Kid, as though he wasn’t twenty-eight years old and a grown-ass man. The old term of affection always made Aaron feel like he was a ten-year-old again. It made him feel small, but in the best possible way. The world had made sense when Aaron had been small. It had seemed like a safe place as well.
Uncle Will trod up the stairs, leather boots creaking. “Need a hand?”
“Need a fucking leg,” Aaron muttered, reaching for the nearest crutch.
Uncle Will looked like he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, which was how Aaron felt most days. He fussed around grabbing the other crutch instead, and then helping Aaron to his feet. “Come on. I made you breakfast.”
“Breakfast?”
“Yeah, breakfast at ten o’clock in the goddamn morning, and I had to wade through a sea of empty whiskey bottles to do it.”
Well, that explained the breaking glass.
Aaron grunted, and let Uncle Will help him down the stairs. There weren’t many people he would have trusted to do that. Hell, there weren’t many people he’d even let see him like this, but Uncle Will was the closest thing he had left to a parent, and he also didn’t take no for an answer. He’d been turning up to the house at least once a day since Aaron got back to town, bringing booze and food and movies to watch together. Though he’d stopped bringing booze when he saw how hard Aaron was hitting the bottle lately. Luckily Brody was always happy to go to the liquor store on Aaron’s behalf. They’d been friends since childhood; Brody was a good guy.
The scent of frying bacon made Aaron’s dry mouth water.
Aaron sat down heavily at the wonky kitchen table; there hadn’t been one when he’d arrived, so Brody had turned up with a truck full of stuff from the junkyard. None of it was pretty, but it did the job.
“What the hell are you doing sleeping upstairs?” Uncle Will asked as he turned the bacon over in the pan.
“That’s where my room is,” Aaron said.
Uncle Will cut him a look but didn’t say anything.
The house was an A-frame cottage. The main bedroom was at the back of the bottom floor, along with the bathroom. It would have made more sense to use it, but Aaron couldn’t even walk inside. That was his parents’ room. He couldn’t sleep in his parents’ room. Bad enough he was back under this roof with nothing but his memories and their ghosts to haunt him. Hence the whiskey.
The pan sizzled as Uncle Will cracked a couple of eggs into it. “You planning on leaving the house today?”
“Not planning on it,” Aaron admitted.
“So what? You’re just gonna sit around on your ass and do nothing?”
“The lumber doesn’t come until next week.”
Aaron had worked a few years in construction between graduating high school and joining the army, so it had seemed like a good idea to come back and fix the house up before he sold it. See if he could add some value to it and up the sale price a little. Mostly though, he’d wanted something to do, maybe figure all his shit out before he readjusted to civilian life. And to life as an amputee. The future stretching out in front of him wasn’t one that he’d planned for, and he had no fucking idea what to do with himself now. He’d always intended to look into joining law enforcement when he got out of the army, but that was out of the question now. He was too fucking old for college. Not that there weren’t students his age, but Aaron couldn’t imagine anything worse than being a twenty-eight-year old college freshman, surrounded by all those kids partying and living their lives when he could barely even walk up a flight of fucking stairs.
So he’d found another way to torture himself, and had come back to Spruce Creek.
“So what if the lumber doesn’t come until next week?” Uncle Will asked. “I thought you were gonna strip the old wallpaper in the den and paint it? There’s nothing stopping you from getting a start on that before the lumber arrives.”
Aaron shrugged and didn’t answer.
Uncle Will sighed. “IsaidI could handle selling the house for you.”
“I know you did.”
“Kid, if you came back here to fix the place up, then do it.” Uncle Will crossed the kitchen floor and set Aaron’s plate down in front of him. “Otherwise, what the hell are you doing here, apart from drinking your own bodyweight in whiskey every damn day?”
“I’m doing it,” Aaron grumbled, stabbing a crispy piece of bacon with his fork. “I’ll do it, okay? I’ll get started on stripping the wallpaper today.”
He concentrated on his breakfast so he didn’t need to see the look of worry in Uncle Will’s eyes, and so Uncle Will wouldn’t see the lie in his.
* * * *
Aaron didn’t get started on the wallpaper that afternoon. Instead, he limped back upstairs for a nap and woke up craving a drink. He wanted whiskey and would have settled for beer, but he discovered when he wobbled back downstairs again that either he’d drunk everything last night, or Uncle Will had quietly disposed of his meagre stash.
Will sent a text to Brody, only to discover that he was out of town for the day. Had Brody mentioned that to him? Probably. Between the booze and his pain meds, Aaron wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.
