Where she’d seen a playground for our child, I’d seen something else: a potentially deadly landmine. A creek? Running water? What had I been thinking of, building a house where we wanted to raise a family so close to a body of water I couldn’t put a gate around or a cover on? Sure, it might not have run much deeper than knee level at its deepest, but a child could drown in mere inches of water. I’d heard a story like that on the news. I couldn’t build our house ten yards back from a threat like that creek. A toddler could climb out of his or her bed at night, sneak through a front door to go splash around in the water, and drown when they slipped on a rock and knocked themselves unconscious. What had I been thinking?
I didn’t tell Rowen the reason I’d insisted we move the house farther back from the creek—a mere four hundred yards—but I guessed she knew I had reasons other than not wanting the skunks and marmots and other animals that would head to the creek for a drink to make a home beneath our front porch or inside of our shed. She let me have my paranoia when it came to keeping her and the baby safe, and I figured she was so calm because she assumed it would pass after she’d safely delivered the baby and both she and it were okay. I hoped that too.
But I couldn’t be sure. How could a person be less paranoid when it came to taking precautions with the people they cared for most in the world? How did someone mitigate their risks when it came to their family? How did a father “let go” when it came to things like handing over the car keys to his sixteen-year-old? I didn’t know. But I hoped I’d learn.
The “road” leading to our house was more of an I-think-this-is-the-way kind of trail that had become more pronounced over the past couple of months with the regular traffic between Garth’s, mine, and my dad’s trucks. The soil wasn’t too rocky, so the drive wasn’t too bumpy, which Rowen would appreciate after bouncing down so many back roads she said her teeth chattered permanently now.
Garth must have just beaten me to the site because he was jumping out of his truck when it came into view. The house wouldn’t be a particularly large or fancy—a one-floor rancher with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a dining room big enough to hold all of our friends and family relatively comfortably at Thanksgiving or insert other holiday dinner here. Coming in at just under two thousand square feet and designed with the ideal balance of economical and quality, I couldn’t help but feel like I was looking at one of those sprawling mansions overlooking Lake Washington in Seattle. Nothing more than the foundation and framework was complete, but an overwhelming sense of pride took me over every time I drove up to it. This was where my family would live. This was where my kids would grow up. This was where I would spend winter nights curled up beneath a pile of blankets with my wife and summer ones running ice-cold glasses of lemonade across each other’s foreheads while rocking on the porch swing.
This was home.
It was a good feeling. The home I’d known as a boy had stopped feeling quite so home-like when Rowen and I got married, as I supposed it would for anyone leaving the family they grew up with to join the family they would grow old with. The apartment and then the condo in Seattle had never really felt like home, at least not unless Rowen and I were together. I’d spent nights in one-and-a-half star hotels when we’d traveled to watch Black rodeo a few times, and even in those, when I’d wind my body around her in bed, I was home.
This place though, it already felt like home, even when it was just me out here, pounding countless nails into countless two-by-fours. Or even when an old friend was waving his middle finger instead of the rest of his hand as I pulled up beside his truck.
“Nice of you to show up, Jess!” he hollered before I’d turned off Old Bessie’s engine. “It’s not like I’ve got important things to do with my time or anything!”
Snagging my tool belt from the passenger seat, I threw open my door and crawled out. “You showed up a whole minute before I did. Sorry to keep you waiting for sixty seconds. I didn’t realize how precious time was to the man who could waste entire weekends drinking cheap whiskey in a busted lawn chair.”
Garth finished cinching his tool belt before grabbing a couple of yellow paper bags from his truck, followed by a cardboard tray holding two massive Styrofoam cups with the familiar QuikStop Drive-Thru logo stamped on them. “Those are the old days, Jess, the days of the past. I take my time much more seriously now.”
“Good to know.” When I cinched my own tool belt into place, I found it hung too far down on my hips. Frowning, I had to move it down two additional notches to get it to fit properly.
“I mean, do you know what I could do with sixty seconds?” he continued, traipsing over to the porch.
“Count to ten?” I smiled at the ground when a French fry flew my way and slapped me in the chest.
“Be in and out of the arena, earning another championship buckle, polish the chrome door handles on my sweet ass truck, polish something else—”
“You’re talking about silverware, right? Because I’ve told you before, and I don’t want to tell you again, that I’m uncomfortable having conversations with you circling around polishing and human anatomy. Take that up with Josie. She’s the one who said yes to spending the rest of her life with you. The rest of us are more contingent on your behavior.”
“Good to know I’ve got good friends,” Garth jeered as he sat on the edge of the porch before shaking the yellow paper bags at me. “Especially when I ordered the Family Round-Up combo at your favorite burger joint in town.”
“Other than the M-word burger joint, and I use the word burger in the loosest is-this-really-meat? sense, QuikStop is the only burger joint in town.” I could smell the grease from here, and it made my stomach growl. That ham and cheese sandwich must have been like nudging a hibernating bear. Now that it was waking up, it was ravenous and intent upon eating everything in sight.
“Do you want a Whoopie burger and double fry or not?” Garth waved one of the giant burgers wrapped in yellow paper. Grease had already seeped a wide ring around the paper, and the special sauce was oozing out of the corners. “Because I ordered you five. Three for now, two for a snack later, along with a few orders of fries and a colossal-sized summer strawberry milkshake.” Garth tapped one of the true-to-size Styrofoam cups, glaring at the one leaking a few rivers of pink cream down the side. “Do you know how it feels rolling up to a drive-thru window in my badass truck, with my badass name, and order a summer strawberry shake? I mean, dammit, Jess, I’ve got a reputation to uphold.”
I made sure the volume on my phone was as high up as it would go so I wouldn’t miss a call from Rowen and shoved it deep into my back pocket. “I didn’t ask you to order me a summer strawberry milkshake, or enough grease and sodium to give a dozen men cardiac arrest, so don’t take your reputation-upholding issues out on me.”
Garth aimed a tight smile in my direction before tossing one of the yellow bags at me. I caught it. Barely. “Yeah, yeah. Enough with the chatter. Eat already before you wake up next week and discover there’re no more notches to go down on that tool belt.”
Ah, now I got why he’d gone all gluttonous at the QuikStop. “Why is everyone so concerned with trying to fatten me up?”
When I opened the bag, I found he really had ordered me five burgers. The fries weren’t inside, but that was only because there wasn’t any room to fit anything else. Two and a half pounds of beef, paired with just as much weight in toppings and buns, could really fill a drive-thru bag.
“Because you’re size Manorexic.” Garth waved a French fry at me before popping it into his mouth. “I mean, Christ, I can practically count your ribs through that shirt of yours.”
I knew better, but I still glanced down to check. I was in my standard white tee, same brand and size as I’d worn for the past five years, but now that I was actually paying attention, it did seem a bit looser. It didn’t quite pull around the chest like it had, and more material floated above my belt than ever had before. I hadn’t been on a scale in over a year, since my last p
hysical, but I guessed I’d lost some weight. “So I’ve lost a few L.B.s—big deal. I’d like to see how you fare when Josie is carrying you two’s first child.”
Garth was in the middle of peeling his wrapper back from his burger. He stopped long enough to give me a look that led me to believe he thought I was mental. “A few pounds? Yeah, right. And I’ve got a shot at entering through Heaven’s Gates when I kick the bucket.”
I kicked the toe of his boot before settling down on the porch beside him and reaching into the fry bag. They were still warm. Starting to get a little soggy from the grease they were swimming in, but still warm and wonderfully salty. I felt the granules rolling between the pads of my fingers. “Fine. So you’re on the Fatten Jesse Up bandwagon now too. I guess you’re in good company since it seems like everyone in my life is doing the same thing.” I tossed a few fries into my mouth and found they were every bit as good soggy as they were fresh from the fryer. At that point, my stomach wasn’t discerning about texture so long as the grease and salt packed a punch.
“Hey, I’m not trying to fatten you up,” Garth said around a mouthful of burger. “I’m trying to keep you from becoming a skeleton with skin.”
I washed down another handful of fries with a drink of milkshake. They were the old-fashioned kind, made with real ice cream, so a person felt like they would pass out from trying to get the first bit of milkshake up the straw and into their mouth. Somehow, all of the effort made the shake taste that much better.
“You know, I’ve always been more of a fan of silence when I eat. How about you?” I unwrapped one of my five burgers while Garth tore into the rest of his.
“I’ll shut up if you eat, how ‘bout that?” he said before going to work on his own colossal milkshake.
I didn’t hide my smirk when I noticed the pink liquid dotted with red flecks of strawberry finally making its way up his straw. “What about that pristine reputation of yours?”
Garth shot me a glare but kept working at his shake. “Summer strawberry is the shit,” he said around his straw. “Shut up and eat already, Skelator.”
IT WAS A good thing I’d forced myself to down all of one burger, most of an order of fries, and half of that milkshake. After the day Garth and I’d spent raising the roof, literally, I needed all of the energy I had. I’d spent plenty of hard days doing manual labor, but today’s checklist had me wishing I kept a bottle of pain relievers in my truck. I’d have been reaching for it right about now.
Like me, Garth was trying to disguise the fact that we were so bushed we would have been content to crawl into the beds of our trucks and fall asleep. However, the day wasn’t done. Working on the roof had taken a couple more hours than expected, but Garth didn’t know how to quit a job that wasn’t complete any better than I did. So we stayed and finished what we’d started. We each downed another burger and what was left of the cold fries on the porch before packing up and heading for Garth’s place.
He told me to head home and get some sleep—that his washer and dryer could wait until tomorrow—but I couldn’t do that. He’d busted his ass for the past ten hours with me at my place; I could give him an hour of my time.
From Rowen’s and my place, Garth and Josie’s was only about a thirty-minute drive. But barely ten minutes into the drive, I felt my eyes burning with exhaustion right before my eyelids seemed to grow a mind of their own. They kept wanting to close and stay that way. I’d never come close to falling asleep at the wheel, not even during all of my journeys back and forth from Montana to Seattle, and some of those journeys were made late in the night. Sure, I’d been tired and bordering on exhausted, but I’d never felt like this—like the act of falling asleep wasn’t voluntary. Like my body would betray itself and fall asleep on its own. That scared me. I’d driven past a small handful of wrecks that had been caused by the driver falling asleep at the wheel. Back then, it had always seemed so far-fetched that I could ever fall asleep while powering down a highway, but right now, feeling as if an elephant were pressing down on my eyelids, it seemed far too likely a reality.
I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and sucked in a few deep breaths of cooling summer air. I should have known better. On my third breath, a bug kamikazed into my mouth and was swallowed before I could spit it out. After that, no one could accuse me of not getting my protein.
I kept the window down but stuck my head back inside. I proceeded to turn on some Cash. Well, I blasted Cash to the point that Old Bessie’s speakers were rattling and sounded about to explode. With a few violent shakes of my head, just as many neck cracks, and twice as many bounces in my seat, I made it. Garth and Josie’s place might have looked more blurry than clear and my head was swimming like I’d spent the day drinking instead of working, but I’d arrived in one awake piece.
When he crawled out of his truck, Garth looked almost as beat as I felt. He never just crawled out of his truck. He leapt, jumped, leaped, or peacocked out of his truck, kind of the way he did everything else.
“It’s hell getting old, Jess,” Garth called as I tried to peel myself out of my own truck without appearing as though every muscle in my body had been ripped to shreds.
“Can you imagine how much hell it’ll be when we’re actually old?” I replied as I approached the front steps.
Garth’s nose curled. “Shit, why the hell did I pick ranching as my chosen career? If I had been smart, I’d have gotten into something where I could sit at a desk all day.”
“I think desk jobs just mean getting different kinds of body aches.”
“Yeah, plus, can you imagine me in a suit and tie?” Garth kicked his boots against the bottom step of the porch, sending chunks of dried mud and pieces of dried grass to the ground.
“No,” I said, doing the same to my boots. Their place was still in sorry straits, but Josie treated it like a pristine country club. Mud and dirt was not allowed. “No, I cannot.”
“So much for paying for delivery, right?” Garth nodded at the washer and dryer on the porch. “‘Actually, sir, delivery just includes to the front door. Delivery and Install includes bringing the appliances inside and installing them,’” Garth rattled off in a high-pitched voice. “Small print sons of bitches.”
“And you mean you, with all of your charm, couldn’t coax them into making an exception?” I shook my head, knowing that when those delivery drivers had left yesterday, their impression of Garth Black was the opposite of charming.
“Yeah, well at least I’ll know for next time that delivery means half-ass.”
Garth and I moved to the washer first. We were both of the mindset that you start with the hardest-slash-heaviest task first.
“Thanks for the tip. Since I’ll be needing to order only a half dozen appliances soon.”
“Make sure you pay the extra for delivery and installation though, because I’m sure as shit not going to help you haul a double fridge into that place of yours.” Garth grinned across the washer at me as we crouched into position to get a good hold on it.
“It’s good to have good friends,” I repeated his words before we heaved the washer up and moved it.
Josie had already thrown open the door, and she directed us down the hall and into the laundry room like she was bringing in a 747 from the runway. “Looking good, looking good. Nice and easy.” She flagged us over to the wall where the washer and dryer were going. “Garth, your side is off balance. Jesse, you look like you’re going to pass out. Please don’t do it before you get my washer safely into place.”
I shot her a smirk before letting out an exaggerated yawn. “About to pass out any moment is how I look all the time, Josie. Don’t worry. Your washer is safe with me.” And it was. It felt as heavy as if we were trying to move Garth’s truck down a football field, but we managed it. Something about being exhausted all of the time meant my strength had been diminished by half lately.
“Dryer?” Garth panted at me once we’d moved the washer into position.
Garth had said he�
��d work on getting everything hooked up tomorrow, and I was relieved. I wasn’t sure I’d make it through hauling the dryer in, let alone hanging around to finish hooking up two appliances I didn’t have any experience installing. My mental fortitude was gone, out the door, totally useless when it came to reading instructions or figuring out what two plus two times two equaled.
By the time we’d made the second trip with the dryer, my heart felt as though it would explode from the day’s efforts and from what felt like all of those sleepless nights coming to one sum total of unparalleled exhaustion. After scooting the dryer into position, I sat on the ground and leaned against the dryer to catch my breath. I planned on resting for a few seconds before taking off, but my eyelids finally won that war I’d been battling for the past hour.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been passed out when my phone went off, but from the feel of my shoulders and neck, it was longer than it should have been. “Hey, Rowen.” My voice sounded like I’d been sleeping for a week instead of a half hour. “Sorry I’m so late. Things ran late at our place, and I think I just fell asleep against Garth and Josie’s new dryer.” I blinked a few times to clear my eyes and found a blanket had been tossed over my lap and a pillow was on either side of me—to either keep me from tipping over or to catch my head if I did, I wasn’t sure.
“You sound beyond exhausted, Jesse,” she said, sounding almost as tired. “I don’t want you crawling into your truck and driving like that. Why don’t you see if Garth and Josie will let you spend the night, okay? If you need the leverage, tell Garth he’ll owe us when he sees what I’ve picked out for his bride’s bedtime wear.”
I chuckled, but it was all throaty with sleep. “No, I want to come home to you. I want to see you. I’ll be fine. Really. I feel better already with that cat nap.”
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