“No, it’s all right.” I paused again. “How many tiny homes?”
“At least ten. Really, we’d like fifteen or twenty, plus a community building with some medical facilities. A shower room, that sort of thing.”
I nodded, already drawing up plans in my mind. “Let me look into it. I want to see what kind of prefab materials we can get, see where we can cut costs.”
“And your labor too.”
I was already shaking my head like a fool. “I’m not going to charge you.”
“Technically, you’d be charging Grant.”
“We can build your twenty homes if I do it for cost.”
She frowned, “But—”
“I won’t hear of it. Please, consider this my contribution.”
Again, her cheeks flushed deep enough to splotch at the edges. Her eyes shone with emotion. “That’s … you’re too generous, Keaton.”
Stupid was what I was, but there was no way I could take any profit from this, not when the money could be used to help not only the people who needed it, but to take a step to bridge the gap in our town. Everybody could win.
“It’s nothing,” I lied again, certain I would find my way out of my financial hole despite giving my work away for free.
Surely it had nothing to do with Daisy.
The stirring in my chest kicked up embers from coals long thought cold, buried beneath a coat of ashes. But instead of stoking them, I stamped them out, not out of spite. Out of fear that if the fire got loose it would burn me down.
And Daisy? Daisy was as dangerous as kerosene.
Better to live in the cold.
It was the only way I wouldn’t get burned.
8
INHALE, EXHALE
DAISY
I could not for the life of me figure out why Keaton smelled so good.
There was nothing distinctly pleasant about it, I’d noted over the last six weeks. Sometimes there’d be a hint of soap. Sometimes a touch of pine. Maybe a whiff of amber. But there was always a heady, male sort of scent about him, something distinctive to him but familiar to me, though I couldn’t place the connection. It was locked somewhere in a secret room in my brain.
Pheromones were probably the culprit. The man reeked of them, and every time he was near, I wanted to grab him by the collar and bury my nose in his neck in the hopes I could inhale them all and rid myself of the temptation forever. This would have been made extra awkward given the fact that we hadn’t been alone for more than a handful of minutes over the last month and a half.
Whether this was by accident or design, I couldn’t be sure.
If by design, Keaton was a master of time and space. We’d worked closely on every stage of the project, from blueprints to breaking ground. They’d poured the foundation last week, the prefab tiny houses had already started to arrive, and the frame for the community center was going up starting today. We’d be assembling two houses to see how it all fit together and for the guys to get some practice in anticipation of a group of six to put one up a day until they were finished.
While every meeting we’d had was held at the Meyers Construction office, we’d been on site for the last week and change together, and he’d somehow managed to dodge me at every turn. Within a few minutes of us finding ourselves alone, he’d leave to be anywhere I wasn’t. He pulled it off with the skill of a man who would do anything to avoid a conversation—with long-practiced evasions and polite excuses. He was never rude, never made me feel unwelcome. On all accounts, he was a perfect gentleman, all while managing to keep conversation to a minimum and setting plenty of space between us.
As such, it had been a long week. A long six weeks, if I was counting.
The town hall meetings we’d endured had been fierce, with Poppy leading the charge from a political pulpit like a seasoned professional, her natural inclination for argument a boon. Evan Banks, Poppy’s crush and a lawyer in town, found a loophole for our permits when the city tried to deny us, and between that and Keaton’s family’s good standing in town, we’d been able to move at breakneck speed.
I watched him from across the table between us where blueprints of the entire site were rolled out, his attention on delegation as he divvied out tasks, mostly to his brothers. We stood in a temporary building that served as our office, with desks for Keaton, the foreman, and one for me.
Everything was a little dusty and a little dirty, but that didn’t bother me. Neither did the noise, which very quickly became part of the background, the texture of this place.
I didn’t have much to do here, truth be told. But every day I came and sat at my desk, made myself available for any decisions that needed my input, and spent too much time shopping on wholesale websites for furniture, linens, and decor for the community center. Today was different, a new sort of excitement. Even I was dressed in clothes built for hard work, because we were going to put the first houses together.
I didn’t realize we’d been dismissed until Keaton started rolling up the blueprints and people around the table began to file toward the door. Keaton’s eyes met mine for a brief moment before snapping back to his hands as they put the blueprints back in their tube. But I didn’t press my luck, just kept the smile on my face and followed everyone out.
The site was busy with a dozen or so workers, many of them homeless, promised a spot in the community for their contribution. Grant had ordered two dozen high quality, insulated tents and set them up in rows in the back parking lot of Pastor Coleburn’s church. The few children in the mix had been enrolled in school, able to stay with their families by the grace of Keaton and Coleburn and a couple of property owners in our town who had unoccupied houses to lend. There were of course other smaller things, though no less meaningful to those we were trying to help. Like free haircuts and toiletry bags. Some of the women were working in the church helping with the kitchen, some worked here on the construction site.
Twenty-seven in total. Far more people to house than the number of tiny homes I thought we could get. But between Grant’s money and Keaton’s connections, we were able to get twenty-five. It felt a lot like making a basket of fish and bread feed a hungry crowd. But it wasn’t all smiles and cupcakes. There had been a few thefts in town linked to the homeless, and for the first time in Lindenbach’s history, someone had found hypodermic needles in the park. The drug problem was a tricky one, something we were figuring out how to handle in the community we were building. We’d have to drug test, and we were under no illusions—some of the population would be excluded, and they’d be left afloat. We could offer them mental health services and the clinic, even job placement, but they wouldn’t be able to live here.
I hated the thought.
I’d heard every side. Helping an addict would only enable them. It was their fault they were addicts, and they didn’t deserve free resources. They should have made better choices and they wouldn’t have ended up here. The list went on and on. But in my opinion, it could have happened to anyone, under the right circumstance. Anybody who didn’t believe so had far too much faith in themselves.
So we were leaning toward a self-governed community that would serve as their own council with the support of a social worker. This, along with everything else, made people mad. They can’t govern themselves! They’re clearly not responsible enough! Didn’t matter that people had been governing themselves thus since the dawn of man. It was as tried and true a system as there ever was.