The Fall

by Kate Sherwood

  Austin lifted his head to squint at Joe, then slowly shook his head. “Grocery store,” he said softly.

  “Grocery store? No, we’re not buying nails!” He headed for the mudroom and pulled his wallet and keys out of the pocket of his jacket. “Maybe the dollar store?”

  “Grocery store,” Austin said more insistently.

  “No, we don’t need cheap stuff. We need oranges! Let’s go buy them at the gas station!”

  Austin giggled as Joe carried him down the steps, and then they both turned as the door banged shut again and Ally stormed out. “I’m either coming with you, or I’m staying here and killing him,” she said.

  “Coming with us sounds like a good option. We’re just going to the gas station to get oranges.”

  “Grocery store!”

  “Oh, the grocery store,” Joe responded. “Okay. Let’s go to the grocery store and get some feed for the horses.” He shifted Austin into his car seat and started playing with the buckles, then glanced toward his sister. “Did he say why he’s back?”

  “Let’s go to the feed store,” Austin suggested. He loved the place, for some reason Joe hadn’t really been able to figure out. “And the grocery store.” He cocked his head. “And ice cream?”

  “He didn’t say,” Ally responded from the front seat. Then she reached behind her and tweaked Austin’s bare toes. “And no ice cream this early in the morning. Morning is for oranges.”

  “Or berries.” Normally Joe would suggest that they get ingredients for a smoothy, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to drag Austin back into whatever was going on in that kitchen. Or what he hoped was going on. Will and Nick had always gotten along pretty well, so this should definitely be Will’s problem to solve. Joe would deal with the better-behaved kids.

  They made it to the grocery store and ended up getting a cartful, as they seemed to do every time they walked in the door. They grew their own vegetables and raised their own beef and still managed to go through more groceries than an entire city block should need. Partly it was because both Will and Joe still seemed to have their teenage metabolisms and ate everything in sight, but it was also because the house was a comfortable home, and they did a lot of casual entertaining: family dinners; Ally’s friends coming over for a swim and a snack that turned into a meal; people dropping by and staying for a few hours. It was the way it had always been and the way Joe liked it. He wondered if it would change when it was only him and Austin there to lure people in. The kindergarten crowd didn’t do a lot of dropping in on people, at least not as far as Joe had seen. And he had to admit it was pretty rare for anyone to come to the house just to see him. One more thing to worry about, but not right then.

  Right then, he was busy keeping track of Austin. The little guy loved wandering through the grocery store, and he’d been well trained that he wasn’t allowed to touch things without asking, so Joe tried to shop at off-peak hours when a loose kid wouldn’t get in everyone’s way and then let the little guy go. Early morning definitely qualified as off-peak, and Austin was in visual stimulation heaven. “Can you find an S, buddy?” Joe asked, and the boy started scanning the packages on the shelves. It gave Joe time to check a few prices and stack cans in the cart.

  “S,” Austin announced triumphantly, pointing.

  Joe crouched down to inspect the label. “Good job, buddy. That’s an S, for sure! And then with the O, U, P after it, the word is ‘soup.’ Soup starts with ‘S.’” He gave the letter a little extra hiss, because that was Austin’s favorite.

  Ally came back with an armful of ingredients and said she’d make dinner that night, and they shopped on. When they neared the checkout counter, Ally held her hand out, and Joe passed her the credit card without comment. She knew where he’d be, and Austin was already tugging impatiently on his hand.

  The little boy led him to the corner of the store reserved for plants and flowers, then dropped his hand and walked forward as if in a trance. It wasn’t a very big store, and the selection wasn’t huge, but there was always something new, and even the old favorites had their appeal to a four-year-old. Joe had thought about taking the kid down to the city and showing him one of the big flower markets, but there was no point blowing his mind when he was so clearly still enthralled by something closer to home.

  Austin ran his fingers through the air just above each plant, looking back guiltily on the one occasion he slipped up and touched the corner of a leaf. He paced along the row of flowers, stopped to carefully smell a few bouquets, and then finally came to rest in front of a modest collection of irises. “Purple,” he said, and then he peered more closely before adding, “and yellow.”

  “Are those the ones? Those are your favorites today?”

  Austin gave an agonizing look at a tall arrangement of orange-red glads but then turned back to the irises and nodded. “These ones.”

  “And who are they for?” It’d be nice if the kid said Nick, but Joe was pretty sure he wouldn’t, and he’d never prompted Austin’s choices at this. The whole point of the gift was the sincerity of the giver.

  “Ally,” Austin declared.

  “Very nice. I’m sure she’ll like them. Do you need help?”

  Austin looked over to the customer service counter where a familiar face was smiling back at him. He knew that lady, and she knew the drill. He shook his head to refuse the offer of help as Joe peered at the price of the flowers and then handed Austin a ten-dollar bill.

  The boy walked confidently to the counter and handed the bill to the lady, then turned decisively around. Joe had been ready for that; Austin wasn’t great at multistep transactions yet. “Get your change, buddy,” he prompted, and Austin turned back with a sheepish grin.

  “Those are lovely,” the lady at the counter said as she handed the change back to the boy. “Who are they for this time?”

  Austin looked over to where his teenage aunt was waiting by the exit, then turned back to the lady who’d helped him with flowers on so many occasions. The struggle was clear, but so was his final decision. “For you,” he said firmly, and he handed the flowers across the counter.

  She seemed startled, then looked to Joe as if for guidance.

  “We tell him he can give the flowers to whoever he wants,” Joe said with a smile. It was an extravagance, but none of the flowers in the store cost all that much, and it was a nice tradition to maintain. “If he wants to give them to you….”

  “For you,” Austin repeated, standing on his tiptoes to push the flowers closer to the woman.

  “Oh, sweetie. Thank you so much,” she said with a quaver in her voice. “Nobody’s given me flowers in a very long time. These are lovely. Thank you.”

  Austin beamed at her. “You’re welcome,” he said. “They’re purple and yellow.”

  “Yes, they are. And those are lovely colors.”

  Austin nodded, then turned back to Joe with his hand outstretched. He’d done his thing and now it was time to move on.

  “I was about to say that he’s going to be a heartbreaker,” the woman said, clutching the flowers in one hand while the other fluttered over her chest. “But I think he already is.”

  There was a moment when Joe was afraid she might be talking literally, but she took her hand away from her heart in order to wave good-bye to Austin, and she wasn’t falling over or anything, so it seemed safe to head for the exit.

  That was when he saw Mackenzie standing between the checkouts and the exit door with his own cloth bag of groceries, watching the whole exchange. The guy probably could have snuck out, slunk away without being noticed, but he hadn’t, and Joe wasn’t sure if he was impressed by that or not. It was one thing to be casual and not treat an acquaintance as if there was something awkward between them, but surely Joe had made it clear that one-night stands didn’t meet the family.

  But business associates certainly could. Joe put on a friendly smile as he led Austin across to the doors. “Hey, buddy, this is Mackenzie. He owns the church Will’s been working on
. That nice church that was empty for a long time?”

  Austin hid behind Joe’s leg. The shyness had just started a couple weeks ago and was fairly intermittent, as the kid’s smoothness with the flower lady had shown. Maybe he only worried about brand-new people. But then Ally joined them, and Joe went through the introductions again, and by the time that was done, Austin was peeking out.

  “Hi, Austin,” Mackenzie said quietly, and the boy ducked back behind Joe.

  Ally shook her head. “I think we’re supposed to ignore it? If we comfort him and try to lure him out, that’d be positive reinforcement, right?” She shrugged in Mackenzie’s direction. “If he doesn’t want to meet new people, he doesn’t get to make new friends.” Her smile was warmer as she added, “He doesn’t get to meet the guy who’s saving that gorgeous church. Joe and I used to talk about buying it ourselves, just because we both love it so much, but we couldn’t figure out what to do with it. It’s great to see you having such fresh ideas.”

  Mackenzie looked amused. He arched an eyebrow in Joe’s direction and said, “You thought about buying it yourself? I don’t think you ever mentioned that to me.”

  “For about five minutes, maybe. I was probably drunk.”

  Ally rolled her eyes. “Joe doesn’t really have that entrepreneurial spirit. Not a big fan of taking chances.” She looked down to where Austin was sneaking out again, obviously fascinated by the shine on Mackenzie’s brown shoes.

  It was nice that Ally was helping train Austin out of his shyness, but Joe really wished she’d found someone else to use as the bait. It was pretty awkward trying to come up with topics of conversation, and he wasn’t totally enjoying the ‘analyze Joe’s personality’ approach she seemed to have settled on.

  But he wasn’t quick enough to do anything about it. “It’s probably a family dynamic,” Ally said thoughtfully. “Will’s the businessman, so Joe’s the domestic one. I mean, maybe there’s a reason why marriages traditionally got divided up that way, right? Not that it should always be men making money and women being homemakers, but it’s kind of nice to have one of each in a family, isn’t it?”

  Mackenzie seemed much more amused by all this than Joe was, but that made sense: it wasn’t Mackenzie who was being used as an example of traditional roles within a marriage. “I guess each person could take responsibility for some part of each job,” Mackenzie speculated. “Like each person could be half moneymaker, half homemaker. Or whatever ratio worked out for that family.”

  “I make money,” Joe protested. “The cattle are profitable!”

  “I’m not saying you aren’t valuable!” Ally’s eyes were wide enough to make it clear that she was putting on a bit of a show. “But in addition to the money, you give us beef, and you heat the home with firewood, and we love the vegetables and maple syrup and fish and eggs and chicken… but the only one of those things that actually gets sold is the beef, right? Your contributions are primarily domestic, in the economic sense. Like, if we were a country, you wouldn’t have a lot of exports. That kind of domestic.”

  “I don’t think you should go to school anymore,” Joe replied. “Your brain is getting big, and kind of weird. You should stay at home and help with the domestic stuff.”

  “I think your brain is great,” Mackenzie said to Ally with apparent sincerity. He looked down at Austin, who was running his fingers just above Mackenzie’s shoes with the same reverence he used for the flowers. “And your brother is pretty great too,” he said. It was clear which brother he was referring to, but Joe still squirmed a little. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he feeling so torn? None of this was supposed to be happening… Mackenzie shouldn’t be anywhere near either of the younger Suttons. But he was, and Joe wasn’t hating it. He was actually glad they were getting along. And if he was totally honest with himself, he had to admit that maybe he wouldn’t have hated it if Mackenzie had been referring to him when he’d spoken of a great brother. Damn it, the rules were getting messed up. He’d known it was a mistake to let his guard down around Mackenzie, and now his confusion was the price he had to pay.

  “We should get going,” he said. He gently nudged Austin with his toe. “Ready, buddy?”

  “But I haven’t even had the chance to hint about wanting a tour of the church,” Ally protested. “I haven’t seen inside for years, not since I was too young to really appreciate it!”

  Mackenzie laughed. “Anytime,” he said. “I love the place, and I love showing it off.”

  “Are you going home now?” Ally asked hopefully. “If you aren’t, don’t worry about it. But if you are… it’s hardly out of the way at all, right, Joe?”

  He should have been quicker, should have had an excuse ready. But given that he’d left the house in order to avoid getting in a fight with his brother, he couldn’t very well pretend he was in a big hurry to get back. “We bought milk,” he said lamely. “It should go in the fridge.”

  “Ten minutes won’t hurt,” Ally scoffed.

  Mackenzie raised his eyebrow again, clearly mocking Joe’s lack of a ready excuse. Then he smiled sweetly in Ally’s direction. “I am going home now. Can you follow along behind? Make sure your brother doesn’t get lost on the way?”

  And for the first time Ally seemed to realize there was a little more to this interaction than she’d thought. As they walked to their respective cars, she quietly asked, “Is this a bad thing? Is there some reason you might have wanted to get lost on the way?”

  Joe shook his head. There wasn’t any real reason, and wanting to avoid an awkward day-after with the previous afternoon’s quick fuck wasn’t something he wanted to get into with his baby sister. And he was the only one being awkward about it, he realized. Mackenzie wasn’t being weird, wasn’t flirting or making any allusions to anything; he was treating the sex as if it had been just as casual as Joe had insisted it was.

  He was doing it again, he realized as he loaded groceries into the back of the truck. He raced ahead of things in the first part of relationships, caring too much too fast, getting too involved when there was nothing to be involved with. And then he ran out of interest before he got to the finish line. He was the hare in the relationship race, and there were tortoises out there doing much better than he was. So he tried to stay out of the race, and when he couldn’t, he tried to act like the tortoises did. And this time the act had been good enough that he’d even fooled himself, at least for a little while. But here he was, behaving like an uptight idiot around some guy he barely knew, just because they’d spent a little time together naked.

  “It’s a beautiful church,” he said as he settled into the driver’s seat and turned around to check that Ally had buckled Austin in properly. “You should definitely see it. Maybe you’ll give up on this vet thing and turn into an architect.”

  “If I was a vet, I’d give you a big discount for all the animals.”

  “Well, then, maybe we really shouldn’t go see the church. I don’t want to get in the way of my discount.” He grinned at her. “Of course, by the time you’re done with all that school, I’ll probably be retired and won’t have animals anyway.”

  “You’ll always have animals,” she said with quiet confidence. He couldn’t argue with that, and they drove the rest of the way to the church discussing the relative merits of the possible career choices.

  Austin thought she should be an astronaut.

  Chapter 7

  THERE WAS no mirror in the upstairs part of the church, and Mackenzie didn’t have time to run down the stairs to check himself out in the bathroom. Damn it. He’d dressed for a quick trip to pick up cereal, not an encounter with a man who was somehow looking even better today than he had the day before. Maybe it was because Joe smiled more when he was around the younger members of his family. Lord knew the man had a beautiful smile.

  Mackenzie tried to make his own expression as attractive as possible as he stood in the doorway with Griffin frolicking at his feet as they both waited for Joe to unbuckle the l
ittle boy. Mackenzie’d been a model, after all. He knew how to make himself look good. Then he frowned and let his pose relax a little. Why was he trying to impress this guy? Was he tying himself up in knots in hopes of earning another round of afternoon delight? He was that desperate?

  Hell no. He focused his attention on Ally as she made her way up the walkway, already beaming in anticipation. “Does it still have those curved pews?” she asked excitedly. “I loved those!”

  “See for yourself,” he responded, with a somewhat grandiose arm gesture toward the double front doors.

  Her eyes danced, and she scampered past him.

  “Sometimes she’s a bit of a kid,” Joe said from surprisingly close. Mackenzie turned to see the man standing next to him, Austin perched on his hip. “Then two minutes later she sounds like a wise old lady. Two minutes after that, she sounds like a senile old lady….”

  “Sounds like fun,” Mackenzie said.

  “Yeah,” Joe admitted. “It kind of is.” Austin squirmed, and Joe bent to set him on the ground. The boy headed straight for the perennial beds as Joe watched with fond amusement. “We don’t have many flowers at our place. My mom had beds, but no one’s really maintained them. I figure that can be his first job when he gets big enough to be useful—he can be our groundskeeper.”

  “Everyone has their own jobs? Their own areas of responsibility?” Mackenzie had been raised in a household where his only chore had been making it home before curfew. He was curious about the way this family seemed to be run.

  But Joe was frowning, as if the question had brought up a sensitive subject. “Everyone used to. But they’re moving away now, so I just kind of… I don’t know, I guess I decide what needs to be done and what I can let go. But then everyone chips in for the big jobs.”