Page 33 of Wrong Number

She was a nice girl. I noticed in conversation that she sometimes didn’t outright agree or disagree, but she always told the truth. I’ve known girls who pretended to like everything their boyfriends did, to build a connection. Or maybe they just didn’t have a personality of their own.

Tana told me right off the top that she didn’t like horror movies or heavy music. And she did it with zero judgment in her eyes. There was so much that we agreed on that the little differences didn’t mean a thing.

Why was she afraid to tell me about her father?

Spooning rice into my mouth, I stared at the blank screen of the TV, my dark reflection staring back. Tana knew that I would never raise my voice to her. I would never be anything but gentle with her.

But maybe there were couples who fought in her past. If her dad was a drinker, that was extremely possible.

Maybe she was ashamed to be related to him. Or they had a lousy relationship. She had said that she barely knew him.

If she had told me at the very beginning, we would have rolled our eyes, talked it out, and that would be that. But she hadn’t done that. She’d hidden it from me.

Pushing the plate away, I felt queasy. It wasn’t fair to think of Tana as perfect, with zero faults. Yet I did, or at least, I really wanted too. I couldn’t help it. Now there was a huge question mark hanging over everything.

I was already in love with her, and I thought that decision was final. I knew it would take more time for everything to become solid, but now that I knew she was capable of not telling me the truth, I wasn’t sure what to think.

Dragging myself to bed, my first thought as I pulled the sheet over me was that I wished Tana was with me so I could talk this through with her.

Besides being my girlfriend, she was quickly becoming my best friend. How strange that I wanted to talk to her about ... her. But more than anything else, I knew I had to find a way to get past this so that I could find a way to clear this incident up.

My sleep was marred with strange dreams of every possible carpentry project going wrong. By the time the alarm went off, I felt more exhausted than I had when I first went to bed.

Forcing myself to fill my giant coffee thermos and get to work, I remembered that I had to put the entire Tana situation aside for a bit.

Today I had to meet with my uncle and find out what the hell was going on.

I called Bret and Colin, whom I was working with today, and told them that I had a meeting with John and would be an hour late. They knew that I’d sweep in like a frantic demon and catch us all up.

Then I called John to find out where he was, and warned him that I was dropping by. Strangely, he didn’t even sound surprised. Now that I thought about it, he’d sounded a bit more tired, more bored at everything lately.

Uncle John used to be such an imposing man, tall and broad, and with such big energy that the world seemed to gravitate around him.

When I was sixteen, he was larger than life. But over the years, as I grew up, he seemed to shrink. He also seemed more confused about technology, and paranoid that we might run out of work someday.

No matter how many times I explained that there was a construction boom, with endless condos being built downtown for the next decade at least, he really needed to feel like he had six months of work lined up at all times.

I found him just as he was walking away from a food truck, coffee in hand.

“Mornin’, Tyler,” he smiled, clapping me on the back of the shoulder as he always did. “Ready for another busy day?”

“I need to speak with you for a minute,” I said, guiding him to a quiet spot outside of the parking entrance of the building he was working on today.

“A while ago you told me that I should be more involved,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible. “So when I look through some paperwork and find things that don’t make sense, I want to hear what’s going on from you directly.”

John’s face fell. He sipped his coffee, taking a moment. “I was afraid of this,” he muttered.

“Afraid of what? Just tell me what’s going on. Why are you looking for work from…you know. That ‘family’ company.” I gave him a pointed look so that he knew precisely what I meant.

“I got worried a couple of months back,” he shrugged. His dark eyes looked up at me, squinting a bit in the morning sun. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing but an exasperated sigh came out.

Taking a step back, he shook his head. “To hell with it. I should’ve told you the truth from the start.”

“Whatever it is, I just want to help,” I said.

“I know.” He stared uncomfortably at the concrete wall beside us. “The specialist said my back is shot so I can’t do any more heavy lifting,” he said in a flat monotone. “I can’t be around these jobs without helping. I don’t want to feel useless.”

“You’d never be useless,” I said quickly. “Even if you let us do all of the heavy stuff, there’s still so much to do, that–”

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