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About a dozen logs in, my oldest brother came out of the woods, his dogs, Heathcliff and Rochester, beelining for me. The two of them worked together to almost take me down, jumping all over me and covering me with slobbering kisses.
“Training or blowing off steam?” Henri asked, tipping his chin toward the maul I’d left stuck in a thick log.
“Training,” I replied, wiping the sweat from my brow. “Can’t disgrace the family name at nationals.”
Lumbering over, he grunted. “Then I suppose I’ll join you,” he said, picking up another maul from the pile of equipment I’d created just outside the shed. “Alice has been feeding me so well, I could use the workout.”
I elbowed him. “Domestic life making you soft?”
He shrugged. “If being happy and exhausted all the time is soft, then yeah, I guess it is.”
All I could do was grin. My eldest brother, the family grump, the quiet, serious one who never missed a day of work and never missed an opportunity to take on even more responsibility, had been transformed into a doting family man, and he was loving every minute of it.
“How’s Hazel?” he asked between splits, already huffing and puffing.
I split another log, just to show off, and smiled. “She’s good.”
“Paz was against this quickie marriage, but I think she’s good for you.”
I relished the compliment. Henri was not the effusive type.
“And I think you’re good for her too. But what’s gonna happen when she finishes her degree? I don’t see you as the big-city, university type.”
That stung a bit, but I shook it off and went back to work. I certainly wasn’t going to bring up the elephant in the room—my future at Gagnon Lumber. So I tiptoed around it, settling for the easy truth. “Not sure yet. But I don’t care where we go as long as I’m with Hazel.”
It was early afternoon before I finished, and when I stepped into the cabin, I found my wife seated on a stool at the kitchen island, typing away, wearing teeny, tiny shorts and one of my T-shirts, which hung off one shoulder, revealing her lack of bra. Christ, I’d just put my body through a grueling workout, but suddenly, I was filled with restless energy.
I bent down and gave her a sweaty kiss.
“I made us lunch,” she said, waving to two plates on the counter without looking up from her computer. I flinched but recovered quickly. I still hadn’t quite recovered from taco night.
Not quickly enough to go unnoticed by my wife, though. “Just PB and J,” she said, getting up to fill water glasses.
“Thanks, babe.” Famished, I dropped onto the stool next to her makeshift workstation and took a big bite of the sandwich. From the outside, it looked like any old PB and J. But good Lord, it was somehow grainyanda little slimy. I chugged half my water, working to get the bite down and gave her a smile. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
She beamed. “No problem.” She made her way back to her seat and took a bite of her own sandwich, her smile quickly turning into a grimace. “Fuck,” she said, dropping the rest of it onto the plate. “Why does that taste…”
“Oily?” I offered.
She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “And cold and wet and hard and soft at the same time.”
“It’s okay.” I lifted a shoulder, trying to make her feel better while wondering how on earth anyone could screw up the world’s most simple sandwich.
“I even used the fancy bread. You know, the multigrain stuff we got at that health food store in Bangor?”
“It was in the freezer. Did you defrost it before you put the sandwiches together?”
She shook her head. “Why? Bread thaws.”
I pointed to the crystallization in the middle. “Not fast enough.”
She sighed. “And the peanut butter is all oily and nasty. But that one’s on you. I wanted Jif, but you insisted on the fancy natural stuff.”
“Did you stir it first?”
She raised an eyebrow at me.
“The natural stuff, when you open it, you gotta mix up the oil that collects on the top with the actual peanut butter below it. It separates.”
