Chapter 2 - The Logistics of the Past
The second bedroom smelled like old paint and cardboard boxes that hadn’t been opened since they moved in eighteen months ago. It was supposed to be the nursery, but so far it was serving as a storage facility for Derek’s old college textbooks, a spare mattress with no sheets, and a towering stack of empty shipping boxes from Amazon deliveries that never seemed to stop.
“He said he’d clear it out by May,” Sarah said softly from the doorway, her arms wrapped around her stomach as she watched me drag a box of old software manuals toward the closet. “Then the promotion didn’t happen, and he said the market was weird, and... Dad, you really don’t have to stay. We can just... we can compromise.”
“Compromise is for two people who both own the property, Sarah,” I said, wiping a streak of dust off my forehead with the back of my wrist. “Right now, this room is a fire hazard and an insult to your grandfather’s memory. Where are the crib parts?”
“In the garage. Behind the winter tires and his gaming rig box.”
I stopped moving the manuals. “His gaming rig box? The one he brought home last month?”
“The one he said cost two thousand dollars because the graphics card was imported from Taiwan,” she murmured, looking down at the toes of her slippers. “He said if he didn't upgrade, his team would drop him from the roster. He plays with guys from Chicago and London. They’re... they’re sponsored, apparently.”
I let out a long, slow breath through my nose, the kind of breath I used to let out when a private told me he’d lost his rifle bolt in a swamp. Not angry. Just disappointed in the systemic breakdown of basic common sense.
“Sarah, sit down on that mattress. It’s clean enough for five minutes.”
“I’m fine, Dad.”
“Sit.”
She sat, her knees parting around her belly, her shoulders rounding out under the weight of a tiredness that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with the last three hundred days.
“How long?” I asked.
“How long what?”
“How long has he been talking to you like that when nobody else is in the house?”
She didn’t answer right away. She picked at a loose thread on the seam of her sweater, her thumbnail worrying the blue wool until a small fuzzball came away. Outside in the hallway, we could hear the rhythmic clack-clack of Derek’s heavy work boots hitting the floor as he dragged the crib box out of the garage under my direct supervision.
“It didn’t start until the winter,” she whispered at last. “After the company downsized and he had to work from home three days a week. He said the office environment was toxic. He said his boss didn’t understand his value. So he stayed in the den until two in the morning, and then he slept until noon, and... Dad, he’s just stressed. He’s under a lot of pressure to provide.”
“Providing isn't sitting in a dark room shouting at thirteen-year-olds in Germany while your wife eats cold cereal over the sink,” I said, keeping my voice level. “That’s not providing, Sarah. That’s hiding.”
“He loves me,” she said, and there was that old, desperate defensive note in her voice—the one that sounded too much like her mother during the years before we finally realized some things can’t be fixed with counseling and good intentions. “He bought me those flowers for our anniversary. The ones in the blue vase in the kitchen.”
“The ones with the grocery store tag still tucked into the ribbon?” I asked gently.
She stopped picking at her sweater. Her eyes flicked up to mine, wide and wet, the truth sitting right there between us like an unexploded shell.
“He forgot,” she whispered. “I know he forgot. He ordered them on his phone while he was sitting in the driveway because he stayed out too late with the guys from the logistics warehouse. But he tried, Dad. At least he didn't just pretend nothing happened like he used to.”
That was the rot right there. Not the shouting, not the dropped plates, not even the kneeling on the floor. It was the standard she had lowered for herself until she was grateful for a late-night gas station bouquet bought out of panic.
Before I could answer, the door swung open wider, and Derek stood there holding two splintered side rails of an unfinished pine crib, his face flushed and his lower lip pushed out in that specific toddler sulk that thirty-year-old men only use when they think nobody is going to check their credentials.
“The hardware bag is missing,” he said, his voice sharp with a sudden, desperate surge of authority. “The little plastic bag with the four-millimeter bolts. It’s not in the box. I told you we bought a cheap brand, Sarah. Everything online is garbage now. Nothing comes complete.”
I stood up from the box of software manuals, my knees clicking once—a reminder of twenty years in the mud at Camp Lejeune that no amount of stretching could entirely erase.
“It’s not missing, Derek,” I said, walking past him into the hallway. “It’s in the kitchen junk drawer next to the takeout menus and the dead batteries for your smoke detector. Because you dumped it out on Tuesday to look for a Phillips-head screwdriver you never put back.”
He blinked, his mouth half-open. “How do you—"
May you like
“Because you’re predictable, son,” I said, clapping him once on the shoulder—hard enough to make him stumble half a step into the doorframe. “And in my experience, men who can’t find their own hardware usually spend a lot of time looking for someone else to blame for the house falling down around them. Let’s go get the tools. We’ve got a long night ahead.”
---
