Woodlands by Robin Jones Gunn Read Free Book Online

the skylight? It looks new.”
    “Yes,” Leah said looking up. “It was too dark in here. I put in the ceiling fan, too. It can get hot here in the summer.” She reached over and stroked Bungee behind the ears. He was gnawing on Seth’s thumb. “Do you want to meet Hula?”
    “Of course.”
    Leah led Seth and Bungee only a few feet to a door off the kitchen.
    “You keep her in the pantry?”
    “This isn’t a pantry,” Leah said. “This is something I think you only find in old houses in the Northwest. It’s a mudroom.” She opened the door into a small room with a linoleum floor, a deep sink, and a metal baker’s rack stacked with gardening pots and tools. A doggy door opened to cement steps that led to the backyard. Hula wasn’t in the mudroom.
    “She must be in the backyard,” Leah said, opening the door and stepping outside. Hula had positioned herself comfortably at the bottom of the steps, basking in the last bit of sunlight that spilled through the gap between two large trees in the neighbor’s yard.
    “Hi, girl,” Leah said as Hula slowly rose and came to check out the puppy in Seth’s arms. “This is Bungee. What do you think?”
    “Your yard isn’t fenced, I see,” Seth said. “I better not put Bungee down, or we might end up chasing him all over the neighborhood.”
    “He can stay in the mudroom, and we can put a board over the doggy door, if you want to leave him here. You don’t mind, do you, Hula?”
    Hula returned to her corner of sunlight as if to register her apathy.
    “I’ll stick the casserole in the oven and set the timer,” Leah said. “I’ll also call Martin to see if he can meet us at the car with his tow truck.”
    Leah made her call and placed the homemade spinach casserole in her not-so-clean oven while Seth situated Bungee in the mudroom.
    “All set?” Leah asked, hanging up the phone.
    “All set,” Seth replied. He had washed his face, and a few beads of water still clung to his eyelashes.
    “All I have in the mudroom are paper towels,” Leah said apologetically. “Did you want a hand towel?”
    “No, I’m fine. I like your house. It’s really nice.”
    “You’ve just seen half of it. The clean half.”
    “Only one bedroom?”
    “Yes,” Leah said.
    “I had hoped to get into a little house like this,” Seth said as they made their way back to his car. “I had to settle for anapartment in Edgefield, at least for the time being.”
    “You’re really set on the supposedly ‘normal,’ Middle-American lifestyle, aren’t you?”
    Seth closed the car door behind him and gave her a puzzled look. “Why does that keep surprising you?”
    “Because,” Leah spouted, shutting her door hard for emphasis. “It’s so uneventful here.”
    “Costa Rica can be uneventful, too. So can Sweden. It’s not the place; it’s the people.”
    “Well, this is all I’ve ever known. I would think that someone who has been to Europe and who has camped out in a tropical rain forest would find all this pretty blasé.”
    “If you’re seventeen, maybe,” Seth said, starting the car. “That’s why I left the U.S. at that ripe, know-it-all age. I spent my senior year of high school as an exchange student in Sweden. Later I backpacked through Europe as far south as Greece.”
    “And you saw the Alps and Paris and Venice,” Leah said.
    Seth turned and gave her a humored expression as if Leah’s three stated locations were all good guesses. “Yes, I saw a lot of Europe. A lot of wonderful places. And I met a lot of fascinating people. But I returned to the U.S. for college. That’s when I lived in Boulder. For the last four years ‘home’ has been a Quonset hut with a wide variety of roommates who have no idea what the terms ‘privacy’ and ‘lights out’ mean.”
    “Turn right at this corner,” Leah said, motioning for him to keep talking.
    “I’ve never had a place of my own, the way you do. I looked around one day and realized the incoming staff kept