1
“Jake… Jake! I’m talking to you!”
He looked up from his sodden corn flakes. “What? Sorry. I was thinking about the job today.”
Allison sputtered and threw up her hands, getting one tangled in her unbrushed hair. “You’re always thinking about the damned job. When do you think about us? Am I alone in this? If you came home, and I’d packed and left, would you even notice or just grab a beer and plop in front of the TV?”
“Allison, I’m not a drunk.”
“Do you hear what I’m saying? Can you honestly be this dense? I’m not talking about you being drunk. I’m talking about you being absent from our life, from this room!”
Jake braced an elbow on the kitchen table and propped his chin on his fist. “I’m here, darlin’, front and center. Go ahead.” He considered a more genuine approach, but Christ if Allison didn’t pull this shit every single morning.
She blinked at him, the tears working into her eyes, and he sighed and reached across the table. “Honey, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. I have a lot on my mind. This job out on Rudolph is a doozy. I keep trying to figure how I’m going to get the ’dozer down that two-track. If I could just knock out that one oak… but man, she’s a beaut. I don’t blame Reggie for wanting to keep her.”
Her tears vanished, and she ripped her hand from his, pushing back from the table and storming into the living room. Her footfalls pounded up the stairs and the bathroom door slammed.
Jake sighed, stood, and walked his bowl to the sink. He dumped the contents into the drain and flicked on the garbage disposal, flinching at the loud grinding sound as it chewed and swallowed the mush. In the window above the sink, he caught his reflection in the reddening glass as a morning glow crept over the trees. A blond fuzz covered his cheeks and chin. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of weeks and he had been flirting with the idea of a beard, but with summer fast approaching, he’d likely scrap the idea.
He should have gone upstairs and made amends. Instead, Jake shoved his socked feet into his work boots, grabbed his thermos of coffee and walked into the brisk spring morning to his truck.
He backed down the driveway and Allison’s silhouette filled the window in the master bedroom upstairs. He quickly flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror and reversed into the street.
When Jake pulled into the parking lot of his excavating business, he spotted Willis Dooby’s truck and the little red Geo Ricardo Denaud had been driving since the transmission in his Dodge Ram had thrown up a death rattle two weeks before. The guys loved to heckle Ricardo, the nearly six-foot-five giant with a mop of black hair and muscles that made bodybuilders envious, for driving his wife’s teeny-tiny two-door coupé.
Jake leaped from his truck, hitting his stride and all but forgetting about the tussle with Allison as he walked toward the two guys sitting on the tailgate of Willis’s truck. They sipped coffee from flowery porcelain mugs that Jake’s secretary Barbara insisted on hanging from the little wooden mug tree next to the coffeepot in the office.
Despite Jake’s best efforts to nudge her towards a more manly ambience, and repeated reminders that they were an excavating business, not a ladies’ hat shop, Barbie had outfitted the office in framed photographs of Victorian ladies in frilly dresses, lamps with floral-patterned shades and candy dishes filled not with candy, but dried flowers and herbs.
“Barbie made some kind of apple dessert in there. Better get some before the Jones boys show up and devour it,” Willis announced.
“Strudel,” Ricardo corrected. “And here they come now.”
The Jones boys, Allen and Jerry, squealed into the parking lot on two tires, causing shovels and rakes to crash inside the bed of their lifted pick-up. Their matching blond heads bobbed as the truck bounced back onto its wheels.
Two years into his forties, Jake no longer had the spitfire he saw in the Jones boys, but he liked to lean into the flame once in a while and remember.
Before Allen and Jerry could descend on the office, Jake hurried over, pushing through the glass door and into the pungent scent of orange rind, cinnamon and rose.
Barbie, clad in her usual jeans and brightly colored top—today a button-up blouse covered in pink flamingos—talked on the phone. She winked and gave him a wave. “Oh, come on now, Sampson, you old devil. You know I’m a married woman.”
Barbie, a soft, round woman in her fifties, married for thirty years with three grown children she called daily, loved to flirt with the clients of Dig Deep Excavating. Jake could attribute half of his business to his secretary's wily phone skills.
“Sure thing,” she continued. “Jerry and Allen will be there within the hour. Of course they’ll bring the skid steer. No, you can’t drive it, you scoundrel. You’re not on our insurance, are you?” She released a throaty laugh. “Have a good day, Sampson. Oh, yes, I will. Thank you. Bye.”
Jake scooped a chunk of strudel onto a china plate adorned in dainty purple flowers. “You better hide these plates before Jerry and Allen come in,” he told her, sticking a forkful into his mouth.
She strained up in her chair and narrowed her eyes toward the window at the two young men who’d burst from their truck like jack-in-the-boxes. “Oh, no, I won’t. Those boys know better than to get rowdy in here.”
Jake smirked and gobbled up the pastry while leaning over Barbie to look at the desk-sized weekly calendar. “We finished Sampson’s driveway last week. Why’s he on the schedule again?”
“Oh, you know Sampson. He loves the driveway so much, he wants gravel clear back to his barn now.”
Jake chuckled. “I’m pretty sure he just loves a reason to call and hit on you.”
“Oh, you stop it, Jake Edwards. Sampson is just a baby.”
“He’s forty.”
She fluttered her hand dismissively.
“Huntington, Stowers…” Jake read the names, double-checking which guys and which machines would need to go where on what days. “Can you call CAT and see if they’ve got a mini-excavator available for the septic system out at Hancock’s place?”
Barbie made a note on a piece of yellow stationery topped by a spattering of red roses. “Yep, and Reggie called to say if you have to take down the oak, he’ll allow it, though it will break his heart.”
Jake frowned, imagining the tree with her giant trunk and gnarled branches. He shook his head. “I can’t take her down. It’d break my heart too. Call him and tell him I need to push his project back until the end of the week. I need to brainstorm another way to get back there.”
“And Dave Wilson wanted you to call him back with an estimate for a pole barn foundation behind his daughter’s house.”
The door flung open and Jerry and Allen rushed inside. They beelined for the coffee stand, not bothering with china plates. Scooping up the remaining strudel, they shoved it into their mouths, jabbing their forks at each other’s bites as they polished off what remained in the pan.
Jake grinned at Barbie, who shook her head, barely concealing her look of satisfaction. Barbie regarded the Jones boys as she did her own sons. The motherly affection covered the entire crew, even Willis, who was a good five years older than her.