Page 7 of Hard Wood Daddy

The curve of her chin to her neck to the skin I can just barely see under the gap of her collar—I want to sink my teeth into it. Lick it. Shove my nose in her hair to smell it. I want to stick my tongue in her ears and taste her. There and other places. All the places, but especially down low. Where I know she has womanly parts.

Yes, God, I want to eat that part of her.Eat. It.

I’ve never felt like this before.

I’ve never met a woman who makes my head feel fuzzy and like the world is spinning me sideways.

I should have been listening when Lindsay was talking, but looking and listening to her with Tess so close was impossible.

Lindsay and I have business. She says she’s been trying to renew the lease so her art program can stay on my land.We can resolve all your concerns, she said, like I should understand what she’d been telling me. I hadn’t even heard a thing she said before that because I was eating Tess with my eyes.

It would have been fine, except that I still haven’t read the lease.

That’s the biggest problem.

I can’t fucking read enough to know what the hell Lindsay wants from me.

Leases have a lot of long words. Lawyer words. Paragraphs of it.

When you grow up in the forest, there isn’t a lot of chance to learn fancy words.

I can read stuff like “caution” and “DeWalt” and “double aught” and exactly everything else I need to do my normal work around the property. I’m good at my work. I’m great with myhands. I have to be. I started working with my dad at the lumber mill when most kids were learning letters, and I lost half of two fingers over it. The ring finger and pinkie on my right hand don’t go past the second knuckle.

I’m still real good with those damaged hands.

Back when I still had grandparents, Grandma tried to teach me the letters and the words, but my brain didn’t seem to want to understand. It would twist the letters, and it would make me mad. So, they told me to be proud of my big, calloused hands instead.

“Sign of a man who works for a living,” said Grandpa.

They took me in after my dad died to the sawmill. Someone hadn’t inspected the safety on one of the machines in too long, Dad tripped at the wrong moment, and he was just gone like that.

One day I had him. The next day I didn’t.

It took a little longer for my mom to disappear.

She didn’t die. She just left.

See, my mom was scared of me. I hit six feet tall before I was even a teenager. “Early bloomer,” she used to say, like it was an insult. “You’re a monster.”

She was nice to me sometimes, but it always felt a little like she was just a zookeeper trying to keep the lion fed with a long stick.

She hated the forest, hated the sawmill, and hated the fact her kid turned out to belong in the wilderness where she didn’t want to be. Dad always said you can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl. I didn’t really know what that meant when I was young, but watching her berate him and everything about the forest and our life up here, I pieced it together soon enough.

Don’t marry a city girl, my dad used to tell me.Don’t volunteer for misery.

So after my dad went away to heaven, my grandparents said, “We can keep him with us, if you want.”

My mom said, “I want.”

I think I was eleven when that happened.

Good people, my grandparents. They retired the sawmill after Dad died. They found other uses for the land. They were the ones who made the first lease with Paint Forest Program. Said it was good to let the college sit in our forest, that it made people happy. The lease money paid the taxes, they said, although back then I didn’t know about taxes, but I do now. They’re bad. They take and take and threaten. I hate taxes. But, if I’m being honest, I still don’t understand what they are except money you give and if you don’t, they come and take.

My grandparents were simple like me. They said they never finished school either, but they were smart. Their hearts were like Clara’s diner in town. Always room for one more.

Two years ago they got the fever and both left me during the winter. I’ve been alone since, except for the artist people that come in the summers.

I miss my grandparents. Not just their kindness, either. I miss that they could read leases and Lawyer Words. They never let anyone take advantage of them.

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