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“Please call me Wren.”
He tilted his head and let go of my hand. “I’ll email you tomorrow, Wren.”
I watched him get into the truck, and then Gardner drove around the little yard, almost taking out an ancient fencepost in his rush to get the fuck off my property.
The man hated me, and I didn’t care. As long as the job got done, I’d be fine with whatever he wanted to throw my way.
That evening, I was sitting on the couch in the Harringtons’ living room and chuckling at the banter I could hear from the kitchen. It was late enough that Demi’s family had already gone home, so it felt a bit more roomy without the little ones running around.
Payton and Shiloh were playing some game on the floor nearby, and Russ was sitting in the armchair, reading an actual newspaper with his reading glasses perched on his nose. He looked older, but then I hadn’t been around much in the last decade. The cowboy was still one of the pillars of the family, whether anyone brought attention to it or not.
Suddenly Shiloh let out a little sound, and then Payton lifted both of his arms in the air. “You won!” He let out a whoop and high-fived a shocked looking Shiloh.
“That’s awesome!” I said immediately. “Well done, Shiloh.”
“Yeah, it’s a hard game and he just won it on his third try,” Payton praised, and Shiloh blushed and ducked his head, looking pleased.
Mike came over from the kitchen. “What’s this about clever boys, I hear?” he asked, smiling as he sat on the other couch.
To my surprise, it was Shiloh who began to explain to him what’d happened. The boy was really getting braver every day and I loved to see that.
Payton got off the floor and came to sit next to me.
“What’s up?” I asked, because he clearly had something on his mind.
“I can’t decide on my Halloween costume,” he said very quietly, with some whine in his tone.
“Aww, that sucks. What are your options?”
“Well that’s the thing, Wren. I kind of want to go as Edgar Allan Poe, for obvious reasons”—gods I loved this kid—“but I’m not sure. The other option is a wolf.”
“Because…?”
“Oh, so in nature, ravens and wolves have this sym—symb—”
“Symbiotic?” I guessed.
“Yes, symbiotic relationship.” He enunciated the difficult word carefully.
“Well you are the friend of the corvids around here, you know.”
Russ chuckled from his chair. “I think you can be Poe next year. The wolf mask your dads got you looked really good.”
Payton sighed and then nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”
Then his expression turned a bit secretive. He leaned closer to me and very quietly said, “Did you know there’s a whole movie called Crow?”
Oh. Oh man.
I cleared my throat. “Yes, I do know that one.”
His eyes widened with excitement. “Have you seen it?”
“I have.” Multiple times, but he didn’t need to get that excited.
“Is it so good?” For once, he sounded like his age, and I wanted to hug him.
“It’s really good, yeah.”
