Home Away from Home
By Patricia Crisafulli
A basket of blueberry muffins sat on the sideboard beside a quiche made the night before and reheated that morning, a bowl of fruit, two coffee urns—regular and decaf. Not fancy, a far cry from gourmet, but sufficient to cover the second “B” in the farmhouse B&B. No one came there expecting luxury, Lesley knew. They came for the quiet countryside, easy access to small towns offering antiquing and galleries. And excellent Wi-Fi.
Seven years ago, when she’d inherited the property from a widowed aunt, Lesley figured she would sell it. Then the pandemic hit. An IT consultant, she could work anywhere, so why not this house that had once been part of her grandparents’ farm. She installed a commercial grade network with superfast downloads and excellent security. Then she rehabbed three upstairs bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, and kept two downstairs rooms for her office and sleeping quarters. She listed the place as a B&B catering to remote workers and, unable to think of a better name, called it “Home Away from Home.”
A couple escaping the city had been her first customers, committing to stay a month—then two, then three. After the lockdown eased, casual travelers began passing through—spending one night, maybe two. But from time to time, Lesley still had people who booked rooms for a week or two, wanting a break from their routines and to work by an open window that let in a breeze scented by apple blossoms and lilacs, pine trees, and freshly mown hay.
At the end of the day, after her two guests had checked out, Lesley took a hamburger patty out of a package and headed out to the grill on the back deck. She returned with a plate and silverware, a split bun, two lettuce leaves, a thick slice of beefsteak tomato, and a carton of potato salad. Sitting alone at the patio table, Lesley listened to the house finches trill their melody from the old apple orchard. Birdsong always reminded her of childhood summers in this place, with her grandparents when she was very young, and then with her aunt and uncle when she was a teenager. Divorced and in and out of relationships, her mother had moved them a lot, so this old farmhouse had offered the most predictability in Lesley’s life, a north star she orbited around until it became her permanent home.
Having to share it with strangers to pay the property taxes and the upkeep would not have been her first choice. But the remote workers who rented rooms tended to keep to themselves during the day, used the kitchen sparingly, then wandered the area on the weekends.
Forking up the last of the potato salad on her plate, Lesley watched a red-tailed hawk launch out of a towering jack pine with a flap of its broad wings. It gained altitude, caught a current, and sailed on the wind.
“I’ll give you twenty bucks for one of those burgers.”
Lesley felt her heart lurch. Swinging her head around toward the kitchen, she saw a man standing in the doorway.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you, but I knocked. Called the number on the sign, too,” he added.
Lesley tapped the pockets of her cargo shorts; no phone.
Pushing open the back door that led onto the deck, the man introduced himself as Jeff Spencer, a supervisor with the state highway department. “We’re rebuilding Highway 115. I’ve been staying at a motel by the onramp, and I can’t take one more night.”
Lesley knew the project from the traffic tie-ups—fifty-seven miles of highway expansion and a new bridge across a deep gorge. She sized him up, asked to see some identification, and caught a glimpse of the mustard yellow pickup truck with the highway department insignia on the cab doors.
“How long are you planning to stay?” she asked.
“As long as I can. I’ll take whatever you have.”
Lesley led him to her office on the ground floor where she kept her credit card reader. Multiple computer screens scrolled with data and line graphs; three hard drives hummed on a rack.
“Whoa—that’s some setup. What are you? CIA?”
Lesley smirked. “IT consulting.”
Jeff nodded, hands on hips. No wedding ring, not that she was at all interested. He was 40 to her 55, and her last relationship had been with a woman she’d loved most of her adult life, until she died.
He signed up for an extended stay of three months, then month to month after that—probably six months total and maybe longer. When he asked about kitchen privileges, Lesley told him to help himself as long as he bought his own food. Tonight, she’d make an exception and brought the rest of the hamburgers and buns outside.
Lesley had never mastered the art of chitchat but listened as Jeff kept up a steady stream of conversation while he cooked two burgers for himself and a second one for her. His home was almost three hours away in the same town as his ex-wife and their eleven-year-old son, who he tried to see every other weekend. “It’s hard—I work a lot,” he said.
“Same,” Lesley replied. “The work thing—not the family.” Then they ate in silence.
Summer waned into Labor Day Weekend, which brought a few more travelers. After that, there were weeks when Jeff was the only occupant. Lesley’s IT consulting picked up, with another school district needing to overhaul its email system and a credit union that had gotten hacked. Sometimes at night, Jeff and Lesley traded stories about work over a simple meal.
One unseasonably warm Saturday afternoon in early November, as they sat on the back deck with their laptops, Jeff told Lesley his son had a week off from school at Thanksgiving. His ex-wife and her fiancé were going away, so Jeff had his son for the entire time.
“I’m thinking of bringing him here. Asher’s a good kid. Quiet—total computer nerd. He’ll spend the day in his room with a screen.”
Lesley ran a hand through her short salt-and-pepper hair. She didn’t relish the idea of babysitting but liked Jeff and wanted to help him out. “He can have the room across the hall from yours,” she said. “No extra charge.”
On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, just as the weather turned colder, Asher stood beside Jeff in Ashley’s kitchen. The boy was tall like his father, but skinny in the way that kids can be, with dark hair that fell into his eyes.
Feeling as nervous as this kid looked, Lesley gave Asher the tour, starting with the kitchen and back deck. But when she moved toward the parlor and the staircase to the second floor, Asher stayed put, staring through the sliver of an opening into Lesley’s office.
He pushed the door with one hand before Jeff could stop him. “Do you code?” the boy asked. It was the first sentence he’d uttered since arriving.
“Some. Mostly I do networks,” Lesley said as she turned from the staircase and headed back to her office. Clicking on one of the screens, she gave Asher a quick digital tour of her work. Transfixed, the boy looked like he would have stayed there all day.
On Monday, Jeff left early for work, assuring her that Asher would play games most of the day. Shortly after nine, the boy came downstairs. Lesley heard faint noises in the kitchen where she’d left out a platter of muffins and found the boy looking at them as if unsure of what to do.
“They’re cranberry.” Lesley nabbed one with tongs and deposited it on a plate. “Orange juice? Hot chocolate?”
“Water,” Asher said.
Lesley motioned for the boy to sit at the small round table in the corner and refilled her coffee mug. She couldn’t think of anything to say, and the boy didn’t seem to mind the silence, so she just watched him eat with careful, steady bites—the same way she ate.
“What are you doing?” Lesley asked.
The boy looked up, brown eyes widened in confusion.
“I mean, on the computer,” Lesley added.
Asher shrugged. “Games. I challenge people.”
Lesley calculated the seven hours before Jeff came back. “You want to see what I’m doing?” she offered.
Asher raced off to get his laptop.
He asked a million questions—a torrent a words that Lesley had not expected from the nearly silent boy who had arrived. But they were good questions, about firewalls and security protocols. As she answered him, she showed Asher how things were done, which meant everything took twice as long. If it got too much, she’d shoo him back up to his room to play.
Lesley taught him a little coding, just an exercise for fun, and Asher puzzled on it for the better part of an hour while she worked on a new user interface for a client. At quarter after three, pleased with how much she’d managed to get done with an audience, Lesley announced they should take a break and put on their jackets.
“Why?” Asher asked.
“I want to show you something.”
Asher dawdled, but Lesley managed to get him out the door. Four steps away from the back porch, he stopped. Without looking back, she continued as far as the picnic table and sat on the bench, facing the old apple orchard, the bare branches now gnarled fingers poking into the gray sky.
Lesley didn’t speak until she heard a deep inhalation and the boy stood beside her. “Just beyond those trees, there’s a river. But we don’t have to get there today. We can go a little farther every day until you feel comfortable.”
Asher’s fingers worried the end of the zipper on his jacket. The small, tense movements told Lesley all she needed to know—the shy awkwardness, difficulty making friends, probably getting picked on in school. A page right out of her own book.
“Let’s try as far as those apple trees.”
Together they continued across the backyard, the house still in sight. “The deer love these.” Lesley tapped a half-eaten apple with the toe of her shoe. “At night and the very early morning, you’ll see them in here. You like apple pie?”
Asher pointed to a mound of brown pulp on the ground. “You can’t make pie out of these.”
Lesley laughed. “That would be gross. I buy them at the store.”
On Wednesday, they went to the grocery store. Asher wanted to sit in the car and wait, but Lesley cajoled him with a promise he could pick out what they had for Thanksgiving dinner. They came out thirty minutes later with two frozen pizzas, a package of Hot Pockets, two bags of salad, a bottle of ranch dressing, and a bag of apples. “I don’t like turkey either,” she told him, and drove home.
On Thanksgiving morning, Jeff wielded a paring knife in the kitchen as Lesley muttered mild curses at the pie crust that slid out of the waxed paper and stuck to the rolling pin. They watched the parade on television and ate Hot Pockets for lunch. Then, with the pie cooling, Lesley sent everyone for their jackets.
A protest trembled on Asher’s lips—it was cold, it might rain. Jeff tried encouragement—it would be fun, good to get fresh air, a better appetite for all that pie. Lesley rummaged around the top shelf of a narrow closet in her office, found the hat she’d been given the previous Christmas as a gag gift, and plopped it on Asher’s head.
“You go, you get to wear it. You make it to the river, you get to keep it.”
Asher pulled it off, read the words over the visor. “World’s Best Coder.”
They were out the door ten minutes later.
Across the yard, through the orchard, and into a woodland of hemlock, beech, and maples, Leslie kept them moving toward the river. Jeff scanned it appreciatively, asking about fishing. Asher looked nervously at the narrow path that led down a vertical drop of about ten feet. Lesley went first, grasping branches for balance, stepping off the path to gain better traction in the hummocks of dry grass, then hitting the stony shoreline. Jeff followed, Asher in tow—step for step, side by side, father and son. She let out a breath when they made it.
Further downstream, small rapids frothed white. Beyond it, the current slowed and the banks widened. Jeff skipped a stone, and it kissed the surface three times. Asher tried but each small rock sank. Jeff stood behind him, their hands holding a flat stone together. With a flick of two wrists, it hopped once across the water, and Lesley let out a victory cheer.
Asher poked a long stick into a tangle of tree trunks and branches, asking about fish and birds and animals. Lesley didn’t know if he was genuinely curious or trying to quell his fears, but figured it was more or less the same. After an hour of rambling, they headed back to the house, the journey more direct this time but still took a good forty minutes.
As the orchard came into view, Asher stopped.
“What’s going on, buddy?” Jeff asked.
The boy squinted up at his father, then looked over at Lesley. “Can we live here?”
“This is Lesley’s—” Jeff began.
“Yes,” she interrupted. “Any time you want, as long as you want.”
Jeff’s stare was unreadable, and Lesley knew she was making things more complicated. But she wanted Asher to know he was always welcome there.
“You can come here for winter break,” Jeff said. “And this summer, we can come back if you want. I’ll have a couple of weeks off then.”
He glanced at Lesley. “Fine with me,” she said.
Asher started walking toward the house, slowly at first and then picking up his pace to a run. Jeff jogged behind him, while Lesley slowed, letting them have a moment.
She knew how good it felt to belong, to fit in. Her aunt and uncle had done that for her. Maybe she could offer something like that to Jeff and Asher. That’s what this place was for—home, away from home.