“Yeah.”
“You’re a lying sack of shit.”
I almost smiled.
He tossed his pen on the desk and shut his laptop. “Tell you what. Let’s go get a beer and some wings or something. It’s almost six and I didn’t eat much lunch today.”
“Me neither.”
We agreed to meet at Hop Lot Brewing Co., which was south of downtown. Arriving just a few minutes apart—me on my bike, Mack in his SUV—we sat at the bar, shook hands with the two brothers who owned the place, and ordered a couple locally brewed IPAs along with some wings.
“God, I’m so fucking hungry,” Mack said, shrugging out of his denim jacket.
“Same.” I kept my brown leather on, even though I was a little warm. I had USMC tattooed on my left arm, and I didn’t feel like talking about it tonight. Had I known how many ignorant comments and questions I’d get from the general public about it, I might have thought twice before putting those letters in such a visible place.
“I really need to learn how to cook. My kids are going to starve.” Mack had three daughters—three—with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Carla, whom I’d met only once, which had been enough. He had his kids almost every weekend and every other Tuesday night.
“Was last night one of your Tuesdays?” I asked as the bartender set two full glasses down in front of us.
“Yeah. We had takeout.”
“Pizza again?”
He shook his head and picked up his beer. “Millie’s on some kind of diet where she won’t eat bread.”
“Diet?” I paused with my glass halfway to my mouth. “Isn’t she like nine years old?”
“Ten,” he answered after a healthy couple of swallows. “But she listens to every word her mother says, and Carla has decided that bread is the enemy. But not just bread—anything with wheat in it.”
“Isn’t that like, half the possible foods on the planet?”
Mack nodded and tossed back some more beer. “Yeah. I know how to make exactly three things for them: microwave mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and chicken nuggets. All of which are deadly now, apparently.”
“Damn. Sorry, brother.”
We sipped in silence for a minute, then he spoke again. “It’s fucking crazy, you know? You think you have it all figured out—the wife, the kids, the future—and then boom. It all goes up in smoke.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong in Mack’s marriage and didn’t want to ask, but I did want him to know he could trust me. “I hear you.”
“I keep looking back, trying to pinpoint the moment it started to burn, and I can’t find it.”
“I couldn’t either.”
“Why is that, you think? Are we more fucked in the head than we realize?”
“I don’t know.” I’d wondered the same thing about a million times. Not all of us came back damaged, I’d said to Stella last night. But maybe we had. Maybe it was impossible not to.
“I mean, I know guys that lost legs. Fuck, I knew guys who didn’t come back at all. Sometimes I think, what the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t handle this—regular life?”
I shook my head. Tipped up my beer. “We know too much,” I said quietly.
He looked over at me. “You think that’s it?”
“Yeah. I do.”
We sat in silence for a minute, each of us trying not to think about the same things.
“You heard from Bones lately?” Mack asked. Tommy “Bones” Neilson was one of the guys in our squad, a skinny kid from some small town in Iowa where he grew up milking cows in the morning before school. Like the rest of us, he’d struggled to adjust to life back at home, despite a close-knit family and a girlfriend he was devoted to. He was young—too young to go through what we went through—and we’d all been protective of him.
“Yeah,” I said. “He messaged me a few times last week. Sent some pics of the squad.” Which I deleted, but I hadn’t told Bones that. I loved those guys like brothers, but I had no desire to revisit those days.
“Did he seem okay?”
I shrugged. “What’s okay?”
Mack grimaced. “Right.”
Our wings arrived, and we ate them hungrily, then ordered more, plus another beer apiece.
“So what’s bothering you?” he asked once our glasses were full again and our bellies were at least less empty. “I can tell there’s something.”
I shrugged. “Not exactly sure.”
“Bullshit.”
That was the problem with Mack. He knew me too well. I exhaled and rubbed the back of my neck. “There’s this girl—woman.”
“There always is.”
“Ha. Well, this one is Mrs. Gardner’s granddaughter. Stella.”
“Oh yeah. I think I might have met her a few years ago. Tall blonde? Kind of quiet?”
I nodded. “That’s her. Mrs. Gardner introduced us, and … I don’t know, there’s just something about her. I can’t get her out of my head. Last night she brought me this apple pie …” My eyes closed reverently, and I might have moaned.
Mack laughed. “She knows your weakness.”
“Apparently.”
“She’s visiting?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you take her to dinner at the inn?”
“Because the more I talk to her, the more I like her. And I don’t really want to like her.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
Mack shook his head. “Dude. You need to get laid.”
I frowned. “I probably could have last night. We messed around a little, but I stopped things before they got out of hand.”
He stared at me like I’d sprouted horns. “Why?”
“Because she told me she thinks I’m honorable. One of the good guys. And I kind of like thinking there’s one beautiful woman in the world who believes I’m a decent human being.”
He sighed. “Take her to dinner, Woods. Just dinner, okay? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do after that, but I think you’ve been holed up alone in that house long enough. It’s fucking with you.”
On the ride back from Hop Lot, I had an idea.
When I got home, I put my bike away and dug around in the garage for some materials. I still had the tools I’d borrowed from Cloverleigh to fix Mrs. Gardner’s porch as well as some leftover boards, so all I needed was some rope. I couldn’t find any lying around, so I jumped back on my bike and headed to a hardware store. The one in town was already closed, so I had to go almost all the way to Traverse City. By the time I got back, it was long past dark, but I got to work anyway.
I cut and sanded a piece of wood for the seat, wishing I had time to paint it but unwilling to be that patient. I drilled holes in the plank for the ropes, then took everything into Mrs. Gardner’s yard.
There were several trees along the back fence that might have worked, but I remembered Stella had said it was a birch tree, and there was a large one over toward my yard. I glanced at the house, finding it completely dark. They were probably both asleep, since it was almost eleven. Hopefully I could stay quiet enough that I wouldn’t wake them. I didn’t want them to hear a noise and be scared.
Locating a solid branch on the tree, I secured the ropes, tugging on them to make sure it would hold, then slipped the ends through the holes in the seat and tied two simple knots so the seat hung about two feet off the ground. It hung slightly uneven, so I redid the knot on one side until it was level.
Standing back, I looked at the swing and imagined what Stella would say when she noticed it. She’d know it was me who did it, right? I wondered if maybe I should—
“Ryan?”
Startled, I turned around to find Stella standing a few feet away on the grass, wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants, arms crossed over her chest. Her feet were bare, and her hair was loose around her shoulders and a little messy, like she’d already been asleep. Thinking about her in bed did things to my insides. “Hey. Did I wake you?”