Page 30 of Upstate

At the kitchen door, he hesitates. “I dropped my mask somewhere.”

“Go around to the front. I’ll meet you there.”

Unearthing a misty memory of my mother tending to me after a sting, I dump baking soda in a bowl and stir in water until it’s a thick paste. I carry the bowl up the back stairs to the bathroom, where I grab tweezers and some Benadryl. Coming down the front stairs, I open the door to find Wren sitting on the granite stoop. The welts have risen up like plateaus from the smooth plains of his face.

“It’s shady here,” he says, his stiff cheek slurring his speech. “I haven’t seen any bees.”

“Good. Now, let me take a look.” Looping my mask over my ears, I aim my phone at his face, using the camera zoom to search for stingers. As I pluck a silver thread from the center of each welt, I mutter, “This is exactly why Eric Anderson said I needed liability insurance.”

Wren stiffens. “Eric Anderson?”

I pat globs of baking soda over the bumps. “He was my buyer’s agent, and he sells insurance, too. Why, do you know him?”

“From high school, yeah. We weren’t friends or anything, but everyone knew Eric. He was on the football team, homecoming court, handsome as an actor—the popularity trifecta. The yearbook committee named him most likely to succeed.” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe he ended up as an insurance salesman in Schuywich.”

“And a Realtor.” I hadn’t wanted to buy another policy on top of my homeowner’s insurance, but Eric insisted I needed liability, too, saying a customer could sue for any injury that happened on my property—including if they got stung by a bee while visiting the barn. I thought he was being dramatic at the time. How strange that his prediction came true.

“How did he look?” Wren asks.

“Eric? I don’t know, I never met him in person.” Assessing Wren’s face, I put down the bowl. “All done.”

“Let me see.”

I take a photo and show him. Wren cringes. “I’m like Frankenstein’s monster.”

“Don’t some people get bee stings on purpose, for their complexion?”

He laughs with half his face. “Are you saying I should think of this as a spa day?”

“Would that help?”

“You know what would help?” He closes his eyes and seems to wilt. “A glass of water.”

“Oh, sure, sorry.” I rush back inside and return with a glass, leaving the front door open.

“Thanks.” Water dribbles down his chin as he drinks. “Here, I made a list of antiques I found that we could sell. It’s not an inexhaustible supply, but it should keep a pop-up stocked through the summer.”

Looking over the piece of paper he gives me, I’m stumped by his illegible lettering. “You’d better read it to me.”

Wren squints through one eye, narrating his notes. Of the barrister bookcases in the barn, Wren recommends selling the ones made of walnut and keeping the quarter-sawn oak cases as fixtures for the store. He found a pie chest and a church pew down by the sheep pens and uncovered a set of Windsor chairs in the woodshed. In the workshop, there was a maple Quaker table being used as a tool bench and a Rookwood vase holding dried-out paintbrushes. “There are lots of other pieces, too, but they’re so jumbled together you can’t appreciate them.”

“You didn’t come across a puppet theater, did you? Aisha mentioned there used to be one.”

“The puppet theater!” One side of Wren’s mouth lifts in a smile. “I forgot all about that. Miss Cabot used to let me design sets for it.”

“Is that how you got into set design?”

“Well, my path to Broadway didn’t exactly run in a straight line, but yeah, maybe it planted a seed.” He sighs. “That was all so long ago. I mean, one day I was a confused kid from a small town, and the next I was a gay man in Manhattan at the start of the AIDS crisis. It’s hard to remember much from before those years, they were so intense.”

“That’s totally understandable,” I say, wondering how much of this pandemic people will forget in the future.

“Getting back to the furniture,” he says. “The question is where to set up shop.”

“Not in the barn?”

Wren shakes his head. “It’s too visually cluttered in there. I’m picturing a domestic space, of the era, of course, but more Restoration Hardware than hoedown.”

“I’m not using the living room for anything,” I say. “If I shut the door between the foyer and the dining room, it would be separate from the rest of the house. Go take a look if you want.”