Total pages in book: 92
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89265 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 446(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
“I really need to learn how to cook. My kids are going to starve.” Mack had three daughters—three—with his soon-to-be ex-wife, Carla, whom I’d met only once, which had been enough. He had his kids almost every weekend and every other Tuesday night.
“Was last night one of your Tuesdays?” I asked as the bartender set two full glasses down in front of us.
“Yeah. We had takeout.”
“Pizza again?”
He shook his head and picked up his beer. “Millie’s on some kind of diet where she won’t eat bread.”
“Diet?” I paused with my glass halfway to my mouth. “Isn’t she like nine years old?”
“Ten,” he answered after a healthy couple of swallows. “But she listens to every word her mother says, and Carla has decided that bread is the enemy. But not just bread—anything with wheat in it.”
“Isn’t that like, half the possible foods on the planet?”
Mack nodded and tossed back some more beer. “Yeah. I know how to make exactly three things for them: microwave mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and chicken nuggets. All of which are deadly now, apparently.”
“Damn. Sorry, brother.”
We sipped in silence for a minute, then he spoke again. “It’s fucking crazy, you know? You think you have it all figured out—the wife, the kids, the future—and then boom. It all goes up in smoke.”
I nodded. I wasn’t sure what exactly had gone wrong in Mack’s marriage and didn’t want to ask, but I did want him to know he could trust me. “I hear you.”
“I keep looking back, trying to pinpoint the moment it started to burn, and I can’t find it.”
“I couldn’t either.”
“Why is that, you think? Are we more fucked in the head than we realize?”
“I don’t know.” I’d wondered the same thing about a million times. Not all of us came back damaged, I’d said to Stella last night. But maybe we had. Maybe it was impossible not to.
“I mean, I know guys that lost legs. Fuck, I knew guys who didn’t come back at all. Sometimes I think, what the fuck is wrong with me that I can’t handle this—regular life?”
I shook my head. Tipped up my beer. “We know too much,” I said quietly.
He looked over at me. “You think that’s it?”
“Yeah. I do.”
We sat in silence for a minute, each of us trying not to think about the same things.
“You heard from Bones lately?” Mack asked. Tommy “Bones” Neilson was one of the guys in our squad, a skinny kid from some small town in Iowa where he grew up milking cows in the morning before school. Like the rest of us, he’d struggled to adjust to life back at home, despite a close-knit family and a girlfriend he was devoted to. He was young—too young to go through what we went through—and we’d all been protective of him.
“Yeah,” I said. “He messaged me a few times last week. Sent some pics of the squad.” Which I deleted, but I hadn’t told Bones that. I loved those guys like brothers, but I had no desire to revisit those days.
“Did he seem okay?”
I shrugged. “What’s okay?”
Mack grimaced. “Right.”
Our wings arrived, and we ate them hungrily, then ordered more, plus another beer apiece.
“So what’s bothering you?” he asked once our glasses were full again and our bellies were at least less empty. “I can tell there’s something.”
I shrugged. “Not exactly sure.”
“Bullshit.”
That was the problem with Mack. He knew me too well. I exhaled and rubbed the back of my neck. “There’s this girl—woman.”
“There always is.”
“Ha. Well, this one is Mrs. Gardner’s granddaughter. Stella.”
“Oh yeah. I think I might have met her a few years ago. Tall blonde? Kind of quiet?”
I nodded. “That’s her. Mrs. Gardner introduced us, and … I don’t know, there’s just something about her. I can’t get her out of my head. Last night she brought me this apple pie …” My eyes closed reverently, and I might have moaned.
Mack laughed. “She knows your weakness.”
“Apparently.”
“She’s visiting?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you take her to dinner at the inn?”
“Because the more I talk to her, the more I like her. And I don’t really want to like her.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
Mack shook his head. “Dude. You need to get laid.”
I frowned. “I probably could have last night. We messed around a little, but I stopped things before they got out of hand.”
He stared at me like I’d sprouted horns. “Why?”
“Because she told me she thinks I’m honorable. One of the good guys. And I kind of like thinking there’s one beautiful woman in the world who believes I’m a decent human being.”
He sighed. “Take her to dinner, Woods. Just dinner, okay? You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do after that, but I think you’ve been holed up alone in that house long enough. It’s fucking with you.”
On the ride back from Hop Lot, I had an idea.