The phone rang again, and Jeff picked it up without looking. “Did you tell them the twenty-first?”
Silence. Then, “Did you hire someone to cut my lawn?” Another pause. “And weed my garden?” A final accusatory silence. “And power-wash the garage?”
“They had a promotion,” Jeff said. “Hi, Carter.”
His mind supplied the visual of Carter’s eye roll. “Hi, Jeff. What’s the twenty-first?”
“Another test of my patience.” When Carter didn’t immediately respond, he clarified, “Second concert date in Toronto. Unfortunate contract loophole. Are you pissed about the landscapers?”
“Landscapers? I thought they were just cleaning up.”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch.” And that was a horrible thing to say out loud when he was wearing Carter’s underwear himself. He should probably change. “What did you want me to call them?Lawn maintenance professionals? Kind of a mouthful.”
“I’ll give you a mouthful,” Carter muttered. Jeff’s dick twitched in his borrowed shorts. “I want to be pissed.”
“But you’re not.”
He exhaled. “No.”
Jeff sensed there was more there, but he didn’t know how well his probing would be received. Carter had always been at his most prickly when he was annoyed about being vulnerable—sick or injured or, for one miserable, memorable month the summer he was fifteen, heartbroken from his breakup with Marina Thompson. “Do you… want to talk about it?”
Another one of those annoyed pauses. Then, begrudging but not particularly snippy, “About what?”
“Just… don’t bite my head off, okay?”
“When have I ever?”
Jeff didn’t bother responding to that. “I just noticed that, uh, you’ve kind of been letting the house get a bit… I just want to make sure you’re okay.”I know your dad died, and you idolized him, but are you depressed?seemed like a stupid question.
This time Carter’s silence was softer. “I’m okay,” he said after a moment. “It’s… okay, do you want to hear something dumb?”
Everything that comes out of your mouth is dumb.But this wasn’t the time. “You can tell me anything.”
Carter breathed in sharply enough Jeff could hear it. “When Dad died, there was a lot to do—not just funeral arrangements but practical things like covering his shifts at the garage and making sure the shop’s bills got paid on time, ordering supplies. And I couldn’t help with the grief, you know? I couldn’t make that better for Mom any more than anyone could make it better for me, but doing the practical stuff made me feel like I was helping. And then I kind of forgot to stop doing it.”
“Classic Carter,” Jeff murmured. “You’re almost lucky you broke your foot, you know. Now youhaveto slow down.”
“I think I’ve slept more in the past day and a half than I have in the past month,” Carter joked.
“That’s horrifying,” Jeff said. “You need to sleep more. And that’s coming from a professional musician who’s been on cocaine benders.” He paused and, in the interest of honesty, amended, “Okay, one cocaine bender.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “You’re not still…?”
“No. I told you I quit and I meant it. Kind of loses its appeal when someone derails right in front of you. Plus it fucks up my sleep.”
“All right,” Carter said quickly. “Just checking.”
He couldn’t help being a mother hen. Jeff wondered if it was a middle-child thing or a Carter thing or both. “So how’s the foot today?”
“It hurts and I’m bored.” His voice held a heavy note of self-deprecation. “I’ve never been good at doing nothing, and after the past six months, I’mreallynot good at doing nothing.” He paused. “Also, I just remembered something else.”
“Hm?” Jeff asked.
“I’m supposed to coach T-ball tonight.”
And that was how Jeff found himself swinging into Carter’s driveway at six with a stack of foil-wrapped sandwiches in a bag on the seat and a couple bottles of Gatorade in the cupholders. Carter limped out of the house toward his own truck.
Jeff rolled down the window. “Get in, loser. I’ll get the camp chairs and equipment.”