Off Season - Jack Ketchum [4]
She made a few trips to the stove and back and laid in some wood, enough to do for the time being. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table to consider what still remained unfinished. The bathroom was clean, the bedrooms were clean, and now the kitchen was done, too. That left the living room and, if she wanted to bother, the attic. Were she not expecting Jim and Marjie and the others tomorrow she’d have let the living room go for a few days, but with six of them in the house she figured she’d need the space.
Dumb idea, she thought, to have them here so soon, before I’m even settled in. But she had invited them on impulse and what was done was done. Jim’s shooting was over now and who could know when he’d have to run off to L. A. for another idiot TV commercial or something. So the timing was convenient for him at least. How in hell had she gotten involved with an actor, anyway? By and large they were not her favorite people. They tended to be very single-minded, very egocentric. But she knew how she’d gotten involved with him, all right. It was simple—she’d never seen anything prettier in her life. The admission made her smile.
After Nick it had seemed so much simpler just to have a man around who was attractive, who made love to her and took her places and left it at that. Nick had been much too complex. She had put entirely too much energy into that one. Now it was work that interested her, not men. She had always given too much of her life over to relationships, and they’d never quite worked out. Now she was simplifying her life in favor of her career. It gave her a sense of control to watch herself succeeding, and a great deal of satisfaction. As for Jim, he was very handsome, and very nice to touch. And that was that.
She sipped distractedly at the coffee, her eyes fixed on a bright patch of sunlight on the kitchen counter. Even her relationship with Nick was simpler now, she thought. They were friends. At the moment she was looking forward to seeing him. She remembered how jealous he’d been when she first began seeing other men. She was glad that was over now, glad they’d had that little talk, which was really a marathon lasting till dawn. Otherwise it might have been messy having Jim and Nick in the same house together. Friendship and sex were really all she wanted from men these days. Nick gave her one, Jim the other—and life wasn’t bad at all.
She considered the sleeping arrangements. Nick and Laura could have the first bedroom, she thought, Marjie and Dan the second. She and Jim could use the old pullout couch in front of the window in the living room. That meant she’d better get off her butt and clean it. She downed the coffee like a shot of whiskey and went to work.
In a way, the layout of the house was strange. The living room seemed almost an afterthought. It lay along the wall of the first and largest bedroom almost as if it, too, were a bedroom—so that all you had was a kitchen on one side of the house and three similarsized rooms, plus a bathroom, on the other. There was a small fireplace in