To her credit, Irina didn’t look like she had as much interest in John Deere as she’d had a few hours prior. She took him by the arm to steady him—he was still complaining—and hailed him a cab, then told him she’d catch the next one with Nicole and Eric.
“You all don’t got to go,” I heard John Lawson saying. “Just him.”
“No, it’s alright,” Rae said. “I’m really sorry about the mess.”
“It’s nothing, ma’am,” John Lawson said.
Nicole, Eric, and Irina all climbed into a cab. But Rae still lingered.
“Look at you, saving the day,” she said, as her friends took off. We stepped away from the curb. Maggie gave us a funny look and let the bar door close, leaving us alone on the street.
“The least I can do,” I said.
“Walk me to my car?” She offered her elbow, and I took it, nervously. She was a head shorter than me, and I didn’t know how to walk in time with her. She let go after a few steps.
“Are you alright to drive?” I asked.
“I had two drinks, and stopped about an hour and a half ago.” She looked up at me and smiled. “You’re sweet to ask.”
Maybe she hadn’t been so drunk as I’d figured. Maybe I didn’t know if she was a happy drunk just yet after all. Could be she was just happy.
“Just don’t want anything bad to happen someone as nice as you,” I said.
Rae smiled. “I kept thinking about trying to invite you over to join us, like on a break or something. Figured you probably couldn’t, though.”
“You should have,” I said.
She took me by the elbow just then, and stepped up onto her toes. Our eyes locked and held. Suddenly I knew she wanted to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss her. I wasn’t sure it was right, though. Right for me, right for her, the right time, the right move.
Then again, to hell with it.
I cupped her face in my hands, ran my thumb softly across her lower lip as her mouth parted and she tilted her head back. Her eyes closed and I leaned forward—
Her phone rang just then, startling her away from me. An irritated ringtone, like a sad trombone. She didn’t even take it out of her purse, just huffed an exasperated sigh.
“That’s my ex,” she said. “I set my ringtone so I don’t even have to see his name on the screen. Looks like he’s ruining everything, as usual.” She shook her head and flashed an apologetic smile.
“Oh,” I said. There was a kind of space between us now. The moment had passed. We resumed walking down the street.
“He’s been kind of harassing me since we split,” she babbled, trying to fill the silence.
“How long has that been?” I asked.
Rae looked away, suddenly uncomfortable. “Hey, so, I had a nice night up until my friend got too drunk in there, and I don’t want to make it any worse, so...”
“So let’s not talk about your ex,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “You sounded excited about Eric’s job at the studio though. You sing or something?”
“A little,” I said. “And I like to play guitar.”
“That’s great. I’d like to hear you play sometime.”
We reached her car just then, a four-door sedan, about ten years old. Intensely practical. I could appreciate that. We kind of stood there, her looking up at me, me looking down at her. She was beautiful in the streetlight. She was beautiful in any light. We met eyes, but we didn’t fall into one another, not again. The weight of her ex was on her mind, the weight of Emily on mine.
“Well,” I said. I tipped my hat.
“Goodnight,” she said, wistfully.
I started to walk away. I knew she was waiting by her door, keys in hand, watching me go. I could turn around right now, push her gently against the car, finish that kiss we’d started.
I pushed the thought away. Decided I’d open another letter when I got home.
First, back to my late shift, serving drunks.
I pulled into my driveway, walked up to my door. Took a deep breath. Opened the door. Expecting chaos and destruction…
Nothing was ruined.
King heard me come in, trotted down the stairs to meet me. He had an old shoe in his mouth, one of my old trainers I hadn’t been able to bring myself to get rid of. And sure, it was chewed up a little, but it wasn’t nothing compared to what he’d done before.
“Who’s a good boy?” I asked, crouching down. My muscles hurt from standing, and I realized I wasn’t used to coming home quite so sober. King got his slobbery face into my arms, and I was happy like that for a moment.
Funny how when you’re happy, when you’re not used to being happy, the tears well up behind your eyes just as bad as when you’re miserable. But I pushed them down, gave King a good tussle, and went for the kitchen table and the letters.
Sat down in the chair, felt it reassuring and solid beneath me. Unfolded my knife, cut open the fourth envelope. Refolded my knife. Put it back in my pocket. I poured a shot of whiskey, but the night had been too strange and too long to cap it off like that. I sipped off the shot glass, instead.
Unfolded that letter.
“Well, I hope you’re feeling a little bit better.”
I had been, until I read Emily’s words. She’d drawn a heart over the “i” in “bit” and like a sad sack I just let myself get lost in self-pity. Let myself remember that she’d never draw another heart again, that her heart would never beat again. That I’d never again hear it beat so fast, my ear against her breast after morning sex.
It comes in waves, I told myself. You let them wash over you, you trace their departure in your mind’s eye. The first or second wave of any given attack, those are the worst. The worst was over, though. It would always hurt, would always feel wrong that she wasn’t at my side, sharing my life, but I was starting to feel like each day I got a little bit stronger. Just a little bit. And that meant the waves would come less and less.
That’s what my mom told me once. And she’d lost my oldest brother in the womb. She maybe knew what she was talking about.
Back to the letter.
“If you want to keep feeling a little bit better, you’ve got to work with your hands. It’s the only thing that keeps you happy. Maybe you don’t need the stress of contracting right now, but hear me out: I think you should go volunteer. Get out of the city and commit to something. I bet there’s still plenty that needs fixing in the wake of those tornados up north. Been a year and something by the time you read this, but I bet you dollars to donuts they still could use a man like you.”
I set the letter down a moment and leaned back in my chair. It was perfect. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d never have thought of. Emily was always thinking about other people. That was my wife, bless her heart.
“So I spent some time last night looking into it and I think you should join Heartland Habitat. Good people, God’s people. Volunteer with them. Do some good.”
I liked that idea right off. I’d thought about building, but I’d always get caught up in logistics: how I was going to get customers, how I was going to afford new tools. Or how I’d have to work for my dad. All stressful. But this was simple. And it would do some good. Get me away from all the distractions in my life. I had a couple days off anyway, since Warren had me on a kind of unspoken suspension of two shifts a week instead of my usual five or six. I think it was as much to keep me away from Maggie as it was to keep me away from the bar.
“Hey King,” I said. He looked up from where he was lying on the floor. “Tomorrow, how about we get out to the country?”
He yawned, settled his jowls back onto his paws and closed his eyes.
Looked an awful lot like a yes to me.
CHAPTER NINE
Sure, my eyes were open and I was walking, but I didn’t really wake up until the smell of that venison hit my nose and told me life was worth living. Better than coffee. But I made myself plenty of the black blood of the earth to go with it, because better than coffee d
oesn’t mean a man should do without coffee.
The sun wasn’t more than halfway over the horizon, and the pale morning light lit up my house. Even though I hadn’t slept more than a couple hours, I was doing pretty good, feeling pretty good. I think you can build up kind of a reserve of sleep. It’s not one-to-one, but I’d spent a year pretty depressed and getting plenty more than the six, seven hours I really need. I could do a night without.
And I wasn’t even hung over. Maybe there was something to not getting piss drunk every night.
I slipped a piece of deer to King, who just kind of looked up at me in a sort of puppy-like bliss. I couldn’t really think of a reason why I shouldn’t just spoil the hell out of that dog, at least for now.
I washed down venison and fried eggs with coffee, threw on my Carhartt jacket—been too long in the closet, that thing—and got King into his harness and went out to the truck.
Wasn’t too far to the Heartland Habitat headquarters, it’s right in Kansas City. The other Kansas City, the one in Kansas.
It was a big ugly block of a building, the kind of place you build when you’ve got property and need a warehouse and aren’t going to blow a lot of money on it. Which made sense enough to me.
“Come on, King,” I said. I got him on the leash—never liked keeping dogs leashed, but what can you do, especially when you’re making first impressions—and went on up to the glass doors.
It wasn’t yet even 7am, and I hadn’t called ahead or anything like that. I was just assuming they’d take me. Or, worst case scenario, I’d get to talk to someone in person. Show them what I could do.
The door was locked, but there was a light on inside, so I knocked. King was pacing around, trying to keep warm, and I decided to join him. Ran in place for a moment to get the blood flowing.
I heard the door open behind me, and turned around.
“Yeah?” The man who asked me that was about my dad’s age, sixty or so. But he’d lived a rougher life than my dad, that was certain. He was rail-thin but for his gut, and his weather-lined face had seen more sun than anyone who’d ever worked inside.
“This is Heartland Habitat?”
“Sure.” He looked me up and down. Didn’t look too impressed.
“Well, I want to volunteer.”
“Congratulations.” The man stepped outside, pulled a can of Skoal from his back pocket. Took some for himself, didn’t offer me any. Fair enough. I didn’t need the temptation.
“Well?” I prompted.
“Well what?” There was that hard-edged scrutiny again. At least King had gotten an approving nod.
“How do I volunteer?”
“You call the damn volunteer line like everyone else.”
I bit back an impolite response and thought what Emily would do if she were standing in my shoes. I had a feeling she’d be on the receiving end of better treatment, though. Older folks tended to warm up to Em right off the bat. Me, not so much. “What’s the number?”
“Ask your damn phone. I’m sure you’ve got Google.”
This wasn’t going right. We’d gotten off on the wrong foot I guess. I just had to make him understand.
“I’ve been a contractor,” I said. “I know how to build. I could oversee a project for you.”
The man spit, off to the side. “I’m sure you could hump lumber.”
I wasn’t prideful about it. It was a yes, and that’s all I needed. “So you’ll let me come? Today?”
He squinted over at me. “If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll even let you pound a nail.”
I laughed. He didn’t join in but I’m pretty sure I saw a glint of amusement in his eyes. “I’m Luke Cawley,” I said, sticking out my hand. Everything casual dropped out of the man. A handshake, that’s solemn. He gripped my hand, as strong as me, and looked me in the eye.
“Morris,” he said. “Sam Morris, but I go by Morris.”
“I could do a lot more for you than hump lumber,” I said.
“We’ll see about that.”
He started walking off towards the parking lot. Besides my Chevy, there were a few utility vans, a new Ford F250 with a crew cab, and another Ford pickup at least as old as Morris. Both were full up with lumber and assorted construction materials. To my surprise, he walked up to the shiny red F250 and opened up the driver side door.
“I don’t need you to do more,” he said, then climbed up into the seat and closed the door.
It wasn’t how I thought my morning would go. I’d just been emasculated by a volunteer coordinator, of all things. One twice my age.
He rolled down the window. “Well?” he yelled. “You getting in the truck or not?”
“You got room for a dog back there?”
Turns out the old man could grin, after all.
We drove up north out of the city with country music blasting and I might have even seen Morris smile once or twice again, singing along under his breath. Only when he thought I wasn’t looking. King was in the bed of the truck, on top of the lumber, but he was happy enough. His shaggy face was flapping in the wind.
It was most of an hour out to the work site, a dead-end street in a small town. Used to have houses on it, that was obvious. But a tornado had torn them all to hell and the bulldozer tread in the grass marked where someone had torn down the ruins.
There were about six people there already, putting in molds for a cement foundation. Two women, almost identical except one was in her sixties, the other in her forties—mother and daughter, most likely. A couple of the younger guys looked homeless, in their thirties. Another one, kind of a hippie or something, with one hell of a beard for a guy my age or younger. Then there was a man I swear should have been 100 and in a home somewhere, but he carried an 80lb bag of cement on his stick figure frame like it was all he’d been put on the earth to do.
“Morning, Morris,” the older woman said. Her gaze flicked to me. “Who’s the buck?”
“This is Luke,” Morris said. “Thinks he’s in charge. His dog seems nice though, so I let him along.”
He introduced me to them all, then, but I was too embarrassed for the names to stick in my memory just yet. Except Judy, the older woman, and her daughter Georgia. I’ll be dead and in the ground before I forgot an older woman’s name right off if we’re introduced. Just wouldn’t be polite.
“Luke, see all those bags in the next lot over?” Morris asked.
“Yeah,” I said, because I did. The next lot over was covered with tarps and stacks of lumber and materials like that.
“We need about fifteen of them over here.”
“You need me to mix them up, pour the foundation?”
“The hell I do. I just need you to bring me fifteen bags of cement.”
“Got a handtruck?”
“You got a back, don’t you?”
He started ignoring me then, which was for the best. My ego hadn’t been hit that hard since I don’t know when. But I trudged on over and got an 80lb bag up by lifting with my knees and I trudged on back.
I was sweating pretty soon. You work hard at a bar, but tending bar you just get tired more than you get sore. On a job site, you get tired and sore and sweaty and it makes you realize that you’re alive in a body with limits that want you to push them. Tending bar, you get lost in your brain. Building, you get lost in your body. Once I moved the cement, the two homeless guys started mixing it up and pouring it and Judy had me do some timber framing.
I went for the nailgun, over by Morris.
“You’ll use a hammer,” he said. It was like his sole purpose in life was to torment me. “I’m in charge and I don’t want some amateur messing up my house because he thinks he knows what he’s doing.”
I grabbed a hammer, instead. Amateur? I’d show him.
I put timber together like nobody’s business and yeah, I can use a hammer.
Got a blister, of course. Should have known I would. Should have worn gloves until my hands got used to the work. Big fat blister on the inside of my left f
orefinger, a hot spot matching it on my thumb. If it’d been just some job, I probably would have started swinging right-handed, because I’m alright at that. But I wasn’t about to mess around, put together something substandard. Or let Morris hear me take more than two strikes to drive a nail.
So I kept going, worked right through that blister. Bled a little. God, I’d missed work like that. And there was something more to it now that I was a grown-up with grown-up problems worth drowning in work. Work like that meant more than what it had meant to me when I was a kid.
Shit. I’d been a kid until I got married, and maybe I’d been a kid until she died. Because I’d done a hell of a lot of growing up, learned a hell of a lot about being alone. What a terrible way to become an adult.
I couldn’t go on with that line of thought, though, because there were two bad ends to the line of thought. First, that I was, in some regards, going to be a better person for her passing. That wasn’t an okay thing to think. Second, that she’d never had a chance to grow up either. That was worse.
But banging in nails, that was real, and it took just enough concentration to keep my mind off nonsense like that. Keep that old darkness at bay.
King had the run of the place, and though he ran off from time to time, he came back when I whistled and he seemed content to sit around in the sun wherever he could find it. A great dog.
We took a quick break for lunch, simple brown bag sandwiches and kettle chips, and Judy came up to me and smiled. “You work hard,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“You live down in the city?” She was just making idle conversation. She was nice enough, but I didn’t want idle conversation. I started eating faster, so I could get back to work.
“Yup.”
“Got a wife at home?”
“Nope.” I remembered why I hated idle conversation. “I don’t mean to be rude, ma’am, I’ve just got a lot on my mind today.”
“It’s alright,” she said. And it really was. These were good people, here.
I finished lunch and went back to pounding nails like it was the only thing I’d ever been good at. Hours went by.
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