Short Fiction: What You Might Call a Veranda

I.

“We need a lanai,” Freya’s teenage daughter Rakel says one night at dinner. They are eating at a table jammed into the kitchen, as there is no formal dining room or breakfast nook in the two-bedroom house on the tiny lot.

The kitchen table serves as Freya’s home office, cleared before dinner each evening of her work laptop, order books and customer files, pens, markers and colorful Post-it notes, the day’s commerce replaced by two orange-and-white gingham placemats, from what Rakel lovingly calls her mom’s “Early Dreamsicle” collection.

“What was that, Sweetie?” Freya is thinking about something she’s forgotten to tell a casino client about a back-order of hand sanitizer, 200 cases of it she’s tracked down for them.

“We need a lanai, you know, a covered patio, so we can eat outside when it’s nice weather like this,” Rakel says, taking a bite of the healthy rosemary-herb planked salmon her mother insists on buying. They are watching their figures, doing without bread or pasta or Rakel’s favorite, garlic mashed potatoes.

Freya grew up twenty-five miles away in Oroville. They moved to the house in Coyote Hole when Rakel was seven years old, to leave a verbally abusive husband, who happened to be a sheriff’s deputy.

“I’m not sure,” Freya says. “A deck like that is going to cost fifteen or twenty grand easily, with the treated lumber, if you could even get someone to come out here to build it.”

“I was thinking we would be the ones building it,” Rakel says. The back of that house is weeds and shrubs, ugly as sin, but the view from there into the old growth forest behind them is peaceful and soothing.

“When twenty grand lands in your lap, come talk to me,” Freya says, sipping on the lime-flavored bubbly water they are almost out of.

“I want one, and so do you, but you just don’t know it yet,” Rakel insists.

II.
Freya has been married seven times, a record for Coyote Hole.

“Something’s wrong with my picker,” Freya says, upon reflection, “so don’t judge.”

She has a vanity plate on her truck: “7SOFAR.” Freya will also point out, once she gets to know someone, that she has been married twice to one of her exes, so six is the real number.

“It’s a full-time job remembering their names and in the right order,” she adds. “I feel like I’m in The Sound of Music.”

People in the area recognize her as the HVAC lady, from the television commercials thirty years ago. Mack, her second husband, not Rakel’s dad, owned an installation and repair company, with a fleet of cherry-red trucks.

Freya was the heavily made-up, curvy gal who faced the camera semi-seductively, and repeated the silly slogan from the truck doors and the highway billboards, “Trust Ol’ Mack with your H-VAC.”

She was in her early twenties and a blonde back then. “Ol’” Mack was not even thirty. That corny commercial is why she has those tight-fitting, low-neck tops taking up room in her closet that she never wears anymore.

Freya is resourceful, by nature and out of necessity. She pays to have her nails and her taxes done. Everything else is D.I.Y.

She changes the brake fluid on her truck, so, why not build a deck? It will make Rakel happy.

She walks out back at dusk to look at the set-up. It’s a level grade. She can add a canvas awning off the eaves, which would cut down on the sun. She can take out the shrubs next to the house. There will be less grass to mow.

III.

Coyote Hole is not a town, but a census-designated place in the Sierra foothills, population 761. No coyotes were holed up here. In gold mining, a coyote hole refers to a shallow excavation, something you dig quickly to figure out if a claim is needed.

Coyote Hole is not completely remote, although it can feel that way. There’s a Dollar General, a family-owned motel and a small airstrip for the summer home people who fly in and out.

The nearest gas station is twenty-four miles down the hill at the state highway, and the closest shopping mall and Cheesecake Factory is 70 miles away. A trip to Sephora and Ross for Less takes up most of a Saturday.

Freya and Rakel live in what they have been calling the “suburbs” of Coyote Hole, on the straightaway that comes after two turns in the paved road once you pass the Rocker Box store. Rocker box is also a gold mining term, why people came out here in the first place.

IV.
“Keep an eye out for plywood,” Freya tells Rakel, as she drives her to school. Because of the pandemic, there’s a lumber shortage and the price of treated wood has skyrocketed, just like the cost of chicken breast at the grocery store.

“Is C-grade okay?” Rakel asks, definitely her mother’s daughter.

Some kids accumulate beanie babies, hundreds of them, at a cost to the parents of $5 each. Rakel started collecting hotel “Do Not Disturb” signs for free, when she was seven. Going out of town? Going to Palm Springs? Can you bring me back your hotel room Do Not Disturb sign?

Rakel had over 2,000 placards, from 43 countries, organized in plastic crates, out in the storage shed, next to the chicken coop. The Guinness world record at that time was 11,000 Do Not Disturb signs, collected by some guy in Switzerland named Jean-Francois. Rakel planned to meet him one day, while touring Europe, staying in hotels and expanding her collection.

V.

Freya is driving past a produce warehouse one afternoon, when it comes to her, the solution to the lanai problem: wooden pallets.

She tracked down Russell, another ex, the one she married twice, the one she would marry again if it came to that. Russell was a good dad to Rakel, a good partner for Freya, but Russell was way too close with his first wife, and the three kids from that marriage.

Russell works in the dried fruit business north of Marysville, dried raisins, prunes and apricots and nowadays, dried mango. Russell is married to a very young eyebrow aesthetician named Sonya and they have two toddlers, living in a new tract home down in Plumas Lake. There are kid toys scattered across the backyard and the living room, snack food is out on the counters, and breakfast dishes stacked in the sink, as Russell works on raising his third family.

Freya and Russell go out to lunch, then check into a motel for the afternoon. Freya drives away from their two-hour reunion with a smile and a commitment for the delivery of thirty 48” x 40” wooden pallets to her house in two weeks.

“We’re getting there, Sweetie,” Freya tells Rakel, later that afternoon at school pick-up, “keep your eyes peeled for carpet.”

They are driving east along the highway below the levee, 45 minutes from home.

“Dad has extra carpet,” Rakel says, “at the rental house.”

“Can you ask him about it?” Freya asks, not willing to go to the lengths she did with Russell to land the wooden pallets.

At an estate sale in Penn Valley, she scores two water-damaged boxes of framing nails for $25, with a box of carpet staples thrown in.

“It’s for my daughter’s lanai,” Freya tells the auctioneer, drawing on her “Trust Mack with your H-VAC” charm. “Ever since she was a little girl, she’s been asking for a lanai, or what you might call a veranda out here.”

VI.

The donated Berber scraps are meant to be indoor carpet, but Freya doesn’t care. The back deck will be covered by the canopy and will mostly stay dry from April to November. The box of

Berber carpet pieces from Rakel’s dad’s rental house are factory seconds, with some minor stains and tears; the migrant worker tenants don’t notice those flaws and they’ll be damaged soon enough anyway.

It’s not up to code, but Freya and Rakel build the lanai along the back of the house in one weekend, using the wooden shipping pallets stacked six-high, anchored into the ground and lashed together with steel cables.

They hand-nail sections of plywood to the top layer of the pallets to create the decking. After that, they staple the misshaped strips of Berber carpet to the plywood, which happens to be B-grade, courtesy of a second lunch and hook-up with Russell, when his wife Sonya was at a Microblading seminar in Vallejo.

A stairway is secured on the side using a low step ladder with railings.

The canvas awning goes up a month later, behind schedule but ahead of the winter rains. They put a metal dining table and chairs on the lanai, covering the table with a Halloween-themed solid orange tablecloth from Ross that matches the Dreamsicle placemats.

There’s even room enough for a chaise lounge and a dorm fridge, and white holiday lights strung along the eaves.

Freya (meaning “noble woman” in Old Norse) is happy about the project, and happy that Rakel is happy about what they’ve accomplished.

With a decent space heater, they can eat breakfast out there, and dinner outside almost year-round.

Rakel has started to take over some of the cooking, and recently mastered an entire meal in the Dutch oven. Having the lanai in back means Freya can keep on working on client orders at the kitchen table, and she won’t have to stop and clear anything to make room for the placemats.

What You Might Call a Veranda will appear in early 2024 in The Avocado Wars: Stories, Jon Obermeyer’s fifth short story collection.