I stand in the hall with that growing weight in my empty stomach.
My feet move of their own accord as I walk past the bathroom and past my own bedroom door, all the way to the end of the hall. I face that closed door and swallow, hard.
Not a sound comes from the other side. Like Dad is sitting in a black hole.
I knock.
"Yeah."
I open the door.
Dad sits at his desk with his hands flat on the worn wood surface, on either side of a stack of envelopes like he expects something to happen. That ominous feeling in the pit of my stomach churns into something acidic at the back of my throat and suddenly, I have to refrain from closing that door and jumping into that shower like I saw nothing.
But Dad's hands are never still. Dad's hands fix engines. Dad's hands fix stuff. Dad's hands do things.
My eyes go from those still hands to his face and I have to swallow the lump in my throat that suddenly appears there.
"Hey, kiddo." He's not looking at me. He's still looking at that damned stack of envelopes between his hands. "Thought you were hitting the shower."
"Just wanted to check in with you first."
I step in and close the door behind me. He lifts his eyes from the desk and those envelopes, and a muscle tightens along his jaw.
I sit down in the chair across from him, the one I used to put my feet on when I was twelve and he pretended not to notice until I scuffed the varnish. My headache registers and a sharp pain shoots behind my right eye, moving from behind my eyeball to somewhere deeper in my skull, but I barely notice it.
"Dad, talk to me."
His eyes go from me to somewhere both close and infinitely far above my head, then he inhales a long, deep breath that stretches his massive chest under the rough cotton uniform.
"The town killed the new piers project."
Oh, shit.
He says it to that spot above my head, not to me. His brows furrow like he's tasting the words out, trying to wrap his own mind around them.
A bucket of ice pours down from the crown of my head all the way to the small of my back and all of a sudden, I'm not tired anymore. All of a sudden, I can barely breathe.
"When did that happen?"
"This morning. City Council session."
I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my face. I keep it still, because I get the sense that if I say the wrong thing, Dad is going to shut down on me and stay there in this office, staring at his flat, useless hands on that desk forever.
"Town's broke," he says, still staring above my head. "Broke, that's the word they used. The bonds they issued didn't have any takers, so there's no money for the piers, at least not this year."
He does a little gesture with one hand. He leaves the other one flat on the desk.
"Maybe next year. Maybe never. They couldn't say. They were real sorry about it."
When he finally tears his gaze from that distant spot above my head, I almost wish he didn't.
Because what I see in those deep crimson eyes flattens something in my chest. Despair, hurt, maybe even self-pity. All things I never thought I would see in my formidable orc father.
"Eighteen months I had that contract locked in. Eighteen months." Dad takes another deep breath and his mouth scrunches like he's sucking on something extra sour. "I've got to call the boys tomorrow and let them know I won't be able to give them a full time this summer. Danny and Paulie will give me shit about it, but they have other tricks up their sleeves and they'll be okay. I'm more worried for Will, the troll kid I hired last spring. He just had a baby six months ago and his wife isn't ready to get back to work."
"They can't just walk away from a signed contract," I say.
"Sure, they can." He nods to himself as he corrects me. "And they did. They had a budgeting clause in there in case the town couldn't get the funds together. Those types of contracts always do."
