by Hugh Howey
“Come back at noon,” she said. She stood up and rested her hands on her hips. Daniel fumbled with the zippers on his backpack, then slung the now-light sack over his shoulder. “If you want, you can eat lunch with us,” she said. “It’s nothing special. We’re just having some salad to use up the tomatoes and cukes that survived the storm.” She frowned. “Of course, you don’t have to, you can always just pick up your things whenever—”
“Of course,” Daniel said. “I’d love to.” He nodded. “Noon.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a salad, much less as an entire meal, but it sounded like the most appetizing thing in the world right then.
Anna smiled. She held out her hand. Daniel grabbed it and felt her pump his arm up and down. “See you then,” she said.
20
Daniel practically skipped home, his hand and cheeks burning. The sweat from the humid Beaufort air stuck his shirt to his chest and back, but hardly bothered him. The awkward goodbye, the way Anna’s perfect eyes had darted about while waiting for him to accept her invitation, the handshake: Daniel was thrilled with the stiffness of it all. It was like every stuttering encounter he’d ever had with the opposite sex, but this time it had been mutual! She was almost as awkward as he was.
He ran past one of the brush piles and breathed in the air of injured timber and tree sap. He was pretty sure he was in love. His legs felt at once light and powerful with it, as if he could run a marathon. His brain tingled with the newness, the feeling of being let in to some august and exclusive club. He suddenly knew what so many others must’ve known for much longer. He could feel his hatred and envy of Roby dissipate. Even as he no longer cared about the storm’s aftermath or the loss of power, he desperately wished for some temporary line of communication, some way to tell his best friend that he was no longer a loser for not having a girlfriend and that Roby was lucky to have someone as well.
“Oh my god,” Daniel said to himself, slowing to a walk. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”
Some girl had invited him to share some salad for lunch, and now he was wondering if it would be better, for their future family, to have a boy first or a girl first. There were good arguments for both ways. An older brother could look after his sister, or he could torment her. Daniel was moving right past losing his virginity to wondering what kind of parent he’d be.
“I’m a fucking idiot,” he said to himself.
The deflated sensation intensified as he entered his cul-de-sac and saw his father hoisting a massive limb before letting it flop down on top of the growing debris pile. Daniel used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead. As he started up the driveway, he scanned the yard for his sister, but didn’t see her anywhere. His mom was also absent. Carlton had moved off to another tree with the chainsaw; the last tree had become nothing more than a dashed outline of its former self, a line of sawdust marching down the row of jumbled logs. Daniel waved at Carlton as he peered up at him through his safety goggles. His stepdad pointed in a tall arch as if over the house, signifying perhaps that the rest of his family was in the back yard.
Daniel dropped his book bag by the garage and hurried around to the back of the house. Yet another pile of twisted limbs lay jumbled at the end of the drive. His mother and sister were just beyond it, talking to one another, their gloves off.
“Am I interrupting?”
Daniel walked slowly in their direction. Zola turned her back. His mom wiped at her eyes and shook her head.
“You guys need any help back here?”
“We’re fine,” his mom said, which was the opposite of how they looked.
“How long is he gonna stay?” Daniel asked, taking a guess at what was upsetting them.
“He says he has a friend in Charleston he can stay with,” Daniel’s mom said. “So just until the phones work or he can get a ride some other way.”
“And we’re gonna make him sleep in the toolshed until then?”
“He’s not staying in the house,” Zola said, her voice as broken up as the tree out front. She kept her back turned; her hands went to her face. Their mom stepped closer and put an arm around her shoulders. She looked back toward Daniel.
“I think there’s more for you to do in the front yard.”
Daniel let out a sigh. He hated being excluded, but he thought he understood their wanting to be alone. “He says he’s quit drinking,” Daniel told them. It felt like a feeble attempt. His mom glowered at him over her shoulder, her brow wrinkled and lips drawn tight. Daniel turned and headed back around the house, his elation from a few minutes prior completely and utterly smashed.
For the next several hours, he barely saw his mom or sister. It was only when he was dragging something down the driveway, walking backwards, that he might catch a glimpse of them working slowly and methodically on their brush piles in the back yard. He and Carlton and his father worked with few words. They alternated between disentangling limbs and hauling them to the street, and stacking the green firewood Carlton chopped up between a rare pair of still-standing trees.
When the chainsaw ran out of gas, Daniel’s father offered to get more out of the toolshed, but Carlton waved him off and insisted on going himself. That left the two of them, father and son, piling logs, the yard silent of the tree-chewing machine, the distant buzz of a few other saws and the chirping of some returning birds to keep them company.
“I’ll be moving on just as soon as I can,” Daniel’s father finally said. “I hate that I’ve brought so much tension here.” He threw a log on the pile. It landed with a solid and ringing clunk.
“So the boat’s gone?” Daniel asked quietly. He remembered days anchored out on the river with the old houseboat. His dad would grill out on the roof while he, Hunter, and Zola trailed behind on the swift current, clinging to fenders and life rings strung out on chewed lines and suspect knots.
“Yup,” his father said, then cleared his throat. He turned and wrestled with one of the biggest logs, almost as if to punish himself.
Daniel remembered helping him toss the lines on the boat that last time. When his father had puttered down the intercostal waterway over a year ago, Daniel had watched from the dock and had suspected they were both gone forever, boat and father. Now one of them was back in his life. The other sounded as if it had been demolished in the storm.
“I hope Hunter gets back before you go,” Daniel said. He wasn’t sure why he wished that, but he did.
“You picked out a college? Or are you gonna go to the community center with Hunter next year?”
“Probably go with Hunter, unless I get some kind of scholarship. My grades are good enough, but they want you to have all these other things. Club memberships, community events, summer camps, volunteering and whatnot.” Daniel shrugged. “I’m taking my SATs again next month before I send some more applications out. I’m hoping I can get some money from Wofford if USC and the College of Charleston turn me down.”
His father nodded and threw another log on the ever-higher wall of circular bricks. “You dating anyone?” he asked.
Daniel laughed. He felt close to telling him about the girl down the street, but already his delusions of their status felt ridiculous. He didn’t even want to explain why he wouldn’t be around when the rest of them were eating canned ravioli for lunch.
“Not really,” he said.
“Probably best to wait until you see where you’re living next year,” his father said, almost as if consoling him.
Daniel felt like arguing, like saying a year was too long to be alone—he felt with a burning rage that he needed to not be alone. Then he thought of what his father must’ve been doing the last year, how hard the last few months of sobriety—if he’d really been able to manage it—must’ve been like. He felt like yelling at his dad for being down at the docks all summer and never calling him. An entire summer of being alone and scrounging for things to do. All those days they could’ve taken the boat out on the river, the wasted days when he hadn’t
known some gorgeous girl lived just a few houses down, an entire summer wasted doing nothing when so much had been so close by.
“Whatcha thinking?” his father asked. He looked Daniel in the eye. “Or do I not want to know?”
Daniel shrugged. He looked at the tall pile of logs shouldered between the two trees, dappled light filtering through the gaps. “We should start a second pile,” he said. He thought about how rarely they used their fireplace in the winter—mostly just for ambiance around the holidays. Normally, they picked up a bundle of split wedges at the grocery store, a cloth handle stapled to one of the logs, and paid who knows how much for one fire’s worth. What they had stacked, once it was split and dried, would last them for decades. It would be sold with the house, he suspected. More than once, probably.
“How about over there?” His dad pointed to two other lucky trees, which would soon hold the remains of their fallen kin.
“Looks good,” Daniel said.
He picked up one of the larger logs before his dad could. Carlton came around the corner with a red canister in his hand, a dark mass of fuel and oil sloshing around in the lower half of it. The three of them fell back into their silent routine, working against the backdrop of the roaring and chewing chainsaw. Now and then, they would take breaks and drink warm water from the cups on the stoop. When Daniel did so, he marveled at the idea of the three of them doing yard work together. There was no force in the universe, he would’ve thought a week ago, that could have coerced him to do half as much with either man, much less willingly.
21
Daniel’s mom took the news of his lunch plans in stride, her face showing more shock and bemusement than any pain of abandonment. Daniel used the excuse that he had to go back for their phones and his Zune, anyway. After stripping off his sweat-soaked clothes and sponging off with some soap in the upstairs tub—a bucket of downstairs tub water at his feet—he toweled off, pulled on a fresh pair of shorts and a new shirt, grabbed his backpack, and sped out the front door. The smells of heating tomato sauce faded behind. Outside, as he strolled through his neighborhood, a different smell greeted him: it was the smell of campfires, of burning wood. More than one rising column of gray smoke beyond the trees of his neighborhood signified the beginning of the great fires it would take to remove the debris. It was funny. Daniel had imagined someone would be coming along to scoop up the limbs and leaves. He never considered they might be having bonfires up and down his neighborhood, sending the ash up to chase away the clouds that had felled them.
He turned down the now familiar driveway. The address on the mailbox was 2238. Daniel memorized this, filing it away with brown hair and green eyes. All he needed was Anna’s last name and date of birth, and he could practically picture her driver’s license. He wondered if she were the sort of person to donate her organs once she was through with them. Seeing a neighbor at the charging station, retrieving a freshly charged device, made him think she probably was.
Daniel waved to the gentleman standing by the solar panel, his phone powering on and giving him reason to frown. He started holding it up to the sky, searching for a signal, while Daniel bounded up the front steps.
He knocked on the screen door, and a man inside yelled, “Come in.”
Daniel pulled the screen door open and slipped inside. He wiped his feet, made sure the door didn’t slam on the jamb, then followed the sound of cabinets opening and closing toward the kitchen. Anna stuck her head around the corner and smiled at him, then disappeared again. Daniel walked back to the kitchen to find the two of them chopping vegetables on either side of a sink, the open windows letting in what little breeze stirred outside.
“Smells good in here,” he said, meaning it.
“We picked a lot of stuff out of the garden before the storm hit,” Edward said. “Good thing, too, because the garden flooded.”
“You want to snap peas?” Anna asked.
“Sure,” Daniel said. He went to the sink to wash his hands, then realized the habitual gesture was futile.
“The tap’s right there,” Anna said. She pointed to a garden hose snaking through the window and tied down to aim at the sink. Daniel put one hand under the nozzle and squeezed the large, plastic trigger. A thick stream of warm water gurgled out. He rubbed some soap on his hands then rinsed them one at a time.
“How much water do you have?” he asked. He leaned close to the window and tried to trace the hose as it disappeared up and out of sight.
“Oh, we’ve got tons,” Anna said. “I’ll show you later. You’ll love it.”
Daniel smiled at her and thought about how shallow the word “love” was when used in such a way. To suggest that he loved ice-cream was now tantamount to heresy. It was a word reserved for a specific function, and none else.
I’m being an idiot, he thought, in a sudden bout of rationality.
“How bad was the storm for you guys?” Daniel asked. He started snapping the tips off the peas and placing the unused bits in a large bowl of vegetable scraps.
“The house held up okay,” Edward said. “We lost some shingles, and our fruit trees out back aren’t gonna make it, but I’d say we were very lucky. Especially since no one got hurt.” He finished slicing a tomato and held out a piece to Daniel.
“Thanks.” Daniel popped the thick, meaty hunk of dripping redness in his mouth and nearly fainted. “Damn, that’s good,” he said. “Pardon my language,” he added, and the other two laughed at him.
“There’s nothing like a fresh tomato,” Anna said. She nodded out the window toward the large garden with its vine-covered trellises and tomatoes growing up large wire cones. Daniel saw peas on webs made of string and what looked to be corn stalks bent over from the wind. Some of them had been propped back up. “Unfortunately, we lost a lot of good stuff that we didn’t pick ’cause they weren’t quite ripe.”
“Didn’t think the storm would be that bad,” Edward said. He swung the knife in Daniel’s direction and bounced it once or twice. “I saw the tree that caught your house. Nasty wound, that.”
Daniel popped peas two at a time and set them in a pile with the rest. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s no telling when we’ll get that thing off or get the roof fixed. It went right through my sister’s bed. Felt like an earthquake.”
“How old’s your sister?” Anna asked.
“Fourteen. She’s a freshman. My brother Hunter is two years older.” He watched as Anna sliced small mushrooms into perfect cross-sectional bits with a tiny razor-sharp knife. “What about you? Just the two of you live here?”
Anna tucked some hair behind her ear, a tic Daniel was madly fond of. She nodded. “I have a younger brother, but he lives with my mom in Pennsylvania.” She finished the last mushroom and scraped the slices into a massive bowl already full of lettuce, some other greens Daniel didn’t recognize, green peppers, onion, and other buried layers of goodness.
“Is that where you guys are from? How long have you lived here?” He added the peas to the mix. The tomatoes were kept separate. Anna’s father grabbed two large spoons and began tossing the salad while Daniel followed Anna’s lead in setting the table.
“We’re all from Atlanta, actually,” she said. She looked to her father, then back to Daniel. “And my parents are still married. She just got a good offer from Penn State, and my dad works here, so it’s just temporary.”
“And then you guys’ll move to Pennsylvania?” Daniel tried to choke back the raw dread in his voice.
Anna lifted her shoulders. “Or they’ll move back down here if she finds something closer.”
“Or we’ll all end up somewhere else,” Edward said with a laugh. He scooped the mix of veggies and let them fall back in place, a waterfall of bright and healthy colors.
“What about you?” Anna asked. “Have you always lived a few doors down?” She straightened one of the forks and smiled up at Daniel. He couldn’t tell if she was playing with him, or if she liked him.
“I was born in Beaufort. We mo
ved into this house when I was eight, so it’s all I really remember. My dad pretty much built the entire thing by hand. He was a carpenter. Then my parents divorced a few years ago.”
Anna’s smile faded.
“It’s okay though,” Daniel said quickly. “Sometimes I think it’s better than staying together and making everyone else miserable with the fighting.”
Anna nodded. Edward turned and placed the massive bowl of salad in the center of the table.
“Do you see your dad much?” Anna asked.
Daniel laughed, but obviously with more than humor in his voice. Anna held her palms up and shook her head. “I’m sorry to pry,” she said. “You probably think I’m nosy.”
The others sat down, and Daniel did the same. He draped a cloth napkin over his lap.
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I actually hadn’t seen him in over a year until yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” Anna screwed her face up in confusion. Edward craned out a large scoop of salad and dangled it ponderously in Daniel’s direction. Daniel snatched up his plate and held it under the bushy load. Edward released it, and the plate blossomed with leafiness.
“Yeah,” he said to Anna. “A guy from the power company dropped him off on our doorstep. He’s living in our toolshed.”
Daniel grinned at her and basked in her look of disbelief.
“You’re not serious.”
“As a heart attack,” Daniel said.
Edward laughed at that. He got up, grabbed the tomatoes, and added them to the table. Anna poured water from a pitcher into each of the three cups. Daniel looked through the selection of warm dressings for the one with the most fat.
“So, mister . . .” Daniel looked to Edward to fill in the blank. He still didn’t know Anna’s last name.
“It’s Redding,” he said, “but I prefer Edward.”
