9. Chapter Eight #2
“Do you call people stupid?” Jessie asked Quentin.
Quentin started to answer, hesitated as he thought it through, and eventually said, “I’m going to try not to?”
He sounded dubious about the idea, but it seemed to satisfy Jessie. One sandwich and a soda later she went to check on Angus, and Joe gave Quentin an exasperated look.
“You’ll try not to?” he said. “You couldn’t just say ‘no’?”
“I wasn’t sure if it was OK to lie to her or not,” Quentin said.
“It’s…not,” Joe said. He really wasn’t used to having to back up his ‘because I said so’ to another adult. “But you could just stop calling people stupid?”
“But some of them are.”
“Does calling them stupid fix that?”
This time it was Quentin’s turn to squint as he tried to work out his own justifications. Instead of committing to anything half-assed, he just changed the subject. Joe wished he’d thought of that.
“Do you know how to fix one of those?” Quentin asked as he nodded at the stove.
They both looked at the stove. Joe thought the answer should be obvious since sandwiches were still the dietary staple for his children, but…
“I looked it up on YouTube,” he said. “They said it was an easy fix.”
Quentin nodded thoughtfully. “Is it?”
Either the answer was ‘no’ or Joe was one of those stupid people who put Quentin’s back up. Rather than find out, Joe just flipped the screwdriver around and offered the handle to Quentin. “You want to try?”
Quentin held both hands up and took a performative step back. “No,” he said. “That’s OK. I’ll take a sandwich if one’s going, though?”
It wasn’t.
This wasn’t where he belonged. Only people who belonged got to eat bologna sandwiches on cheap bread in this house.
****
One week later and range was still dismantled in the middle of the kitchen and the older kids had developed new, life-long friendships in order to cultivate invites to dinner. As frustrated as Joe was with the whole process, he was impressed with their social skills.
“I’m just waiting on a part,” Joe insisted. He pulled his tie (he’d not had a chance to get changed out of his work clothes yet) loose on his collar. “Once I get that, I’ll be able to fix it myself. No need to call anyone else in.”
Benjy looked up from his math homework. “He’s been like this all week ,” he said direly to Quentin, who’d just dropped Angus off and had a wriggling Cody under one arm. “Nat’s mom thinks it’s sexual frustration."
Quentin nearly dropped Cody. Joe accidentally yanked his tie so hard that it nearly choked him.
“Benjamin!” he blurted out. “That’s not…Did Gayle say that to you?”
Benjy shrugged and went back to his homework. He chewed on the end of his pen as he said, “No. She was talking to someone on the phone?”
“Who?” He shouldn’t have asked. That wasn’t the point. He wasn’t sure he would feel any better if he knew. “Not that it matters. Don’t eavesdrop and don’t repeat things!”
“Well, it’s something!” Benjy blurted. He grabbed his books and got up to stomp away from the table. “It’s not my fault people think they know what .”
Quentin adjusted his grip on Cody and set him down right side up, with a pat on the head as apology. He put his hand out to redirect Benjy.
“How about we get pizza?” he said.
“That’s not necessary,” Joe said stiffly. He willed his stomach not to betray him with a growl. “The kids are expected at–”
“Can we get Weird Pizza?” Benjy asked eagerly.
“No,” Joe said. “Quentin isn’t DoorDash, and Jessie hates that place.”
Benjy scowled for a moment and then gave a massive, huffy sigh. “Fine,” he groused. “Just boring pizza then. I’ll go ask Jessie what she wants and let Ms. Franklin know we aren’t coming.”
He loped out of the room.
Joe stared after him. “I think I’ve been played,” he said.
“Like a fiddle,” Quentin agreed as he pulled his phone out of his pocket to order while Cody leaned back against his legs. “So, no Weird Pizza, how about Dannevilles?”
Joe pulled a chair out from the table and sat down as he gave up. He held his arms out to Cody, who wobbled over.
“They’ll do,” he said. “I’ll just have cheese.”
Quentin snorted and kept ordering.
****
One month and a lot of take out later Joe stood in his kitchen and looked dubiously at Quentin.
“And you sure you know what you’re doing?” Joe asked.
Although, to be fair, he supposed that was a question he should have asked himself…and possibly YouTube…a month ago.
Quentin was on his back in front of the oven, long legs sprawled over the floor and half his upper body inside the compartment. House-proud wasn’t something that Joe would usually call himself, but he felt himself hoping that it was at least not filthy.
“I fly a plane,” Quentin pointed out. “You think I can’t fix an oven?”
“You said flying a plane was mostly flicking switches,” Joe pointed out.
He stepped over Quentin’s legs— maybe stole a glance at the slice of lean stomach exposed by a hiked-up shirt—and opened the cupboard to get the last of the cereal out.
He handed the slightly crumbled Cheerios to Benjy at the kitchen table.
“Not that you regularly crawled around the fuselage.”
Quentin squirmed out from inside the oven.
Apparently, ‘filthy’ was on the table. His T-shirt was stained and there was a smear of something greasy across his forehead and up into his hair.
It wasn’t like he wasn’t handsome enough to start with, but something about him, all scruffy as he grinned up at Joe, made Joe’s throat tighten.
“I also have a Cessna,” he said as he propped himself up on his elbow, his other arm cocked over his hip. “I do the upkeep on that myself. Get my hands dirty and everything.”
Joe could think of other things he’d get dirty.
Goddamnit. He closed his eyes for a beat as he tried to shove his brain back into the lane he’d given it. Quentin wasn’t the problem here. He might want more, but he’d made it clear that if friendship was what was on the table, he’d color in those lines. It was Joe who chafed at them.
He tried to think of something non-flirty to say. Before he could come up with anything, he heard Benjy blurt out an impressed, “Seriously? That’s so cool! You can just go and fly anytime?”
“Yeah, when I have time,” Quentin said. “I keep it at the airfield in Palmer. That’s where I was when you found Angus.”
Benjy looked fascinated.
“Can you go places?” he asked. “Or do you just fly around, like on a racetrack?”
Quentin sat up. He rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb, leaving a long streak of grease. It would have made Joe look grubby, but it just made Quentin’s look more sharply carved.
“I can go about 600 miles on a tank, but you can refuel and do another,” he said. “I know someone who flew to Hawaii.”
“No way!”
The packet of clipped shut cereal dangled from Benjy’s hand as he interrogated Quentin.
Meanwhile, a watching Cody opened and closed his mouth like a baby bird in anticipation.
Joe leaned in and plucked the pouch free.
He finished opening it and emptied it into the little plastic bowl while Cody clapped his hands.
“...Portage a couple of times,” Quentin said. He had disappeared back into the oven, where his voice drifted out from the interior matter-of-factly. “I was thinking of going to Juneau some weekend soon.”
Joe paused for a second as he glanced over at Benjy.
The near-teenager registered the location, but didn’t seem to react to it.
He continued to pepper Quentin with questions as Joe added some milk, spooned some up, and offered it to Cody.
Despite his intensity up to that point, Cody immediately went cross-eyed and rocked drunkenly, smearing food over his face.
“Why?” Joe asked him. He grabbed a napkin to wipe the milk off as it dripped down onto Cody’s T-shirt.
“If Joe’s OK with it,” Quentin offered casually. “You guys can come out sometime. I’ll show you the ropes.”
Benjy gawped. “You’ll teach me to fly a plane?”
“Oh god, no,” Quentin said. Benjy’s face started to fall, but before it could, or Joe could object, Quentin went on.“You do not want to learn from me. I’m not a good teacher. If you were really interested I can tap Hannah to give you a few lessons.”
Joe folded the napkin over to cover the stain and pulled a ‘ well’ face at Cody to make him chortle. He appreciated that Quentin hadn’t shot down Benjy’s interest, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to—or if he had the right to—let his nephew learn to fly a plane.
A small plane! That could still cover 500 miles.
Before he could decide there was a brisk rap at the front door.
“Food’s here!” Jessie yelled from the living room. A minute later, she came into the kitchen, laden with sweaty plastic bags of Thai food. Angus wandered in with her, nudging the plastic bags with a curious, pink nose, and Cody immediately lost all interest in cereal. “They didn’t have our sodas.”
“There’s some in the fridge,” Joe said, relieved to be able to offer something like a normal host for once.
Even if it was some weird, store-brand flavor that had been on offer.
Cody crowed excitedly at the sight of Angus and waved his dog-lion-thing excitedly at him, managing to dip its feet into the cereal.
Joe rescued it, made a face, and pointed at the bigger kids. “Get the plates out first.”
In one of their occasional moments of accord, Benjy hopped up to do that while Jessie emptied the bags of styrofoam containers and plastic pots.
“You know,” Joe said to Quentin, guilt hot and spiky in his chest as he looked over definitely more than needed for dinner order piled up on the table. “You don’t have to do this every time you come over. I’m pretty sure you didn’t do this for the boarding kennels.”
Quentin stuck an arm out of the oven and groped around on the floor until he found the wrench. He picked it up.
“I didn’t,” he said. “But then, they lost my cat.”
He did something that barked his elbow against the side of the oven and made a raw, metallic ripping noise from inside the guts of it that made Joe wince. A moment later Quentin squirmed out of the oven and stood up, wiping his hands absently down the front of his once-crisp white shirt.
“That’s that,” he said.
“It’s fixed?” Joe asked in…he shouldn’t have been surprised, he’d spent the last four weeks claiming that he could do it. He still sounded surprised. “That was all it—”
“Oh, no,” Quentin said. He grabbed a fork from the bag and waved it absently as he grabbed the container of drunken noodles. “It’s really broken now. I don’t know what I did, but that’s not coming back.”
Joe’s heart sank–although he supposed he should have known better than to put this much faith in anyone, even his pilot in shining armor–and his mind raced.
If he got a second job, or took up some of the offers to do private tutoring?
It did pay. He’d tried to avoid it so far, Gateway parents expected bang for their buck, and he had a feeling none of his kids were getting enough of him as it was, but he needed a working kitchen.
He also needed to pay for Benjy’s travel football and put some money into the travel fund for Cody’s check-up in Portland in six months and…
“My fault,” Quentin said smoothly as he pulled a chair out from the table. “I’m sorry. Look, I’ll call someone to get it fixed or replaced. I should have listened to you.”
He popped the lid on the drunken noodles as he, somehow, managed to make it sound like Joe was doing him a favor here. The awful thing was the temptation to let him.
“I can’t let you–”
“Tell you what,” Quentin cut him off. “We’ll get it fixed, and you can pay me back in home-cooked meals.”
Benjy looked up from shovelling noodles into his mouth. “He’s not that good a cook.”
Despite himself, Joe laughed and…he could pay Quentin back. Somehow. It wasn’t that he didn’t have money. He just never had it long.
“ OK,” he said. “Maybe I got a bit…fixated on fixing it myself.”
He pulled a chair out and sat down. Quentin pushed a bowl of soup toward him, and Joe nudged it to the side until he’d finished feeding Cody. He looked over the table and saw that Jessie hadn’t taken a bite yet.
“Jessie?” he said. “You OK?”
She blinked, looked down at her food, and nodded. “Yeah,” she said as she poked at her rice with a fork. “Just… Dad could have fixed it, couldn’t he? He was good at stuff like that. These are all his tools.”
The last part was true. Joe didn’t think accuracy was the point, though
“Yeah,” he said. “He was.”
Once she nodded and started to eat, Joe glanced at Quentin to see how he’d taken it. Not that he got a say, but…still. It was hard to read his face as he used his phone to sketch out a very rough flight plan on the table.