He rinsed out the sink and wiped the counter, then went back over to the ancient phone mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator, his finger hovering over the button to delete the message. Then, without knowing quite why, he hit the button to save instead. He told himself to stop thinking about it, and he did, mostly. Then he went upstairs to bed and fell asleep.
His mom had stopped asking him to go to church with her, but she did still like for him to show up at Rick and Alicia’s for lunch periodically, so on Sunday Colby put on an ugly blue dress shirt his mom had bought for him at Costco and drove over. His Uncle Rick lived in Cedarville, in the nicest McMansion in a development of McMansions he’d built himself. Rick and Colby’s dad had been in business together when Colby was small, but they were perpetually fighting about the direction of the company—“Rick wanted to make money, and Dad didn’t” was how Matt had explained it to him once—and after everything happened with the Paradise project when Colby was in high school, Rick had bought his dad out and taken Matt with him. Now Rick’s face was plastered on billboards all over the county alongside ads for model homes now open. Micah kept saying they should climb up there and draw a giant dick on his face.
“Hi, sweetheart,” Alicia said when she opened the door, her thick yellow hair bouncing like something out of a shampoo commercial. Alicia sold essential oils over the internet, lavender and tea tree and something called Thieves that was supposed to keep your house clean of bacteria or evil spirits, Colby wasn’t entirely sure. He thought the name probably said it all. Before this, Alicia used to sell leggings, and before that, she’d sold some system that involved wrapping yourself in Saran for weight loss, which she’d actually convinced his mother to buy. Colby had come home and caught her doing it once and he could tell she was embarrassed, so he’d wrapped himself in it, too. In the end, they’d had a pretty good laugh about the whole thing, the two of them standing in the kitchen all mummified in plastic, passing a bag of sour cream and onion chips back and forth.
Still, he kind of hated Alicia’s guts.
Now he toed off his sneakers per the house rules and headed into the dining room, where his mom and Matt were already sitting at the fake-antique farm table. On the wall was a verse from 1 Corinthians painted in a wedding invitation font on a piece of driftwood, even though they didn’t live anywhere near the water, plus a picture of Rick and Alicia and their kids sitting on the front porch of the house all wearing jeans and white T-shirts, their golden retriever, Lucky, at their side. As far as Colby was concerned, Lucky was the only member of the entire family who wasn’t an idiot, and even he licked his own butt pretty much constantly.
“So, Colby,” Rick said brightly, passing a platter of ham across the table while the twins, Mykala and Mykenzie, dutifully shoveled green beans into their nine-year-old mouths. “How’s big-box life?” He always said it like that when he asked Colby about work, like installing IKEA cabinets was so much better than driving a forklift. Colby was actually the youngest guy in the warehouse trained to handle the thing, which felt like an extremely dumb thing to be proud of but was also the truth.
“Oh, you know,” he said now, taking a heaping mound of potatoes, then another for good measure. “The usual. Hanging around with a bunch of losers. Wasting my bright young mind.”
“Colby,” his mother murmured, taking a sip of her lemonade. Matt snorted an irritated breath. Rick forked some green beans onto his plate, unruffled.
“You know, son,” he said conversationally, “if I’d had the week you had, I don’t know that I’d be joking quite so cavalierly about the company I kept.”
“What?” His mom’s gaze snapped up, darting from Rick to Colby and back again. “Why? What does that mean?”
Colby glared across the table at Matt. “It’s nothing,” he promised, trying to keep his voice even. “Rick’s just kidding around.”
“I am, I am,” Rick said, smiling a megachurch-pastor smile. “And Colby knows I just give him a hard time because I want what’s best for him. Which