Page 7 of Roughing It

Chapter3

Maddox

The static on my walkie always sounds like crinkling paper, which crawls under my skin, and I’m very much not in the mood to hear whatever’s about to come next. It’s always some sort of crisis that I need to solve, and it’s been a long week already.

Halfway down the hall, it starts up again. The signal is shoddy, which is just the universe’s way of letting me know we’re about to get pummeled by a monsoon, and my only saving graces are the generators out back and the fact that the lodge is at four percent capacity.

I’m not sure what our check-ins are like for the weekend, but there’s some massive festival in the city that has cleared us out. Next weekend will be hell, but this at least gives me some space to breathe every year right after the early summer vacationers all start going home.

“Sir?”

The voice makes me cringe, only because I hate being called sir. I’ve told my staff that repeatedly, but they rarely listen. “Maddox here,” I answer.

“Sir,” the voice says again, and I recognize it as Cody, the new maintenance hire who started just before Christmas. “I’m in two-oh-four, and it looks like signs of a clogged line. Water’s coming up the bathroom sink drain.”

Nothing I wasn’t expecting, but it’s still going to be a major pain in the ass. It just means I have to haul my happy ass out into knee-deep mud and check that the pipes are all in order.

The life of a small-lodge owner, I suppose.

Of course, most people in my position would just hire people to do this, but I actually like getting my hands dirty. It’s only the first few weeks of the summer rush that makes me feel like throwing myself into the sun. Soon enough, I’ll be smiling again.

There’s always something to do—repairs, updates, and the winters like to ruin the pipes—but there’s nothing I enjoy more than the quiet solitude when the season is over.

Or, at least, that’s what I tell myself every time I start to feel overwhelmed—which is often. It’s not even the job, really. It’s mostly the lingering side effects of my traumatic brain injury that killed my military career. I used to be able to handle the most high-stress situations while I was literally under fire. Now, the idea of a clogged pipe has me pausing against the wall and working through some of the calming techniques my therapist gave me.

It’s frustrating to remember what life was like before my world turned upside down, but I can safely say the good outweighs the bad. In truth, I’m still trying to escape the world my parents live in and the life they wanted for me. The military was the first moment of rebellion, and buying the lodge was the second.

See, I didn’t come from some long military legacy. My father’s an investor, and my mother’s an heiress, and they assumed I’d go into the family business of making and spending obscene amounts of money. For a while, I followed their plans. I even married Holly, the daughter of a family friend I’d known from childhood.

And a month later, I enlisted.

To this day, I’m not sure what my long-term goal would have been. My wife didn’t seem to care that I was never home. When I was deployed, we talked every now and again, but neither of us made the effort. I still wonder sometimes what would have happened to us if I’d retired instead of coming home injured, but it’s a pointless thought exercise my therapist says I shouldn’t indulge too often.

The reality is, I was hurt. Permanently. Our Humvee hit an IED, and I woke up from a coma two months later with aphasia and a long stint of recovery ahead of me.

My wife served me divorce papers three weeks after I was discharged to the rehab facility, and I knew then I had to make my own way. I couldn’t run from my problems, and I couldn’t let my parents—who’d been hovering since I’d woken up and talking about bringing me home when I was better—dictate what came next.

By the time I was ready to walk out on my own two legs, I had decided to use most of my inheritance to buy a place in the mountains and create something for myself. After all, I had always been better with horses than I was with people, even before my injury. It took some time, but within three years, the lodge was in the black, and I had a group of employees who were more like family than my own blood relatives had ever been.

I finally felt like I was home.

The only real struggle about living in the middle of nowhere and rarely leaving my mountain is how lonely it can get. It’s not like I can bump into people at the local bar and get phone numbers, and even if I could, I’ve long since forgotten how to be social.

It also doesn’t help that the few women I’ve managed to meet since my divorce quickly turned the other way when they learned I’d been married. Like my marriage not working out meant I must have done something wrong or driven her away somehow.

Miguel and René—the two employees I’m closest to—tried setting me up on dates once, but that crashed and burned fast. When the final date looked me in the eye and said, “Divorced? So what’s wrong with you?” I realized I was going to spend all of my life trying to prove I was a worthy man.

People don’t want to believe that sometimes relationships just fail. Sometimes the wrong people are in the right place at the right time, and try as they might, they can’t ever be someone they’re not. That’s what happened with me and Holly. She was from the same world my parents occupy: rich and with priorities so far from my own fundamental understanding that it was doomed to fail before it even began.

And the rehab and struggle to find my new normal was the nail in the coffin for her.

I don’t really blame her though. Neither one of us had signed up for that, and we hadn’t been a good match to begin with.

Even years later, I still struggle to make sense of words when I’m reading if I’m too tired, and sometimes my words get mixed up when I’m speaking. I know the last thing she wanted was to be embarrassed by her husband at some social event when I couldn’t string two words together.

But, honestly, by the time we were signing papers, I was more relieved than she was.

I just wanted a fresh start.

---