The County Line

The thing about house sitting for a farmer you've met exactly twice is that you spend the whole drive out there trying to remember which of the two times it was that she handed you the spare key, and whether either of those times involved her asking your last name. Jon, 28, delivery driver for the county co-op, and by Friday afternoon in late April I was bumping down the gravel lane to the Hessler place with a duffel bag, a grocery sack, and a mild feeling that I had been talked into something.

Walt Conway had done the talking, which is how most things get done around here. Walt runs a stall at the Tri-County Farmers Market, sells jams and preserves two rows over from Judy Hessler's honey and eggs, and he caught me unloading feed behind the co-op on Wednesday and said, "You got a free weekend? Judy needs somebody watching the house while she's at market, cat and thermostat and all that, and you're reliable, I told her you were reliable."

"I'm reliable," I agreed, because arguing with Walt is like arguing with the weather, it just stands there and eventually you give up.

So that's how I got here. The farmhouse sat back from the lane looking like every other farmhouse in three counties, white clapboard, a porch with a sagging swing, a barn off to the side that had seen better decades. Judy's pickup was already loaded, crates of jars bungeed down in the bed, and she came off the porch wiping her hands on her jeans, a tall woman of 32 with her hair pinned back like she'd done it in under a minute and didn't care who knew it.

"You're Jon, right?" she said. "Walt's boy. Well, not his boy, but you know what I mean."

"Co-op boy," I said. "Close enough."

She walked me through the basics in about four minutes flat, which might be a record. The fridge, where there was leftover soup I was welcome to and not welcome to refuse. The cat, a gray slab of animal named Duchess who had clearly never done a day of work in her life. The thermostat, which Judy made me actually touch, twice, because her dad had kept that house at a temperature she described as "well, you'll see," and she'd fixed that after his stroke eight years ago and was not going back. Cat food in the laundry room, spare bulbs in the hall closet, don't worry about the barn.

"Keys lock from the outside only," she said, handing them over. "There's, hm." She paused, looked at the door, looked at me. "Guest bedroom's shut. You don't need it. Two bedrooms up, take the big one, the other one stays closed."

"Fine by me," I said, and she nodded like she'd expected that answer and was maybe a little relieved by it, and then she was gone, gravel popping under the tires, and it was just me, Duchess, and two days of pretending I had any business being in this house.

* * *

Friday night went about how I'd figured. I called in a pizza from the town, one traffic light, one pizza place, no choice needed, and played a game on my laptop at her kitchen table because the couch in her living room felt like furniture you weren't allowed to sit on. Duchess sat on the other chair and watched me eat with the contempt of something that had been fed twice already. Around ten I was bored enough that the ceiling started looking interesting, and that's when I realized I hadn't actually walked the whole house. Nobody does. You get shown the fridge and the thermostat and your brain files the rest away as somebody else's.

But I was up there getting a glass of water, and the hallway past my room had one door shut tight, painted over at the edges like it had been shut a long time, and the door opposite, the guest room she'd told me to leave alone, was just shut. Regular shut. Shy shut, not locked shut. Which, I want to be fair to myself here, I did register as a signal, and I did ignore it, because I was 28 and bored and it was somebody else's house, which is exactly the combination that gets houses explored.

The knob turned. The room was dark and smelled like cedar, sharp and dry, like the inside of a hope chest, and I stood there a second thinking, okay, closed up storage room, nothing here, and then my hand found a light switch that worked, so much for that theory. It was a normal bedroom, bed made with a quilt, a lamp, a window with the curtain drawn, and against the far wall a cedar wardrobe, big as a coffin stand, actually probably bigger, dark wood with brass hinges gone soft brown.

I'd like to tell you I backed out and watched TV. What actually happened is I noticed the door to this room didn't lock from inside, which meant the key, if there was one, lived outside, and I did the thing you do in old houses, I ran my fingers along the top of the doorframe, and there it was, a little brass key sitting up there in the dust like it had been waiting for exactly one curious idiot.

So the guest room had a key on the frame of a door that was already unlocked, which raised a question I didn't stop to answer, because I was now standing in a dark room at eleven at night holding somebody else's key and the only person who could catch me was a cat.

The wardrobe was locked, and the little brass key turned in it like somebody kept it oiled. Cedar smell rolled out thick, and inside, hung tight on wooden hangers, were dresses. Women's dresses, a whole row of them, maybe thirty, dark ones and pale ones, a green velvet with sleeves like something out of an old movie, a red one with a big collar, slips between them in cream and black, and below the hanging bar a shelf of shoes, and I'm not going to act like I inventory all of it calmly because I did not. I stood there with my glass of water going warm in my hand and just looked.

There was costume jewelry too, in a divided tray, brooches and beads and clip-on earrings, the kind of stuff you'd see at an estate sale, except this wasn't an estate, this was a working farm owned by a woman who'd moved back home at 24 to take care of her father and, as far as I knew from Walt's rambling, had never once mentioned a man in that time. These weren't her everyday clothes. You don't feed chickens in green velvet.

The oldest thing in there had a tailor's label stitched inside, some city I'd never heard of and a year in the 1950s, which meant most of this wardrobe was older than Judy, older than her dad probably, inherited or collected or both, and I kept thinking, okay, family thing, keepsake thing, people keep weird stuff, and that explanation sat fine for about four seconds until my eye caught the black heels on the bottom shelf.

Low heel, pointed, polished, size, I'd guess, close to mine, which is not a thought a person should have in somebody else's guest room at eleven at night, and I had it anyway. They weren't dress-up-old shoes. They were maintained. Someone had wiped the dust off those shoes recently enough that there was no dust, in a room where the doorframe key had a gray film over it.

I did the arithmetic you do when you're alone and bored, which is bad arithmetic. Judy was 32, farm girl, no boyfriend anyone had ever mentioned, kept a locked wardrobe of vintage dresses in the shut bedroom, and hired a stranger to watch the house rather than have anybody from the market, from Walt, from church, from anywhere, come out here with a key. That last part was the part that stuck. Walt had talked me into it, not Judy choosing me over neighbors.

I'm not saying I touched the black dress. I'm saying the black dress was the third one from the left, fitted, sleeveless, heavier than it looked, and that when I finally pushed the hanger it swung and clicked against its neighbors and the sound was so loud in that quiet room that I flinched like I'd been caught, which, in a moral sense, I had been.

The key went back on the doorframe, roughly where I found it, and I closed the guest room door and then the wardrobe was still sitting there in my head with its cedar breath, and Duchess was waiting in the hall like she wanted to talk about it.

"Don't," I told her, and she blinked at me, and I went to bed in the big room with the quilt that smelled like somebody's washing soap and lay there listening to the barn creak, thinking about black heels in a dust-free house.

* * *

Saturday was market day, and Judy would be gone till four, and I had a whole list of things I was absolutely not going to do.

Saturday morning I woke up at eight with the sun coming through the blinds in stripes across the quilt and the first thing I thought about, before coffee, before checking my phone, was the guest room, and I lay there a while arguing with myself about it like a man negotiating with a dog he knows is going to win. The list of things I was absolutely not going to do got shorter by the minute. I made coffee in Judy's kitchen, and it was good coffee, better than mine, and Duchess sat on the counter which I assume she wasn't supposed to do, watching me drink it with the patience of a creature that knows exactly how this Saturday is going to go.

By nine I had run out of ways to stall. I did the dishes from my pizza night, I walked out to the porch and tested the swing, I looked at the barn and decided the barn was none of my business, and then I went upstairs, took the brass key off the doorframe, and let myself into the guest room with the morning light coming through the curtains, which is a very different experience than the lamp-at-eleven version, believe me.

The wardrobe looked smaller in daylight, humbler somehow, just a cedar box with soft brown hinges, but the dresses were still there, still hanging in their tight row, and I stood in front of it with my hands in my pockets like a man at a museum. The black one was third from the left, the fitted sleeveless one