The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay by Kelly Harms Page A

house I’m looking for. It is imposing, dark, and hyper-masculine. Ugly, even. The side facing the road is peeling brown wood slats and garages, no windows, and it seems to be only one story, maybe one and a half. The road has risen a bit, so this house must be set into the hill, with some kind of spectacular lake face that only the people who really matter get to see. I suppose it makes sense, but still, pulling up to this home after seeing one beautiful well-loved property after another is a bit disorienting. There is no cute wooden sign, no landscape lighting, just a low red-fire number that catches my headlights at the last second. This is it. I turn in to the long, barely plowed and certainly unpaved driveway, and pray for traction.
    I get up the driveway by staying in well-worn tracks, and park in front of the garage, but I do not get out. It’s hard, from my car, to tell even where the front door is. To the left I finally discover an awning and a small shoveled pathway in the snow. I pull my bomber hat down low around my ears against the windy chill, and tromp through new fallen snow to a nondescript door, and think, Does someone actually live here? The closer I stand to the house the scarier it seems. The wood siding is rotting in a couple of places, patched up with aluminum in others. There are icicles everywhere, including in the doorframe. There is plywood nailed over the window of the door.
    Should I knock? Or should I turn around and go home?
    I knock.
    â€œSorry for the mess,” Ben Hutchinson says even as he opens the door and gestures inside. I step in right away—I’m so cold, I forget my manners—and take everything in. Ben, tall, blondish, striking in his now-untucked flannel and worn denim. As hyper-masculine as the house. But with a much nicer facade. And then the house. Egad, the house.
    This is no million-dollar house with a beautiful lake face to offset the modest approach. The land might be worth something, but the house itself is a dump. As ugly as it looked from the outside, it is worse inside. Half of what I see is just walls stripped to the studs and then draped in plastic sheeting. The other half is a Formica and wood-paneled 1970s nightmare. Behind Ben I can see through the framing all the way to a back bedroom, and I can tell it’s a bedroom only because it has a mattress on the floor.
    â€œLet me take your coat,” he says. I hand it over a bit warily. Does this place have heat? Then I bend down to slip out of my boots, but Ben shakes his head. “You’ll want to keep your shoes on.” Never has a sartorial advisement seemed so ominous.
    The livable bits of the house seem to be concentrated toward the lake side, and that’s the direction Ben leads me. There the walls have drywall at least, but no paint, no molding, no nothing. Measurements or diagrams are written on every wall in thick contractor’s pencil. I also see a shopping list written on a wall near a table, unless “bagels, milk, cream cheese” is a secret builder’s code. Near a counter that might once have been a breakfast bar, there’s a doodle of a maze. Stuck to an exposed stud I see some Christmas cards, pushed in with thumbtacks. So that’s the décor.
    And then there is the furniture. Well, furniture is sort of an overstatement. In the main room of the house there’s a card table, an old one with a drooping middle, with three folding chairs around it. There’s a vile-looking black leather sofa that I pray I won’t be expected to sit on, and propped up on a wooden fruit crate, a large flatscreen TV and various blinking video devices.
    And that’s it. Mattress, couch, card table, TV. My riches-to-rags hypothesis about Ben is confirmed. I find myself feeling strangely relieved.
    I do smell something rich and warm cooking in the kitchen, and hear lovely music playing, something acoustic and rhythmic and maybe Brazilian, but beyond those touches