Cam unlocks the bike from a handicapped signpost on the first floor of the garage. Crossing back over the river into Shreveport, he checks the time on his grandfather’s clock: 5:58am. In two minutes, his mother will indulge in the single touch of the snooze button she allows herself every morning. Then she’ll slip into an old pink terrycloth robe with a monogram of her married initials and a flattened pair of matching slippers, and walk to the kitchen wondering where Cam ended up that night.
As he pedals back towards her and away from his grandfather’s clock, he wonders if its tungsten hours and minutes will be the only part of that man’s legacy he’ll ever have a share in.
He’s sweaty and beat when he wheels his bike around into his mother’s back yard and shuffles in through the kitchen door. His mother startles when he comes in, spilling a few grains of Folgers on the counter as she spoons them into the hot water waiting in her Breast Cancer Walk-a-thon mug.
“What happened to you?” she croaks, her first words of the day.
These have been her first words of the day too many times, Cam realizes. “I went downtown on Andrew’s bike, and ran into… some people I used to know.”
She looks at the analog clock between the dials on the stovetop, “Must’ve had a lot of catchin’ up to do,” she says, in the playful way she’s learned to call him out without setting off his defenses. “Why were you downtown?”
“Went to cash the check at Papaw’s bank.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you…” she says, pausing to sweeten her coffee with almond-flavored creamer from a plastic bottle in the fridge. “I know you said you’re gonna use some of that money to get an apartment, but you should ask about a place here first, just to see.”
Cam looks at her hopeful eyes and then down at the floor.
“I’m not gonna be spyin’ on you,” she smiles.
“I started a savings account with it instead.” He looks up at her. “I was thinking it’d be nice to stay here a while.”
“Really?”
He nods.
“Stay as long as you want,” she says.
He smiles his thanks, takes a glass down from the cabinet and fills it with tap water in the sink. As he leans over the sink and gulps down the water, her rubber-soled slippers flap towards him across the vinyl tile floor. “You need a bath,” she says, touching the sweat on his forehead.
Cam snickers to himself.
“I meant a shower,” she says.
“Bath is fine, mom.”
“You’re punchy, buster… go get some sleep.”
Cam goes to the sink to wash his glass.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
Her hand strokes his hair as he passes her on the way to his room. He pushes the door closed and falls back onto his old bunk in his boots.
Chapter Three
Andrew left the mechanical remnants of his old summer landscaping business in a storage unit when he went down to New Orleans for college. He’d intended to revive his operation over summers back from school, but seven years and two degrees later, he still hasn’t been back for anything other than a few Christmases and family funerals.
Cam calls Andrew in New Orleans for the key to the padlock and the unit number at the storage place.
“Hey man,” says Cam, working-in an unaccustomed familiarity to soften the fact that he doesn’t even remember the last time they talked, and that even now he’s only calling to ask a favor.
“Oh… Hey.” Andrew’s voice flattens out as soon as he realizes it’s Cam on the line, like he was expecting a friend but got a telemarketer.
“How’s it goin’?” asks Cam.
“Fine. You?”
“Alright.”
“Mom said you got into Tech.”
“Everybody gets into Tech.”
“What’re you taking?”
“Just some bullshit.”
“How’s being back home?”
“Livin’ with mom’s killing me.”
“You’ve been sayin’ that since you were ten.”
“I’ve been meaning it since I was ten.”
“Why don’t you just get your own place?”
“Money.”
“Then get a job.”
“I will. I want to do some landscaping.”
“Do you know anything about landscaping?”
“I know how to mow lawns.”
“Walked right into that one didn’t I?”
“Into what?”
“Into why you called me for the first time in a year,” says Andrew, his voice veering towards wounded.
“You know I didn’t just call you to get your lawn mower, Andy,” says Cam, “I want your edger and your Weedeater, too.” Cam grins into the receiver.
There’s a silence on the other end of the line that Cam recognizes immediately. Andrew has always seemed to hate, more than anything else about Cam, his dry joking way of handling Andrew’s feelings.
Cam didn’t experience the worst of their father’s alcoholism and the breakdown of their parents’ marriage, so he never really earned the right to joke about the family problems to Andrew as often as he did. From time-to-time though, Cam had tried to talk straight with him. “You know what your problem is…” Cam would say when he’d find Andrew sitting on his bed, teary-eyed from a cold exchange with their dad. “Your problem is you let stuff get to you.” This would usually send Andrew further into whatever hole he was in, and it would take him a good several minutes to pull himself together enough to shoot back with his usual whispered response of “You know what your problem is, Cam? You don’t let anything get to you.” Cam never really thought that was much of a comeback, and even wondered why he shouldn’t take it as a compliment.
“No, but seriously, man…” says Cam. “It’s nice to talk to you.”
“Is this talking?”
“What else is it?”
Cam listens to the static of his mother’s cheap cordless phone for a few seconds. Andrew eventually breaks the
