9 Letters (14 page)

I checked my phone. No new
messages but that one from Maggie, the one I was a bastard for not
getting back to.

“Hey,” I texted her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you last night.
Been working a lot, kind of ignoring my phone. Sure, we can talk
sometime. Maybe later in the week or something?”

I didn’t want to talk with
her, because I knew that road pretty much led to her bedroom and to
guilt and to continuing to be a jerk to both Maggie and myself. But I
couldn’t ignore her text, either.

I went into the bathroom,
lathered up, and shaved off almost a week of beard. Usually, I would
have just hit it with trimmers. But damn, why not shave proper? Then
I hopped in the shower and let all the dried sweat flow off my body.

I got out, put on my briefs,
started stretching. Working through the worst of the knots that sleep
had put into me. My chest was sore from swinging the hammer and my
legs were sore from humping lumber. Went downstairs, microwaved some
leftovers, and went to start a pot of coffee.

I was out of coffee.

King ambled down just then, his
tail wagging, came into the kitchen expecting a nice breakfast. I fed
him a bowl of dried dog food.

He looked up at me like he wanted
to complain, and I looked down at him like “hey, you’re a
dog. I’m giving you dog food. Deal.” He ate the dog food.
I ate my leftovers.

I washed up, scrubbed down the
cast iron I’d cooked in the night before, and dragged me and my
dog out to the truck to head to Heartland Habitat. I was just about
running on time. But I didn’t have any coffee, so I stopped off
at Starbucks.

By the time I made it to Habitat,
it was a quarter past seven.

“You’re late,”
Morris scowled.

“Ran out of coffee,”
I said. “Got you one. Got it black, since I didn’t know
what you liked.”

He reached out and took the cup I
was offering him, and maybe his scowl turned itself down a notch.
Maybe I imagined that.

“Why don’t you get me
your cell number,” I said, “so I can give you a call if
I’m running late.”

“Better yet, why don’t
you just show up on time?”

That’s not the kind of
grief I’d take from a guy my age. Not even a boss, to be
honest. There’s a reason I’d rather work for myself. But
Morris wasn’t my boss, and he definitely wasn’t my age. I
guess you just gotta let old crotchety men be old crotchety men
sometimes. It’s part of their charm. And besides, I’d
left him to load up the truck by himself—a new load of lumber
was in the bed.

His scowl disappeared when King
ran up to him, though, and he squatted down to give my dog a good pat
on the head. I couldn’t decide if King liking Morris spoke well
of Morris or if it just meant the two were conspiring against me
behind my back.

I climbed up into the passenger
seat after King loaded up in the bed. I let the coffee and the wind
and the music take me away from my troubles while that truck took me
away from Kansas City. There was some spring rain coming down light
on the windshield, but working out in the rain was something I never
bothered to mind.

Only the two women were still
there from yesterday, Judy and Georgia.

“Little bit of rain and the
boys go packing,” Judy said, greeting us with a smile. “Nothing
left but the real men and us women.”

Her daughter Georgia offered me a
rain slicker, and I put it on and pulled up the hood. Most of the
site was tarped off, but someone—and I knew it wasn’t
me—had left the nail gun out in the rain.

“Know how to deal with
this?” Morris asked, holding the nail gun as water ran out its
tip.

“Pretty much,” I
said. “I’ll re-oil it.”

He handed it to me and I took it
under the tarp. Didn’t take but ten minutes. And the sun came
out from the clouds.

“Bet you your truck that
those good-for-nothings will find their way over here now,”
Judy said. She was ripping up cement forms.

“Hey Morris,” I said,
holding the nail gun still. “Since I just dried this out, can
I...”

“Nope,” Morris said.

He was inspecting some of the
framing from the day before.

“Get over here, bring a
claw hammer.”

I went over to where he was
looking.

“Tear out these nails.
We’re going to build it better.”

Ten years ago, I would have told
him the truth, that he was looking at a section someone else had
framed. No way I’d let my work have bent nails in the finished
piece. But I was grown up, so I kept my mouth shut. He either knew it
already or he didn’t, and putting the blame on someone
else—even deservedly—wasn’t a thing a man should
do.

“It’s not good
enough. Just because we’re building a house for free doesn’t
mean I’m going to let it be shoddy. Do it better this time. Rip
them all out.”

“Some of them are alright,”
I said. “Hell, most of them.”

“I said all of them, didn’t
I?”

I didn’t say anything, but
I guess my face said a lot, when I started in on ripping out the
nails.

“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.