I consider knocking him out of his chair.
He scoots just out of reach.
“You wanna talk, or you wanna take out all of your frustrations on a meatloaf?” he asks.
“Not frustrated.”
“Gotta get out of the river if you want help, my friend.”
“The river? What the hell are you talking about?”
“The river. Da Nile.” He cracks up.
I close my eyes and breathe deep through my nose. “Another day, another woman,” I tell myself out loud. “This will pass.”
“Oh, hey, did I tell you I had a stretch of fence come down last week?” He leans back and tips his cowboy hat back on his head.
“Fuck. When do I need to show up?”
“You don’t. Your landlady came by and already helped me patch it.”
My brain processes the words.
But something deeper processes the relief.
Utter. Fucking. Relief.
She doesn’t even know she’s helpingme, butshe is.
“Heard she took care of the Hancocks’ chicken coop too. Does the woman sleep? Does she? Because I know she’s taking her kid to school and picking her up every day, and she’s at every soccer game, and she’s the PTA superstar, and she’s making progress on shit on her own land ... It’s like she’s you but a single mom doing even more than you do.”
I’m supposed to reply to that, but I can’t find a single thing to say.
So instead, I flag down George, the owner, and order a beer and a meatloaf.
For the past six years, I’ve beenthe guy. The one everyone in town calls when they need something.
And now, Kory’s telling me Maisey’s fixing all the things that I would’ve normally gotten a call to come help with.
And she’s not doing stuff that takes away from the local electrician or plumber or painters or roofers. She’s helping with the projects they can’t get to for months, for the families that can’t afford to wait or can’t afford to pay for repairs.
“Tony’s kickin’ back up there at his palace in the sky, getting a big ole hootin’ chuckle out of watching you lose your shit over a woman who beats you at your own game,” Kory says.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Means you volunteer everywhere because you never got over feeling like the bad kid for running away from home when it was the only option you had left to take care of yourself, and now you’re still afraidnobody will like you if you don’t bend over backward to try to make them, and here she is, moving to town after a big, ugly, public divorce, with an angry teenager, doing the exact same.”
Should’ve gone home.
Should’ve. Fucking. Gone. Home.
But I was afraid that was where Maisey was going, and I didn’t want to follow her, or have her follow me.
“I don’t do it so people will like me,” I say to Kory. “I do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Is it?”
I stare at him.
