not this too?”
“What are you saying? You’re not talking about bringing our regular crew out here to work on this, are you?”
“Not exactly. Like I said, we’re getting older. How much longer can we keep going like we are?” Mike frowned.
“I don’t know, but that’s why we’re careful and we’ve saved…”
“But what if stepping back from construction at some point didn’t have to be the end of our careers, but only the beginning?” Mike leaned forward. “Each of us is plenty capable of running a crew. And in a town like this, there’s probably enough business to support us without having to compete. Maybe our crew should learn to manage projects instead of doing the work ourselves. Imagine if we had multiple large-scale jobs going on at once? Sure, we might give up some profitability since we would need to add payroll for workers, but with bigger bids like this, I bet we’d still have more than six times the cash coming in. And if we’re all foremen, and forewomen, then we could collaborate on this stuff so no one would be going at it alone.”
“Wow. That’s…” Joe blinked a few times. “I like it. I mean, really like it.”
“Me too.” Mike took a deep, shaky breath. “The only thing holding us back, I think, is Bare Natural. We can’t ask Kayla to walk away from her whole business. Her whole life. Everything she and Dave have built there from the ground up. How could we expect her to sacrifice that? And if we can’t, how can we pull this concept off when split up? And worse, how could we abandon the pair of them, leaving them behind while we move on.”
“You’re right,” Joe’s face fell. “It’s not fair to do that to them.”
Mike scrubbed his hand over his face. He was probably a fucking traitor to even consider it. But he’d been longing for more. A greater purpose. And to be honest, when Joe had come out to Middletown, Mike had seen the potential, but without a way to reach it.
“If nothing else, you should consider it.” He tapped his hand on Joe’s notebook. “You’re ready, whether you believe it or not. Even if it means you leave the rest of us in your dust. You were right. This place is doing wonders for you and for your family.”
Joe looked over at Nathan playing tug of war with the puppy over his tennis ball, laughing and rolling around in the grass. He smiled and sighed. “Thanks for saying that. And I’m sure it could be good for you too, except I know you’re too decent to abandon the crew, like I did.”
Mike would have argued, but just then someone honked the horn from the Hot Rods parking lot almost as furiously as Nathan had rung Joe’s doorbell the other day.
The crew! They had arrived.
Mike shot to his feet, a bit guilty maybe, as if they could have overheard what he’d been discussing with Joe. Nathan whizzed past, even more excited to see Abby than he’d been to show off his arm and his dog. Klea was jumping up and down on the porch of Tom and Ms. Brown’s cabin, where she’d been helping to make favors for the weekend wedding.
Mike felt at least as eager as the kids to see the rest of the crew and to try to act like things were back to normal. Unfortunately, more than ever he had a feeling they were on a path that couldn’t take them home again. At least not together and not the way they’d been for years.
“We’ll talk more about this later, okay?” Mike put a hand on Joe’s shoulder and clasped it tight. “For the record, I think you just might be the smartest motherfucker I know.”
“Can I get that in writing?” Joe flashed his lopsided smile then. “There’s lots to think about, I guess. Yeah, we should definitely circle back to this. Some better time.”
Mike hoped that didn’t mean never. If they waited for everything to be perfect, it would probably never happen. And with every day he spent there, with Joe, in Middletown, he was starting to believe that if he didn’t follow his dream, he might regret it for the rest of his life.
With that, they watched as Nathan charged across the lawn, his puppy close on his heels. Abby was running in his direction too. Nathan might have been a couple months younger than her, but he was growing by the day. So when