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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
Davin sits at his desk in his office, the big room on the second floor he had made by opening up the common wall of two smaller rooms, and his desk fills an outside corner with Gwen’s own desk running perpendicularly to his along the front face of the house, except that the desk isn’t hers anymore. He has metastasized the space, and this veneered door blank sitting on top of two-drawer filing cabinets now holds his old monochrome laser printer and what seems like ever-growing piles of papers, periodicals, and folders.
He likes the office, with its generous amount of work surface and the nice light from the south- and west-facing windows.
He really likes the office, except, of course, when his feeling about this space is less than positive, and, at the moment, matching his dour mood. Gwen had mostly only used her laptop, and later, mostly just her phone, and was less and less at her desk. The office doesn’t trigger her absence particularly, at least not nearly as much as their bed—his bed, now—and the empty side on which he still doesn’t sleep.
He’s in the middle of reviewing South County Interactive ad reports, cross-referencing the ad-to-sale ratios and checking subtotals to be sure his first real payout is what Alicia figures. He has learned the hard way over the years it’s always best to double check, as much as he has to push himself to take the time to do it.
With age comes wisdom, he thinks, even while wondering if it’s especially true.
Part of him keeps thinking about swapping the old recliner in the back corner of the office for a smaller armchair in the living room, which would then make room for an extra side table, but he recognizes the delay tactic. He has come to know his frequent thoughts about changing, adding to, and otherwise manipulating the space and structure around him are a kind of daydreaming in which he engages, a kind of reverie, and there’s comfort he draws from such thoughts, but he suspects there’s something unseemly, unhealthy, in such thoughts too.
Mental masturbation through redecoration.
Christ, he tells himself at this thought. He’s not feeling particularly depressed, but he knows he’s not always the first to notice.
He glances out the window behind the left corner of his desk, then stands to better look out. It’s a nice sunny day, a bit warm for the time of year, and unusually humid. The adolescent leaves of the second-growth northern cherry trees are bouncing in the breeze, and he thinks it’s another good day for some garden work. But he’s looking over the South County Interactive ad revenue reports for the last couple of months, checking them against the amount on the first check he’d just received from Alicia.
He has no real confidence he’ll ever make much money with this work, especially relative to the long hours he’s already put into the project, and especially considering he’ll likely not leverage this work into other similar work. After all, he’d been intentionally winding down his professional efforts, when, before the South County Interactive assignment, he’d been working mostly as a freelance analyst, researching electronic publishing business processes and technologies for a boutique consulting firm. He had produced white papers, webinars, case studies, and reports, and on occasion, had been hired out for some hands-on project consulting.
More than I wanted to do, he thinks.
Less than I should have done, he considers.
He had worked for this small consulting company before his exodus from the city, and for a while he had mixed the Housatonic house renovation work with more such professional work, but that work had grown less frequent. All for the best, he had thought at the time. After all, he had made the move to Berkshire County to build a studio and concentrate on his art, and the disappointment he’s felt in his last few professional projects seemed just another sign to stay the course, confirmation his interest in such professional work was over and done with.
And who could have possibly known it’s hard to make money making art? he jokes for the hundredth or thousandth time.
And yet here he is, working with South County Interactive. Somehow though, this work feels different, and he would have to guess it has something to do with it being local and something that could contribute to the community whereas the bulk of his previous work involved large corporations and publishing segments that held little personal interest for him. He had long ago also noticed the better a job might pay seemed to correlate with his not liking the assignment, so he’s pretty sure he’ll be liking the SCI work for quite a while.
And Alicia has been talking to him about writing pieces for SCI, which, he admits, makes him feel good, at least if he ignores a species of dread when imagining he’s back in the writing business.
He starts pacing around his office. When he draws back near the window he can see the retaining wall structure that holds back the cut of the driveway and thinks yet again about the unexpected cost of making the back property accessible. The cost was largely caused by the steep slope the house was long ago built into, and the driveway problem turned out to be a $40,000 solution to get drivable access to the upper yard, but the parking area up top is an essential requirement for the first-floor apartment rentable to Airbnb guests, and now, for the two paying additions to the household.
Well, one, so far, he reminds himself, wondering yet again if Chaplin will work out in the long run. Chaplin, the first of the house sharers, is a young twenty-four years of age but seems an okay fellow, even though cash availability seems tight, which has Davin wondering if he should talk to him about some sort of regular property work schedule since the kid seems pretty competent, according to the construction work references he’d given.
But the main thing he notes as he looks at the retaining wall and the part of the driveway he can see from his office window is, I’m a fucking idiot. Considering how much had been spent on the property to date, this is not an infrequent refrain.
And then he’s back at his desk and retakes his chair, getting back to the reports from South County Interactive. “Fuck you, I’m not an idiot,” he says out loud as he brings up an Excel spreadsheet with the latest tracking of ad buys.
The numbers look stronger and stronger the more he looks at them.
Davin knows businesses that advertise with SCI like to see if the money they’re spending on their ads has demonstrable and positive results. The design of the backend operation of the SCI content management system he’d spec’ed has expanded tracking routines, so he can easily illustrate ad spending successes. If all goes as planned, South County Interactive should be selling more ads to current and new clients alike, which will mean he’ll get a bigger percentage for new or expanded business the online publication pulls in.
And with the Airbnb, once the season starts, there’s more income, although he hasn’t yet selected a contractor for the repair of water damage in the apartment, so the season won’t start all that soon for him this year. But having finally agreed on another boarder—Well, house share, as he always corrects himself—then maybe, just maybe, the ends will meet.
He gets back to work, building a presentation of the data that will interpret the results of the report. This kind of presentation has its challenges, but the data looks good, especially if no one thinks to challenge one or two key assumptions.
Like the assumption that $10,000 should be plenty to improve access to this property, he hears himself think, before telling himself to focus.
He clicks on a PowerPoint template and pulls it over to the second monitor in front of him.
And somewhere behind his sudden sigh he wonders when he’s ever going to get back to the studio.