Theo entered the living room behind Annie and watched her gaze through the window, her open coat falling slightly off one shoulder.
She had not bothered with makeup, and resting in this living room from the past, she could have been a farm woman from the 1930s.
Her bold eyes and abundance of unruly hair didn’t conform to contemporary standards of manufactured beauty. She was simply a creature unto herself. He could imagine the makeover his sister and her fashion-forward friends would have ordered up if they had had the chance, chemically straightening Annie’s hair, fillers to plump her lips to deranged proportions, breast implants, and a little liposuction, even though he couldn’t imagine where. But the only thing with how Annie looked was nothing at all. Theo could not point out any fault. However, he noted the layer of sweat on her skin courtesy of the faulty cooling equipment. It was in the dead of summer, and the farmhouse’s HVAC system had broken down just before dawn. After he called the cooling company, he could only wait for a cooling professional. He had changed the air filter a fortnight before, so there was little he could do to improve the indoor air quality other than wait for cooling system service. Even with the heat, Annie looked quite at home. The cooling specialist arrived at noon. Theo also showed him the cooling system setup and left him to labor on it. When the cooling expert finished fixing the climate control system, he told Theo to look into the latest cooling technology because he would need to replace the entire component in a year or less. After the full HVAC maintenance, the air conditioner was finally up and running.