I push off the edge of the tailgate, landing on my feet with a bounce. "It's not great."
"You're like a modified Harry Potter."
"But without the powers."
Hugo scratches the back of his neck. "How about your body?"
That's a different story. Keloid scar tissue has formed on my chest and over my ribs on my left side, bumpy and lumpy and unsightly as hell.
I reach for his trash, balling it up and adding it to the bag that held our food. "I need laser treatments."
"So," Hugo hops down, watching me toss our trash in my back seat and call Slim Jim over from his very important job of sniffing everything in the vicinity, "they're going to sear your ass?"
"Not my ass." I throw him a look and start for the front door of the place I once called home. "Just my chest." And my ribs. And part of my stomach. "Some fancy ass laser thing. I don't know. My doctor back home suggested it."
Hugo slaps my back as we walk over the dead-grass front yard, and as we do, I begin to realize something that should have struck me the moment I pulled into the driveway. Why aren't there mile high weeds around this place? Plants, bushes, spindly Palo Verde trees, cacti growing wherever it damn well pleases? This front yard should resemble a walk through the middle of nowhere, but it almost looks as if it has been kept up.
I pause at the foot of the likely rotten porch steps and glance at my best friend. "Have you been coming here, Hugo? Maintaining the landscape?"
He shakes his head, but my question spurs him to look around. "It's..." His head swivels, taking in the unnatural tidiness. "Not what it should be."
"Not by a long shot."
Who has been here? It had to have been more than one big cleanup, because there's no evidence of anything being uprooted, of disturbed earth. Has somebody been maintaining this place?
"If not you, thenwho?"
Hugo says the last word with me, the same question hovering in his eyes. "I can ask around town, see what I dig up?"
I'm already telling himnowith the shake of my head. "I don't want to stir up curiosity. Better to let sleeping dogs lie."
Using the toe of my boot, I give the first front porch step a tentative push. The wood does not crumble, so I test it using the full weight of my foot.
"Solid," Hugo comments, stepping up and lending his entire six foot frame to my testing. "Looks like you managed to avoid termites." He does the same to the next two steps, and I wince each time as I wait for him to fall through.
"You coming?" he asks, from the porch landing.
We could be nine years old again, Hugo's black, expressive eyebrows cinching as he tells me he doesn't have all day to play because he needs to train. Even then, Hugo took fencing seriously.
Slim Jim leaps from the ground onto the landing in one graceful arc.
"Your dog is an acrobat," Hugo mutters as he hurries up to walk in front of Slim Jim, just in case any of the wood is rotten.
"You don't have to tell me that," I reply, following my dog and my best friend. "Should have seen him counter surf after I made beef tacos a couple weeks ago. Damn stealthy about it, too." If it hadn't been for thetap, tap, tapof the glass leftover container hitting the countertop, I wouldn't have realized what he was doing.
Hugo stops at the front door. "You know that's bad for them, right? Not only can they eat food that's harmful to them, but they could touch something hot or sharp."
I roll my eyes to the porch overhang, taking note of a giant wasp nest in the corner. "Thank you, Uncle Hugo. You've saved me from almost tying a dinner napkin around Slim Jim's neck and making space for him at my table."
Hugo slaps my back as I fit my old key into the lock. "Someone has to look out for you."
Pretending like his comment doesn't remind me of exactly how alone I am in this world, I shove open the door and stare down my past. "After you." I extend an arm. "If there are any furious raccoons in there, they'll scratch you up instead of me."
"Nice. Then we'll match." He elbows me out of the way and stomps inside.
Hugo has never, not for a single second, allowed me to feel bad for myself. Not when he came and saw me in the hospital on base in San Diego. Not when I stopped returning his calls and he showed up without notice, threatening to kick my ass if I didn't shape up. There definitely won't be any naval gazing allowed now, either.
I understand why. I might have been in a terrible accident that resulted in a handful of surgeries and some massive scarring, but I'm alive. That's more than he can say about his father.
