The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter I, Scene 1: 28 A Street

The orange clouds gathered to the horizon as if a trumpet had blown, calling nature to a close for the day. A freezing winter wind pushed across the plains, blowing in strong and then dying down like waves rolling in to the shore and retreating again.

Olatha, Kansas stood still against the shadows of the November evening, a quiet suburb to the large rambling city of Overland Park. The city was fat at its heart with businessmen in white shirts and dark blue suits and women in pastel dresses with matching hats and coats but thinned out to American Gothic, salt-of-the-earth farming families and frozen wheat fields at the edges of Olatha.

All that was Kansas met here—flat still earth, the sweat and stoicism of long dead German immigrants, eternal wind from some hidden primordial canyon, Bible-belt Christians, and halting modernity. While below and beneath and through it all seethed the same itching unrest that walked the streets of towns like Dodge City and Abilene.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 1, Scene 2: 28 A Street

Anni dropped the brush in the empty can and looked around once more at her future. She conjured glimpses of her childhood spent on this quiet street hidden away on the outskirts of an old Kansas town. She never thought she’d come back, but Max had given her little choice. Her shoulders felt the weight of his memory and what he had done to her. To them.

A light flicked on in one of the upstairs rooms. Lena. Making one last round, checking to make sure nothing had been forgotten, herding all the ducks into a row for tomorrow morning. Like Anni’s grandmother, Lena would be the rock in this house of hungry souls. She would feed them, clean their rooms, make them tea and tuck them in at night. The mother of 28A Street. For Anni she was that and a friend too.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter I, Scene 3: 28 A Street

Lena’s shadow crossed in front of a closed blind in the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. Anni smiled. She could picture Lena smoothing a wrinkle out of the light blue chenille bedspread, blowing flecks of new dust off the chest-of-drawers, stepping backward toward the door as she inventoried the room for the last time. The light went off, then on, then off again. She was an artisan and a crazy woman for order and perfection.

Anni leaned over and picked up the paint can by its thin metal handle and carried it up the brick walkway and onto the front porch. She tucked her free hand into her coat pocket. The air blew tiny ice crystals that needled her cheeks, though she didn’t give the stings much attention because in Kansas the air was cold but clean, and she was grateful for that gift. Anni drew in a deep breath and opened the door to the marshmallow embrace of radiant heat; she turned to take in her last night as an unemployed woman. Tomorrow she would begin a life.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter I, Scene 4: 28 A Street

“Almost ready,” Lena said when Anni appeared in the doorway.

While Lena busied herself heating the water in the silver kettle and gathering the necessary accouterments for tea, Anni sat at the white breakfast table that had belonged to her grandmother. She traced the Japanese country scene painted in black on the porcelain top and tried to remember the names she had given to each figure when she was a child. They all had names–the woman holding the giant fan, the man standing nearby looking out over the lake. Even the cranes standing in the tall grass next to the pergola.

Lena poured the hot water over the teabags in both their cups. “Cream?” She held out a small stoneware pitcher.

“Yes,” said Anni and Lena set it on the table.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 2, Scene 1: Unexpected

Anni opened her eyes to darkness. At first she could not fix her mind on where she was or even what day it was until the smell of Lena’s fat slabs of bacon cooking on the stove in the kitchen downstairs brought her back to Monday morning, in her bedroom. She stared at the long bank of curtained windows looking out over her half-acre backyard and could just make out the yellow glow of the back porch light. In truth the yard didn’t end at the half-acre mark but joined a horse pasture, which joined acres of farmland beyond that. Hence the dense, unlit darkness that stretched out from the house to the hedgerow that bordered her property against miles and miles of wheat, sorghum, and corn fields.

She pulled the chain on the lamp waiting for use in the middle of her bedside table; the darkness gathered in shadowed pillars at the four corners of her spacious master room.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 2, Scene 2: Unexpected

Anni stared back at Lena. “Have what?” She sipped her hot chocolate to buy a few seconds. Even if she mentioned the premonition, a word Lena did not like to hear and Anni wasn’t crazy about either, nothing would change. The boarders would come for lunch at 1:00 p.m. and that was that. They had to come, or Anni would have to sell the house and she and Lena would be jobless and homeless.

“You are still bothered. The feeling hasn’t gone away.” Lena’s eyes were on Anni, her face set like cement. Anni had seen that stoic expression before. Lena would back away from their plans and start from scratch, if that’s what she had to do.

Anni leaned forward, hoping that before she opened her mouth she would think of something to say that would turn the USS Lena around. “Yes, okay. I feel uneasy. But—”

“We will be wise, then, and change our plans.”

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 2, Scene 3: Unexpected

The tick tick tick of the wall clock reminded Anni that one o’clock wasn’t far away and she hadn’t cleared the snow off the front steps and sidewalk. Or showered. “After we finish the dishes, I’ll shovel the walk.”

“No, I can do these on my own. You go ahead and get dressed.” Lena’s s’s sounded like z’s—her accent tended to appear when she was tired or preoccupied or out of sorts. Like this morning. She set the plates in the sink.

“No, I’ll stay and help,” Anni said. “I’m not anxious to go out into the freezing cold just yet anyway. Besides, work takes your mind off things.”

Lena nodded. She ran hot water in the sink and squeezed in a green stream of Palmolive. “Arbeit macht frei,” she said, her face hard, her jaw set. Her mood darkened without warning and she said the words as if in a dream, like someone talking in her sleep.

The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 2, Scene 4: Unexpected

“Oh.” Anni stared at her feet in black tights but no shoes. “Oh,” she said again, this time with the same panic she felt.

Lena waved her hands as if fanning a bad smell out of the room. “Go and get your shoes. Your good shoes.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Just a second,” Anni yelled.

Lena shushed and clasped her hands together as though praying, while Anni looked around the floor. “Oh good,” she said and shoved one foot and then the other into her mukluks, still waiting where’d she’d left them earlier. She tied the laces fast. “There. Okay. Go ahead.” She nodded in the direction of the door, but Lena stared with wide eyes at the puddle Anni’s boots had left on the floor. “What did—”

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Hi Everyone,

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The Last Minute Boarder, Chapter 3, Scene 1: Shades of Things

“Madame?” the man said again.

Anni noticed then that he held a small black valise in his hand but nothing else. Odd that he had no other suitcase, though she supposed he wouldn’t bring all his belongings with him to make an inquiry.

“Oh, I am sorry,” she said at last, breaking free of her thoughts. “I wasn’t expecting you. Please, come inside out of the cold.” She opened the heavy wood door wider.

“Thank you,” he said and stepped into the foyer, glancing through his tinted lenses down the hall and up the staircase, as though expecting to find someone he knew there. “You are very kind.”

Charlotte, watching and listening, stayed close when the stranger entered the house, for which Anni was grateful. She had an uneasy feeling about this man, and though she tried, she had no good excuse for turning him away if he decided to lease a room.