“Appreciate it,” I say as I start to pick through the discarded pieces of metal and soldering, pulling out a few unfinished pendants and rings. Beneath it is a folded-up piece of paper in a familiar shape—a pointed front and a symmetrical fold of wings that I know when I pull out will be a basic dart fold. “I didn’t—” I clear my throat, shoving down every single feeling that’s threatening to surface. “I didn’t know he had spent time here.”
Tommy turns back and says, “I’m not as loud or pretty as the Crowne girls, but I know how it feels to love them, and to want to be near them, even when it’s not an option. I don’t know why he came so often. I have some theories, but then again, I have some of those about you too.” He smiles to himself.
I wonder exactly how much he knows about all of it.
“I’d really like to not be wrong about you, Julian. So do me a favor; if you’re here for anything other than the right reasons, leave. Stop by the bar, hedge your goodbyes, and let Wyn move on from wherever it is you followed her from.”
That isn’t going to happen. I lift my chin and sit taller. The last thing I normally do is care what someone thinks about me, but Tommy seems like the closest thing to a dad in Wyn’s life, so I’ll treat him that way. “I’m staying for the right reasons,” I tell him. “Whatever your theories might be, just know I’d never hurt your niece. And I’ll make sure no one else does either.”
Clapping his hand on my shoulder, he smiles, shaking his head like I missed the punchline. “I’m glad to hear that. And it’s not Wyn who I’d be worried about getting hurt,” he says as he turns and moves toward the doors.
I crack a smile, because it’s not lost on me the threat that lingered in his words. As I look around at the bench and the few cases filled with tools, I’m more caught up in understanding the semi-permanence of what my dad had built here.
“Dad, why keep this from me?” I whisper to myself as I catalog the different sizes of metal files and pliers. I start thinking about all the parts that I still don’t have clear answers about, and it makes me uneasy. I want to close out this part of my life, wrap a legacy that doesn’t feel right anymore without him, and now I’m here and feeling like I’m sinking in information that I won’t ever fully understand, not without being able to ask him.
“An accident,”was what the officer had told me. And his cause of death was a heart attack. The injuries to the body had been postmortem, as his car collided with a building on the north side of Queens. It all sounded like some kind of fucking mistake. He was supposed to have been in Tennessee for a job, not up in one of the burrows of New York City. It still feels wrong to this day.
I drag my fingers through my hair, thinking about what he’d say to me about listening to my gut.
“Met a woman once who told me it isn’t your gut that tells you when something isn’t right. That the world is far more complicated than that. You have to look for all kinds of signs. And listen.”
I remember how he folded the blue paper down its center and the top left corner next. I’d already made three and he was still on his first.
Sunday morning coffee with my dad often turned into lunch on days we’d talk about the jewelry business. He’d always ask me,“Find a woman worth mentioning yet?”I’d always shake my head and tell him no. I never asked him.
I can’t help but smile thinking about what I’d say if he asked that question again now.
With a deep breath, I pull open the last drawer and most of it is just saved pieces of metal, steel nuts that have been filed down, and a pouch of small gemstones that are an interesting mix. But there’s a polaroid beneath it that I don’t recognize. It’s not me or an old one of my mother, but my dad smiling at the camera, holding up his glass with a much younger Birdie Crowne nuzzled into his neck.
“What are you doing out here?”Jo Crowne asks from behind the red pickup.
I shut the door to my Bronco and walk around as she stands to her full height, hauling a sack of something heavy from her shoulder and making the truck bounce as she drops it into the bed.
“Is Birdie inside?” I ask in response.
Stevie comes out from the old building, popping a pink bubble in her mouth. “Thought you’d still be here.”
My heart picks up pace at that idea. Wyn is complicated and the situation that keeps unfolding between us gets more and more messy. I’d be fucking lying if I said she doesn’t make me feel things, but I’m a bit distracted after what I just found. I don’t say anything about that, though. Instead, I smile at the insinuation and say, “Sorry, just came looking for Birdie.”
Jo raises her eyebrows and smiles, wide-eyed at me first, and then Stevie.
Ignoring me, Stevie says, “We all watched that little spectacle last night at the bar, Julian,” Stevie says, hand propping on her hip. “You guys bang it out yet?” She wiggles her eyebrows.
“Stevie,” Jo warns with a roll of her eyes. “Ignore her. She watched too many soap operas growing up; turned her into a hopeful romantic. But Birdie’s not here.” She points to the wood and rolled-up canvas next to the truck. “Mind getting that?” she asks.
I move around to the back of the truck and grab what she’s asking for. “Any idea when she’ll be back?”
“She’s helping out some of her garden club girls prep barbecue for the Bluegrass Full Moon Fest this weekend. I think she said she had to pop up to Nashville and see a man about some meat.”
Stevie snorts out a laugh. “How long have you been wanting to say that?”
Looking at the decent-sized pile they had in front of them to load, I haul some of the wood into my arms and shove it along the far side of the truck bed. “This a music thing?”
“It’s a Tennessee thing,” Stevie says. She doesn’t elaborate any further as she heads into the garage and comes out with two gallons of paint in each hand a beat later.
“What is all of this?” I ask, looking at the truck being stacked with hardware. It’s loaded with art supplies, raw materials, and a rolled-up rug, while the front seat is already filled with greenery, with even more green leaves pressing against the back window and draping out the side.
Jo hops down from the truck, closing the foldable bed, and claps dirt off her hands. “I finally leased an art studio. Want to come see it?”
