9 Letters (11 page)

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 forefinger, 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.

“Well you bled all over the
hammer,” Morris said.

I looked up from my reverie. I’d
built a hell of a lot of bits of house in one day. Not as many as if
I’d had a nail gun, of course.

“Good enough though,”
he went on. “Quitting time.”

We rode back in silence, but for
the country radio and the wind rushing in the cracked windows. King
had the run of the back, since it was empty, and he paced around
happily a bit, but mostly kept his face firmly plastered in the wind.

I looked at my phone for the
first time that day. Maggie had texted me: “Sorry I called you
a jerk. But, well, I get defensive. I dunno if this ‘no
strings’ thing is working for me anymore. We could talk about
it. Maybe better if we don’t. I don’t know.”

I didn’t know what to tell
her about that. “No strings” wasn’t working for me
either—never really had, as a rule—but I wasn’t
ready to be serious with anyone, and I was pretty sure I didn’t
want to be serious with Maggie at all. Maybe I’d text her back
when I knew what to say.

Morris dropped me off by my
truck, then stepped out to help King down out the back.

“See you tomorrow, Cawley,”
he said. “Same time. The dog can come too.”

King looked up at that, wagged
his tail. Morris reached down and pet his head, then closed the
tailgate and sauntered back to the driver’s seat.

As he drove out of the parking
lot, King looked up at me, pleased with himself.

I frowned. “Traitor.”

All I got was a doggy smile I
couldn’t help but return. Damn fine dog I had there.

I stopped at the store on the way
home, got myself real groceries. Yeah, you can live off of just meat
and eggs, but if I was going to be working as hard as that, I needed
more. Vegetables, fruit. I couldn’t really remember the last
time I’d bought vegetables. Cooking had meant nuking something
frozen or it had meant, well, meat and eggs. Sometimes potatoes,
especially before I’d gotten hired by Warren, when money had
been hard to come by.

Can’t pump crap into your
system though, not forever. I got myself a good steak, some
asparagus, lemon, onion, garlic, everything a real dinner needs. A
dinner like Emily always liked. Except to hell with cooking the steak
till it was ruined, of course.

I couldn’t say I was
happy
when I kicked open the door with groceries under my arm. But I was
exhausted, with just enough energy left over to cook myself something
worth eating. And that’s kind of like happy. Maybe that’s
all you ever get of happy, once you’re grown up. If so, I’d
get by.

King, though, was having the time
of his life. I bet he smelled that steak even through the plastic
wrap, and I
know
he smelled it once it started cooking. Meanwhile I cooked some rice
with greens on the side.

That’s when I learned that
not everything reminded me of Emily. Or, rather, that not everything
that reminded me of her had to hurt. In the back of my mind, when I’d
been going through the checkout line with my groceries, I’d
figured I was going to be in for a hell of an emotional night. I
figured since Emily was the one who’d gotten me to get over my
knee-jerk hatred of asparagus, cooking myself a real dinner was just
going to bring on those waves of grief.

I’d felt shored up against
them, mind you. An exhausted body is a happy body. But I expected
those waves nonetheless.

As I cooked, and I thought about
some of the times I’d cooked the same damn thing in the same
damn kitchen alongside the love of my life, I realized it was
alright. Kind of melancholy. But I could handle that.

I took King’s half of the
steak off even sooner than mine, served it up in a bowl with some of
his dried food underneath. Maybe I’d learn to cook for him. Why
not?

Then I sat down and I enjoyed
that meal more than I’d enjoyed food in a long time. I’d
forgotten food could taste as good as that. Not that I’m the
best cook—I try, but I never was half as good as Emily—but
exhaustion and hunger and sore muscles all give food a spice of their
own. Every morsel of that meal I savored like it was the first and
last thing I’d ever tasted in my life.