To Build a Home

22 | Lumberjack Burrito

Darren and I stood on opposite sides of the unmade bed in the master bedroom and stared at each other as we tried to catch our breath. Darren was shirtless, his tan skin glistening with sweat, and I tried not to notice his abs contracting with every breath or the scattered patches of dark body hair on his chest and sticking out of his shorts. Instead, I looked at Noah, tucked inside an empty cardboard box, our makeshift playpen, with squares cut out as windows on all four sides of the imaginary tower. "Prince No," I said, "Do you have any ideas?" Noah squealed with delight at the mention of his name and poked his head out of a window square, but was otherwise unhelpful.

It was late afternoon and Darren had just finished carrying a few things from his house to his temporary room at my brother's. His things were scattered in the walk-in closet behind me and we were trying to figure out how to flip the heavy king-size mattress. We had attempted to turn it over a few times, but all we had accomplished was a workout. "What if I lift and you slide?" Darren asked.

"I don't know why we have to flip it." I whined. Darren urged me to indulge him with his puppy-dog eyes. I rolled mine.

We each walked to the foot of the mattress on either side and lifted it above our heads with our arms outstretched. It leaned at an angle on the frame. Then I let go of my side and made my way to the other end while Darren continued to hold it in the air. I slid the head of the mattress to the middle of the frame with a grunt and a push and then Darren's part of the mattress flipped, slamming into the wall on the way down. The painting above the bed that I had given to Phil and Theresa for their anniversary came crashing down with a loud thud and a long, clawing scratch. Noah poked his head out of the box again. "Boom!" he said.

"Shit." Darren ran over to the painting. It was a modern piece with gold and lavender strokes over a grainy canvas with flecks of wood for texture. I had gotten a deal at the gallery when the artist, a woman from Brazil, took a liking to me. I had confessed that the wood in all of her work reminded me of my brother and she had gestured at the room on closing night, saying, "Pick one." I had picked the one that looked the most like something you might find at a TJ Maxx, knowing my sister-in-law's taste.

Darren lifted the painting, which had fallen between the bed frame and the white wall. The corners scratched the wall as he fished it from the narrow space. Some of the wood pieces got caught on the fabric of the mattress as he pulled it up and they ripped off. Darren placed it on the mattress and reached down for the fallen pieces. "We can just glue them back on, right?"

"If you didn't insist on flipping the mattress, we wouldn't have to," I said, taking the painting and the wood pieces into the guest room.

Darren called after me. "They had sex on this mattress!"

"Sex!" Noah repeated from his tower, the cardboard box rocking as he moved back and forth with excitement.

I returned to the master bedroom. "Now look at what you've done."

Darren was about to defend himself, I could hear the huge inhale as he thought of a response, filling up like a balloon, but then his phone rang. I knew it was probably going to be a customer, maybe one of the Roberts from the disastrous first estimate I had earlier, so I quickly picked Noah up from the box and escaped downstairs.

I had arrived late to the Roberts' house after the morning's commotion. After we had found Noah and changed the bandage on my neck, I didn't have very long to get ready. It had been hard to concentrate on the time when I was feeling insecure about the bandage. I went through my suitcase for something to cover it and when I couldn't find anything, I started digging in the boxes in the master bedroom. Finally, I had found some of Theresa's outerwear, but when I went downstairs in a flannel scarf, Darren had stopped me at the door.

"It's 80 degrees outside," he had said.

I did a dramatic turn from the door. "Is this what living with you is going to be like?" I had asked. "You telling me what I can and cannot do like you're my father?"

"I'm your boss. You can't dress like that to meet a customer." He laughed as if I was being ridiculous.

"Like what? It's a scarf."

"It's summer!" He watched me walk over to the hall mirror and play with the scarf. "If you're nervous, I can go instead."

"I thought you were starting work at the cottage today." I immediately felt guilty. I was supposed to be making things easier for Darren, not harder. There he was moving in because I couldn't bring myself to sleep in my brother's room and I couldn't even show up to the estimate that he had prepared me for without a bright red scarf in the middle of August.

I took the scarf off and placed it on the hall table under the mirror. I looked at the white bandage sticking out of the neck of my shirt. It looked like I was recovering from a run-in with a vampire or a curling iron or had a hickey from a night at the trolley graveyard. I would have preferred any of those scenarios to the embarrassing wood panel incident.

Noah ran to the table and pulled the hanging end of the scarf so that it fell to the floor. Then he wrapped himself in the flannel like a lumberjack burrito. Darren spun him around faster, wrapping him tighter, Noah giggling louder and louder with each revolution. I said goodbye and walked to the door, determined to get over my insecurity. If anything, the bandage would be an ice breaker at the meeting.

"Are you sure you don't want me to go?" Darren had asked as Noah dropped to the floor. He started rolling around, the scarf unraveling and re-raveling the toddler like a tide.

I had shaken my head and left before they could see any doubt in my face. I had tried to maintain the confidence the entire drive, but by the time I had arrived at the Roberts' house and we had sat at their kitchen table, the events of the morning had played on a loop a million times in my mind and each time a smaller, more awful detail jumped out at me; Noah falling down the stairs during one of his midnight walks; my cut getting infected; Darren finding something else wrong with me once he moved in, just like Charlie. I hadn't felt this anxious since high school, since before coming out, worried that someone might find out. Something about Darren's comments about the scarf––Theresa's scarf––had taken me right back. Sure, it wasn't practical because of the summer heat, but maybe it was something more, something in Darren's voice, the way he said, "It's a scarf!" like it meant something, like there was something to find out, like that nurse at the urgent care refusing to let us pass the yellow line together. There were some things that Windber would not accept and a man wearing a woman's scarf was one of them. Or maybe I was blowing things out of proportion. This was all running through my mind as I had tried to go over the estimate with the Roberts.

Darren came rushing downstairs after the call and found me and Noah in the backyard, using chalk on the patio. He was still shirtless. The afternoon sun revealed the sweat from a long day of work and the move and flipping the mattress had dried. "What happened today, Ryan?" he asked, standing over us.

"I had a hard time answering Mrs. Roberts' questions and she..." I couldn't say it.

"She said she didn't feel confident about moving forward with the project," Darren finished.

"I told her she should talk to you, that I only had the pricing and the punch list."

"That was an expensive project, Ryan. Now I have to go over there and we have to find something else for you to do." He stormed away without waiting for a response.

I didn't blame him. He had been taking care of me since the moment I arrived and I was constantly letting him down. Was it me? Was it the town? Was it sudden parenthood or losing my brother? Whatever it was, it was starting to suffocate me.

Author's Note: Thanks for reading and voting and commenting! <3

What's your favorite chapter title so far? I love this one! Haha