During those winter months Jack became a regular at the diner and Lydia soon caught him sneaking peeks at her. Not that she minded. At this point only a little bit of the fatigue of being Caretaker showed on his face. He was fairly decent looking, still had his hair, his back mostly straight and his chest only showing slight signs that someday it would cave in from all the stooping he had to do. Anyway, he didn’t let his hands roam along her backside like a lot of the men in the diner, and after three weeks of her trying to look shy and him pretending that he wasn’t openly staring at her, he asked her out and she accepted.

He took her to a nice restaurant two towns over in Hamilton. They both had lamb chops and he ordered a bottle of red wine and the waiter didn’t bother to check her driver’s license to see that she was two years under the legal drinking age. He didn’t talk much during dinner, mostly looked down at his hands or through the window at the snow falling outside. Around the time when they were eating parfait desserts and drinking coffee with Amaretto, he cleared his throat and asked whether she knew he was Caretaker of Lorne Field.

“Well, yes. I suppose everyone back home knows that.”

“Any idea what I do as Caretaker?”

She thought about it, shrugged. “I guess you take care of Lorne Field.”

He smiled at that. It was a mean-spirited smile confined mostly to his mouth; his eyes reflected something other than humor. She didn’t like it at all. “That’s one way of putting it,” he said. “You know much else about it?”

She shook her head.

“You know anything about the contract?”

Again she shook her head.

“My family’s been under contract for almost three hundred years now. That’s nine generations of Durkins. Contract calls for the Caretaker to live freely in the home at Lorne Meadow and to be paid eight thousand dollars as an honorarium each year.”