Page 9 of Hearts on the Mend

I’m thirty-six, and never wanted my dad to feel like he needs to take care of me. It’s bad enough Ethan and Jack ride my ass now, and Annie hasn’t stopped calling from Canada, where she’s wrapping up another fellowship studying puffins. Kept going to earn her master’s in biology.

“Yep.” I turn my baseball cap around. “I’m good to drive. Don’t need to worry, Dad.”

“What else am I supposed to do?” My dad shuffles alongside me, giving a small wave to the woman behind the counter at check-in. “Thanks, Mary.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Murphy,” she calls out.

“You’re retired,” I say. “Enjoy some time with Mom and Nana. Travel. Do whatever you want.”

“Ahh.” He waves his hand, as if brushing me aside. “Sounded better a year ago. Now I’m bored. Been so busy all my life, don’t want to slow down.”

I know that feeling all too well. “You sure you still want to see what Ruth needs?”

We step outside, the bright January sun glaring against a bank of fresh snow. Snow in December is pretty. In January? It’s violent.

“Well, if you don’t mind driving out there. Think it might help you a bit. Give you something to work on besides being a stubborn ass all the time.”

“I’m going to be a stubborn ass no matter what.”

He sighs, and I push past the fact that it hurts to hear. The past few years, that spark inside me has died. I have lived and breathed wildfires for the past nineteen years. After the accident last June? I’ve been miserable and exhausted. I don’t want to be home, and I can’t be at work.

I don’t think I want to be either. But I don’t know what else I want.

“I’m not a licensed contractor, Dad. Don’t mind helping Ruth, but what does she expect me to do?”

He shrugs, then groans as he hauls himself up into my black RAM truck. “Couldn’t get something smaller? Compensating for something?”

“You done busting my balls?”

“What are you going to do about it?” His seat belt clicks into place, then he grins up at me beneath his plaid Scally cap.

I trace my palm against the steering wheel, my lips set into a stubborn line. Can’t find it inside myself to even pretend to be fine. “Thanks for coming,” I say instead.

Richie Murphy is a lot of things, but he’s never been shy about telling his kids that he loves us. Over the years, though, this pattern settled between the two of us that we can’t seem to slip past. We give each other a hard time, and I pretend he doesn’t hate the fact that I abandoned the family lobster business, and he pretends I tell him I love him instead of keeping it to myself.

Ethan lives and breathes the ocean, like my dad. Jack is the charming glue that sticks us all together. Our younger sister, Annie, is a chaos gremlin. And I… I don’t fit.

Never have.

I don’t expect my father to understand. Or any of my siblings really. Jack and Ethan have each other; pretty much always stayed local except when Jack played for Oregon. It’s been Annie and me since my father set her in my arms when I was eleven.

“Have any errands to run first?” I ask, pulling out of the cramped parking between growing mounds of snow.

“Nope.” My father slips on his readers and peers down at his phone, looking above, then below.

“Sure you don’t need to stop at the eye doctor?”

“When are you heading back to Montana, son?”

Not soon enough. Keep that to myself, though, and turn the radio up instead to listen to Neil Young.

I squint against the bright sun and the glare off the road, driving farther out of Merritt Point, toward the stretch of farmland not far from the ocean. A lot of the properties are all second homes or horse farms out this way. I haven’t driven out here in years, so when I round the corner and set eyes on Ruth’s farmhouse, my heart sinks.

What am I supposed to do exactly?

The clapboard siding is weathered, some boards falling off or missing entirely. Vines and overgrown evergreens swallow up the exterior of the home. The small front porch looks as if it’s about to collapse. And the giant attached barn to the left doesn’t look much better.

“It’s January. She wants me to do exterior work?”