Page 71 of The Hometown Legend

“Because you’re so easy to talk to.”

“I’m not, historically. I’ve gotten very good at it in the context of being the manager of these different cabins and rentals. I don’t know, it was sort of my attempt at fixing myself, I think. But I don’t have a lot of close friends.”

“I liked you when you were a kid. You were always telling me about something interesting. You talked a ton on those car rides. I just don’t understand why people didn’t like you at school.”

“I couldn’t talk like that there. Lydia has always made it easy. You always made it easy. I never felt like I had to adjust myself to talk to you. Either of you. I get excited about something and I want to talk about it endlessly, and you just never thought that was silly.”

“I don’t understand, isn’t that most people? They like to talk about what they like. Especially when you’re thirteen.”

“I think the problem was I was never interested in the thing that everybody else was. Maybe the problem was just me. I was the perfect person to pick on. Skinny and a brace face and usually wearing a dress that would look better on a prairie than on a middle schooler.”

“I feel like I see people wearing those all the time these days.”

“Well, I was wearing them before they were cool, let me tell you that.”

“Do you ever wonder if maybe people just pick someone they know they can hurt?” She thought it was her, and in some ways it was, but he’d been in the military. He knew about bullies. What he wanted her to know was that the flaw was in those people, not in her.

She blinked rapidly. “I don’t know. Do you really think people do?”

“I’ll tell you something about being an officer in the military. I had to identify early who was going to break. And in basic, I would break them quickly. And mercilessly, because you had to. Either they were going to be able to recover from that, or they weren’t, and then you had to figure out what to do with them. You couldn’t send somebody fragile out on the front lines. So, the sooner you broke them, the bigger favor you were doing for them. Now, middle school is not the military. But yeah, I do think some people know exactly who they can break. They didn’t break you, though, did they?”

“Sometimes I feel a little like they did.”

“You seem whole to me.”

They pulled onto the property, and this time he felt calmer. Maybe because he wasn’t just coming off a phone call with his ex-wife.

They drove past the main house, out to the spot where the trail ran through the trees.

This, he thought, would be a great place for the course.

He went to the bed of the truck and started to get the different things he needed out.

Rory hung back, watching him unload items, including the set of weights.

“What’s that for?”

“Personal training,” he said. “I’m not gonna send you up a rope without doing some reps.”

“No way,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I thought maybe it was a good idea. At least, maybe it’s a good idea for me.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Your muscles are huge.”

He did not tell her that was because when you had addictive behaviors, sometimes you replaced unhealthy ones with healthy ones. At least then you weren’t in a gutter.

“I have a pretty fixed routine,” he said. “It includes a lot of lifting things.”

Sometimes running until the edges of his vision got black because that’s what happened to him now, and sometimes running till he wanted to vomit because no matter how far he ran, it still felt like something was chasing him. But he wasn’t going to say that.

“Do you roll tires around the backyard?”

“Sometimes,” he said gravely.

He grabbed the rope, and the mounting equipment, and looked up at one of the big pine trees in front of him. It would be as good as any.

He pressed the edge of his foot against the tree, and launched himself upward, getting a firm grip on the trunk with his thighs, one arm wrapped around the base.

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