MITCHELL: I’m sorry I blocked you. It wasn’t personal.
MITCHELL: And you could have gotten my new number from Conrad.
BLAKE: You mean the good brother? The one who didn’t drift down from his ivory tower to announce he was living in my hometown, neglect to tell me fucking where, and then ghost me one call later?
MITCHELL: I’m this close to blocking youagain.
BLAKE: You didn’t block me. You threw out your phone. The number said out of service. What did you do, smash it? Throw it out of your private plane?
MITCHELL: You were distracting me. You and that pretty wife of yours. All fucking moony-eyed.
BLAKE: She’s not my wife yet. And don’t call her pretty. Call her Cassandra, or I’ll throw you down and sit on you like you used to love.
MITCHELL: Couldn’t do it once I turned twelve.
BLAKE: Go to hell, Mitch. I mean it.
MITCHELL: No, you don’t.
BLAKE: I don’t. But I *could* take you.
That actually got a smirk out of me. My big brother wasn’t little, but I was a good three inches taller than he was, and outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. Maybe more since I’d been here. Besides writing and drinking myself into stupors, I spent most of my remaining time doing laps in the pool and prison-style calisthenics out on the basketball court. It was punishing.
All of it was.
MITCHELL: She is pretty, though. Don’t know what she sees in you.
BLAKE: I would say maybe you should find your own woman to fall in love with, but I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to you.
That one hurt, even if I agreed.
We shot a few more jabs back and forth, and since I still wouldn’t tell him where I lived, I ended with loosely promising to visit him and Cassandra at some point. Maybe never. I knew I was being fucking weird. I loved the shit out of both Blake and our middle brother Conrad, back in Seattle. But I was isolating for a reason.
I tossed the phone aside, tipping my head back and pressing the heels of my palms to my eye sockets. The reason was to finish writing this book. But it wasn’t working.
Except for that one day that it had.
Monday—the day that fucking firecracker was in my house. That whole night, the words had flowed from my fingertips onto the keys of the typewriter in a way they hadn’t in months. Theclack-clacksound was like water on some dying, parched part of my brain. The woman?—
She has a name, asshole.
Winona.
Winona gave me fire.
Winona.
She was some kind of witch. That had to be it.
I stood up. I shouldn’t have given my number to Blake again. He’d only be a distraction.
But I was already fucking distracted. I strode to the kitchen, intending to get a beer for lunch.
Texting Blake was a distraction from the distraction that wouldn’t leave my goddamned mind.
Winona.
Her name bounced through my head like a heartbeat zagging on a monitor. Like ticker tape. At night, it rolled around in my brain, looping around my tongue like candy. Like something else I could almost taste.
