Travis had a sleepless night, and when he awoke the next morning, Kim had already gone to work. His car, the old BMW Penny had bought for him, was in the driveway. He wanted to see Kim. But if he did see her, he didn’t know what he’d say. His system was still shocked at the news that she had a boyfriend. A “serious” boyfriend.
Without thinking what he was doing, Travis got into his car and started driving. His first impulse was to do something physical. That’s what he did when his father demanded too much of him. Climb, run, drive, ski, surf, skate. It didn’t matter what he did as long as it left him too tired to think.
But he didn’t drive into the preserve, didn’t seek out a lake or a cliff. Instead, he found himself pulling into the parking lot of Joe Layton’s hardware store.
He sat in the car, looking at the brick front and wondering what the hell he was doing there. When someone opened the car door, he wasn’t surprised to see Joe.
“You’re just in time. I need to check inventory. You open the boxes, pull the stuff out, and I’ll mark it off on the papers.”
“I need to . . .” Travis couldn’t think of anyplace he needed to be. “Sure. But I warn you that I don’t know a saw from a hammer.”
“I do, so we’ll be fine.” Joe held the door open while Travis got his long body out. “Yesterday you looked happy. Now you look like the world came crashing down on you. Kim throw you out?”
Travis wasn’t used to revealing his thoughts and certainly not his feelings to people, and he had no intention of starting. But maybe unloading boxes of tools would help him release some energy.
“So she dumps it on me that she’s got a boyfriend,” Travis said. It was four hours later and he was covered in sweat, grime, and those plastic foam packing beans that someone was going to hell for inventing. Travis had told Joe the story of how he and Kim had met as children, and one thing had led to another until he was telling much more than he’d intended to.
While he talked he had single-handedly unloaded what seemed to be hundreds of cartons and crates of tools and supplies. That there were no shelves to put them on didn’t seem to bother Joe Layton in the least. But then he just sat in a big leather chair with a clipboard and checked off whatever Travis opened. Joe had let his disgust be known when Travis didn’t know a Phillips screwdriver from a flat head.
“My daughter knows—” Joe started again. According to him, his daughter could run the world.
“Yeah, well I know how to hire a mechanic to keep the machines running,” Travis had at last snapped. That seemed to release something inside him and in the next minute he was talking about Kim.
“I don’t get it,” he said as he pulled some electrical tool out of a box. It looked like a plastic wombat.
“Router,” Joe said. “Look in there for the bits.”
Travis bent over into the box, foam beans sticking in his hair and wiggling their way down into his T-shirt. He couldn’t help thinking of the Frankenstein movie. “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
“What don’t you get?” Joe asked.
“I came to this town to see Kim. We were great together as kids. I mean, she was just a little girl and I was close to puberty, but still . . . I helped her with her jewelry. I wonder if she’d have that shop of hers now if I hadn’t—”
“Liar!” Joe said loudly.
Travis pulled his head out of the carton. Packing beans stuck out all over him. “I beg your pardon.”
“You came here to see your mother about me.”
Travis’s mouth opened, but no words came out as he stared at Joe.
“Don’t look so surprised. You look like my Lucy, talk like her. Did you two think I was so stupid that I wouldn’t see the resemblance?”
“I . . . We . . .”
“You want to check me out,” Joe said. “It’s what a good son would do. Lucy is a prize worth protecting. But I warn you, boy, if you tell her that I know who you are I’ll show you what a chain saw can do.”
Travis blinked a few times. His mother had made him swear not to tell Joe about her, and now Joe wanted Travis not to tell her that he knew.
“You find those bits yet?” Joe growled.
“No . . .” Travis said softly, still staring.
“Then get busy!” Joe said. “You expect me to look for them?”
Travis bent back into the carton, found two more boxes, and pulled them out. When he came up, he looked at Joe in speculation. Where did they go from here? he wondered.
Joe marked off the items Travis held up. “So you came here to see if your mom had gone crazy when she said she wanted to marry some nobody that owned a hardware store.”