“Yep! It’ll basically be a wall. It’ll be fine.”
Owen and I are staring at each other. I’m feeling a mix of commiseration that we’re both in this scenario that I never could’ve guessed we’d be in just twenty-four hours ago, and feeling incredibly exposed. When surrounded by your home’s walls, having your next-door neighbor (who is also surrounded by his home’s walls), being able to see you, is just wrong.
I don’t get much more than about two seconds to take it in, though, before a knock sounds at my door. Reese takes the box of cookies from me, and I walk in a daze to open the door for my sister-in-law-to-be, Mackenzie, her best friend, Livi, and who I’m convinced will eventually be another sister-in-law, Zoe. They are each holding a big box containing everything we need to put together the wedding favors for Mackenzie’s and my brother Jace’s wedding. I just say, “Come in.” No need to explain—they’re about to experience it.
The moment they reach the kitchen, they all freeze, mid-step.
“Charlie!” Livi says. “Why does your kitchen look like it lost a fight with a wrecking ball?” Then she turns to me. “Was it the Kool-Aid Man?”
The guy in charge waves. “It’s a fun and unexpected twist, isn’t it? You ladies just go about whatever you have planned. Pretend we’re invisible.”
As I’m directing my friends around the construction mess to put their boxes on my coffee table, Owen starts talking with the construction worker. I keep sneaking peeks at him. He’s dressed in a T-shirt and well-worn work jeans, and has a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind one ear and a tool belt slung low on his hips. His boots are dusty, and there’s a smudge of drywall powder on one forearm and a streak of something—possibly caulk?—on his bicep. Based on the faint white flecks in his hair and the thin layer of sawdust clinging to his shirt, I’m guessing he was cutting or sanding something at work today. He justlooks… I don’t know. Manly and adorable at the same time.
He must feel me looking because his eyes shift to me, and it feels like he’s seeing right into me. I duck down behind the cabinets that are piled up beside my kitchen table. Do you know what? A bandage over the problem sounds way better than “fully fixed.” Let’s just go ahead and put my wall back up. What’s a little water leak? That’s what buckets are for, right?
I have got to somehow overcome my instinct to duck. It’s not as if Owen—and everyone else in the room—didn’t see me do it. So while I’m down here, I pick up a little chunk of Sheetrock that they missed when hauling out our old wall and stand, pretending that was all I was crouched down on the floor for. Then I go to toss it into the garbage and join the others around the coffee table.
Mackenzie is taking things out of boxes, explaining how we’re putting together seed packets. She’s got craft envelopes, seeds to scoop into them, a hole punch, ribbon, a stamp for one side that has their names and wedding date, and a stamp for the other side that reads,The beginning of something beautiful.
The whole time we work, I keep sneaking peeks at Owen through our suddenly open-concept neighbor situation as he goes in and out of the kitchen area. Whenever he’s not visible, I feel both immense relief at having eyes off me and a little touch ofletdown that I can’t just, you know, see him while I’m in the middle of doing something that has nothing at all to do with him. Which is weird, but I have to admit that I do like seeing his face.
I look again, right when he’s looking at me. And I don’t duck! I do look away quickly, as one does, but I still think I just scored one for me.
We are all chatting, stamping, and filling seed packets when Leandro and Josh get to the point of putting up the sheeting. I was wondering if the sheeting Leandro said they’d install might be hard plastic sheeting. Like Plexiglas, except solid instead of see-through.
But nope. He was talking about the kind that’s as bendy as fabric and comes on a big roll. They roll out a section long enough to cover the open area left to right, then unfold the sheeting and staple it to the wood frame at the top, adding a few staples to the side, too. I’m getting pretty nervous because although the sheeting isn’t transparent, itistranslucent—barely—and I can see body shapes on Owen’s side. Which means he can see them on my side, too.
This feels like such a security breach. And not just that, but a security breach designed to poke at my specific insecurities. I take a deep breath. I can handle this. I can.
They add the sheeting to Owen’s side of the wall, too, and I pretend that I can’t see exactly whereeverything is on his side of the wall. The two men clean up, and then the one in charge comes over to tell us that they’re finished and leaving for the night. Then, just before he turns to leave, he says, “We’ll see you again bright and early on Monday morning. Have a great weekend!”
Reese and I turn to each other. “Monday?” she says.
“We have to goall weekendwith a fake wall?” I’m trying not to panic.
“It probably won’t be too bad,” Zoe says. “It almost feels like an actual wall. I had blankets hung instead of walls in one place I lived as a kid.”
I can handle this.
“I still can’t believe they took out the whole wall,” Livi says.
Reese nods. “Well, their name does suggest they dream about doing demo. Otherwise, their company name would beRestorationDaydreams.”
“Maybe they should rename it Open Concept Daydreams.” Mackenzie spreads her hands like she’s picturing it on their van.
Zoe says, “I think they should’ve named it Collateral Damage Daydreams.”
“Or Oops-All-Demo,” Livi says.
The hostess in me hates that the disaster surrounding us happened on the same day as this get-together, but I’m glad everyone is here,talking and laughing about it. I might be freaking out right now if they weren’t. Or, I might be freaking out more. I still am a bit.
Can Owen hear us talk? He might be able to, which would be more than I can handle. Although the double layer of the plastic is probably enough to muffle sounds. Plus, I can see shadows on Owen’s side enough to tell when he’s in the room, and he’s currently not.
Livi is Mackenzie’s best friend, and I’m Mackenzie’s best (and only) sister-in-law. She asked both of us to be co-maids-of-honor, which is great because Livi is fun and doesn’t mind being in the spotlight. Plus, the girl has an almost magical ability to never let a bad boyfriend experience dampen her enthusiasm for hunting down her Mr. Right. And oh, boy, has she had some doozies when it comes to bizarre boyfriend experiences.
Eventually, the conversation turns to guys, and I peek over at the plastic wall. I don’t see any Owen-shaped blobs, so I think we’re good. Livi tells us about how she and a guy she’s been dating had plans to go walk around a park where a bunch of artists were painting. Before they got there, though, he asked if they could go to the hardware store instead. “And he pulled out his growly voice to ask, so of course, my resolve turned to jelly and we went to the hardware store.”
“Ah, yes, the growly voice,” Reese says. “Gets me every time.”
