“Good to see you, Colby,” Doug said, once they’d shaken. “Been a long time since you and your brother used to run around on your dad’s job sites.”
“He hated that,” Colby said with a grin.
“Nah, he didn’t,” Doug said easily. “That guy loved having you two nearby.”
The waitress showed up before Colby could answer, a woman a little older than his mom with glasses the size of dinner plates; Colby ordered a stack of pancakes and a side of bacon, then dumped a bunch of cream and sugar into his coffee before taking a sip.
“Keith speaks real highly of you,” Doug said, once the waitress was gone.
“He does?” Colby blinked, surprised. Keith was always spouting all kinds of inspirational bullshit, but Colby had always figured it was for his benefit. It was weird to think of him saying it to other people.
Doug smiled. “Yeah, Colby. He says you’re a smart kid, that maybe you need some direction.” He raised his eyebrows. “Told me about the water tower, too.”
Of course he fucking had. “Yeah,” Colby said—looking down and picking at his cuticles, trying not to visibly bristle. “That was pretty stupid, I guess.”
Doug took a sip of his coffee. “It was,” he agreed. “Was stupid back when I did it, too.”
Colby’s gaze snapped up. “You climbed the water tower?”
Doug nodded. “I was a little younger than you, probably? Scaled it in January of my senior year with a buddy of mine, only once we got up there it started snowing like a mother, and he got the yips and couldn’t climb down. Had to scream our asses off until finally some neighbor woman heard and called the fire department to come get us.”
“No way,” Colby said, unable to hide his smile.
“Way, my friend.” Doug nodded his thanks as the waitress topped off his coffee cup. “So,” he said, “Keith told you I’m looking for an apprentice carpenter.”
“He did,” Colby said, then cleared his throat when he heard how dorkily squeaky his voice sounded. “He did.”
Doug nodded. “It’s not going to be particularly glamorous,” he warned. “A lot of grunt work—moving materials, sweeping up, that kind of thing. But in my experience, guys who don’t mind grunt work are the same ones you can trust with sophisticated work later on. And if we both feel like it’s a good fit, there’s room for you to grow.”
“I don’t mind grunt work,” Colby said, trying not to sound too eager.
“Well,” Doug said, “that’s good to hear.”
They talked about the projects Doug had in the pipeline, big restoration jobs up closer to Columbus and a full gut on an old mansion a theater group was converting into a performance space in Chillicothe. When he finally named the salary out loud, Colby had to struggle to keep his face neutral: it was more than twice what he was making at the warehouse.
There was no way this was actually going to happen, he reminded himself, swallowing the last of his pancakes.
Meg’s voice whispered: But what if it does?
Matt was at the house when Colby got back from work late that afternoon, standing in the yard throwing the tennis ball to Tris. “Mom home?” Colby asked, and Matt shook his head.
“Not yet.” He tucked his hands into the pockets of his khakis. “What were you doing on a date with Doug Robard this morning?”
“First of all, fuck you,” Colby said, not unpleasantly. He’d known this was coming, though it had happened faster than he thought. “Second of all, who says I was with Doug Robard?”
“Nikki saw you at Bob Evans,” Matt said. Nikki was the girl Matt was dating, a snotty redhead who always seemed to be scowling about something. Not that Colby had much of a leg to stand on in that department, he guessed. “Are you working with him?”
“No,” Colby said, then shrugged. “What if I am?”
“What if you—” Matt broke off, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “Look,” he said in the measured voice he used when he wanted to drive home exactly how much of an idiot he thought Colby was, “if you don’t want to come work for Rick, that’s your business. But I think it’s fucked up to turn around and go take a job with his direct competitor, that’s all.”
Colby scooped the tennis ball up off the ground and threw it, watching as Tris took off in pursuit across the muddy grass. “They’re not direct competitors,” he said.
“Close enough.”
“Not really.”
Matt rolled his eyes. “Yes, Colby, you think Rick’s a hack, we know. You’ve been very clear.” He stepped out of the way as Tris came careening back toward them, overshooting before turning around and trotting over with the ball in her mouth. “If family means nothing to you, then—”
Colby whipped around to look at him. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
Matt startled, then held his ground. “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“You don’t, which is why I’m asking.” Colby wrenched the ball from Tris’s mouth a little more roughly than he meant to, throwing it out toward the woods one more time. “Because that’s hilarious coming from you.”
“Seriously?” Matt looked momentarily wounded, which was surprising. “Everything I do is for this family. Who do you think helps Mom pay the mortgage? Who do you think kept the lights on all year long? What do you think, because you buy dog food every once in a while you’re moving the needle? Do you have any idea how much help Mom needs that she doesn’t want to put on you because you’re the baby? Ever since Dad’s been gone—”
“And whose fault is it that he’s gone in the first place, Matt?”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Colby set his shoulders. “You know what it means.”
“I really don’t.”
“It means you threw him out with the trash, and look what happened.” It felt good and gross and painful and satisfying to say it, like ripping a scab that wasn’t quite ready. Matt got very, very still.
“Is that what you think?” he asked, half his face lit by the glow of the deck light and the other half in shadow. “What, because I went to work with Rick?”
“See?” Colby asked, vindicated. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You abandoned him, and two weeks later he—”
“I abandoned him?” Matt laughed out loud, though it sounded more like he was choking. “By going out and actually making some money? He wasn’t fucking working, Colby! Literally, the guy had no jobs lined up and was too depressed to get up and find any. I begged him to get his act together, and so did Mom, and he didn’t. Or couldn’t, I don’t know.”
Colby shook his head. “You’re lying,” he said. He remembered that time, or he thought he did, though all of a sudden he wasn’t entirely sure. Work had been slow, that was all. His dad had been working on figuring it out. “He didn’t get really bad until after you left him to—”
“He was messed up on and off since before you were born, Colby!” Matt shook his head. “The first time he tried to kill himself I was in middle school. Mom fell all over herself trying to keep you from finding out.”
“Wait.” It felt like the ground moved suddenly. Colby took a physical step back. “What? Shut the fuck up. You’re full of shit.”
“Why would I lie about that?” Matt asked, sounding terrifyingly sincere. “You were a little kid still. We stayed with Rick and Alicia, remember?”
Colby shook his head, mulish. “We stayed with them because Dad was doing repairs on the house.”
“Repairs.” Matt gestured back at the house like a carnival barker—Step right up. “What repairs, exactly?” His eyes narrowed. “God, everybody coddled you because you were the baby. And now you’re a grown-ass man and you still want everybody to coddle you—”
“And you’re just jealous because Dad left Paradise to me instead of you, so you’re—”
“You think I give a shit about Paradise?” Matt demanded. “Paradise is worthless, Colby. Congratulations; Dad liked you better. But Dad’s dead, in case you haven’t noticed, so i
f at any point you want to stop using what happened as an excuse for acting like a lazy sack of shit all the time—”
That was when Colby hit him.
It was a sloppy punch, catching Matt at the temple instead of the jaw, where Colby had been aiming; just like that they were a tangle of legs and fists and fingers. There was a ripping sound as Matt grabbed hold of Colby’s flannel, Tris barking frantically as she circled around. They used to wrestle all the time when they were kids, even when they were a little too old for it, suplexing one another into piles of dead leaves in the backyard or pile driving one another into the couch. He’d broken Matt’s front tooth once by hitting him in the face with the remote control for the DVD player, but they’d never done anything like this.
Colby hit his brother again, then another time, anger erupting out from an inside deeper than he knew he had. He could feel something warm and wet, spit or blood or maybe both, slipping down the side of his chin. His fist caught his brother in the cheekbone. Matt’s work boot caught him square in the chest. “You’re an asshole,” someone said, though Colby wasn’t sure which one of them was talking. After that, he didn’t hear anything at all.
Twenty
Colby
“Welp,” Meg reported miserably when she called him late that night, Colby’s phone vibrating wildly across the nightstand, “turns out Rebecca Latimer Felton was a giant white supremacist.”
“Wait, what?” Colby shifted around on the mattress as gingerly as possible. His ribs were bruised, according to the ER doc; every time he breathed it felt like someone was stomping on his lungs. “Who?”
“Rebecca Latimer Felton!” Meg repeated, like if she said it enough times he’d somehow magically know who she was talking about. He could hear her typing angrily away in the background. “The first woman in the Senate! I’m doing my independent study about her, remember? Or I was, at least.”
“Oh,” Colby said, wincing. “Yeah. Whoops.”
“Yeah, Colby, whoops.” Meg sounded aggrieved. “I read all these scholarly sources about her, I had a freaking children’s book, and it wasn’t until I looked at Wikipedia of all places that anybody even thought to mention the fact that she owned slaves and was, like, very much in favor of lynching.”
Colby grimaced. “Shit.”
“That’s what I’m saying! My project is due in six days, and it turns out she’s basically the poster woman for the most awful, racist, violent kind of white feminism.”
“I mean, I keep trying to tell you that about politicians,” Colby said, leaning back against the pillows. His head throbbed. They’d only just gotten back from the hospital a little while ago; his mom had gone directly into her bedroom and slammed the door loud enough to rattle the whole house. “They’ll let you down every time.”
Meg made a strangled sound. “It’s not funny, Colby!”
“I’m not joking,” he countered immediately. “This lady sounds like she was hot garbage, which is a good example of why you shouldn’t, like, put all your faith in—”
“Okay, okay,” Meg interrupted. “I get it. But can you just feel bad for me without telling me why it’s stupid to believe in government altogether?”
“I do feel bad for you,” Colby promised, though truthfully he wasn’t super surprised there’d been gaps in her research. Meg meant well—Colby knew that now—but still he got the feeling she only knew what she was talking about, like, half the time. “I mean, I feel a lot worse for all the people she thought she had the right to own, but—”
“I mean, yes, obviously. Thank you.” Meg sighed. “Are you okay?” she asked a moment later. “Your voice sounds funny tonight.”
“I’m surprised you can hear me at all, the way you’re pounding on those keys over there,” Colby informed her. “Whenever I picture you working, I imagine that gif of Kermit the Frog slamming away on the typewriter. Arms flying all around, clouds of dust everywhere . . .”
Meg laughed at that. “Oh, that’s how you imagine me?”
“It is,” Colby said immediately. “A very sexy Kermit the Frog.”
“Perv.”
“Prude.”
“That’s what you think,” Meg shot back immediately. Colby smiled, then winced as the butterfly on his cheekbone pulled his skin. His voice sounded weird because there was gauze shoved up into his sinuses: Matt had broken his nose, which Colby guessed was fair enough considering the fact that Matt had needed seven stitches in his lip.
“What are you up to this week?” he asked Meg now, wanting to change the subject. He didn’t tell her about his fight with Matt. It felt too complicated to explain, even to her, on top of which he knew it would just underline the stuff she already thought about his family, the idea that they were too dumb or backward to settle their disagreements with SAT words and civilized debate.
To be fair, he didn’t know if she actually thought that.
Also, he was a little embarrassed.
After they said good night, Colby lay on his back on the mattress for a long time, trying not to jostle his busted self too badly and also not to think about what Matt had said that afternoon in the backyard. Part of him had meant it when he told his brother he was full of shit—it was fucking absurd to think his dad had just periodically wanted to die for Colby’s entire childhood while Colby strolled stupidly around playing PlayStation and eating Little Debbies. He would have known. He would have to have known.
Still, the other part of him kept replaying that week at Rick and Alicia’s—they’d gone on a hayride, he remembered suddenly, all of them drinking hot apple cider out of Styrofoam cups—and felt like he was going to throw up all over his bed.
It didn’t matter, Colby told himself, clicking the light off and trying to put the whole thing out of his head. It ended the same either way, didn’t it? All roads led to Rome, or whatever the expression was. He thought Meg would probably know, not that he had any intention of talking to Meg about this. Not that he had any intention of talking to anyone.
After all: What was the point?
He had to go to the pharmacy the following morning to fill the prescription for heavy-duty Tylenol the ER doc had given him: “You shouldn’t need anything stronger,” she’d said as she’d handed it over, like she half expected him to grab her by the lapels of her white coat and demand a year’s supply of Oxy. He was heading back to his car when someone called his name from across the parking lot.
“Hey,” Joanna said, lifting a delicate hand in greeting. She was wearing a shiny purple blouse and one of those skinny knee-length skirts, her legs long and tan even though it wasn’t summer yet. Her hair was a tidy yellow knot on top of her head. “I thought that was you.”
“Hey,” Colby called back. “I was wondering if you were working today.” The hair salon was in the same strip mall as the CVS.
“Could have texted,” she pointed out, raising her eyebrows teasingly. “Found out for sure.”
Colby knew that, actually. He hadn’t on purpose—one, because his face was so fucking busted right now, and two, because he didn’t know exactly what to say to her. They hadn’t talked since Saturday night when Meg was in town. “Yeah, well,” he said, jamming his hands into his pockets. “Didn’t want to scare you.”
She nodded. “You’re pretty ugly,” she agreed with a smile that suggested she didn’t actually think so. “Jordan told me about you and Matt, but I thought he was exaggerating.”
“Yeah, not so much.” Colby shrugged. “We went after each other pretty hard, I guess.”
Joanna seemed unperturbed. “That’s what brothers do, right?” she asked. “Mine used to beat the shit out of each other every day before Pete went to college. Jordan broke his collarbone once throwing him off the side of the deck.”
Colby smiled at that, though he guessed it wasn’t actually funny. Still, he knew what she was trying to do, and he appreciated it. Talking to Joanna always made him feel like his fuckups weren’t that big of a deal. “I remember.”
Joanna nodde
d. “So,” she said, rubbing her palms over her bare arms as the breeze rustled through the trees that ringed the parking lot. “Your friend Meg seemed nice.”
Colby’s eyes widened, at the mention of Meg’s name in the first place, and in the second place because he was fairly certain that whatever impression she’d given off that night in the parking lot, nice was not it. “She said the same thing about you, actually.”
Joanna smiled, a little uncertain. Colby could see she was considering asking him what the hell his deal was. He knew he should take responsibility for the situation—apologize, or at the very least explain what had happened. Jo deserved better, that much was for sure. Still, the truth was he was pretty sure she’d let him off the hook rather than push it, and he was right. “Are you going to this thing at Micah’s tomorrow?” she asked, tucking some imaginary hair behind her ears. “The pig roast?”
“What?” He’d known there was a party, though he hadn’t really thought about it. He guessed he hadn’t thought about much, since Meg’s visit. “He’s doing a pig roast?”
“I mean, I don’t know,” Joanna amended. “He says he is. Where he thinks he’s going to get a whole pig is beyond me.”
“Hope the security’s good at the petting zoo,” Colby joked, and Joanna groaned.
“Gross,” she said, kicking him lightly in the ankle. “Anyway. I think you should come.”
Colby nodded. “Maybe,” he hedged. “We’ll see what my face is looking like, how about.”
“Send me a picture,” Joanna instructed, turning on her heel and heading back across the parking lot. “I’ll let you know if you’re too scary for young audiences!” She was gone before he could think of a reply.
You Say It First Page 15