Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) Read Free

and some life experience, you think?”
    “Russell, we’re not screwing around here—this is your life. You go to a good college, you network, you move on to graduate work. Why would you think that’s changed?”
    I opened my mouth, a lot like Oliver had, and closed it, and opened it again. “I . . . I mean, I’m not great at school—you know, there’s tech schools and vocational schools all over the place for guys who don’t, you know—”
    “You are not graduating from Western Career College,” my dad snapped, and I grinned and tried to get the smile from him that I vaguely remembered from when I was a kid.
    “You can do it !” I sang to the commercial, and apparently that was exactly the wrong thing to sing, because Dad rolled his eyes and walked away.
    So I tried Mom.
    Now in some houses, Mom would be the guaranteed win, right? “Oh, honey, of course. I understand that you’re feeling out of your depth and you’d like to see if maybe something a little less cerebral might be a better match for your much-vaunted future.” Or, you know, at least “Yeah, go out and sweat in the sun, you’re eighteen, who gives a shit?” right? But that wasn’t the way it was in my house. It wasn’t like Mom was the guaranteed win; it was more like she was better at calculating what was in it for her.
    “What will you be spending your money on?” she asked, narrowing her brown eyes at me as though trying to figure the angle. I’d gotten her eyes, but there was something wrong with mine. They were wider and nothing about me looked like I had anything to do with angles. I was all about the curved muscle and brick walls.
    I blinked. “I don’t know. Clothes, the car—I mean, you guys pay for everything else. Maybe I’ll put it in savings and see what I need.”
    She nodded consideringly. She worked part-time from home. She had a degree in finance, and she did business for a day-trading firm. “That sounds prudent,” she said. “And I think once you spend some time doing manual labor, it might lose its charm.”
    As. If.
    Best summer of my life. Oh my God, give me simple tasks and a logical progression and I am a happy boy. And you know what I figured out after, like, the first month? I figured out that once I understood where I was and what I was doing, once I was comfortable with things, I could think for myself .
    On my third day, if someone left a bucket of nails in the middle of the path I was walking, I walked around it. On the sixth, I picked the bucket up and moved it out of the way. The second week I was there, I found the guy with the nail gun and set it next to him. During the third week, I checked to see if the bucket was full enough, and if it wasn’t, I filled it. Then I asked the guy with the nail gun if he could show me how to use it, and by the second month, I could spell the guy with the nail gun, and then, when he came back to do his thing, I went and asked the guy sanding the drywall exactly what the hell he was doing.
    They thought I was a frickin’ genius . It was awesome . After the first week, I was totally full-time.
    And Oliver’s dad couldn’t get enough of me. I loved that guy! When I moved the nail bucket, he told me good job. By the time I was using the gun, he was telling me I was a natural and asking my opinion and showing me how to use the equipment and shit. He was great. I mean, my dad probably wouldn’t have thought much of him. He was a short Latino guy, his black hair going iron gray, with beefy forearms and a thick middle. He had a bushy mustache and faded tattoos on his sunburned brown skin, but not a day went by without him asking me how I was doing and telling me—hell, telling everyone on the site—what a good job we were doing, or asking our opinion, or letting us know if we needed to hustle and why.
    Oliver would come by the site on his lunch hour—he was working at the library, and he seemed to love the hell out of that—and brought us sandwiches and told us