out what I wanted to do next.”
“Good place for it.”
“I thought so,” she replied. “It’s not hard to find people who want the same thing there. And it felt huge, especially compared to this place—Damn, I didn’t even know where to start, it was like I had just walked into another dimension.”
She smiled as she replayed the memories inside her head, and I could tell how precious they were to her. She seemed to contain so much more than I had given her credit for. I had thought she was just a girl on the run from her responsibilities, but I could see there was so much more to her than that. She was exploring, seeing what the world had to offer. She had just done it in reverse order to me; starting out in this small town and getting out into the world, instead of the other way around.
“Oh, crap, I remember making this one!” she exclaimed as she pulled out a quilt from the back of the pile of fabric. “I helped my mom work on this for weeks before the big fair. She was so sure she was going to win the sewing category.”
“The fair?” I asked, as she held out the quilt and looked it over fondly.
“Yeah, the Maple Valley fair,” she replied, glancing up at me, looking surprised, as though she couldn’t conceive of me not having heard of it. I shook my head.
“Not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“Really?” she replied, tipping her head to the side in surprise. “It’s pretty much the only thing anyone knows about this place. The fair?”
She repeated herself as though it would suddenly make sense to me, but I just shook my head again and shrugged.
“Never heard of it, sorry.”
“It’s a little county fair they hold in the town square every summer,” she explained. “It’s a big deal, if you’re from around here. A few bands come out and play, there are competitions, people get together from all over. It’s a lot of fun, actually. Pretty much the only thing I miss from here.”
“You came all the way from Madrid, and you miss the fair?” I asked her with incredulity. I saw her visibly bristle before she responded, noting the tone of my voice and not liking it at all.
“What’s wrong with that?” she demanded. “It’s a fun time. And it’s about the only thing we have around here for people to look forward to.”
“No, no, it’s nothing,” I assured her. “I just thought you wanted to leave all of this behind you. I didn’t think there would be any part of it you actually missed.”
She looked down at the quilt again, rubbing her finger along the stitching as though just the mere touch of it was enough to bring back a million memories at once.
“There are a few things,” she murmured, her voice soft.
“I don’t think I’ll miss much when I get out of here,” I remarked. She raised her eyebrows at me.
“You sure about that?”
She sounded a little defensive, as though she was annoyed by how easy it seemed for me to brush her off like that. I eyed her with confusion.
“Yeah, I’m sure about it,” I replied. “You got out, didn’t you? Not like you had much reason to come back here.”
“Yeah, but...there’s more here than you think,” she pointed out. It was as though she was doing her best to convince me as much as she was herself, and I cocked an eyebrow as I listened to her talk.
“You think?”
“I know,” she replied. “Look, just because you only just got here doesn’t mean we’re a bunch of hicks sitting around doing nothing.”
“I thought you’d be the first one to look for a way out of this,” I remarked, and she shook her head.
“It’s not like that,” she replied. “I didn’t leave because I felt like there was nothing here for me. I left...”
She trailed off and shook her head, stopping herself in her tracks before she got any further.
“I’m saying, there’s more here than you might be ready for,” she told me, a smile curling up her lips.
“Like what?”
“Like the fair,” she replied. “It’s starting in a couple of weeks, I think. You should go along, see what Maple Valley is all about.”
“Hmm,” I remarked, leaning on the doorframe. “You think it’s worth it?”
“Nate, it’s about the only thing in this town I can confidently say you’ll enjoy,” she replied, raising her eyebrows at me. “It’s not like there’s much else going on here you would get distracted with, anyway.”
“You sure about that?” I replied, and I realized what had come out of my mouth just a split-second too late for me to stop it. She stared at me for an instant, her lips parted with surprise, as though there was something she wanted to say to me but had no idea how. I could see a redness sneaking up her cheeks, and the sight of her so flustered by my comment tickled me a little.
But there was no way I was going to make a habit of speaking to her like that. I was meant to be here as part of my job, not as some excuse so I could get closer to her. Was I attracted to her? Of course. But that didn’t mean I was going to allow it to get in the way of what I knew needed to be done here. I had agreed to this so I could help Celeste, not so I could have an excuse to grow a little closer to her daughter.
No matter how cute she looked with the flush of pink on her cheeks right now.
“You want to go together?” I suggested. “You could show me what this place has to offer. Maybe change my mind on it.”
And, as I stood there and waited for her answer, I did my best to figure out if I had just asked her on a date.
