Free Instructions for Love by June Shaw

minutes. How do all of you get used to this heat?”
    He gazed at her. “Some days are hotter than others.” He descended the stairs, taking them by twos. “Enjoy your nap. I’m going to work.”
    “I won’t sleep,” she said, but he had climbed into the truck and slammed the door. Dane drove back toward the fields. Erin made another stretch, watching his truck until it took the curve past the banana trees and disappeared from sight.
    Inside, the house felt empty, as if no one had lived in the rooms. Erin decided to peruse some of them, to see how her lively aunt lived, to see if she’d stopped living once she moved into this old large shell.
    How could anyone clean spider webs off the ceilings, all at least ten feet high, she wondered. On a small screened porch off the hall near the kitchen, she located the answer. In one corner stood the longest broom she had ever seen, its handle worn, its bristles frayed. She touched the rough handle and decided not to try to lift it to touch the porch ceiling. She’d probably fall down trying to balance it. Her petite aunt surely had not been the person who used this broom. A strong man must have done that.
    Long spider webs clung to this porch’s ceiling corners. No man had been coming in here lately to clean them out. The only things on the porch besides the broom were three ceramic planters, each filled with potting soil and brown shriveled flowers. The view outside offered nothing much, only a sign that flowerbeds had once grown there. Border trim marked off spaces now filled with scraggly bushes.
    “Aunt Tilly, what happened to you?” Erin asked. She stared out, recalling how her little aunt fluttered around her well-kept flowerbeds and shiny house. Had this temperate climate tempered her aunt’s spirit?
    Erin discovered still no other signs of what could have occurred to her once-lively elder when she studied what must be the office. Right off the short hall from the kitchen, that room held dark furnishing, including a pendulum clock and huge desk, the wine-colored leather chair in front of it turned at an angle, the seat indenture too large to have been her aunt’s. The area gave off the scent of a male, or maybe it only seemed that way.
    Erin sat in the chair. She looked over the desktop holding a computer, pens and scattered papers, making it appear the most used space in this house. She lifted the pen that had been set down beside a leather-bound ledger. Fingering that ledger, she imagined Dane sitting here writing in it. Maybe if she looked inside, she could learn why he held the impression that this plantation now belonged to him.
    The idea of reading other people’s personal papers seemed too much like cheating, and she discarded the idea. Her aunt had left her papers with whatever she’d wanted her to know. If Erin was to learn of her aunt’s other private matters, she would learn them from her aunt’s attorney or other family members.
    The banister behind the desk led the way up the stairwell. A sharp bend in the way lent shadows to the stairs that ran farther up into darkness. Only storage rooms were locked up there, Dane had told her. She wondered.
    Weariness sank in, making Erin give up her search. She spied a washer and drier through a partially-open door in a hall and reached the master bedroom, stretching sideways on the bed to close her eyes for just a few minutes.
    When they opened again, the lowered sunrays filtering through slats on the green louvered door told her she had slept quite awhile. Unusual for her. Back in Manhattan, she normally had trouble sleeping. So many sounds, so much activity, so much of it all in her head.
    She rose and stood beside the bed, listening.
    The central air conditioner droned. Chirping birds had to be resting now, taking respite from the heat on the wide porch. No footsteps sounded on boards that creaked. No evidence that Dane had returned.
    But he might have. The man, admittedly overseer of the place, could be