“What about the other two? What are their favorite foods?”
“For supper? Bekka’s my casserole girl. She loves baked enchiladas, tamale pie, and lasagna. She likes one-pot dishes with cheese on top.” Lasagna was probably her favorite. Although that little baby, she craved herself some green chicken chile enchiladas. For being so sweet she could eat some hot food.
“And your girl of the night?”
“Potatoes. If you can do it with potatoes, she will eat it. Mashed, fried, baked, tater-totted.” Was tater-totted even a word? He liked it, even if it wasn’t. “Scalloped, au gratin. Boiled in a stew, in a soup. She loves her a potato.”
“I love that for her. I also am a fan of the humble potato.”
Mitch chuckled, and he didn’t want to chuckle because he didn’t want to think that Cam was funny. He didn’t want to think that Cam was charming. He wanted Cam to be awful so he could tell him to go away and never come back and darken his door.
But his mouth was full of pizza, so he couldn’t do that.
He shook his head, thinking how he should let bygones be bygones, but it was tough. The kind of total rejection Cam had laid on him back in the day still stung, even if his life had moved on in a huge way.
It was nuts.
So instead of saying anything, Mitch gnawed on a crust.
Cam sat down across from him and started eating. “So, how’d you end up roofing?”
“Needed a job. Tried tile work; didn’t like it. Got a job on a roofing crew, and I had a knack for it.” Simple as that.
“You ever think about owning your own business, hiring a crew?”
Shit. He had it all planned out. “All the time. But you’ve got to have equipment. You’ve got to be able to buy supplies. You’ve got to be able to hire a crew. Pay them before you get your money. It’s one of those things where you have to make time to make the money to do it. I think once the girls are grown, or at leasteverybody’s well in school all the time, I might be able to sneak a few more hours for it.”
It was just hard.
To be honest, he got into a rut every now and again. Day-to-day life was enough to keep him on his toes, and the second he thought he was going to get ahead, something happened. A tire blew, one of the kids got strep, a pipe busted—something.
It was always something, and he would say he was unlucky, but he was also smart enough to look around at the folks next to him and across the way from him and know this was how it worked.
If a man didn’t have big money, life was a challenge, and even some of those folks who thought they had big money? It wouldn’t take but one broken back to fix that right up.
“That makes sense to me. It’s always one step forward, two steps back with everything.”
“Well, I hope it’s more even with you.”
“Shit, man, I’m a rodeo cowboy. I work with animals all the damn time. My year can hinge on whether or not somebody turns up lame or decides that he just doesn’t want to rope today.”
“I hate that, but I get it.” He really didn’t. He didn’t understand the need to be on the road. He didn’t understand the need to throw a rope.
But he wasn’t a gambler either.
He was the turtle, except he had this sinking suspicion that maybe he wasn’t winning in his race.
And he would be a shitty human being if he willed someone else to fail because he wanted to win.
“Yeah, sometimes it sucks to have to be a good guy.”
“Where did that come from?”
He shrugged. “I was thinking about what I would teach my girls, and I would teach them to be good folks, so I can’t be an asshole. On purpose.”
Cam tilted his head to one side, chewing slowly on a piece of pizza, looking for all the world like a goat chewing its cud, which was hilarious. He just sort of nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. You don’t want to be a dick anyway, but when you have kids to pass it on to, you have to think about what you’re teaching them, huh?”
Mitch had to admit it surprised him that Cam got that so fast. But maybe it wasn’t such a surprise. He had tons of brothers and sisters, right? Maybe he knew more about setting an example than Mitch thought.
