Free Ransom Canyon by Jodi Thomas Page B

all, but Mr. Paris didn’t need to know that. Being late because he was talking to a girl didn’t compute in the old guy’s world.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Yancy
    Y ANCY G REY HAD worked ten days straight at the Evening Shadows Retirement Community and loved every minute. The first few evenings he’d cleaned out an old office that stood apart from the rest of the bungalows. The front of the building was lined with dirty windows with a long counter separating the lobby area from the back storage and living quarters. A tiny, windowless bedroom and bath ran across part of the back. The living quarters were barely wide enough to fit a full bed, but it was bigger than his cell had been.
    Originally, in the ’50s, this place had been a motel, boasting that every cabin had a kitchen, bath and sun porch. Eventually, the sun porches had been enclosed to make living rooms, and the bungalows had been rented by the month. Oil field workers and seasonal farmhands had taken over the place, but the owner had never bothered repairing any of the buildings. Finally, he’d let them sell to pay his back taxes.
    Cap had told him the school board bought them in the ’90s, planning to offer discount housing to new teachers for the first two years in the county school system. That had only lasted a short time before retiring teachers asked to buy them.
    Yancy hadn’t figured out why only teachers wanted to live in the place, but he didn’t really care. All he knew was he had a great find. All eight of the residents, except maybe Miss Bees who lived in the first unit, seemed to like him. Old lady Bees didn’t like anyone. She sometimes came out to sit with the group, but, if she talked, she only complained. She went to church on Sunday and played bingo over in Westland on Wednesday nights, but she didn’t talk to Yancy.
    Mr. Halls told him that she thought every stranger was probably a criminal. Yancy figured she might have a few more marbles than the others. He’d be smart to stay out of her way. He had Cap ask her what color she wanted her door and wasn’t surprised she chose white. Only interesting thing about Miss Bees seemed to be her nickname, Bunny.
    Yancy, with the advice of everyone except Miss Bees, had painted his one-room-and-bath behind the office. He’d used leftover paint from the porches, so every wall was a different color, but he didn’t care. He’d spent too many years without color. He’d bought a used mattress and frame from the secondhand store a block away and a desk he could also use as his one table. The owner agreed to let him pay the furniture out at twenty-five dollars a week.
    He’d turned what had been the front office into a sunny sitting room. That way, on cold days the old folks could sit in the long row of sunshine and watch their former students go by. The men would drink coffee while the women knitted or worked puzzles. Then, just for fun they’d argue politics. Cap, Leo and Mrs. Kirkland kept up with what was going on, but Mr. Halls only heard half of any news, and Mrs. Butterfield kept forgetting who was president.
    About three in the afternoon they’d all wander back to their little cottages for naps.
    Yancy started lists on the office wall. The first was things that needed fixing fast, like Miss Bee’s roof and Mr. Halls’s porch. The second list was for repairs that he could get to when he had time, like Mrs. Ollie’s sink that had been dripping for six months and Mrs. Kirkland’s broken window in the back. She’d covered it up with colored paper so her grandson wouldn’t notice.
    “If he sees it, Staten will only ask questions, and I’m not in the mood to tell him the truth,” she’d said one morning.
    As soon as she’d left, all the men stayed behind, trying to guess what she’d been doing to break a window higher than her head. Leo had explained that during World War II, he’d seen a female member of the French underground who could kick higher than six feet and knock a man out cold.