As she was reaching for the ice, Adrienne saw Paul come out from behind the gate.
“Did you get started without me?” she called out.
“No, not really. I was just making sure I could find everything.” He motioned to the load. “Do you need a hand with that?”
Adrienne shook her head. “I’ve got it. It’s not that heavy.” She nodded toward the door. “But let me get started in there. Would you mind if I went into your room to close up the shutters?”
“No, go ahead. I don’t mind.”
Inside, Adrienne set the cooler next to the refrigerator, cut open the bags of ice with a steak knife, and poured them in. She pulled out some cheese, the fruit that had been left over from breakfast, and the chicken from the night before, stacking it with the ice, thinking it wasn’t a gourmet meal, but good enough in case nothing else was available. Then, noting that there was still room, she grabbed one of the bottles of wine and put it on top, feeling a forbidden thrill at the thought of sharing the wine with Paul later.
Forcing the feeling away, she spent the next few minutes making sure all the windows were closed and latching the shutters from the inside on the bottom floor. Upstairs, she took care of the empty guest rooms first, then made her way to the room where he’d slept.
After unlocking the door, she stepped in, noticing that Paul had made his own bed. His duffel bags were folded beside the chest of drawers; the clothes he’d worn earlier that morning had already been put away, and his loafers were on the floor near the wall, toes together and facing out. Her children, she thought to herself, could learn something from him about the virtues of keeping things neat in their rooms.
In his bathroom, she closed up a small window, and as she did, she spied the soap dish and brush he used to create lather lying next to his razor. Both were near the sink, next to a bottle of aftershave. Unbidden, an image came to her of him standing over the sink that morning; and as she pictured him there, some instinct told her that he’d wanted her beside him.
She shook her head, feeling strangely like a teenager poking through a parent’s bedroom, and headed to the window beside his bed. As she was closing it up, she saw Paul carrying one of the rockers off the porch to store beneath the house.
He moved as if he were twenty years younger. Jack wasn’t like that. Over the years, Jack had grown heavy around the midsection from one too many cocktails, and his belly tended to shimmy if he engaged in any sort of physical activity.
But Paul was different. Paul, she knew, wasn’t like Jack in any way, and it was there, while upstairs in his room, that Adrienne first felt a vague sense of anxious anticipation, something akin to what a high roller might feel when hoping for a lucky roll of the dice.
Beneath the house, Paul was getting things ready.
The hurricane guards were corrugated aluminum, two and a half feet wide and six feet high, and all had been labeled with a permanent marker as to which window they protected on the house. Paul began lifting them from the stack and setting them aside, putting each group together, mentally outlining what he needed to do.
He was finishing up just as Adrienne came back down. Thunder sounded in the distance, rumbling long and low over the water. The temperature, she noticed, was beginning to drop. “How’s it going?” she asked. Her tone, she thought, was unfamiliar, like another woman was speaking the words.
“It’s easier than I thought it would be,” he said. “All I have to do is match up the grooves and slip them into the braces, then drop these clips in.”
“What about the wood to hold it in place?”
“That’s not too bad, either. The joints are already up, so all I have to do is put the two-by-fours in their supports and hammer a couple of nails. Like Jean said, it’s a one-person job.”
“Do you think it’ll take long?”
“Maybe an hour. You can wait inside if you’d like.”
“Isn’t there something I can do? To help, I mean?”
“Not really. But if you’d like, you could keep me company.”
Adrienne smiled, liking the invitation in his voice. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
For the next hour or so, Paul moved from one window to the next, slipping the guards into place as Adrienne kept him company. As he worked, he could feel Adrienne’s eyes on him, and he felt the same awkwardness he’d felt after she’d let go of his hand earlier that morning.
Within a few minutes a light rain started, then it began to fall with more intensity. Adrienne moved closer to the house to keep from getting wet, but she found that it didn’t help much in the swirling wind. Paul neither sped up nor slowed down; the rain and wind didn’t seem to affect him at all.
Another window covered, then the next. Sliding in the guards, dropping the hooks, moving the ladder. By the time the windows were done and Paul had started on the braces, there was lightning over the water and the rain was driving hard. And still Paul worked. Each nail was sunk with four blows, coming regularly, as if he’d worked in carpentry for years.
Despite the rain, they talked; Adrienne noticed that he kept the conversation light, far from anything that could be construed the wrong way. He told her about some of the repairs he and his father had done on the farm and that he might be doing a bit of this in Ecuador as well, so that it was good to get the feel of it again.
As Adrienne listened to him talk of this and that, she could tell that Paul was giving her the space he thought she needed, that he thought she wanted. But as she watched him, she suddenly knew that keeping her distance was the furthest thing from her mind.