Page 8 of You Were Invited
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The snow-eating chinook carried the scent of chainsaw gas, moldering leaves, and sap from a large conifer as the wedge in its side crackled.
Julian Lincoln held his breath. The two-hundred footer came off its hinge and crashed to the earth. A shudder came up through the dirt into the soles of his worn boots. Needles blew up like shrapnel, and the guideline he’d tied to the tree twanged.
He whistled, took off his baseball cap, and wiped the sweat from his brow with his gloved hand.
The tree had not only been a hair too close to the Jaminseon’s house, but also their side yard neighbors and Main Street, which ran right in front of the two properties.
He walked to the tip of the tree at the gravel edge of the road. The tree top had just missed the neighbors’ mailbox, which was carved with spruce in the shape of a beaver.
“You get to live another day,” he said, patting the critter.
Within an hour, he had the entire tree sawed into pieces and loaded onto the flatbed trailer hitched to his blue one-ton pickup truck. Sap splotched his overalls.
“What’s the damage?” Tim Jaminseon handed Julian a glass of water with a hand gnarled by decades of mechanic work. His checkbook was stuffed in his shirt pocket and stuck out the top.He had a white mustache and coke bottle glasses. Earlier, he’d offered Julian a can of beer, but he’d declined.
“Seven-hundred. Even.” Julian knocked back the water. He thought about charging more, but most trees were difficult for one reason or another.
Mr. Jaminseon wrote the check out on the flatbed of Julian’s rig. “Care to come to Saturday supper sometime?”
“Thanks,” Julian replied, “but I’m usually dead tired.” Which was true. During the week, he acquired nuisance trees from townsfolk and his own personal land before splitting them into logs and kindling. He then sold it on the corner of Main and Emerald on Fridays and Saturdays. Julian handed the empty glass back.
“Wifey was right. You were parched.” Mr. Jaminseon chuckled. “Sunday then?”
“Really, that’s… too kind of you. Thanks for calling me. That’s generous enough.”There were several other lumberjacks in town that people called for help, but they were getting up there in age, and were of little consequence to Julian’s business.
“Thankyou. The last thing anyone needed was a tree fallin’ on ‘em while they slept. Paul Hart and Tommy Katz took one look and told me it was coming down one way or another, but they were going to let an act of God decide when that day was.” Mr. Jaminseon nodded to himself. “Wifey makes an excellent cottage pie. It’s the number one reason why I married ‘er. It’s a great deal that won’t last forever. The second reason I got hitched was her peach cobbler.”
Running out of excuses.Julian smiled. He didn’t know the old couple well, but it felt genuinely kind of them to open their home to him. Their own children– who he’d gone to high school with fifteen years prior– had since moved away from their smalltown of Northgold. “I’ll get back to you... all right?” He made sure to flash another grin. “Appreciate it.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll quit puttin’ the screws on.” Mr. Jaminseon gave him a tight-lipped smile before he helped Julian double check the straps securing the logs to his trailer. Fresh green wood filled the air with the scent of sap and earthy bark.
Hopping into his truck, Julian said his goodbye, and drove a little ways down Main before pulling into the gravel parking lot in front of Buckeye's Grocery Store.
He hoped he hadn’t seemed rude. He wasn’t particularly close to more than a couple people anymore, and those people didn’t get real close to him. Sometimes the loneliness tugged him down in a bad way, but after about an hour of brooding, he was usually able to remind himself why things were the way they were.
He opened the glass door of Buckeye's and waved at Rich, who stood behind the front counter.
“Hey, Julian.” Rich’s voice had almost a whistle to it. He took the heavily tinted aviator glasses off his angled face and cleaned them on his long-sleeved thermal shirt.
“Hey, Rich.” Julian would only admit to himself that Rich Lee was the closest thing he had to a best friend. Through town gossip, they “knew” a fair amount about each other, but neither had confessed a word of knowing about it to the other. If anyone had ever asked about the store owner’s past in the military overseas, Julian would’ve pretended that, as far as he knew, Rich had never left the state of Montana– not even for a funeral or free gifted vacation.
Julian grabbed a grocery basket.Don’t forget bread this time. Before he knew it, his basket was overflowing with the essentials and a small bag of cat food. The muscles in his biceps flexed as he lifted the basket onto the scuffed checkout counter.
“That some kind of kids’ challenge?”
Julian raised a brow.
Rich gestured to Julian’s face. “You lose a bet and haveta stop shavin’, or is it another no shave month, or other?”
“Not necessarily.” Julian adjusted his cap and scratched his chin, fingers lingering on the light brown curly tufts that stuck out haphazardly.
He scratched his neck. The last four weekends, he hadn’t bothered to clean himself up, and more than once, an out-of-towner had side-eyed him. “You’re one to talk.” Rich’s plumage of salt and pepper hair looked like it could walk itself to the dog groomer’s, when normally it was semi-neatly combed down.
“Don’t like the new barber.”
“That’s too bad.” Julian tugged on his beard, thinking for a moment. “I could help ya out.”
