I grabbed a bunch of bricks, setting them down beside his pile. I got another load before he could straighten his back.
“I’m not helpless.”
“I know.”
“You don’t need to treat me like I am.”
“I’m not. I’m just helping you.”
He grunted, which made me smile.
“You don’t got enough work?”
“What else am I going to do?” I asked, taking out the last of the bricks.
He sighed. “I hear alcoholism is time consuming.”
I was worn down and thin with all my worries and that joke just made me howl.
“It’s not that funny,” he said with a smile, watching me sideways.
“I know,” I said, wiping my eyes.
He started clearing the bricks off the cement pad that I’d placed my stacks on. “Thanks for the pasta sauce,” he said.
“You’re welcome.”
“It was better once I put some of my oregano in it.”
I sobered again, shackled by the reminder of my own gutlessness. Can’t ask for what I want. Can’t enjoy what I’ve got. Can’t even touch my body without being pulled apart by all the shit I’m trying to leave behind.
That night…after the thing with Dylan, I’d taken Fifty Shades of Grey and thrown it in the drawer with the gun and the phone and shut it. I’d been enjoying that book, was excited to read the rest of it, but I denied myself that because I’m a gutless dummy.
Because in the end, I get what I deserve.
I started an Agatha Christie novel. Because who doesn’t love Agatha Christie? But the whole time I wanted to be reading the book in my bedside table.
“I’m sure it was,” I said, crouching down beside him to clear the cement pad. After my shower I was going to finish that damn book. I was. No one was going to stop me. Not even myself. “What are you working on?”
“A little brick oven,” he said, brushing leaves away with his hand. “It’s too hot to cook in the trailer during the summer.”
He pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket and I saw again under his white shirt the shadow of that big, black tattoo.
It seemed ominous.
“Where did you live before here?” I asked.
“A bunch of places.”
“What did you do?”
“A bunch of things. Why are you asking?” His suspicion was uncomfortably threatening.
Because I’m trying to figure out why I’m supposed to be watching you.
“We’re neighbors,” I said with a shrug.
“Where are you from?”
“Oklahoma.” I surprised myself with the truth. “A farm.”
He grunted and took the wheelbarrow back over toward his trailer, where a pickup truck was parked. I followed and helped him move a bag of cement and a bucket from the truck bed into the wheelbarrow.
“You want me to help you with that?” It was hard watching him struggle.
Smith, who’d helped Mom and me on the farm, broke his hand once fixing a tractor. He’d had the whole thing in this weird splint, and then in a sling, but he wouldn’t stop working. Trying to do everything with one arm. I followed him around relentlessly until he snapped and demanded to know what I was doing.
“Waiting for you to need me,” is what I’d said.
I was doing the same thing with Ben. Waiting for him to need me.
Memories of Smith were best not contemplated. They were best kept behind their locked door.
“I don’t need your damn help,” Ben said, and wheeled it across the rough ground toward the bricks and cement pad.
I ignored him and followed. Once he made it there I helped him unload it, despite his grumbling, and he took the bucket over to the hose he had coiled up and hanging around a fence post, connected to a spigot in the ground.
His bad mood, with its familiar undertones of begrudging tolerance, made me feel better.
Smith again.
“What brought you to this place?” he asked over the gush of water into the bucket.
“I was running,” I said.
“Now what are you doing?”
He turned off the hose and brought the bucket back over to where I stood. When he set it down, water sloshed over my feet. I watched puddles form around my beat-up tennis shoes and didn’t answer. Didn’t have an answer.
Running had been such a wild departure—a giant crack—and I was still running. I didn’t know what happened after running.
“Seeing the sights?” he asked when I didn’t answer, oddly paralyzed by his question.
What am I doing, now?
“No?” he asked, with a smile. “Finding yourself? No, I know…finding God.”
I shook my head. “I think…I think I’m just…waiting.”