“If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right. And if you don’t like it, you can leave. You want to quit?”
“No,” I said. Only thing that feels worse than being told what to do is quitting.
He wandered off, and I set about tearing out nails. Took me all morning. Some of the bent heads were pounded into the wood. I could have had a word with whoever’d done it, but Judy was wrong because no one else showed up that morning.
Right before lunch, I started putting it all back together. It’s quick enough work, if you pay attention to what you’re doing and you’ve been doing it since you were old enough to hold a hammer. Had to remember that—the person who’d done it lazy probably hadn’t grown up a contractor’s son.
My hand hurt worse the second day than it had the first, because those blisters hadn’t even started towards thinking about healing. I’d have to take better care of them tonight, and if it made sense I’d take a couple days off or pick some other job. Like hell would I let Morris know, though.
Then we broke for lunch, and I got out a sandwich. Nothing special, just PB&J. Judy had a big bag of chips, Georgia a two-liter of Coke, and Morris brought out a bag of apples.
“Sorry, y’all,” I said, sitting on an overturned bucket with the sun coming down on my face. King had his head on my lap, not begging, just resting. “I hadn’t known it was going to be a proper picnic.”
“Usually do it when it’s going to rain, helps us keep up our spirits,” Georgia said. She smiled at me. “So where you from?”
“Kansas City, Missouri,” I said, “born and raised. One day I’ll be buried there.”
“Missouri, huh?” Georgia asked. “Come over here to save us poor Kansas folk?”
“What’s got you two volunteering?” I asked, sidestepping the question.
“Habitat built me a house, ten years back,” Judy said. “Husband ran off and left me homeless, and I was staying with folks from church until Heartland Habitat saved me.”
“And I moved back in with Mom when my double-wide went up in a tornado last year,” Georgia said.
“We talked each other into it, the volunteering, and it beats sitting around and waiting for life to come and go.”
“Turns out old dogs can learn new tricks,” Georgia said.
King took that as a cue to start walking between us. About the only trick he knew that day was ‘beg.’ Georgia slipped him some chicken, and the damn mutt looked just too happy for me to get upset about it.
“What about you?” I asked Morris.
He’d been just a little bit accessible, a little bit open, when he’d brought out the apples. But the emotional wall fell back down, and fast.
“I don’t want to talk about my life, and I don’t care why you decided to volunteer, neither. I just want to finish my lunch and build a damn house.”
I took King around for a walk around the block, saw all the torn up houses and bare foundations. Then came back to the job site and saw Morris inspecting my work. He was nodding.
I walked up, and he handed me the nail gun. “Be careful with that,” he said.
I put more timber together over the next few hours, more carefully and more masterfully than I had at any point in my life.
I fell into a rhythm, with that nail gun in my hand. Didn’t aggravate my blistered-over hands, either. I set wood in place, nailed it together. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
I stopped at the store on the way home, because I needed more coffee. And, what the hell, I needed more produce. Maybe I could be the kind of guy who buys fresh groceries every day. Cooks himself a good dinner every day.
At least I could be the kind of guy who takes care of himself two days in a row sometimes. That was a bar low enough that I was I pretty sure even I could hit it.
I’d been spoiled, with Emily. A lot of guys, good people, they go their whole lives without what I had. And they make do. I should learn to take care of myself for a lot of reasons. If I didn’t want to be alone, then, well, I wasn’t the star baseball player anymore. I wasn’t even an up-and-coming. I was a widower and a bartender. If I wanted someone worth having, I’d better have my act together.
But I cut that thought off before it went too far. I wasn’t doing it to try to get with someone. Wasn’t doing it to try to get with Rae. I was doing it for me. For the memory of Emily, and for me.
I was trying to figure out where they kept the liquid smoke when I saw Rae walk into the store. She strode in, and heads turned. For just a second, I got kind of jealous, or protective maybe. I’d never been able to get those two emotions distinct in my head. But there was no sense of it with Rae. She was just my friend, if that. My ridiculously kind, intelligent, very hot friend.
She saw me and walked over, picking up a basket on her way.
“Hey!” she said, offering me a hug.
It was kind of awkward, because I had a bottle of hot sauce in one hand and a basket of food in the other, but she wrapped her arms around me and it was like I wasn’t in the store, it was like I wasn’t on earth. I was nowhere except in her arms.
Then I was back in the store, with a basket more or less full of bacon and potatoes. She looked at it and considered.
“Hadn’t gotten to the vegetables yet,” I said defensively. “Definitely going to add some vegetables to it too.”
“Wouldn’t want you to get scurvy,” she said with a wink.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, you’ve got the two basic food groups covered.”
“Besides beer,” I said.
“Beer’s not a food. Essential to life, but not a food. It’s more like air, that way.”
“Are you the perfect woman or something?” I asked. Which was the wrong thing to say, at least just then. I knew it as the words tumbled out of my mouth and made their way to Rae’s ears.
She blushed, I think. Emily had always been too tanned to blush.
There I went with that again.
We went together back to the produce aisle, and I got some carrots and onions and even some lettuce. I don’t know that I would have bought the lettuce if Rae hadn’t been with me.
She was picking through boxes of strawberries, lifting each container to her nose to breathe in the sweetness. It was kind of adorable. “These ones are just right,” she grinned, setting a box in my basket. “And if you were to invite me over for dinner tonight, I might could be coerced into whipping up a strawberry shortcake afterward.”
Her flirty implication hung in the air between us, but I was thinking about Emily just then—how much she’d always loved strawberry shortcake—and by the time I realized that Rae was waiting on me to ask her over that night, the moment had passed. She was on the other side of the aisle now, still smiling as she picked through the produce. Damn.
I wanted to make her laugh, make things feel easy and good again, but my mind was drawing a blank. In desperation, I almost made an inappropriate joke about a pile of bananas, but thought better of it.
“Maybe I’ll just have to invite you over sometime,” Rae said as we headed toward the cashiers.
“I’d like that,” I said. If I couldn’t be smooth, at least I could be sincere.
Then we went to go check out, each of us turning toward a different register, and for a moment we both hesitated.
“Well. See you around,” Rae said. I couldn’t help noticing the way her hips swayed as she walked away.
On my way out to the truck, I realized how much I must have seen her around before I knew her.
It’s a small town, at the end of it all.
I tried my hardest to keep my mind only replying the nice parts of the conversation: the hug, the flirting. I’ve never been one to get too down on myself about what I say in social situations, but damn, if I wasn’t an awkward bastard sometimes.
When I got home, I put down the groceries and started to stretch. I should have been happy, but I was on edge. Like my world was opening up again, and all this newness was flowing in, and I had all this
energy that I didn’t know what to do with. So I got on my running shoes—they’d survived the purge and King both—and I took off with King. Just around the block, I figured.
But I kept going.
I ran through neighborhoods I hadn’t even explored, past happy families and tired families and sad men and sad women and children too dumb to know better than to be happy. King kept up.
I was exhausted before too long, and so was King, and we walked home. I put on a record—Crosby Stills & Nash. Something to remind me of my granddad. Because I was going to be thinking about someone dead, no way around that. Might as well think about someone else other than Emily.
I baked up one of those potatoes, started some bacon. With the bacon sizzling in its fat in the pan, I looked at the table. Looked at the letters. Not yet. I’d cook a good meal first.
Thing about bacon, though, was that Emily and I liked it the same way. Crispy. And she’d taught me how to get potatoes crispy outside, creamy inside. She’d laughed at me once when I’d tried to cook it for her without scallions.
My phone started going off in my jacket pocket, but my jacket was across the room and you don’t abandon your post when you’re cooking bacon. It rang, rang, stopped.
I dropped a few pieces of bacon onto a paper towel, then went over and got my cell. Listened to the voicemail.
“Hey,” Rae said. I knew her voice already. “It’s Rae. It was nice running into you today. Sorry for inviting myself over, I think I was just hungry or something.”
She laughed and I laughed too, relieved she’d taken it upon herself to make a joke of the whole thing, smooth it over rather than let it hang awkward between us.
“Anyway I, uh, wanted to check in, see how King was doing. Some people are going to the park tomorrow, a dog park, the one up on east 32nd. We usually wind up in the back corner, by the trees. Should be there around noon. Not sure when works for you, what hours you work. But anyway, in case you wanted to hang out, maybe get King out of the house.”
I stared at the phone for awhile, just kind of contemplating it, then pressed delete.
Sure we’d almost kissed the other night after the bar. But what did a woman like Rae want with a man like me? The hell did I have to offer her? Maybe nothing. She was probably better off without someone like me around.
I got the potatoes out of the oven, filled them up with sour cream, and sat down at the table to eat.
But I didn’t eat. I just sat there while the bacon got towards cold. After awhile, I couldn’t help myself. Got out my phone, started looking through pictures.
I had pictures of Emily, sitting at that table, eating that very meal. If I held up my phone at the right angle, it was like she was there, sitting across from me.
She was scowling a little in the pictures. Didn’t like her picture taken, not outside the ones we’d had done on our wedding day, and that was knowing a professional was handling the photography. So there she was, grumpy Emily, flashing me her grumpy face.
She used to pick at her food when she was grumpy.
There was a certain peace, an awful peace, found in letting myself float away into that oblivion.
There she was, across from me, picking at her food, grumpy and alive. She’d spent so long alive. So many years. I smiled.
I cleaned up, scrubbing at the baking pan with steel wool like I was scrubbing out everything bad that had ever happened. I used too much soap, went at it too hard. Didn’t care.
But then I was done, and I sat back down at the table, arranged the letters. Felt the ground beneath my feet. Let myself sink into my chair. Feel present. Let myself know she wasn’t across from me, that the picture was just on my phone. That these letters were what was left of her.
Unclipped and unfolded my knife, cut open the sixth letter. Re-clipped my knife. Deep breath. Shot of whiskey that I looked at but didn’t drink. Unfolded the paper.
“Hey,” the letter started. “So...this one is for me. I know that’s awful, but I guess here I go, asking you to do something for me still. Anyway, I want you to call my sister. I think Natalie probably misses me as much as you do.”
I didn’t think that was true, because it wasn’t possible. No one could miss Emily as much as I did and survive. But I didn’t feel like arguing with a ghost. I kept reading.
“I always wanted you guys to like each other more. Help her. That’s what life’s about, as I figure. Helping people. Especially family. Is she still your family? Does she still feel like family? Either way, give her a call. Listen to her, let her listen to you.”
Natalie didn’t feel like family. Emily’s parents, especially her mom, they’d tried to reach out to me. They’d kept up with me for months, and I think they would have stuck with it longer if I had reached out back to them. I could have been there for them, too. No parent should bury a child, just like no one should bury their spouse. But I hadn’t been there. I knew that.
I could see reaching out to her parents. I’d even meant to. One day I would. But Natalie? There were two people in the world who sometimes found it in the dark of their soul to blame me for Emily’s death. I was one of them. Natalie was the other. She didn’t want to hear from me. I didn’t want to hear from her. There was no way I could call her without apologizing for the way things’d soured between us, for the way I’d spoken to her last time she called, and to be honest I wasn’t ready to do that.
It was the first letter with instructions I didn’t want to follow.
Then I remembered my dad’s advice, when I first got engaged. I’d been terrified he was going to try to give me the birds-and-bees talk in the age of the internet, but I got lucky. He’d given me the kind of advice you don’t easily find with Google.
“Your wife is in charge,” he’d told me. “She’s not in charge of you. She’s in charge of her. But if you want the relationship to do you both good, that means if she puts her foot down, she’s in charge. If she asks you to do something, she’s going to have a reason. You need to think that through, figure out what her reason is. Odds are good, real good, that whatever her reason is, it’s more important than you-don’t-want-to-do-it or whatever lazy excuse you’ve got.”
Once he’d told me that, I started looking at my folks in a different light. I started to realize they both did that for each other. That compromise wasn’t meeting people halfway, most of the time. That compromise was more often about taking turns learning to value the other’s needs over your own wants.
But I looked at the clock, and it was nearly 10. Another thing my dad had told me, when I’d been much younger, was that you don’t ever call anyone after 10pm unless someone’s dead.
Someone was dead, but she’d been dead a year. It was too late to call Natalie. Maybe tomorrow.
Instead, I went over to the couch, pulled the guitar into my lap, and started to play.
“I will be yours / I will always be yours.”
I needed to write some new songs.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’d like to say I had a good productive morning, that I cooked myself a good breakfast again, that I practiced guitar, went for a run, took the recycling out to the curb. But I didn’t.
I woke up at 7am like my body told me to, but I laid around in bed for a good hour after that reading sports crap on my phone. Then I made it downstairs, fixed up a bowl of kid’s cereal, and sat around in my briefs eating cereal on the couch with the TV showing inferior sports like football.
When I got cold, I should have gotten up, done some jumping jacks, stretched out my sore muscles. Instead, I got up, found the thermostat, cranked it up.
To hell with it. I deserved it.
For some reason or another.
Wasn’t sure what. I’d come up with that later.
Mostly, though, I was trying not to make up my mind about whether I was going to that dog park. So I just let time disappear from under my feet until it was too late to make a decision.
“Alright, King,” I said, pulling the harness and leash off t
he coat rack by the door. “Get your ass over here. We’re going to get you some socializing.”
The whole place looked more than a little like a baseball field, only instead of boys running around happy with bats, there was dogs running around happy with dogs. And it was bigger.
I kept King on leash until I found Rae in the back corner, watching a group of small dogs. There were a couple other folks around, but the way Rae was standing in relation to them, it was obvious they were strangers.
“Hey,” she yelled, when she saw me walk up. She waved big, over her head, as if there was a chance in hell I’d miss her.
Every time I saw her, it was like all my troubles felt a little bit further away. Maybe it was just because she hadn’t known me at my worst, when I was in such utter despair. No, that wasn’t it. It was that she hadn’t known me at my best. She’d never seen me with Emily. She just accepted me as me. No pitying glances, no thinking how far I’d fallen, nothing like that.
I closed the distance, and King started pulling at the leash as soon as he saw her. I knew the feeling.
“Glad you could make it,” she said. She reached out for a hug, and I hesitated for half a moment before accepting it. She was warm, and I tried not to be so completely aware of her breasts as they pressed into me.
“I don’t go on shift for a couple hours still,” I said. I opened my mouth to finish the thought by telling her I wasn’t volunteering that day, either, but my mother didn’t raise a braggart.
“You can let him off leash, you know,” she said. She knelt down, took King’s face in her hands, and gave him a kiss on the snout.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just, uh, I didn’t know how he’d handle other dogs.”
“He’s fine,” she said. She unclipped his leash from the harness, and King looked up at me. I nodded, and he took off towards the mess of his canine soon-to-be buddies. Damn, what a dog.
“Which one’s yours?” I asked. The other humans were milling around about ten feet away, and there were five dogs scampering over one another, chasing one another.
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