Page 40 of Relief Pitcher

TYLER

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Austin: Anyone want to come over for dinner tonight? Caleb’s cooking salmon. E, I’ll save you leftovers since you’re working.

Ethan: You are an angel.

Dom: Hell yeah. Caleb is so good with fish.

Ty: Can me and Seth get in on those leftovers? We’re having dinner with my parents tonight.

Austin: Trade you salmon for a pack of sugar cookies out of her freezer.

Ty: [GIF of two people in trench coats stealthily exchanging packages]

Ty: Deal.

* * *

“Mom,come on. I don’t want to go through the shit in the garage.” I leaned back in the wooden dining chair. The set with the oval backs had been a staple in our dining room for as long as I could remember.

Not much had changed about my parents’ house over the years beyond finally getting rid of that seventies harvest gold carpet. Half the time I wanted to hire an interior designer to help them bring their home into the twenty-first century, and the other half, I basked in the nostalgia.

A napkin hit me in the face. “Language, Tyler Ray McNeill! I worked foryouby cooking dinner. Now you and your brother work formeby clearing your shit out of the garage.”

“How come you get to cuss and I don’t? I’m an adult.” I pouted.

Mom reached over and swatted my ear as Seth chuckled. Traitor. “Because this is my house. Let’s go.” She stood from the dining table. Seth and I dutifully followed her through the kitchen and utility room to the garage.

Dad had the walls lined with utility shelves full of plastic tubs. Wreaths and other odd-shaped Christmas decorations hung from hooks in the ceiling. The place was organized but packed. A minimalist’s nightmare. Like the house, the garage was a shrine to our lives over the decades.

“Your father and I want to start kayaking, and we need to make some room. That means your shit has to go.”

It was hilarious that she acted like our stuff was such an inconvenience given the constant battle Seth and I had waged as kids to get her to let us throw away anything—even old book reports and terrible art. She kepteverything.

“I especially want it done since this one has been sticking around.” She jerked her thumb toward Seth, who eyed the teetering stack of boxes with increasing horror.

Only my mom could get away with saying that out loud. Dad and I had been tiptoeing around the topic of Seth staying in town. The guys at the brewery had too. None of us had point-blank asked Seth how long he planned to stay in Dahlia Springs. No one wanted to spook him and send him back to work on another cruise ship for several more years.

I really hoped he’d stick around because we’d grown closer than ever before. Our new relationship was young enough that I worried we’d revert to being less close if he moved away again. Never in a million years would I have expected Seth to be one ofthe guys. Austin, Ethan, and Dom had become like family years ago—well, Austin was actual family—and Seth had become my friend. A good friend. I was so damn lucky in the friend department.

He fit in great with our group now. As kids, though, he’d been the annoying little squirt, always trying to follow me, Austin, and my childhood best friend, Gavin, around. The three years between us were nothing as adults, but back then, it might as well have been a decade with the social divide between us. His brainiac ass having skipped a grade hadn’t helped either. I appreciated him now though. Maybe distance really did make the heart grow fonder.

Mom pulled a box off a shelf taller than her and dropped it onto a folding table already set up. A premeditated murder of my free evening. I sighed and Seth shrugged.

I unfolded the top of the box and spotted a familiar blue-and-white material. I pulled my high school letterman jacket out of the dusty box.

“Wow. This takes me back.” I pulled it on. It was snugger than it had been all those years ago. Good thing my guns had grown.

“Me too. Endless weekends of haulin’ your ass around to baseball practices and games. You outgrowing your Nikes every other week,” she grumbled.

I tried to wrap my arm around her shoulder but didn’t have enough give in the fabric. “But you love me.”

She pinched the tip of my nose. “Your giant stinky feet and all.”

Seth laughed. “Your feet seriously stank. Bad enough that you should’ve gone to a doctor.”

I tugged the jacket off and tossed it back on the box. “I was a teenage boy. Hormones and puberty and shit. What do you expect?”

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