Best Laid Plans (Garnet Run 2)

Instead of putting the food on the dining room table, Charlie took it to the living room. They ate pizza and drank beer on the couch. The cats emerged at the smell, Jane from one hallway and Marmot from the other.

It was so comfortable here; so goddamned nice. Charlie? Was so nice. Bossy, yeah, but nice. And the bossiness was...kind of hot? Wait. Surely Rye must’ve just been addled from so much physical labor.

“So, um, how’d you learn all that shit?” Rye asked.

Charlie snorted.

“By that shit do you mean carpentry?”

“Yeah.”

“My dad taught me some. Then when I was sixteen or so I started working construction in the summers. A friend’s dad ran the crew so he got a couple of us jobs. I liked it. I’ve always liked building things. Then after my parents died and I took over the store, I learned a lot really fast so I could help customers. And I started doing construction on the weekends for extra cash.”

“When did your parents die?”

“When I was seventeen. Almost eighteen.”

Rye sat up.

“Jesus, that’s awful. Both of them?”

Charlie nodded.

“Car accident.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

Charlie accepted the apology with an offhand nod that said he’d done so many, many times before, but Rye saw the tension in his jaw.

“Is Jack younger than you?”

Charlie nodded.

“He was thirteen when they died. So for a while it was just the two of us. It was...”

He shook his head like there was simply too much to say.

“You raised him.”

Rye knew it was true before Charlie nodded, and several pieces clicked into place.

For the first time Rye saw Charlie in a very different light. The man who had interceded in his disaster and given him a home. The man who cooked dinner every night and did laundry and ran his business in an orderly and practiced way. The man who knew about mortgages and loans and cosigning. Who worried about safety standards and about his brother, and always, always, always other people, but not about himself. He wasn’t bossy and overbearing—well, okay, he wasn’t simply bossy and overbearing. He had been a caretaker out of necessity and was a caretaker still.

“That sounds really, really hard.”

Charlie looked at him for a few moments and Rye wondered if he was going to lie. Then his eyes got a faraway look.

“It was. I think I spent about five years straight completely terrified. Terrified Matheson’s Hardware would fail, terrified we’d lose the house, terrified something would happen to Jack. Just terrified of everything. It was exhausting.”

“Were you close with them?”

“Yeah. My dad... I always wanted to be like him.”

He looked sheepish as he stroked his beard.

“At the time I didn’t say it because it wasn’t cool, right? You were supposed to think your parents were a pain. But my dad was great. He got the store from his parents. It was more of a farm store then, but he went in the hardware direction. Made it what it is today.”

In fact, the other day, Marie had mentioned that Charlie completely overhauled the store in the last ten years, adding the entire lumber department and partnering with as many local and sustainable businesses as possible. But it was just like Charlie not to mention that.

Charlie fumbled with the remote and flicked the TV on, signaling he was done talking about his parents. Rye got them each another beer and settled back on the couch, fatigue creeping through him.

“Tired,” he mumbled.

“Mmm,” Charlie agreed, his eyelids fluttering. He had put on an episode of Secaucus Psychic.

Rye raised an eyebrow.

“Shut up—’s good,” Charlie said, and bumped Rye’s shoulder with his. But because Charlie was huge, he kind of shoved Rye over on the couch. “Oops.”

Rye had never actually watched the show, though one of his old roommates had been obsessed with it, saying she wanted to make a pilgrimage to the East Coast to meet Jackie and have her contact her long-dead grandmother.

To Rye’s surprise, it turned out to be better than he expected.

“Isn’t she a medium, if she can talk to the dead?” Rye asked.

“Yeah,” said Charlie.

“But the title says she’s a psychic.”

“Are mediums psychics? Or are psychics mediums?” Charlie mused distractedly.

“I guess then it wouldn’t be...whattayacallit? Two s sounds. Catchy in a title.”

“Alliteration,” Charlie murmured.

On screen, Jackie told the man his deceased sister agreed that he should take a new job and move if it would make him happy. The man cried.

“Do you believe in this stuff?” Rye asked.

“Psychic stuff?”

“Yeah.”

“Nah,” Charlie said, but his eyes were glued to the TV.

A few hours ago, Rye would’ve said that figured, given how practical Charlie was. How grounded. But now that he knew about Charlie’s parents dying when he was young, he wondered if rather than dismissing it out of hand he’d had plenty of time to consider his stance.

“Not even a little?”

Charlie tipped his head to look at Rye. His eyes were the kind of hazel you forgot was a combination of green and brown except when they were fixed on you, paying attention to you, and then you didn’t know how you ever forgot.