Page 31 of The Homewreckers
He jumped from the car, grabbed his camera, and pointed. “Stop right there,” he called to the two women, aiming the camera at them.
“Hell no!” Cass yelled. “You can’t take my picture looking like this. Sweaty and nasty with leaves and shit hanging outta my hair?”
“You’re supposed to look like that,” Mo replied. He pointed the camera at Hattie, whose sweaty T-shirt clung to her body. She’d jammed a baseball cap over her hair, and her forearms were dirty and crisscrossed with small cuts and scrapes.
“Look into the camera and tell me what you’re doing,” he coached.
“I’m trying to clear this driveway. Right now it’s impassable,” Hattie said.
“Keep telling me what you’re doing and why. We’ll use this for social media. Give people a sneak peek at what they’ll be seeing onceHomewreckersgoes on air.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Just say something like, ‘Hi, I’m Hattie Kavanaugh and I’m a homewrecker. Wait until you see the house at the end of this driveway we’re clearing. I can’t wait to get started.”
“I hate that name,” Hattie said. “It makes me sound like I’m trying to steal some other woman’s husband. Makes me sound slutty.”
“Get over it,” Mo said. He looked over at Tug, who’d been watching this interchange and shaking his head. “Come on, Mr. Kavanaugh, you get in there too. Okay?”
“Who, me? You don’t want a fat old geezer like me in your pictures. Take a picture of these beautiful young ladies right here.”
“It’s a reality show, Mr. Kavanaugh,” Mo said. “If you’ll just sort of move in between Cass and Hattie, act like you’re helping them move that tree limb, that’d be great.”
“If it’s reality, why do you want us to act?” Hattie grumbled, as she shifted positions to allow Tug to shoulder part of the weight of the limb.
They stood in a small semicircle, facing the Creedmore house.
“Jesus, Mary, and Fred,” Tug exclaimed, wiping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. “Hattie, what have you gotten us into?”
But his daughter-in-law wasn’t listening. She was unloading tools from the bed of the truck, and now advancing on the porch and the boarded-up front door with a crowbar, while Mo trained his camera on her.
“Don’t actually do anything,” Mo called. “I want to save the drama for when our crew gets here.”
“I’m not waiting for a camera crew to get into this house,” Hattie said.
“We could go around the porch to the kitchen door,” Cass suggested. “Did they give you anything like a key at city hall?”
Hattie brandished the crowbar. “This is all the key I need. Watch out for these rotten floorboards,” she called, as the group trailed along the side of the house.
They clustered around her as she examined the back door. The wood was rotted and swollen from the damp. Hattie gave the door a kick, and the bottom panel splintered in half. Another kick and what was left of the door swung open with a creak from the rusty hinges.
“Gonna need a new door,” Cass said.
“This is gonna be awesome,” Mo said, following Hattie inside.
He’d meant to film the kitchen, but he was drawn to Hattie’s expression, her face alive with authentic excitement, her energy a palpable presence.
“Awesome, my ass,” Tug muttered.
Hattie wasn’t listening. She felt the familiar rush that came fromstarting a new project, the mixture of anticipation and dread and excitement. Hank always said she was an adrenaline junkie, and he wasn’t wrong.
He’d known her better than anybody, better than she knew herself. Hank had always been the quiet one, the planner, the plotter. And Hattie? She was always ready to kick in the door of a new project and plunge in headfirst. As much as she loved starting a new job like this one, she was reminded that she was starting another project without him. It had been almost seven years, and the missing him was still there.
Now, it wasn’t the knife-sharp anguish she’d felt that first year, the despair of waking up without him in bed beside her, or fixing a sandwich for one instead of two, or pushing his clothes aside in the tiny bedroom closet to get to her own.
The pain wasn’t like that now. It was more like a dull ache, like the pain of a scar that never quite healed. She would never stop missing Thomas Henry Kavanaugh, but in the meantime, this old house needed her.
“It looks like the Creedmores just walked away one day, locked the doors, and never came back,” Cass said, pointing at the kitchen cabinets. “They even left dirty dishes in the sink.”
