Parts & Labor Read Free

the throw-up taste again then walked around to the back door and dug
my key out of my backpack. I unlocked the door and went inside and into the
kitchen. I tossed the bills on the table then emptied my lunch box and stashed
it in the lower cabinet. None of the cabinets had doors, and the floor was the
cement slab. The walls were bright yellow (Mom said the prior owner's only sense
of taste was in his mouth). Mom and Dad had gotten a good deal on the house
because it was a serious fixer-upper, but Dad hadn't finished fixing it up when
his National Guard unit had gotten called up. His favorite show was This
Old House. We had moved into this old house four years ago right after
Maddy had been born and Dad had been promoted to station chief. He was a
fireman, and the house was his project.
    It
looked like a construction project.
    Mom or Dad used to always be home to greet us after school. If Dad were here, he'd give me a
big hug and say, "Max, my boy! How was school?" Then we'd toss the
ball in the backyard or shoot hoops or work on the house until dinner. After
dinner, we'd do homework (he understood math; I didn't). If he was at the fire
station for his twenty-four-hour shift, he'd always call to see how my day had
gone.
    But
now the house sat empty and silent.
    I
climbed the stairs. Scarlett's bedroom was off to the left, mine to the
right. Her door was closed, but she wasn't home. Scarlett was in eighth grade
and always had after-school activities—on Wednesdays it was band—so Mom picked her and Maddy up on her way home from work, unless she was running late. I never,
ever entered her room, not even to snoop around her stuff while she was gone; a
fourteen-year-old girl's room was just too creepy. Dad always said, "Max,
God didn't intend for guys to understand girls, which is why He gave us a
hundred sports channels on cable."
    Made
sense.
    Scarlett
and I shared a bathroom, which neither of us liked. The sharing, not the
bathroom. She didn't like that I left the toilet seat up and sometimes forgot
to flush; I didn't like that she hung her personal items to dry over the shower
curtain rod. I mean, a guy my age didn't need to see that kind of stuff.
Fortunately, none of that stuff was there to see when I walked into the
bathroom. I brushed my teeth then rinsed with mint-flavored mouthwash to get
rid of the throw-up taste, but I couldn't get rid of the smell. Then I got a
washcloth off the shelf and soaped it up. I sat on the bare wood floor and
wiped the blood off my knee and scrubbed the road rash.
    Yow,
that stung!
    I
patted it dry then found a big Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet and stuck it
over the scrape. I rinsed the washcloth. I could hear the water running
through the exposed pipes because Dad had torn down the walls, but he had deployed
before he could put up the new Sheetrock panels that were stacked out in the
garage. The Army didn't ask if it was a convenient time for him to fight a
war; they just ordered him to Afghanistan, like he didn't have a job or a house
to fix up or a family to take care of.
    I
stood, went into my room, and shut the door. I dropped my backpack on the
floor then pulled the broken iPod out of my pocket. I set the pieces on my
dresser in front of the big photo of us that Mom had taken at the airport the
day Dad deployed; he was standing between me and Scarlett in his desert camouflage
fatigues with his big arms wrapped around us. Maddy stood in front with a
frown; she had a mad on that day because Dad was leaving. I did too, but I
tried to smile anyway.
    I
always liked looking at photos of Dad in his Army uniforms. He was on active
duty back before I was born. He had been stationed in a lot of foreign
countries, like Germany and California. When he got out of the Army, he stayed
in the Guard, moved to Austin, and became a fireman. And a home repairman. He
could fix anything and build everything. We always joked that if he had been
the guy in that Castaway movie, after five years on