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"Yeah. There’s a lot of family shit up there at Longside you don’t know anything about. Keep that in mind when you drool over her shadow, Kyle." I held my silence for a long enough moment that he sighed, tapping his boot impatiently on the veranda’s hardwood boards. "She makes up gels. Poultices out of what's there on the land. Eve uses them, says they're damn miracle creams. I’ve taken to trying some of them out on the animals. Haven't had an infection out of them yet.” He jerked his head to the baskets of eggs and a few home-made things beside my folding table. “Don’t forget to pack it all up.”
I nodded slowly, absorbing the information. "Appreciate it."
“We're gonna see you again soon, then?"
"Might do." I headed back to my pick up truck with its dents an old eight-point stag left embedded into the passenger side door.
That stag lost its horns and cost me four hours jimmying up a bad axle and a punctured tire on the side of a dirt road in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Shaking myself out of the memory, I shut the door, walking round to the other side, measuring the sun’s distance above the tree line. From here that horizon wasn't visible, but once I crested hills out to the east, and I passed Travis’ wife’s vetsurgery, I’d have a better gauge if I had time to drop in on an old friend.
****
Jack Stone wasn't home when I pulled up and left the basket of eggs from Red Hart on his doorstep. The door was locked, and my shout could have roused neighbors miles away. I clutched a double stack of cheese sandwiches, picking out the lettuce Eve insisted on throwing on them.
"Jack!" My voice was hoarse from talking all day. "Jack. You around, old man?"
His dog barked inside the house. The damn thing had to be frantic. I walked around the back and came face to face with a black Doberman that attempted to lick me to death.
"Okay. Get down Daisy." He named the dog after his last wife when she walked away alone on the edge of nowhere claiming if he called the dog after his ex-wife’s name, he wouldn’t have to change old habits.
The dog sniffed at me, though she didn't try to take the sandwich from my hand for now. Her ribs weren't poking out, so she'd been eating so God knew what, and who knew how long Jack had been gone. Turning my back to the fading, the purple haze that settled on the horizon over the mountains to my west, I faced the fields beyond the house, cupping my hands around my mouth. "Jack!"
Beside me, Daisy’s tail sank. She sat on my feet on the back porch and whined. One of the floorboards jumped under her slowly moving tail, flicking up at an inch, its rusty nail dragging annoyingly. I tested the next one with my boot. That one rattled, too.
"I've been away too long." I could afford a few days to help fix Jack's place up. If he wasn't back in the morning, I'd head intoWhite Cap, make sure he hadn't drunk himself stupid and not been able to get home from forty-seven North, the bar in town he often laid up at for a few days on a binge in an effort to forget the lives lost in someone else’s war years back.
Not wanting to break into the house I grabbed my swag and laid it out between the truck and the house. Daisy curled beside me, and we sat there, chewing on the stack of sandwiches in companionable silence, until night set in. Thankfully the early fall air was still warm enough to sleep outside without risk of losing part of an ear. The weather stayed warm, but in a few weeks it would be frigid out, and then I’d need shelter.
Daisy slept with me, her tail thumping happily when I woke to break into the barn and pull out the tools I needed to fix the back porch.
I didn't see Jack that day, or the day after.
****
It wasn't until I was nearly done with the damn veranda and hammering in those bent old runners back where they should be with their mismatched nails that I found a pack of brand new ones in the back of the tidy barn. That was one of the few things kept neat on the entire property. Tossing the hammer in the air I shook my head and went back to the job at hand.
"How long you been out here?"
Those were the first words I heard in three days apart from my chat with Daisy. I stopped hammering and glanced halfway over my shoulder, picking out the pair of spanking brand new boots I didn’t know but belonged to a voice I recognised.
"Where you been, old man?" He didn't stink like a brewery, so that was a bonus for the first time ever. I realised he was wearing a suit. "Having a party without me?"
My words broke the pervading silence I got used to in the last few days. My words ricocheted off the house and back at me, shattering into thousand fragments matched the man they came from.
"My niece got married. Good kid. Married a soldier."
He pulled a tall bottle from his jacket and drained it in one.
"This is how this afternoon is gonna go, huh?”
The old man grunted, settling his weight on the wobbly steps I hadn’t gotten around to fixing yet. The wood creaked beneath his weight. "Do them next?” he asked, hopefully, and squinted at me.
I snorted and shook my head. "I’m surprised you got home in one piece. You know better to drink, and then haul your ass across the state.” He was lucky he hadn't overturned in a damn ditch somewhere between his place and wherever the wedding was held. Not that I’d heard a whisper about any family he had left in the decade or so I’d been coming around.
Jack pulled his keys out of his pocket and tossed them into the air. "Do you want to come inside?" He nodded to my swag and my truck where I'd been sleeping for the past few days.
"I’ve already been inside and had breakfast, old man. Though that shitty light fitting of yours could do with a refit. "
