Do You Take This Man (16)

I rested the card against the vase and opened my email, clicking through the most pressing messages. My eyes drifted to the loopy handwriting and my mind to the forearms and the stretch of Lear’s large hands.

Shit. I needed to shut those thoughts down.





Chapter 8


Lear





“THERE’S THAT BOY of mine.” Uncle Harold waved from his porch as I stepped out of my car in his driveway. “Been waitin’ for you to get your tail out here.”

I waved back, the gravel under my feet giving me a weird feeling of being twelve again and spending the weekend at Harold and Aunt Bette’s place, or being a teenager and figuring out the new rules when we moved in with them. I felt the tension in my shoulders begin to dissipate, being home. “Sorry it took me so long,” I said, leaning down to give him a quick hug. He always pulled me close and mussed my hair or kissed my cheek.

“You look good, son. I like that car.” He motioned to the seat next to him and then returned to tossing birdseed into the yard, where a cadre of birds pecked eagerly on the grass.

I eyed the almost-new SUV with the great safety rating and lots of room. “Thanks. It’s alright.” I reached into the bag next to him and took a handful of birdseed, settling into the seat and leaning back.

“Hm.” He nodded in approval, and we sat in silence.

The sun hung low in the afternoon sky. The light diffused across the mountains, peeking through the trees at the top of the ridge behind his house. A tire swing that had been ancient when I was a kid hung from the massive oak tree. Harold lived alone now, after Aunt Bette died a few years earlier. I’d only been by a couple times since moving back. Something Penny and my sister had let me know in no uncertain terms was not cool. They were right, but Harold didn’t know everything that had happened in California, and I hadn’t wanted him to see how much my life had fallen apart.

“How’s Penny?”

“She’s good,” I said, reaching for my phone. We’d gotten Uncle Harold a smartphone a few years earlier. As far as I could tell, he used it as a paperweight. I handed him mine, where a few photos of newborn Connor were stored. “The baby is doing better every day.”

“What a face,” he said, a smile lighting up his eyes. “I tell you, that sure is a good-looking baby. Those two’ll be wonderful parents.”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing at the road winding up the hill. “They already are, I think.”

Harold nodded, handing the phone back to me. “What about you?”

“Me?” I reached into the bag of birdseed again, tossing some to the spot to my right where a little cardinal pecked around. “Happy to be an uncle or second cousin once removed or whatever I am to the kid.” I tried to ignore the way my chest felt hollow at his question and my stomach clenched at my answer.

We watched the birds again, the sounds of the evening filling the air so I didn’t have to talk. The distant whirs of the highway were muted by the breeze blowing through the trees and crickets beginning their chirrups. Harold didn’t look at me when he spoke this time.

“You doing good?”

“Oh,” I said, relieved at the general question. “Sure. Yeah. I’m good.”

“Tell me about the job.”

Relief colored the edges of my mood and I pictured RJ Brooks. “It’s alright. Little different from my last one for sure.”

The birdseed bounced off the concrete and into the grass. “I never asked you what happened there.”

My tongue was too big for my mouth and uneasiness roiled through me, that same feeling I had in high school when I’d messed up on a test. “You didn’t.”

A pickup truck rumbled down the road, the driver waving to Uncle Harold out the window. That kind of one-handed, smileless wave I imagined was common of neighbors across the country, like pleasantries weren’t needed, just the acknowledgment of seeing and being seen. I’d never exactly fit in when my sister and I came to live there—I was too something and not enough something else, and everyone just kind of left me alone. That was before Penny gave me the advice for fitting in. After that, I got the waves. The literal ones in Sybel and the figurative ones elsewhere, though I wasn’t sure I always felt really seen.

Uncle Harold had never treated me like I didn’t fit in, just kissed my head and told me to treat people right. “I got fired,” I said, sinking into my seat.

“Hm.” He tossed a sunflower seed across the porch to where a more tentative bird paced, never getting close to us. “What did you do?”

That uneasy feeling returned. “A guy was being inappropriate to one of the waitstaff at a team event. Making comments, hitting on her, and I got into it with him.”

“Doesn’t seem like the type o’ thing you’d be fired for.”

I tossed the last of the seed in my hand into the grass and shoved my hands into my pockets. I hadn’t heard what the guy said, but I remembered the look on the woman’s face—irritation, frustration, annoyance—and the way she initially stepped back from him. They were the only two on that part of the veranda and she probably saw that kind of thing a lot, had to get used to leering assholes saying what they wanted and needing to keep her mouth shut to keep her job. Maybe that was why I stepped between them: the entitlement on his face, like he had the right. Maybe it was me being hungover and sleep deprived for months, too. How else to explain why I not only stepped between them, telling him the behavior was inappropriate, but then punched him in the jaw when he waved me off?