Cradle Creek

Chapter 21, Pretty Persuasion

Drew watched her hop the fence and wondered how many things he did not know about this woman. And all the things he did know about her that no one else ever would. He pushed the car into first gear, slowly driving away from the convent. Returning to his house, he freshened the ice in his cooler and headed over to the big house, poorly whistling along to the tune in his AirPods. He flipped the lights of the generator in the back room, found his sander and set to work. He had a few hours left in him. The beer was cold and tasted good.

He had been working for almost two hours when Nick knocked on the window and let himself in through the back door.

"Who was that?" he asked, grabbing a beer from the cooler and a nail gun to help with the trim in the room.

"Who? AJ? Just a friend, she's nice isn't she?" Drew said as nonchalantly as he could muster.

Nick let it slide. Drew was a private person and he had never seen his friend with anything other than a lost cause, mostly this house. They worked in silence for an hour before switching to the sheetrock that needed to be hung in the next room. The men used trowels to mud the sheets in place and working in synchronicity, finished the wall in half the time it would have taken Drew by himself. Probably a quarter if he was being honest, because Drew was still in the YouTube construction school.

"Let's call it a day," Drew said. "Thanks for your help."

"Anytime, I need to check back at the restaurant anyway."

Nick left, leaving the door open. Drew cleaned the mess they made, always finding a clean workspace easier to start work in than a messy one. He killed the lights and headed over to the little house. A shower and sleep were in his immediate future.

—

The light flicked on and Sister Mary Something said, "The glorious day is upon us, Children of God. Let's start anew, washed clean with the morning dew. Morning Lauds in twenty minutes, my doves."

She heard this from her room across the way from the dormitory. AJ rolled over, stretched and realized she wasn't crying. In the bathroom, she splashed cool water on her face and studied herself in the mirror. The puffiness in her face had gone down substantially, her eyes were not as swollen as they had been.

She was healing.

Dressing in a pair of khaki shorts and a white v-neck t-shirt, she knotted her hair and went to the kitchen to start her morning followed by her chores. AJ gathered and scrubbed dishes, remembering how badly she burned her hand a few weeks before. Was that in this lifetime? She was more careful this time and survived the chore unscathed.

AJ proofed some yeast and made another bleak attempt at baking bread. After the dishes, she scoured the counter and then the floor. This was not required of her, but she felt like going a little above and beyond the call of duty. Five hours later it was after ten in the morning and she was tentatively knocking on the door of the workman's cottage.

Drew opened the door, his hair wet from a shower. She handed him a loaf of homemade bread, warm from the oven. He inhaled the yeasty aroma and sighed, "Yum. Did the nuns make this?" he asked.

"Hardly. And don't say 'Yum' until you try it. I made it, and I'm still learning," she said, following him into his small cottage She was impressed by how tidy he kept the place. It was homey and welcoming in a warm and masculine way. Sparsely decorated except a small picture of four kids on a side table. A picture of a college group of friends with arms in the air, cheering for something the lens didn't catch. On his stainless steel refrigerator were funny magnets. One was shaped like a bone. "I find this humorous," written across it. A blue square one was towards the top: "After Monday and Tuesday, even the calendar says WTF." They made her smiled as she returned her attention back to her host.