I cracked the beer, this time keeping the cap in my hand.
I needed to leave it alone. To focus on the book.
But she’d made the words come.
I’d been so fucking elated after reading those pages, I’d put on that song she’d been singing. I nearly blew my eardrums out.
The next day, I wrote a few more, high off the day before.
But the next day, after working through a crisis call from Sal about the merger looming on the horizon I needed to be back for, I sat down ready, fingers on keys.
And nothing fucking came.
After that, I slid back into failure like it was my natural resting place. It hadn’t been, in life, except for this one part.
I’d paced so hard today, for so many hours, I was surprised there wasn’t a path burned into the pool deck. I’d swum a thousand laps, lifted a thousand pounds. Still, the familiar memory came rushing back like it always did when things went bad with the book.
What the fuck is this?
My dad’s voice in my head was a shock of cold water. I was brought back to that moment, seeing my awkward, stilted twelve-year-old handwriting open and exposed on the page, under the judging wrath of my dad’s gaze.
Don’t be an idiot, Mitchell. No son of mine is going to be a fucking pussy poet.
It’s not poetry!
Then the book, tossed into the fireplace, those earnest words melting into the embers.
Blake got a backhand for trying to defend me. I got blisters trying to pull the book out of the fireplace.
Dad laughed at us both.
I swallowed now, the taste of the memory, poisonous on my tongue. I was twelve.
“Fuckingtwelve,” I said out loud, my voice a startlingly low thrum in the silence of the kitchen.
I was writing this book as a fuck you to my father. He wasgoing to see my name in print. He was going to see the words I wrote about him in the preface. He was going to see it all, and it would mean more than all the mergers and acquisitions I’d achieved in my business. It would mean more than my first dollar earned without him and the billion earned since.
If I could ever fucking finish.
I pulled open the cupboard door with my foot, intending to toss the bottle cap into the trash. But my eyes went to the piping under the sink. I stared at it for a good minute. Then I looked back out across the pool to where I’d come from, to where that blank page sat on my typewriter.
Winona was the only thing that could fix this.
I looked back down at those pipes. My fingers were tight enough on the bottle I was sure it was going to crack in my hand. I set it down. Then I strode back to the pool house. Not to the writing studio inside, but around back, to the attached toolshed.
The sledgehammer felt solid in my hands; the weight delicious as I strode back into the kitchen, positioning myself next to the empty cupboard.
I swung. Hard.
It only took one hit for the pipe to come detached. Sink sludge splattered onto the interior shelf. I gave the pipe a few hits until the plastic splintered into shards.
I flipped the sledgehammer head-up, then took it back to the shed, hanging it on its hook.
That done, I picked up my phone. “Sal,” I said the moment she answered. “I’m going to need the plumber’s number.”
CHAPTER 7
Recalibration
