by Scott, Ada
Now I didn’t have anybody left to protect either. So what the fuck did anything matter?
The Pres of Ex Machina back in Port Magnus gave me a pass to come sort my personal business out, no questions asked. He gave me this loaner car too. Big but not too flashy and attention-grabbing. The owner “didn’t need it anymore.” I didn’t need to be told what that meant, and he didn’t have any need to be a hardass with me and try to make me put the MC first.
Why would he? Over the past few years I’d proven myself to be a hard-working, respectful soldier that followed orders, and loyal to a fault.
Loyal. The word made my brain ache like salt in a wound. The one person who had been loyal to me no matter what was now a pile of ash in a little wooden box on the passenger seat and I couldn’t fucking make my body work right to open up the car door and walk into my dad’s house.
How the fuck could this happen? How could all the hugs, all the advice he gave, all the shit he talked, all the jokes we shared, all the breakfasts he made, and the time he taught me how to ride a bike fit into one little box like this?
I didn’t understand. It was too small to hold it all. I was always a big guy, but I was starting to feel too small to hold everything in myself too.
I’d taken the news, driven across the country, signed papers I didn’t read, paid my respects as best I could, and collected these ashes from the funeral director like I was a robot. All business. But, oh fuuuuuuck, something was breaking inside me.
“I wanted to see you again,” I blurted out the truth of that part of my brain that had become quiet over the years. Quiet but clearly not gone.
Well, too late. All I could do was hope I’d done everything right since I received the news. Had I tracked down his few good friends? Had I said what needed to be said, even if it was too late?
You did everything right.
His voice, clear as day as if he was talking right next to my left ear made me look out my window and across the road away from his ashes, away from his house. My face contorted, my stomach cramped and I locked my jaw against a surge of pain that puffed out in little fits and starts like steam overwhelming a pressure valve.
Once I started, I couldn’t stop for a few minutes. I leaned my head on my hand and my elbow on the edge of the door at the bottom of the window, and rode out the waves of cramping grief.
This town was fucking cursed. I hadn’t felt this shit since the last time I was here and I was beginning to wonder if I should have stuck with my original plan.
I’d collected the ashes and the car was pointing in the direction of Port Magnus when something told me to come home to Shippensburg instead. If I recalled correctly, the reasoning went something like “FUCK IT! Go get some fucking answers.”
That was exactly what I was going to try to do. Who knew if I’d actually get answers, but I was going to ask some damn questions, you could be sure of that.
First though, if I was here, I’d spread some of my dad’s ashes around. Maybe all of them. It wasn’t always the most harmonious home, but it was home and it was his, and there were some good times here. Some great times.
There might be a few irreplaceable things I could take with me too. It wasn’t like I could live here, and it might save some of his stuff from going to wherever abandoned property goes.
The small wooden box of my father’s ashes was heavier than it looked and I concentrated on not dropping it while I opened my door and stepped out. It didn’t get any lighter as I opened the rear passenger door for Chopper to get out. If anything, it became even heavier the closer I walked to the house.
I half expected the doorknob to be searing hot, but it felt freezing cold in the palm of my hand as I turned it and pushed. Chopper walked in like we’d never left and immediately pressed his nose to the floor as if he meant to personally smell every square inch of the house.
A moment later, as I crossed the threshold, I knew why. The smell of the place hit me. Not that it was overpowering or bad, it was just quintessentially the smell of the place I grew up. It was the smell of my father too.
I stopped and listened while Chopper did his inspection. Everything I could see looked so freakishly… normal.
The pile of mail on the table next to the door was small. There were a couple pairs of shoes on the other side. The clock was ticking from its place on the wall in the kitchen. For all that could be seen from here, the owner might have simply gone to the store for a few minutes to pick up some milk.
After a few seconds I realized I was holding my breath, straining to hear my dad’s old Ford pulling into the driveway. When I let it out, I struggled to breathe in again and eventually sucked air in with a choking gasp that made Chopper’s snuffling pause for a second before resuming.
I entered further into the house, moving as cautiously as anybody navigating a minefield ever did, all the while bargaining with imaginary voices in my head. The internal negotiations swung back and forth. There must be some depth of grief I could feel… or some level of functional resolve I could display that would make the universe realize this was all a fucking mistake and undo my dad’s fatal stroke.
No matter how the hypothetical conversation went, there was no deal struck. My dad didn’t step out from behind a door and say, “Gotcha, motherfucker, I faked my own death to trick you into coming home.”
I put my dad’s ashes on the kitchen table and pulled a chair out with a scrape across the floor that made my skin crawl before plopping myself down in it. The noise was almost blasphemous in this claustrophobic normality and I was feeling heavier than I ever had in my whole life.
The clock ticked, running on the batteries my dad had installed without knowing he’d never have to replace them. One of his sweaters was hung over the back of another kitchen chair, where he’d hung it without knowing he’d never pick it up again.
I rested my head in my hands and took several hitching breaths. From down the hallway, Chopper continued to do his thing.
Sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-SNIFF
Sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-SNIFF
SNIFF
Sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-sniff-SNIFF
Coming here was the right thing to do. It was going to be horrific to go through this house and decide what little I could take away with me, which essentially meant that the rest of his life, everything else, I would be indirectly throwing in the trash.
It wasn’t fair, but life wasn’t fair, so I supposed I didn’t have any reason to think death would be either. I’d give myself a couple days, maybe three if I had to, and I’d get through it all.
Plus, if I was going to get those answers out of Hazel, I was going to have to find out where she lived now. I figured I’d call a few old friends who hadn’t heard from me since I left, people I could trust to be reasonably discreet.
I wouldn’t call Hazel though. When I saw her again for the first time, I wanted to look her in the eye when I asked her why she did it, how she could have done it. Then I’d never come back to this fucking town.
Smells Like Lust
Hazel - Before
I was out the door as soon as Jeff’s text came through saying they were picking up the last truckload of hay. All his income came from odd jobs or seasonal jobs like this, so there wasn’t always a reliable schedule for us.
He said I could just head to the pool with everybody else and he’d meet me there, but the truth was I didn’t want to go without him. Even with Ella sending me poolside selfies every twenty minutes and teasing me about not being able to drive with my puppy-dog eyes, I waited.
Everybody looked like they were having a blast. My friends were mingling with his friends from what I could see in Ella’s photos. Maybe some of them might get together, that’d be cool. I hoped one of those people might be Ella.
She had actually wanted to invite James Poppleton, and it had taken a lot of convincing that, no, Jeff and James couldn’t just let it be water under the bridge, but she had finally relented and I didn�
�t see James in the background of any of Ella’s selfies. I was going to have to have a long talk with her about James at some point.
The farm Jeff was picking up hay on was conveniently about halfway to the waterpark. I pulled over to the side of the road when I spotted a flatbed truck in the middle of one of the fields with some guys sitting on and around it.
I climbed halfway out the window and sat on my door with my feet on my seat, then reached in, honked the horn and waved. Jeff waved back, took a big pull from a bottle of water, finishing it off, and quickly said his goodbyes before running over with his bag over his shoulder and workmates yelling good-natured abuse after him.
“Hey babe,” I said.
“Hey cutie.”
Jeff was shirtless, wearing a pair of overalls tied off at the waist and still slick with sweat from loading and unloading the last of the conventional hay bales. The sun glistened on his skin, and copious amounts of hay stuck to him, obscuring his tattoos.
“Sorry, just a second,” he said, kicking off his shoes and untying the overalls.
Part of me wanted to stuff dollar bills in his shorts as he shrugged the overalls off. “Take your time.” I smiled.
Using the overalls, he brushed himself off as well as he was able and pulled out a singlet from the bag, storing the overalls in a separate plastic bag. I slid back into the car as he entered on the opposite side.
There was still plenty of hay and miscellaneous grit stuck all over him as we leaned in and kissed over the center console. The smell of sweat and hay wafted at me and I inhaled deeply through my nose mid-kiss while scooting as close to him as my car would allow.
Before this summer I never would have dreamed that sweat, engine grease, hay and dirt would be added to my list of favorite smells, but here I was. On Jeff they didn’t seem grimy or unhygienic. They smelled clean, like hard work and passion, and it was like a drug to me.
Reluctantly, I pulled away, then caved in and went for another kiss. I couldn’t get enough, the feel of his hard body did strange things to my mind, made it a little one-tracked you could say.
I’d dated boys I thought were cute before, but never felt so overwhelmed and surrounded by what I could only call lust. It was a miracle that one of our make-out sessions hadn’t turned into something more yet.
I knew the only thing holding Jeff back on that front was me. His hands would wander, I’d get nervous and tell him to slow down or stop and he always did. This feeling, this deep-seated assurance of safety and trust, grew inside me every time I was around him.
We’d end up cuddling, talking and one time we even fell asleep in each other’s arms. It was heaven to wake up being held by him. Heaven.
“I got something for you,” he said.
“Huh?” I raised an eyebrow.
He pulled a little gift-wrapped box out of his bag and handed it to me. “Happy one-month anniversary.”
My other eyebrow rose to join the first. “Oh! Thank you… I didn’t get you anything… um…”
“It’s OK. I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it, but I saw this and thought you’d like it. Open up.”
I carefully peeled open the wrapping paper and read the writing on the top of the box.
Hilda’s Witchy Bath Bomb Sampler.
I gasped and brought my hand to my mouth. “I love it! Thank you!”
Balancing the box on my lap with the help of one hand, I leaned over to the passenger side of the car again and hugged Jeff tightly with the other arm. Knowing how little he had, I didn’t expect him to shower me with gifts, let alone bath bombs after I’d accidentally found myself talking to him about them for several minutes one night last week.
I pulled back from the hug, noting some hay and grit had transferred to me, and lifted the top off the box. There were six bath bombs inside, with labels like Peach Elixr and the more mysterious Black Cat Familiar. If one of them smelled like engine grease and hay I might never leave the bath.
“Where did you stumble across these? And are you saying I stink?” I smirked.
“We stopped by a farmers’ market thing trying to find some lunch yesterday and this lady was selling all this kind of stuff. And no, you always smell like a bowl of fruit salad… uh… in a field of flowers…”
My eyebrow raised again.
“… I’ll stop there.”
“While you’re ahead.”
“That’s the ticket.”
I replaced the lid and put the box in the glove compartment and fastened my seatbelt before pulling back on to the road. The waterpark and our friends awaited.
Jeff casually put his hand on my leg as we talked, and I looked down at it, then dragged my eyes away before I crashed the car. The skin of my thigh, particularly my inner thigh, tingled under his touch, and I turned to the driver-side window to bite my lip for a second.
I’d never dreamed of this inner conflict before. I wanted to be touched so much, everywhere, and yet continued to hold myself back. If his hand slid up a little, maybe pushed the hem of my skirt up an inch or so, I wouldn’t stop him.
Even if he didn’t, just touching me like he was already doing was going to ensure I was wet before I ever dipped a toe in a swimming pool today.
“You said they’ve got showers there, right?” Jeff asked.
“Yep, unless the ladies’ changing rooms are better equipped than the men’s.”
“Good, hopefully I can get all this hay out of my hair so I can swim without clogging the drain.”
The parking lot at the waterpark was busy but not too crazy, and I hoped it wasn’t overcrowded today. This place was incredible, fun water slides, pools of various temperatures, a pool with a movie screen, and grills that were free to use if you brought your own charcoal, so it had been popular since it opened a year or so ago.
Jeff carried his bag and the cooler from the trunk, which I’d filled with things to cook and some ice-cold drinks. I was practically bouncing off the walls as we paid and started looking for our friends.
A general chorus of “Hey!” spiraled up in volume as our friends spotted us, and I scampered in for a hug with Ella and Nadine. Jeff shook hands and patted shoulders with his friends and everybody started talking at once about what the best things were about this place, what we’d brought to cook, who splashed who and how late everybody could stay tonight. Nadine teased about how much hay I had on me, without letting the guys hear, and I stuck out my tongue.
“Yep some there too!”
“Oh shut up, you.”
We laughed and I pulled off my top, already wearing my bikini underneath. I looked over at Jeff and saw he was looking at me already. The tingly feeling from when he had his hand on my leg fluttered around my heart as the general noise of good friends having a good time carried on around us.
This was going to be a great day, and this was the best summer of my life.
Dear Jeff
Jeff - After
I couldn’t listen to that clock anymore, so I took the batteries out. Just one of many of my dad’s works I had to undo.
Every tick just made me wonder how long he’d survived after the stroke made him collapse. Was he conscious? Scared? Aware of anything? Had he been forced to listen to that fucking incessant ticking as they shaved off the remaining seconds of his life?
A lump formed in my throat as I thought of the inescapable dread that would come with feeling those seconds slip by. When you were young they were essentially infinite, but at the end, they slip through triple digits remaining, then double… then the final countdown.
What else should I do here? In the limited time I had, what would make the cut? I stood from the kitchen table and Chopper heaved himself up from the floor as I made my way to the living room and reached up to hang some of my weight off the top of the door frame.
Chopper shoved past my legs and went over by the windows, circling around on the spot three times before collapsing down in a patch of sunshine with a ‘Rrumph’. He always loved that late afternoon
sun.
It had only taken four phone calls to find Hazel. Approximately, anyway. My old friend Greg said he bumped into her on Montgomery Ave as she was coming home with her daughter from somewhere.
He couldn’t remember the number, but said Hazel was getting by as a single mom and described a sort of rundown house colored white and blue and a mostly intact white picket fence.
Tomorrow, I’d see her. My heart lurched at the prospect.
Tonight, though, was all about going through stuff here and seeing what I had to deal with. A stock take of the living room didn’t take much more than a cursory glance. Crappy furniture held together by a pocketful of wishful thinking, an old CRT-style TV. I took a step toward the small shelving unit that held the VHS tapes and DVDs, knowing he used to hide some money in there when he had some cash on hand for some reason, then stopped and turned back to the front door.
Chopper started making sounds like he was going to follow.
“Stay.” No arguments there.
I went back outside and made my way to the garage that used to house my precious Chevy pickup. My dad probably got rid of it once he accepted that I wasn’t coming back. He might as well have, as the garage wasn’t a state-of-the-art facility and the unpainted vehicle would be reclaimed by rust pretty quick if he left it there. Might as well give his old Ford a fighting chance.
When I stepped inside the garage, I stopped in my tracks and even rubbed my eyes before tentatively opening them again. My eyes were sore from being rubbed so much lately, but the added sting didn’t make the illusion in front of me evaporate.
Instead of a beat-up Ford sedan or even the patchwork remains of my old restoration project, if my eyes weren’t some lying motherfuckers, there sat in front of me a pristine 1957 Chevy Pickup in a beautiful deep blue I’d only ever seen in one other place: Hazel’s eyes. Once, just for the fun of it, I’d pored through countless pages of auto paint color code charts just to find this exact shade.
