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“I’ll give you a hand.”
“Great.” I sat there, still staring at the paper, motionless.
“Let’s go.” Jake stood and with his hand under my elbow, hauled me up. “Get it done so you can go get your kid.”
“Ah. Yeah.”
“I can’t wait to meet him,” Jake said from behind me as we walked down the hall to the end bedroom.
We’d agreed to give Jesse some space while we waited for the test results, so no one other than me, Ellen and Bruce had actually met him yet. And Ally, of course. Shit, should I maybe text her and let her know? Hmm, probably better not. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d woken up three days ago and found her gone. A single dad was a lot to take on and fair enough if she wasn’t interested. It wasn’t cool of me to push it, regardless of what I’d started thinking about before that fateful day we went to Slow River Ranch.
We started with the wardrobe, clearing out my old clothes, sports trophies from when we were kids, some junk of our old man’s. It was a weird feeling, but neither of us spoke about it. The past was in the past. Much, much better to leave it there.
“What’s next?” Jake asked, coming back from taking a whole bunch of shit out to my truck.
“Chest of drawers, I guess.” I gestured to the tallboy against the wall. It was mainly photo albums our mom had put together, old birthday and Christmas cards, postcards from our grandparents when they’d gone on holidays.
“What do you want to do with it all?”
“Uh… Keep the albums, throw out the cards and shit.”
“Done.” Jake grabbed a trash bag and held it open while I dumped in everything except the albums.
“I’ll make room on the bookshelves in the living room for these.” I put them on the floor outside the door.
“Great. What else?”
I scratched my chin, trying to think of anything else we could do. “I’ve actually got a set of shelves in the garage. We could put those up. Jesse might have stuff he wants to put on them.”
“Okay. I’ll take this trash out while you get them.”
While we were putting up the shelves, I said, “I guess I’ll take him shopping, so he can buy some stuff for his room. Curtains and bedding and shit. I don’t know what he’s into, so it’s better if he chooses stuff himself, right?”
“Sounds good.”
“Or maybe I should just get something generic, you know, so his room looks better than this when he first comes here?”
“It’s probably more fun to take him to choose stuff himself.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. Put the bracket on the left up a hair.”
I made the adjustment. “Thanks.”
“You’ll be fine, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“With Jesse. Being his dad. You’ve got this in the bag. I can tell already.”
“My nerves that obvious, huh?”
Jake grinned and held his fingers an eighth of an inch apart. “Just a bit. But trust me, you’ll do a good job of it.”
“Not sure how you can be so positive.”
“Worked for me, didn’t it?”
