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“Why are women so complicated, Scout?” I asked as she came strolling in to plop down beside my chair, but she just looked at me with her big green eyes. “I don’t guess you have any answers either, huh?”
Atticus joined us, stopping to lick a single paw before perching himself on a nearby stool to watch us, disinterested. I stood and made my way across the kitchen and down the hall to my hobby room, closing the door behind me to keep them out. They were notorious for climbing on anything they could catch a foothold on and pushing whatever got in their way to the floor. It had already resulted in several small parts ending up in parts unknown.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, just staring at the Messerschmitt BF 109 I had been building in my spare time without touching it, but when I finally stirred again, I was stiff all over. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was well after six. Hadn’t it been four o’clock when I came in here? I had to shake this loose. I left the room for the kitchen and made myself a frozen burrito and some microwave rice for dinner, eating it at the counter and staring out the window for a while.
It was hard to remember ever having felt so alone before, though I knew there had been a time when I was much lonelier than this. There had been a time when I was so consumed with drugs that I didn’t know if I would wake up again each time I lay down to sleep. I’d been unable to get myself clean because there was nothing for me to look forward to. This felt close to that, the same sort of quiet desperation.
I didn’t want to feel like this, but I didn’t want to give in to the beast that would send me spiraling back down a black hole. Normally, I’d have a drink or two to calm down. Right now, though, I was afraid I’d cross that line where I drank too much and then wanted to do something else. I had to break out of this.
Back inside the hobby room, I began removing everything from the back shelf and putting it toward the front. I needed to busy myself, and the modeling obviously wasn’t working. I had the house beside hers to work on, but that was the last place I felt like being right now. What I needed was a home project. Today was as good a day as any to start that back expansion off the hobby room. By midnight, I’d taken a sledgehammer to the back wall for some good old-fashioned destruction therapy.
“Glenn, I need you to get Donnie and come over today if you can,” I was saying on the phone less than seven hours later.
“For what?” Glenn asked sleepily.
“I need you to frame up and pour a slab for an addition on the house.”
“Just like that? You decide on this in the middle of the night?”
“Mostly. You got time?”
“Sure. Why not? I’ll get Donnie up, and we’ll be on our way.”
Glenn had once owned a concrete business, but he had gone under due to some bad decisions on his part. Though he decided it was as good a time as any to retire, he had kept a lot of his equipment and did smaller jobs for me when I needed him. His son Donnie usually helped if he wasn’t on a construction job elsewhere, but work had been slim for him lately, so it was unlikely that he wouldn’t be able to help.
“You made a really big fucking hole, bud,” Glenn told me once they arrived and looked around.
“Yeah.”
“At least you got all your toys covered up,” he laughed, walking around and looking at the unfinished pieces I’d carefully secured beneath plastic sheeting before calling Donnie in. “Come on son, let’s get some measurements and sort this place out for our boy here.”
The three of us spent the rest of the day getting together a plan for what I wanted to do with the addition, and then went into town to the hardware store before they closed. I’d have to go into Moseley to get some additional stuff they didn’t carry, but it was enough to get us started with blocking off the pad and getting the concrete poured. It wasn’t a cure-all, but it at least gave me something to focus on rather than staring at the walls and risking not staying clean.
Glenn and Donnie seemed to sense that I was in a dark place and did what all good friends do, stayed close and helped me stay busy rather than trying to come to any great understanding of my situation. It was a relief to have them there. They got me through the worst of it. I can’t say I was over her by the time they left, but there was still plenty to do once we had it all framed up. It would keep me busy for a while, keep my mind from going to the worst places. I was busy hanging drywall when the phone rang, so I let it go to voice mail. When I checked it later, I found it was from Glenn, inviting me to a barbecue at their house.
