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“Considering you’re closer in age to Rachel than to me, I’m gonna keep my mouth shut and take care of Crabby here. You go convince Lee that your presence isabsolutelynecessary.” Russ keeps his voice low, making him sound like he’s being a hard ass, when I know he’s trying to get a rise out of me by bringing up our age difference again.
I lean up for another kiss before taking his advice to go get warmed up. The wind was whipping something fierce on the way up here, but the moment I step inside Lee’s home, I really start to shiver in response to the heat pouring off the fireplace and the old iron stove in the corner.
“There’s soup for lunch, along with some venison,” Lee says, eyeing the backpack I slip off.
“Grandma sent something for you to enjoy,” I tell him, looking down as I reach into my bag so he won’t see the twinkle in my eyes.
“Unless she has something that mends broken bones, I don’t need it!”
“Oh, okay. I suppose I can sneak this back into Grampa’s stash. Then, she won’t even have to explain it the next time he does inventory.” As I suspected, that was enough to catch his interest and his eyes light up when they see the dark green glass of the whiskey bottle.
“Now, now. She’s already gone to the trouble, so it would be rude of me to turn down her gesture.” Lee keeps the same put-upon tone of voice as he plays along with my little con. “I’m beginning to understand why Andre the Giant calls you Firecracker. You just keep everyone on their toes, don’t ya?”
“Who’s Andre the Giant?” I ask, dishing up three bowls of soup for the table. I understand the reference to Russ, of course, but the name flies over my head.
“He was a famously large wrestler in the eighties, I guess it was,” Lee tells me after clicking his tongue and shaking his head in disappointment.
“Do I come across as someone who follows throwback wrestling, Lee?” I ask, shooting him a grin. Russ comes inside with the saddlebags and I hurry to distract Lee so he won’t think we’re invading. “Russ, do you know who Andre the Giant is?”
“Was. He’s dead,” Lee says in between bites of the venison.
“Yeah, he was in The Princess Bride.” Russ drops that pertinent intel and I can immediately picture the largest character in the movie.
“Oh!”
“Come on! He was a wrestler, first and foremost,” Lee sounds off.
“You gotta play to your crowd, old man.” Russ looks over at the small amount of Saltines that Lee laid out and I nudge the plate toward him, letting him know he can have the two that were allotted for me. “Julia’s not even twenty yet and she was raised by her mom. You gotta go for classic movie references over sports.”
Lee raises an eyebrow in Russ’s direction before looking at me. “Who was Howard Hill?”
“The world’s greatest archer!” I immediately answer. “He won nearly 200 archery competitions in a row.”
“Never heard of him,” Russ readily admits and takes a big bite of his meat since he finished his soup. “You know William Shatner was a famous archer, also?”
“Captain Kirk?” I ask, extremely doubtful.
“No, he’s right,” Lee backs him up. “He was actually tapped to do the marketing for the compound bow when it was invented.”
“I never would have guessed that,” I say, wishing Wikipedia was still around, before I launch into a story about Lt. Colonial Jack Churchill during World War II. It’s plain to see that Lee knows it, by the way he’s nodding along, but it’s new to Russ and gets us all talking.
“You can stay three days,” Lee says once the conversation dies down. “I’d be foolish to turn down the help, but you’ve got your own to tend to. If you’re going to fight me on that, you can both just head back home now.”
“Three days,” I agree, just happy he’s not going to argue about it.
“And I’m a light sleeper,” he adds, giving Russ a pointed look.
That seems like a good time for me to get to work, so I gather the dishes and start with those.
Early the next evening, I fling myself down on the couch. While Lee is very orderly, there have definitely been projects around the property that needed more than one person involved. I look over to where he’s searching for something on his bookcase and finally ask the question that’s been bouncing around my brain for a while now.
“Why don’t you and Grampa get along?”
I hear a soft sigh from him, letting me know he heard me as he stares straight ahead and taps his finger on the spine of one of his books.
“Somehow, it seemed really important at the time.” Comes his succinct answer.
“And now?” I ask him when it doesn’t seem like he’ll say anything else.
