Free Road to Thunder Hill by Connie Barnes Rose Page B

I wait until my feet get used to the temperature before I lower the rest of me into the tub. I’d rather feel like an ice-cube slowly melting than a lobster in a pot.
    If it was summer, a bath would be a whole other story. On really hot days I often climb the path behind my house up Thunder Hill through raspberry brambles scratching at my legs and cobwebs draping my arms like silk. By the time I make it to Bear’s cabin I’ve worked up quite a sweat, and then I have to scramble even higher to the enamel tub perched on a rocky ledge.
    Bear has figured out a way to divert a spring so that it flows into the tub. As soon as the water fills the tub, he re-diverts the spring and the sun warms it up. Warms it up to just above heart stopping cold, that is. I’m the only person I know who’d work up a sweat just to cool off in that tub when everyone else is making for the beach. But that’s because the tub is one of Bear’s coolest creations and if I didn’t use it he’d neglect it and it might fade into the landscape.
    If Bear isn’t home, I go straight to where I hang my towel and clothes on a branch and grab the bio-degradable shampoo Bear makes me use. The tub is long enough to float in so I do, staring through the trees to the clouds, feeling like there’s nowhere else on earth I’d rather be. The spring water on my skin feels way softer than well water.
    Sometimes, if Bear happens to be home, I’ll first share a toke with him before confiscating his binoculars. I do this partly because he’s a guy but mostly for the view to be had from the tub. Farms and fields stretch toward summer cottages strung along the red shoreline. I can’t see my own house from here, but the Four Reasons is in plain sight and sometimes I can tell who has stopped there for gas. Further up the coast, where Thunder Hill Road turns sharply toward town, Kyle House stands nestled under two giant elms. I can practically scope out the county and if I look down to Bear’s cabin and he happens to be working on his deck or yard, then I take a peek at him too. No beer belly yet on that boy.
    Funny where the mind drifts, I’m thinking, home in my own bathtub, surrounded by the sight of blackened grout and cracked tiles. This bathroom needs fixing, but I’ve resisted my mother’s offer to pay for it. Because then I’d need to get someone in to do the work and she’d start asking questions about why Ray can’t do it on one of his weekends home and I don’t want her to think he has left me again. And besides the bathroom’s not so bad if I keep my eyes closed.
    Lately, the idea of a hot bath is the only thing that keeps me going after a day of standing on the cold cement floor of the factory. No matter how many sweaters I wear, the chill stays even after I blast up the heat in the car on the drive home. But once I’m in my bath my mind can drift to the hottest places. For years, the big crush I had on Kelly, my boss, was enough to keep me warm. But then one day Kelly came really close to my ear and asked me to stay after work. I wondered if I’d finally get to act on the fantasies I’d had about him. Like the one where he looks over his glasses and asks me to lock his office door. Without another thought everything on his desk goes flying off, including the picture of his wife, Jilly, and his children, and then we’re both crashing and banging away on his desk or else I’m bent over the same desk staring at the picture of Jilly and the children while he’s busy filling me up from behind. I’ve often wondered about women who fuck their bosses. I suppose nothing ever works the same between them after that.
    Alana didn’t know about my fantasies, but she sure knew about the crush. She thought it was healthy. “Look,” she said. “First, you invest enough into it to keep your imagination alive when you’re having the same old, same