Return to Oakpin(9)

            Craig sat for just a minute looking out at the village of Oakpine spread below him and, beyond that, the sienna steps of greater Wyoming layered to the west. Marci got in her blue Saab and drove through the scrub oak along their gravel drive and disappeared. This was the good life, and Craig was happy. He thought it again more slowly: This is the good life, and I am happy.

            The garage project for Mrs. Brand was the best work he’d had since the back deck on his house. Before that it was sheds; he always tried to go with one of the guys when they built the little storage sheds that he sold as kits out of the store, but those only came up four or five times a year, most of them prebuilt and hauled away. He had the front double doors of the hardware store propped open every morning as the noonday warmed, and he helped customers and made keys, and in his head he planned the afternoon’s work at the Brands’ garage.

            Larry worked in the store all day in the summers, and he made his disdain for such work very clear. This was his third year of cleaning the storeroom, repainting the rest room, dusting and washing some of the fixtures, weeding the alley behind the building, running errands, and making deliveries. Deliveries were his favorite, and he stretched them, swinging by to see his buddy Wade at his house to lift weights or drink a soda while the Ralston Hardware van sat out on the street. Craig knew all about it, and he knew that Larry thought working in a hardware store was beneath him, beneath everybody. Anybody with any dignity got out of Oakpine. Wade, who was the football coach’s son, was going to play football at some college next fall, probably Laramie. Larry had no idea where he was going, but he was going, that was for sure.

            At three, he joined his father at the Brands. Craig finished taping the drywall, and Larry came behind him with his sandpaper blocks. The garage door was lifted open in the late summer afternoon, and their sandpaper dust floated golden in the light. “What’s she going to do about the door?” Larry said.

            “We’ll staple it with our heavy plastic sheeting,” Craig told him. “It won’t be perfect, but the seal will keep the cold out. They’re going to want to use this garage again.”

            “After your buddy dies?”

            “That’s what we’ll do with the ceiling too,” Craig said, pointing above them, where there were still a lot of boxes stored on planks on the bare rafters. “We’ll do that tomorrow and then paint. Remind me to bring some solvent for this floor.” Under all the sawdust there were oil stains in the old cement. The two stepped out into the sunlight, and Larry slapped at his pant legs, freeing clouds of chalk dust.

            “When I come home years from now with all my problems,” he said, “are you going to stuff me in the garage?”

            “Are you coming home?”

            “Should I wait for an invitation?”

            Before Craig could answer, Wade pulled up in his black Nissan pickup, turning into the narrow driveway. It was a beautiful vehicle, and they could see Wendy, his girlfriend, in the passenger side.

            “A new truck,” Craig said.

            “I don’t need a truck, Dad,” Larry said. “I’ll see you later.” He got in, and the three kids were gone to football practice. Craig remembered the summer workouts, running twice a day on the rough practice field behind the school. He’d never liked to run, but he’d never quit, and he remembered sitting on their truck tailgates after practice drinking well water from glass gallon jugs and smelling of cut grass. He could see it vividly, and the feeling he’d had climbed up his chest like some heavy thing in the great afternoon shadows: they could run for two hours; they could run until the sun quit and the dark came up. They would live forever.

            He was losing the light, but he lifted the box of floor tiles and turned to see a gray Mercedes drive by on Berry Street slowly, and Craig recognized the driver: Mason Kirby. Craig walked out to the front of the house and saw the big car drift slowly three houses down and stop in front of the old Kirby place. He waited, but the man did not get out of the car. Craig took the box and went back to work.