September 2018
Hello, all, Jory Harcourt here. I had a great column planned for this month, lots of questions answered about some interior decorating hacks and some safety tips on raw food for dogs and some design shortcuts for graphic designers, as I am one, because some feedback from readers was that my column was supposed to be a place for answers and helpful hints and not just a place for me to recall stories about my life.
But…it’s back-to-school time and everything went into a blender. So guess what, this is my life.
It all started with The Great Gatsby.
First of all, why high school starts on a Wednesday was beyond me, but of course on that Monday, on Labor Day, my son informed me that his class was going to be reading the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic, and it went like this in my kitchen.
“I know, you told me this already when we were at lunch with your uncle Duncan and your uncle Aaron. I thought this was all covered, because he said he had a copy. Didn’t he give it to you yet?”
Kola made a face that only a fifteen-year-old could, sort of pained, like he didn’t want to narc, and maybe even a bit embarrassed.
“Oh God, what happened?” I asked, waiting to hear whatever horror had transpired.
He winced.
“It’s a signed first edition,” Hannah chimed in from where she was making avocado toast. “I mean, he can probably take it for show and tell but”––she grimaced––“I don’t think he should be flipping the pages a lot or using a highlighter in it.”
“Seriously?” I asked my son.
He shrugged. “I think Uncle Aaron doesn’t get the whole a-paperback-you-stuff-in-your-backpack thing. They maybe didn’t have anything like that at all the private schools he went to.”
“I would suspect not.”
“So I need a copy, and it’s too late to order it and have it get here by tomorrow.”
But I loved ordering things online. “Fine. We’ll go down to––”
“Where are you going?” Sam asked as he walked into the kitchen in tan chinos and an ivory tee and Converse sneakers on his feet.
“You look adorable,” I sighed, smiling at him.
“Well, adorable was what I was going for,” he informed me, crossing the room to give me a kiss and take the coffee cup out of my hand. Lately Sam had been abandoning his whole black-coffee deal and been liking the half-and-half I put in mine. “Now what’s going on?”
“Kola needs a copy of The Great Gatsby for school, and I need Beloved and The Color Purple,” Hannah explained to him.
“And Kleenex,” Sam assured her before turning back to me. “Jesus, those books are gonna gut you.”
“They will?”
He nodded enthusiastically before looking at me. “No worries, I’ll take them to a bookstore. I have to run by the office and talk to Jones for a minute. He thinks there’s a problem with some information we got on some marshals who were missing.”
“Is everything okay?”
“It all happened a while back, so whatever it is is old news, but he needed to speak with me in an official capacity, so I have to go do that.”
“Great. Then I’ll get everything ready for the barbecue, and you can start making burgers and chicken when you get back.”
He scowled at me.
“What?”
“You said Dane and Aja and their kids. How is that a lot of food?”
“And Dylan and Chris and their kids.”
“That’s still––”
“And Fallon and Shane and their two kids and––”
“Wait, how did––”
“And your folks and your cousin Levi and his wife and their three––”
“Just––” He put up his hand to stop me. “How many people will be here?”
“Twenty-five,” I told him. “Plus us.”
He groaned and grabbed his keys off the hook in the kitchen. “Then I better get more burgers and that marinated pork your brother likes and a crapton more chicken.”
I smiled up at the man I loved. He grumbled, but he loved the fact that he was a grill master and everyone told him so. Inside, I knew, he loved the praise.
He bent again to kiss me, but I slipped my hand around the back of his neck so he couldn’t pull away too fast and made sure he understood that my craving for him never waned.
When I finally let him go, he took a quick gulp of air, as if I’d taken all his. “You kiss a man like that and he’s gonna get ideas,” he assured me, one golden eyebrow lifted for my benefit.
I waggled both mine for him.
“People,” Hannah said loudly, clapping her hands. “We need to focus on getting out of here, not making out.”
Sam grunted, kissed me again, and then announced that the train was leaving the station. The kids scrambled after him, Hannah giving me a kiss goodbye, then Kola, and they were gone.
I meant to pick up the house, but I got distracted because the TV was on in the living room and The Fugitive was on.
That was one of those, like Jaws, that I always got sucked into.
But finally I got outside to wipe down the picnic table and chairs.
The weather was nice, not nearly as hot as it had been, and the hose was still out from when I watered the flowers in the back—some dragon’s breath and coleus that had gotten huge—and was snaked around the deck.
Sam was always on me to roll it up, but sometimes I forgot, and mostly, it wasn’t a thing.
I didn’t care about it a lot, and so it wasn’t something I did by rote like emptying the dishwasher.
So it was my fault I wasn’t watching where I was going.
I swear it was like a spiderweb, because one second I was walking and the next I was flying through the air, my foot having seemingly stuck in one place while the rest of me kept moving.
I fell over the end of the stairs, which hurt, but I was more winded than anything else.
I realized then that my foot had gone through a loose plank and I was caught.
People always talk about freak accidents, and now I knew what the hell they meant.
From where I was, I could see under the deck, and I was surprised to see a beaver.
“Holy shit,” I yelled, because it was freaky. I mean, who expects to see a beaver? But then as I looked at it more closely, I thought, that can’t be a beaver, it doesn’t have the platypus tail. So because I’m not an encyclopedia of rodents, I had no idea what else it could be.
The thing was, it was under the deck, and now I’d come crashing down into its area and it probably felt threatened.
I would have if I was a…wombat? And I was on the ground, winded, caught by the stairs, and it rushed me.
And I understood because my face was basically barring it’s exit, but it charged me and I rolled left, arms around my face like I think you’re supposed to do if certain kinds of bears attack you—not all, let’s be clear, I think you’re just supposed to run from some of them—and I was scared because I didn’t want to get bitten.
I have no idea what carries rabies and what doesn’t, other than possums. Hannah did a report in third grade on them, and that was all I remembered.
Anyway, I was hoping it would just run by me, but all of a sudden there was this bloodcurdling snarling and five pounds of fury came flying past my head toward the…capybara…and I tried to grab my dog but he was moving too fast and he chased it out into the yard.
Lifting up on my elbows, I watched as the animal flew up our cypress tree, and Dobby was there, at the base, hopping up and down, growling and yipping, doing a very good impersonation of a hellhound.
“You saved me, you little shit,” I called over to my Chihuahua.
He turned, looked at me, and I swear he squinted like of course he’d protect me, and then went back to making sure whatever it was stayed treed.
Slowly, carefully, I extracted my lower leg and ankle, and frankly, I was surprised that nothing was broken.
But when I tried to put some weight on it, the pain that shot up my leg took my breath away. I might have whimpered just a bit.
“Jory?”
I was never so happy to see Aaron Sutter in my life. He was there, at the gate on the side of the house that led into the backyard from the driveway, looking at me like I was a bug or something weird.
“The hell did you do?” he asked as he came in, followed closely by his husband, Duncan.
“I tripped on the hose, and my foot went through the step, and I was attacked by a…muskrat maybe, and Dobby chased it up the tree.”
Duncan went to look as Aaron helped me sit up, and I realized even though it hurt, I could move my toes and the ankle. I was pretty sure it wasn’t broken, maybe just sprained.
“This is a groundhog,” Duncan yelled over to me before starting back. “Lemme get my gun outta the car and I’ll––”
“What? No,” I snapped at him. “No death to small woodland creatures, I have a Disney backyard.”
He stopped walking and stared at me. “I’m sorry, what?”
“You have a what backyard?” Aaron asked, sounding just as pained as Duncan.
I sighed deeply. “I have micro bunnies and a ton of birds and lots of chipmunks. They all live in harmony in some part of the yard, and Dobby doesn’t bother them anymore ’cause I trained him, so…we can’t have blood on the preserve that is the Kage sanctuary.”
He looked at Aaron, who only shrugged. “Why do you think I’m married to you and not him? He’s ridiculous.”
“This isn’t Bambi,” I said implacably. “Nothing dies.”
Duncan groaned and told Aaron to call someone.
I sat on the steps as the billionaire called around to find someone who would remove a groundhog, which is the same thing as a woodchuck—I had no idea—on a federal holiday.
Duncan was on the phone with Sam when he came out of my house with an Ace bandage.
“He’s fine,” Duncan said as he gently but firmly wrapped my ankle. “He just took a header off the steps, and I think he sprained it.” He listened for a moment. “No, he’s not. But apparently, he was attacked by a groundhog and he won’t let me kill it.”
I was going to say something.
“That’s what he said. What the hell is a Disney backyard?”
I had to smile, because apparently the love of my life actually listened to me when I told him all manner of things.
Duncan passed me the phone as he continued wrapping my ankle.
“Are you all right?” Sam asked me.
“Yeah, I just feel dumb.”
“Well, we’re on our way home, because it turns out Aja called and asked me if the kids needed any books for school because she had to go for her kids and was picking up everything with her educator discount.”
“Oh, that’s nice of her.”
“I told her she didn’t have to, but she said it was her pleasure, and besides, it was nice that we were feeding her family, especially Dane, since he likes the lechon asado and I always get it for him.”
“That’s her way of making sure it’s here.”
“Yeah, I know, but like I wouldn’t.”
We were silent a moment.
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll look at you when I get home. Just lemme stop and get the cage from Pat so I can put the groundhog in it when I get home.”
“Dobby chased it up a tree,” I said proudly. “He totally protected me.”
He grunted, clearly disbelieving, but twenty or so minutes later he came into the backyard after parking the car with a cage in one hand that was padded on one end with what looked like an old blanket, and a giant oven mitt on the other that reached down to his elbow.
“Pat has weird crap in his garage,” I called over to him.
“And aren’t you lucky he does,” he assured me.
Leave it to Sam. He went to the tree, grabbed hold of the groundhog, and put it into the cage like he did it every day of his life.
He picked up Dobby, gave him a kiss on the side of the head, told him he was a good boy, and then put the groundhog by the side of the deck after telling his daughter to go get some lettuce from the refrigerator.
He then jogged back to the stairs and stepped on the one that Duncan had already fixed with the leftover wood in the garage and Sam’s nail gun.
“Nice job,” he told his friend, closing on me.
“You’re welcome.” Duncan yawned, sipping one of Sam’s beers, feet up as he soaked up the sun. It was sweet how Aaron was watching him, clearly enjoying the view.
“Lemme see what you did to yourself,” Sam grumbled, sitting down beside me, putting my ankle in his lap to check it over.
“It wasn’t my fault.”
“You tripped over the hose,” he said without looking up, checking the movement, “which you didn’t wrap up, so yeah, your fault.”
I was going to argue, but he leaned in and kissed me and I forgot what I was going to say.
“All right, so you’re going to sit out here and entertain everyone while the kids and I take care of the food. My mother will love to help when she gets here.”
She would, that was true.
“Keep it elevated.”
“This isn’t how I imagined spending Labor Day.”
“Well, I think the day is supposed to be about resting from your labors so—take a load off, all right?”
“What about you? You labor.”
“Grilling is not a chore,” he assured me before he got up, moving a chair in front of me for my foot. “I’ll bring you a pillow. Just sit there and look pretty.”
I was going to growl at him, but he was smiling, Hannah was feeding the groundhog, Aaron had moved to sit on Duncan’s lap, Kola was bringing in groceries as his two best friends helped him, Sam having picked them up during his travels, and soon everyone else would be there.
It was a nice day, and I was feeling lucky to have my life.
“Okay, I’ll sit here,” I agreed, waving him down. “But gimme a kiss first.”
He didn’t have to be persuaded.
That’s it, all. I’ll talk to you in October.