It was several hours before they got back on the road to Brett’s parents’ house. Both of them were mildly mellow from sampling more wine as they sat around and talked with the Ammermans, and for a while with Mike Fowler.

Fowler, a big sixtyish man with a full beard, proved to be one of the vineyard owners the Curlew Creek Winery bought from. It turned out there were several of them, most with only two or three acres of vines. Since the pruning and harvesting were done by hand, it was about all the field work any of them wanted to handle.

A few more things had been settled over wine and a late lunch Samantha served, but as the afternoon drew on, Brett and Meredith decided they’d better be getting back.

As soon as they were on the road, Brett glanced over at Meredith and said, “You know, that went better than it had any right to.”

“I think you’re right,” she agreed. “This ought to work out pretty well, and getting the rent on the house for that price was something of a surprise.”

The house, Mike said, had belonged to an elderly cousin, since deceased, and it had sat empty for a while. “It’s going to take some work to make it livable,” Brett said. “We’ll just have to find the time to do it.”

“God, yes. There must be about seventeen thousand dead flies laying all over the place.”

“They were a little thick, but better dead than live.”

“I agree, and the price is right, the stove and refrigerator seem to work, and Mike said the window air conditioners worked as far as he knew, so that’s all to the good. Look, I know we’ve got a few things to get done before we can come over here to stay. I’d sort of guessed not getting over here for three weeks or a month, but what would you say to coming over a little early so we can get the place cleaned up?”

“Sounds like a reasonable idea to me,” Brett agreed. “How soon is that?”

“Soon,” she shook her head. It’s kind of a pain living with my sister and her little brat. Besides, her boyfriend is a louse, and I can feel his eyes all over me every time I see him. If she weren’t around, I’d be afraid for my gold star. She sure knows how to pick ’em, my sister does.”

“It sounds like you’re talking the next few days,” he said as they turned off the narrow, winding road that ran down to the winery onto the good county road.

“It’s damn tempting. Maybe I could find something to do to help out Marty and Samantha while we’re waiting to get going on the productions.”

“I don’t have that kind of motivation, but I sure wouldn’t mind having an excuse to give a pass to 649 and the fiendish fifth graders of Salem Elementary,” Brett smiled. “What would you say if we spent a couple days at my folks place doing the research we need to firm up the playbill for the first part of the season for Marty and Samantha’s advertising and then set some limits on the second part? We can then go ahead and work on making the move. I wouldn’t be surprised if we can find things to do at the house and possibly the winery, and in the end we might be glad we went ahead and did it early.”

“I can’t say much more than ‘works for me,’ I think.”

“You think?”

“Brett, don’t get me wrong. I like you, and part of the reason I like you is that you respect me and my choices.”

“You mean to be a lesbian.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “I know that isn’t easy for you and there are times I make it even harder for you. I’ve tweaked you about it an awful lot in the past, and I’ll probably keep doing it in the future, just because that’s what I’m used to. I’m worried about what’s going to happen with us sharing the same house. I mean, well, you know.”

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “Think of us as The Odd Couple. We’d be sharing a house, not a bed. From my viewpoint, in some ways it’d be like sharing a house with another guy.”

“But in some ways it wouldn’t. Damn it, Brett, I’m worried that I could tweak you the wrong way and wind up doing something I really don’t want to do.”

“All I can say is that I don’t intend on doing anything if you don’t want to,” he said. “Look, I’ll be the first person to admit that I’ve gotten around a little bit with some other cast members of the more practical female persuasion, but they’ve wanted it about as bad as I did. I at least know you don’t. There have been lots of times I’ve wanted to, but have I ever made a serious hit on you?”

“Well, at least not after you knew me enough to know I wasn’t just laying a line on you about being a lesbian. But look. We’re going to be sharing the same house. What’s going to happen if I pick up a girl to bring home?”

“I’d have to put up with it,” he shrugged as he slowed to turn onto the main highway. “But what happens if I’m the one to pick up a girl? Are you just going to stand back and snark at us?”

“I’ll try not to,” she promised.

“What happens if we pick up the same girl?”

“That could get a little awkward,” she grinned. “I mean, especially for me. I mean, I can imagine us groping around in the dark and you finding the wrong girl, meaning me, and there goes my gold star.”

“‘Whoops’ wouldn’t quite cut it, would it?”

“I don’t think so,” she shook her head. He couldn’t tell how much she was pulling his leg, though he figured she had to be doing it to some degree. This had to be at least a little payback for all the cow jokes and manure jokes he’d laid on her in the morning. After all, waving her sexuality in his face, both from the feminine and the lesbian viewpoint, was one of her major ways of tweaking him, but by no means the only ones. The cow stuff had gotten him ahead for a while, but it wouldn’t always work, while her using sex to tease him in one way or another was ongoing. It was something he would have to learn to live with.

“Look, Brett,” she went on after a moment. “We’ll have to learn to cut each other some slack, both ways. I mean, look at the people in The Odd Couple. They had to learn how to cut each other some slack, too.”

“I suppose,” he said. “But it would help if you didn’t walk around the house wearing nothing but a pair of thong panties.”

“God, you want to take all the fun out of my life, don’t you?”

“At least that kind of fun. And, let’s face it, it’s not like we have to show a little restraint forever, just four months or so.”

“Maybe we’d better change the subject or you’re going to be slinging the cow manure jokes at me again.”

“No shit,” he grinned, realizing the multiple ways that statement could be taken.

“God, you just can’t help yourself, can you?

“Right at the moment, cow manure may be the only defense I have against you and your thong panties.”

“I usually don’t wear thong panties. They feel funny going up the crack of my ass. In that situation I usually just go commando.”

That line of teasing was going to get out of hand pretty fast, Brett thought. There was one good defense: “You know what they call a cow without legs, don’t you?”

“Oh, shit. What?”

“Ground beef.”

“That’s not that gross. Gross, but not as bad as it could have been.”

“You’re still a city girl, aren’t you? You’ve probably never seen the way farmers used to keep their cow loafing pens.”

“Knowing you, I’m afraid to ask.”

“Then let me be genteel about it and say there’s a reason that dairy farmers wear calf-high rubber boots, and it doesn’t have anything to do with fashion. God, some of those places used to be manure swamps.”

“Don’t describe it any more. Please!”

“Let’s just say that I never thought very much of those kinds of places myself, but they’re pretty much gone, and good riddance, too. Now, trying to change the subject to keep you from messing up the inside of the van, while the house is a mess, I don’t think it’s going to take rubber boots to hog all the dead flies out of there. A scoop shovel maybe, but we can probably avoid the boots.”

“How does an empty place that’s all closed up get that full of flies, anyway?”

“Beats me. Getting that many flies hanging around one of those old loafing pens I can understand, but it seems weird to have a house full of them even if it is two or three years’ worth of accumulation. Maybe there’s some way they could get in. I don’t know.”

“We just have to clean the place up and that’s that,” she sighed. “I’m not exactly the world’s greatest housekeeper. In fact, looking at your room I’d guess you’re a little closer to The Odd Couple neat freak of whichever sex of this arrangement.”

“I’m not that extreme but I like to keep things picked up.”

“I’ll try to not be a pest about it. Look, about furniture and that stuff. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to contribute much of anything. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but it is. I’m not sure I want to spend four months living out of a sleeping bag, either.”

“I don’t want to do it myself. I know there’s some stuff in the attic my folks would loan us for the summer, and maybe I can snoop around and find some others. I wouldn’t be surprised if Diane has something in the way of beds sitting around. I get the impression she’s the kind of person who accumulates that kind of stuff and is reluctant to throw it out.”

“Diane? Who’s that?”

“Samantha’s and my mutual friend. She put me together with the Ammermans,” he said. “I’m not trying to tweak you in saying this, but if the chance arises you might check out their dairy farm. It’s actually more of a milk factory. They handle about ten times the cows that Ed does.”

“It might be interesting to some people, but I already know more than I want to about dairy farming.”

“Sometimes I agree with you. After all, I got into theater because there aren’t many of them around dairy farms.”

“Yeah, that makes some sense,” she replied, understanding him perfectly. “I’m sure we all have things we have to do that we don’t like to do. And on that topic, there’s something else we have to work out, and it’s that I’m not going to be little Holly Housewife in the kitchen, either. I don’t like cooking and I’m not good at it.”

“I see that means we’ll be opening a lot of cans, since I’m not much of a cook either. We can try trading off, unless we want to just eat independently.”

“I suppose, but it would be a step up to be eating out of cans, rather than ramen noodles. I get enough of them as it is, and that’s living with my sister. I think that was part of the reason her ex was sniffing around elsewhere, so he could get a good meal once in a while.”

“It sounds like your sister is a piece of work,” Brett replied, thinking that while he knew Meredith pretty well in some senses of the word, he didn’t know much about her real life. From some of the things she’d said, it didn’t sound very happy. Maybe she was just the kind of person who came alive when they were around the theater, putting on an act. For that matter, just how much of her was an act and how much was the real person, anyway? It was a sobering thing to contemplate.

“Oh, she’s OK, it’s just that she and her little girl just about drive me batshit. It might be a little the other way, too. I think she’ll be just as happy to have me out of the apartment for a while as I will be to leave.” She shook her head and went on, “If we get too desperate we can see if there’s some little restaurant or diner somewhere.”

“There might be, but we’d have to look,” he replied. Apparently his peek at Meredith’s off-stage life was over. “Besides, while we didn’t talk about it with Marty and Samantha, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can glom some meals out of the kitchen on theater nights.”

“That would make up for canned stew and that kind of crap,” she said. “Hell, we might even be able to survive that way.”

“Oh, we’ll get along somehow, and with luck it won’t even come to ramen, or at least not often.”

“Missing it entirely would be just fine with me. I can eat canned soup and stuff like that.” She let out a sigh and continued, “Brett, thank you.”

“For what?”

“For including me in this deal. I think that we can make it work out pretty well. I’ll try to be a good girl and not piss people off, so long as I can work it out on you now and then.”

“So long as you can take it as well as give it out, I think I can make do.”

“OK, it’s going to have to be that way. Look, it’s going to make me feel good, knowing I really have a part in creating a production, rather than just acting out the lines. Even when I was doing drama in college, I never really felt that. It seemed like the important decisions had all been made by someone else before I ever got on the scene.”

“I’ve had big doses of the same feelings,” he agreed. “It’s a big reason why I’m excited about this and want it to do well. We’re at the stage right now where we’ve got the big decisions to make, the kind of things that will make or break the whole idea. I’m glad you agreed to stay with me at my folks’ house for a few days so we can work on this stuff.”

“I wish we could go over to the house we’ve just rented and get it all worked out. But as soon as we got inside we’d want to spend several days getting it cleaned up and then move in. We need to have the plays and maybe some of the talent worked out before we get into those hassles.”

“Tempting thought, isn’t it? But you’re right, and to top it off, I asked Marty about it and found out the Internet access is going to be crappy at best. There’s a wireless hookup, but it isn’t any faster than dial-up. Working out what plays we want to do is probably going to involve some serious on-line time.”

“I didn’t know that about the Internet,” she said. “I must have been talking to Samantha or something. You’re right, that would put a crimp in the next few days.” She sat thinking for a moment before she continued, “Brett, would it be a real big hassle to take me back to my car this afternoon?”

“Not really,” he shrugged. “It’ll be a couple extra hours driving to get you there, and that much more for me to get back home. It’s not quite as far if we go direct. Why do you want to do it? Your sister and her kid?”

“Well, there’s that, too. But I’m thinking that you have your play library and I have mine, and I’m sure I have stuff you don’t have. It won’t take me long to load up my stuff at my sister’s. I could drive back to your house, maybe tomorrow, and we’d have both libraries available.”

“When you put it that way, it’s far from the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. I’m sure the folks won’t mind if you stayed with us for a few days. We could get the worst of the planning phase worked out without too many distractions. I won’t do any subbing, either school or milking, so we can knuckle down on it.”

“Good, let’s do it that way. I know it’s going to mean a lot of driving for you but you could sleep in tomorrow to make up for it.”

“Fine with me,” he agreed. “Maybe in our spare time we could pull some stuff together we’ll need to make the house livable for the summer.”

“It makes sense, especially as a lot of it is going to have to come from your folks anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking we can borrow Dad’s pickup to get most of the furniture over there, which could work as a day trip. But, like I was saying, I think we need to get some of the decisions made before we deal with that.”

“Maybe we’d better talk about that, then. I haven’t had much time to think about it, but Barefoot in the Park might be a possibility. Six cast members, two of them bit parts, only one set.”

“It’s a possibility,” he shrugged. “I don’t know about the staging, though with your suggestion for setting up the room staging, it would be an issue to consider. On top of that, we’ve already got one Neil Simon, do we really want another one, at least this year? The way Marty and Samantha were talking toward the end, if it works it could turn into something semi-permanent. We could save it for another year.”

“Those are valid points, all of them. I don’t know about the staging either, but we could probably work it out. Tell you what. Let’s put it on the list for tentatively doing it late in the run, with the possibility of kicking it back a year.”

“Sounds good for now, at least until we can take a look at the script. It’s been a long time for me and I don’t remember very much about it, other than the fact it struck me as being a little dumb.”

“You might be right on that,” she agreed. “Have you thought any more about my doing Chocolate, Roses and Sex?”

“No, and I can’t without reading the script. You say it’s online, right? I could do a read while I’m waiting on you tomorrow. I’m still a little concerned about how a solo play would be received. I’ve given some thought to working up a solo thing myself, but I’ve never gotten into it.”

“Something I would know?”

“Not as a play, it doesn’t exist. I’ve often thought about Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain Tonight, trying to come up with something else like it that people could identify with. The heck of it is, the way he did it was mostly a re-creation of the presentations Twain actually did, so it was mostly a case of him interpreting Twain.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So who else could something like that be done about? Like, James Whitmore did the same thing with Harry Truman. Truman didn’t actually do the same kind of presentations, but Whitmore used things that Truman actually said in public or in books. The play was called Give ’Em Hell, Harry. Old Harry could be a pretty pithy character, so it was good material.”

“I get your idea,” she said. “You’re saying pick some other historical character. Have you got someone in mind?”

“Well, yeah. Henry David Thoreau. I would have to guess that he’s the most recognizable American today whose time fame dates from the 1840s. Again, he never actually gave speeches or performances, but he wrote a hell of a lot, and some of it was pretty memorable. I’ve read a lot of his stuff. There was even a play done about him years ago, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.”

“So you’re thinking you might want to do a one-man show about him?”

“Yeah. The fly in the whole deal is that he wrote a ton of stuff, so boiling it down to a play and figuring out how to do it is a bigger job than we could do in the time available. It’s not something I’d want to try to throw together overnight. It could take months. But I can’t help but think it would be neat to own a role the way Holbrook owned Mark Twain Tonight. I even sort of look like him a little, or at least I would if I grew a longish beard.”

“Maybe you ought to think about it. Wouldn’t it be neat to do two one-person shows back to back?”

“It’d hold down on the budget for talent, that’s for sure,” he grinned. “Marty would like that.”

“How about if we take a look at The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail?”

“It’s a possibility,” he conceded. “I remember Samantha saying she wanted to do at least something a little intellectual, and that one would definitely qualify. And it strikes me that it’s only like two or three characters, but I’m not sure about that.”

“Maybe we ought to start a list of things we need to look up.”

“You’ll have to make the list,” he said. “I’m driving, but there’s a notepad in the glove compartment.”

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