Total pages in book: 196
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186555 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 933(@200wpm)___ 746(@250wpm)___ 622(@300wpm)
Yet none of that benefitted me at all anymore. I hadn’t even felt the urge to write since that month with Yuki. My words had dried up; I was pretty sure. That part of my life was done now. It wasn’t like I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my life anyway. No pressure, right?
So in the meantime, I might as well help my old friend.
If I was going to do that, I wanted to do it well. My mom hadn’t half-assed things, and I had never been the kind of person to do that either. She would have told me to study, to not give up.
And that’s what led me down the stairs and across the gravel driveway, holding a container of blueberry muffins I’d bought from the grocery store after work and the notebook I used to take notes for the hikes I was planning on doing. I thought about the box full of notebooks that I hadn’t opened in a year, then shook the thought away.
I eyed Mr. Rhodes’s truck as I walked past it and knew I was going to the right person.
I hoped.
I knocked and took a step back. About three seconds later, a shadow of a figure appeared down the hall before lights were flipped on, and I took in the size of the body. It definitely wasn’t Amos.
That thought alone made me smile just as he opened the door, didn’t say a word, and gestured me in with a tip of his head.
“Hi, Mr. Rhodes,” I said as I crossed the doorway and beamed up at him.
“You’re on time,” he noted, like that surprised him, as he closed the door behind us. I waited for him to walk ahead so he could tell me where to sit. Or stand.
Maybe I should have just googled all this. Or gone to the library. But I wasn’t a resident yet, so more than likely I wouldn’t be able to get a library card.
“I was worried if I was a minute late, you wouldn’t open the door,” I told him honestly.
He slid me a long look with that stony, hard face as he went around and headed down the hallway. I was pretty sure he even went “hm” like he wasn’t disagreeing. Rude.
I eyed the house again as we moved, and it was just as clean as last time. There wasn’t a single coffee cup or glass of water lying around. Not even a dirty sock or napkin either.
I should probably clean the apartment before he had an excuse to come over and saw the war-zone reenactment that was going on across the driveway.
Mr. Rhodes ended up leading us toward the table in the kitchen that was so scarred, I knew from enough Home Remodel Network that it needed to get sanded and a layer or two of stain. Don’t ask me how it would be done, but I knew it needed it. But what caught me off guard was the way he walked around the back of it and pulled a chair out before taking the one next to it.
I plopped down on it and realized this was the steadiest chair I’d ever sat in. I peeked down at the legs and tried to wiggle; it didn’t move. I knocked on a leg. It didn’t sound hollow.
When I sat back up, I found Mr. Rhodes watching me once again. His raccoon face was back. I bet he was wondering what I was doing with his furniture.
“This is nice,” I told him. “Did you make it?”
That snapped him out of it. “No.” He scooted the chair closer, set two big hands with long, tapered fingers and short, trimmed nails on top of the table, and leveled me with a heavy, no-nonsense gaze. “You’ve got twenty-nine minutes. Ask your questions.” His eyebrows went up about a millimeter. “You said you have a million. We might get through ten or fifteen.”
Shit. I should’ve bought a recorder. I pushed my chair in closer. “I don’t really have a million. Maybe just about two hundred.” I smiled and, like I expected, didn’t get one in return. Worked for me. “Do you know a lot about fishing?”
“Enough.”
Just enough that friends and family posted about fishing stuff on his Facebook page. Okay. “What kind of fish can you catch around here?”
“Depends on the river and the lake.”
I didn’t mean to say, “Oh shit,” but I did. It depends?
His eyebrows went flat. “Do you know what you’re doing?”
“Nope, that’s why I’m here. Any information is better than no information.” I smoothed my hand across the blank page. I tried to give him my most charming smile. “So, uh, what kinds can you get in the rivers and lakes around here?” Time to try again.
It didn’t work. Mr. Rhodes sigh then told me he was wondering what the hell he’d gotten himself into. “We had a dry winter and water levels are very low, which makes fishing conditions not that ideal already. That and the tourists have probably fished out most of the rivers. Some of the lakes are stocked, so that’s most people’s best bets—”