Though he responded with a “yes,” the weird, uncomfortable twinge in his chest told him there was something else he had to do before that happened. He turned to look out the window toward town.
Jen finished brushing her teeth and came out to kiss him with a minty mouth. Then she took his hand and placed it high up on her inner thigh, where she knew he liked to touch. “Sure I can’t convince you to stay for the games?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with being convinced.”
Suddenly he remembered what she’d said to him the other morning in the kitchen of her city apartment: Your dad. The house. You haven’t dealt with losing him yet, and going to the games, which was such a huge part of growing up—for both of you—would be too painful a reminder.
The house.
The tightness in his chest now had a name, a purpose. That house was why he’d truly come back. Because once he started transferring his big equipment and computers and supplies down to Connecticut, he would convince himself there would be no reason for him to come back to Gleann. Except that there was. Da’s house was still sitting there, filled to the brim with things of a life gone, and it would sit there forever if Leith didn’t do something about it.
“I know,” Jen said softly, and moved to the closet to pull down one of the long sundresses he loved on her. He watched her dress, watched how the fabric flowed over her body.
She’d been inside Da’s house, had seen how he’d left it, how he’d locked up his emotions. For a moment he was moved to ask her to come with him that day, but she was already starting to talk to herself, her lips moving through silent lists, her brow furrowed in a look of concentration, and he knew that her mind was already back at work. He’d already stolen a lot of her time last night.
Besides, he wanted to sort some shit out on his own before he talked to her about his mindset.
Before she left for a meeting with the caterer, he kissed her with resolution. He liked that, kissing her good-bye in the morning. He wanted that every day. But first there was something he needed to do.
After he made one phone call to an old contact who could help him out on short notice, he called Duncan and then Chris, asking them both the same thing: “Hey, man, you busy today? I kind of need your help.”
* * *
Leith was standing on the flagstone path leading up to Da’s house—the closest he’d gotten to the front door in three years—when Chris pulled up in his crappy Chevy two-door. Leith’s lone remaining employee got out of his car, worry plastered on his face, his shoulder-length hair bed-messy.
“I just did the yard two days ago,” Chris said. “Everything okay?”
“No, no, the yard looks great.” The younger guy had taken too much off the euonymus shrub there in the corner, but it didn’t matter now. “I need you for something else.”
Duncan arrived then, heavy metal screeching out from behind the closed windows of his SUV. He parked crookedly in the grass on the opposite side of the road and crossed to the two men, his shaved head already shining in the hot summer sun. He slapped palms with Leith and gave a polite nod, hands on hips, to Chris as Leith introduced them. Duncan shaded his eyes with a hand as he took in the tiny, dark ranch house. “So what the hell is this place? What do you need help with?”
Chris gave Duncan a funny look, like he should have known this was the place where Leith had grown up, but Duncan was a throwing buddy, not a Gleann local, and Leith had already moved out of here by the time they’d become friends.
Just then came the rumble of a heavy truck at the top of the hill, then the shrill beep beep beep as it reversed down the slope. It took several attempts and lots of time between the three men to direct the truck down the curving road, but eventually it deposited its load in the MacDougall driveway.
As the disposal company truck struggled back up the hill, Leith surveyed the giant Dumpster now sitting in his driveway, the one his contact had pulled through at the very last minute. He took a deep breath. Words still wouldn’t come out. He cleared his throat. “I need some help cleaning out my old man’s house. Do you mind?”
And there it was.
Though he didn’t look at his employee, he knew Chris’s face would be twisted in a confusion he’d never voice to his boss. But Duncan, in his trademark “Fuck it. Whatever” attitude, just clapped his hands and said, “Let’s do it.”
Yes, Leith thought. Let’s.
The keyhole was much stickier than he remembered, the doorway much tighter. He’d waved off the guys, telling them to wait in the driveway and give him a sec. If they saw his sorrow and his discomfort, so be it. It was time to stop hiding it anyway.
The door opened inward, throwing light into the tomb. He didn’t smell the must and dust, as he knew he should. Instead he smelled Da’s old pipe filtering in from the front stoop where he’d smoked every evening. He smelled Sunday morning bacon and the fresh Christmas tree they’d chopped themselves and that stood tilted in the corner every year. He heard Da’s old folk albums, played on that turntable still sitting on the coffee table, and the yap of the small mutt they’d had when Leith was a boy—the best dog neither of them had been able to replace because there simply was no replacement.
The world shifted and Leith sagged against the big hutch, a few unknown items rattling around inside. Without realizing it, he’d moved deep inside the living room, the light from the front door like a faraway mouth to a cave. Nothing had been changed, nothing moved, yet everything seemed different. Felt different. He was a man separate from the one who’d buried his beloved father, literally and figuratively, and he hated that he’d allowed himself to split apart like that.
He hated what he’d allowed this house and his memories to become.
Pushing off the hutch, he skirted around the coffee table, and edged along the kitchen counter pass-through. To the left stood the door leading into the garage, and as he went toward it, his thigh brushed the folded afghan crocheted by his mother long before he’d been born. A plume of dust shot up, tickling his nose and settling into his eyes. He rubbed them. Damn, the dust was making him tear up.
The garage was pitch-black, so he left the house door open to guide him as he went to the single-car rolling door, bent down, and heaved it up manually. The screech of metal on metal made him cringe, but not as much as what filled the garage floor.
Growing up, he’d watched Da lean back on that workout bench and do reps using those ancient black weights on that tarnished bar. When Leith was little, he used to sit on his bike and count while Da used the big dumbbells to do curls. And when he was old enough, when Da finally gave him the okay and taught him proper technique, Leith had learned how to lift.
And then Da had taught him how to throw the traditional Scottish events.
The old hammer still leaned against the back wall. So did the weight used for the height throw—a round metal ball topped with an attached ring for your hand. The weight for distance—its ball on the end of a short chain—sat in the corner. The caber, the one they’d used to practice with, was sitting pretty in the town park.
He remembered Da perched on the edge of the bench, the weight-for-height on the floor between his feet.
“Come ’ere, boy. Pick it up.”
So excited. At nine, Leith was so excited he didn’t recognize the teasing gleam in Da’s eyes as he braced his feet on either side of the weight and yanked. The ring didn’t budge. Leith stumbled.
Da chuckled, slapping his knee. A good-natured laugh, though Leith didn’t realize that at the time.
“Someday, boy. Someday, I can already tell, you’ll be a better man at this than I.”
Impossible, Leith had thought.
He still thought it.
Leith just stood there, looking at all the equipment. He could still feel the roughness of those bars in his palms, could still hear Da coaching him from the lawn chair when he’d gotten too weak to lift himself—though he often tried to lift anyway, covering up his disappointment over aging and
illness with self-deprecating laughter.
“You ready for us?” Duncan called from where he’d taken to leaning against the landscaping truck.
“Not yet,” Leith said over his shoulder. “Just give me another moment.”
“Take your time.”
He’d already taken three years, but he only had his friends for today, and he needed to determine what would go and what he’d keep this week, before it came time to move away for good. Passing back through the living room, he headed down the creaking, claustrophobic hallway to the bedrooms, thinking how much longer the hall had seemed when he’d been a teenager.
He knew what Da had turned Leith’s old bedroom into after he’d moved out: a monument to their relationship. Documentation of pretty much every feat Leith had ever performed. That level of pride was still too much for now, so the door remained shut. Instead, Leith turned another doorknob and entered his father’s bedroom.
He didn’t remember making the bed the last time he’d been in here, but the blanket was pulled neat and tight over the mattress, the pillows still propped against the chipped headboard. If he’d sit down on the bed, he knew it would squeak something terrible, but that’s not why he’d come in here.
Why had he come exactly? What did he want from this room? The hat on the dresser and the cane still leaning by the door? Yes, definitely. His father to still be sleeping in here? Absolutely.
But instead Leith headed for the closet. He was drawn to it without explanation. As he cracked open the door, the smell of old wool and leather leaked out. Leith flicked on a flashlight and peered inside. All the sweaters and pants and coats he remembered, still in a neat line, waiting to be worn by a man who’d never come back.
Oh God. Oh God.
The stale air in the room—the whole house—caved in on him. Three years of loss that he’d buried somewhere outside under the new viburnum and roses slammed into him, knocking out his knees and collapsing his body to the floor. He sat there at the bottom of Da’s closet in a heap, gasping for breath and pounding a fist into the plaster. The loss was too great for tears. Crying simply wouldn’t be enough, although if Da were here, he would have clapped Leith on the back and told him to let it out, and to take his time doing it, because that’s what a real man did.
His eyes stung and burned, and his chest heaved with great effort, but the tears still wouldn’t come. Leith pressed his back to the closet wall and lifted his head to look at each article of Da’s clothing, recalling days and moments when the older MacDougall had worn them. Leith reached out and thumbed through them . . . until he got to one piece in particular, and stopped.
The MacDougall tartan, brought over from Scotland decades ago, the wool now thin and worn. It was a field of red crossed with thin white lines, thicker blue ones, and intermittent green and blue squares as accent.
And this was Da’s kilt, the one he used to throw in. The old man had been in his formal Highland dress for his memorial, but this kilt, the one he wore all the time with great love before it no longer fit him, still dangled from a hanger.
That’s when Leith cried, a slow leak of tears. He had no idea how long he sat there, a blurred tartan pattern dancing across his vision. Finally knuckling away the tears, he shoved to his feet and reached for the kilt. Unhooked it. This was why he’d come in here. Neatly draping the thing across his arm, he grabbed the hat and the cane and left.
Across the hall stood his old bedroom door, and he looked at it only for a moment before opening it and stepping inside. Jen had come in here. He could see a fresh set of footprints in the dust coating the carpet. She’d already known that Leith and his father were more brothers than father and son, and that Da had been Leith’s hero, but her seeing this, finally realizing all that Leith had shut away, she would know how bad he’d been hurting in order to do that.
He needed to stop ignoring the hurt.
There was a laundry basket still sitting at the bottom of his old, empty closet. Dragging it out, he took down all the photos of him and Da and placed them carefully in the bottom. He laid the cane and hat and kilt on top, then went to the living room and took the afghan of his mother’s. Then he carried it all out into the bright sunshine.
“Now?” Duncan asked.
Leith slid the basket onto the truck bed. “Leave the hutch in the living room, I still have to go through it. But everything else can go.”
Chris slapped a pair of work gloves into Leith’s hand. As he pulled them on, Duncan walked into the open garage and flipped on the old boom box Da had kept there to listen to baseball games, and that Leith had used when he worked out. How about that? The damn batteries still worked, as though Da had changed them yesterday. The blare of guitar-heavy rock filled the once silent house and yard. Duncan cracked some joke Leith couldn’t hear and Chris laughed, and the whole place was washed in a light atmosphere Leith hadn’t expected to feel here again.
Leith reached into his truck and pulled down the cooler. Snatching three beers from the pile of ice inside, he snapped off the caps and handed them to the other guys. They clinked bottle necks.
“Thanks,” he told them.
“To old man MacDougall,” said Duncan.
As the cold beer slid down his throat, Leith turned to look again at the house, its doors and windows thrown open, all saying good-bye.
To old man MacDougall indeed.
Eight hours later, the shitty furniture and worthless household goods mounded over the lip of the Dumpster. The garage was stacked with other things to be donated. The men lounged on lawn chairs in the gravel drive as the sun finally disappeared, the last of the beers in their hands.
Leith glanced up at Da’s kilt peeking out of the laundry basket. He realized that none of this would have happened without Jen, if she hadn’t come here, if she hadn’t unknowingly given him this final push.
“Hey, Duncan?” he asked.
“Yeah?”
“You, ah, need an announcer for Saturday?”
Duncan finished his beer with a smack of his lips and grinned, showing a missing tooth on one side. “Fuck yeah, man.”
Leith still wasn’t sure he could throw—out of practice and still some lingering ghosts—but he could still participate in the games. Still honor Da’s memory in that way and give one final good-bye to Gleann.
Leith whipped out his phone and dialed. She answered on the second ring. “Jen? I have some news I think you’re going to like.”
Chapter
19
Jen stood in the middle of heaven. The sun speared the last of its gold light through the trees on the western hills, a warm breeze blew across what used to be Hemmertex’s side lawn, and everywhere mingled smiling, laughing people, come to enjoy Gleann’s opening party before tomorrow’s Highland Games.
The parking lot was already half-full, and couples and families were making their way up the Hemmertex drive from town, pulling their kids in wagons decorated with Scottish flags. The locals wore all kinds of tartans in all sorts of manners: full kilts, T-shirts declaring their clans, hats. Jen even saw a scarf, though it was pushing eighty degrees.
She had enhanced the long entrance from Route 6 by draping flags along the Highland cattle fence. The hairy beasts had eyed her and she’d tried to talk to them as she did it, assuring them the things would be gone in twenty-four hours and they could have their unobstructed view back. But they still didn’t look too pleased over having so many people this close to their domain. Loughlin, the old farmer and landowner, had stood in the center of his field with his border collies, watching her the whole time in that hard, wordless way, looking like he shared his cattle’s feelings.
None of them were used to crowds, after all.
From inside the giant music tent streamed the first low, sexy draws of Chris’s fiddle. The rest of his band had yet to show up for sound check, but he’d arrived early and was going through his own practice with an admirable enthusiasm. His hair brushed and pulled back in a low, loose ponytail, he made the kind
of music that no recording could capture. She guessed he’d be getting his pick of the girls that night.
A short bus rattled its way up the drive and into the staging area, the product of Jen’s marketing the bus service in Westbury last week. Jen held her breath, watching to see how many people would get off. The tinted windows showed nothing. The doors opened. An older couple staggered to the ground, then no one else. Crap.
Wait. Another couple—this one in their midforties—got off, then another. The four were laughing together, looking around, and then the man with salt-and-pepper hair pointed at the warm, white tent decorated with the Amber Lounge logo. They’d come for Shea and they’d found her. Perfect.
More and more people streamed off the Westbury bus. The beautiful thing had been full. Some trailed the first four to the Amber tent, some families wandered toward the Highland dance exhibition set up in the Hemmertex amphitheater. Others trickled off toward the tug-of-war competition already underway.
Raised voices shot out from the music tent and Jen hurried over, in tune with the sound of panic and impending event trouble. Three more guys had joined Chris on stage, one shouldering a guitar, another with a set of bagpipes under his arm, and the last lazily twirling a drumstick. Chris was laying into the drummer, and as Jen drew closer, she noticed that the drummer didn’t give a shit as he rolled his head in every direction but at the guy yelling at him.
She walked right up to them and tapped the stage with authority, silencing the fight. “Everything okay, guys?”
The drummer swung his head toward her, his eyes bloodshot, his body swaying. Chris stepped between her and the drummer and pushed a wan smile onto his face. “Everything’s great, Jen. We’re still on at nine, right?”
She laid a long, long stare on the drummer. “You better be. Pay depends on it.”
Chris picked up his fiddle and said, “No worries. No worries at all.” But as she turned away, she heard Chris hiss, “For fuck’s sake, Scotty. Get it together.”
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