“The food really is shit, isn’t it?”
“Eh.” He shrugged, brushed crumbs off his lap, and jumped off the tailgate. “No worse than MREs. Come on, let’s get a sample of your shingles and measure for the drywall so we can head back to town.”
I hopped off the truck with a lot less grace than he possessed. I supposed three deployments and countless days jumping in and out of vehicles had made him practically an Olympian at it.
I had only managed a few steps before Asa hooked an arm around me and tripped me. “Fifty pounds and four inches, but I can still tackle your ass,” he said on a laugh. God, it was good to see him laugh. I would happily let me toss me into mud on repeat for the next six months, if it meant seeing him smile the way I remembered.
But that didn’t mean I’d let him get too far before he was in the mud with me, which he was, three-point-five seconds later.
“You’re taking it easy on me?” he asked when he landed easily, making a much less dramatic splatter than the one I’d made.
“No. I’m just looking out for Mom. She’s gonna have to scrub this shit off of our jeans when we get home.” She’d cluck and make noises like it bothered her, but I knew her well enough that she’d be grateful for a task that gave her purpose again.
“You could also be a grown ass adult and do it yourself.” Though he said it intended with humor, there was an edge to his voice.
My big brother had gone off to the desert and his truck had gotten blown up, landing him in the hospital and some of his battle buddies in the ground. Coming home and seeing his younger brother still being catered to by his mom had to burn in a way I couldn’t wholly understand, so I didn’t let the sting affect my reply. “I’m never gonna grow up; I like being an idiot too much,” which earned me a laugh, even though only I knew it wasn’t true.
It was unnerving how easy it was for me to be the Keane that people needed me to be, instead of the Keane that I was. I was my brother’s sidekick (though I was capable of figuring all of this out by myself), my girlfriends’ mr-right-now (even when I didn’t care enough to be a good right-now), my mother’s messy and spoiled son (when I knew how to do laundry, cook, and clean), and my friends’ perpetual wingman (when all I wanted was a night alone). I just wanted to be me, without upsetting the balance of everything else. But it was easier to be the man who served a purpose for others than the man who sought to find his own. And with the complications of my life at the moment, easy was the way to go.
“What are you doing tonight?” I asked him as we put the tools back in my truck, along with the remnants from lunch.
“I have a meeting,” he said. “Couple of guys from the unit are getting together to talk.”
It was hard to imagine my stoic, non-chatty big brother going to a group of any kind. Since he’d returned home, he actively avoided groups especially. That’s why this cabin thing appealed so much to him. While the cabin wouldn’t be my permanent home, it would be my seasonal one and rented out when I wasn’t here. “In town?”
“Hour away. One of them is going to rent a room from me when this place is done.”
“Oh,” I said. “No wild night for you then, huh?”
“No.” An awkward silence lasted for a moment before my brother asked, “What about you? Still chasing that girl?”
He and I had talked about my most recent ex-girlfriend just two days before, the day she and I had split up, but it was evident that his memory wasn’t totally there. I wanted to pretend like we’d never had this conversation before, but in a weird way, it felt like lying not to acknowledge that I’d already told him. “Psh,” I said, playing it cool. “I’ve got a quiet night ahead of me. You know I don’t chase girls. Especially not any at the moment.”
“What was her name? She works at a grocery store. Right?”
I was impressed that he remembered that much about someone who never really came around the house but had forgotten that she and I weren’t dating anymore. “Megan.”
“Megan. Yes. She’s cute.”
“Yeah, well, she’s not in the picture anymore.”
“Oh, why?”
“We weren’t really moving in the same direction.” She dumped me. And I wasn’t heartbroken about it.
“Is there more than one direction to move in a relationship?”
“Duh.” I brushed dried mud off my knees. “She wanted to talk about moving in together. We only dated six months and I was still in the phase of deciding if I liked her enough to see her more than once or twice a week.”
“You didn’t already know that before you started dating?”
“I didn’t really know her before we started dating.”
“That’s why you become friends with someone first.”
“No, that doesn’t work.”
Asa laughed at me. “Sure it does. Weren’t you friends with Tori back in the day, before you started chasing her?”
“Okay, for one—I didn’t chase her. And two, no. We’re friends now, but back then she was just someone fascinating to me.”
“And she’s not anymore?”
“She’s a friend now,” I said again. “There are friends,” I said, using my left hand to make an invisible box. “And there are girlfriends.” I made a separate box with my right hand. “I can go from girlfriend to friend—rare, might I note—but the other way doesn’t work because I can’t go friend to girlfriend and back to friend. If I hooked up with a friend, I can’t undo that and go back to being friends like before.”
“What kind of bullshit hypothesis is that?”
“It’s my bullshit hypothesis.”
“And it’s not founded by any truth. Plenty of people have fallen in love with their friends.”
“But those people aren’t me,” I said. “If I had become friends with Megan before we dated, she’d have seen how much of a dick I am—so we wouldn’t have dated. And if somehow we had, how I was as a boyfriend would’ve made her not want to be my friend afterward.”
“There’s a solution, you know. Maybe don’t be a shitty boyfriend.”
“I’m not a shitty boyfriend. I’m just not the most present one.”
“Yeah, that makes you pretty shitty, no offense.”
“Okay, fine. I’m shitty. I’m selfish because I like my alone time and no one I’ve dated seems to get that. I’m inattentive because I don’t respond to texts right away and I’m boring because I’d rather stay in than go out ninety percent of the time.” I didn’t know why it bugged me so much that my brother was asking me these questions. We’d talked about girls before, but he’d never questioned my dating philosophy.
“Are those things girls have said about you?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.” My brother raked his fingers through his beard. I might be bigger than him, but the bastard had grown a better beard than me and he knew it. “I don’t think being the opposite of clingy makes you a bad boyfriend.”
“Apparently, you haven’t been dating around Amber Lake recently.”