Chapter 6
A Half-Baked Idea
MITCHELL
MITCHELL: This is my number.
BLAKE: Who’s this?
MITCHELL: Your brother, asshole
BLAKE: I have two of those, supposedly.
MITCHELL: I’m sorry I blocked you. It wasn’t personal.
MITCHELL: And you could have gotten my new number from Conrad.
BLAKE: You mean the good brother? The one who didn’t drift down from his ivory tower to announce he was living in my hometown, neglect to tell me fucking where, and then ghost me one call later?
MITCHELL: I’m this close to blocking you again.
BLAKE: You didn’t block me. You threw out your phone. The number said out of service. What did you do, smash it? Throw it out of your private plane?
MITCHELL: You were distracting me. You and that pretty wife of yours. All fucking moony-eyed.
BLAKE: She’s not my wife yet. And don’t call her pretty. Call her Cassandra, or I’ll throw you down and sit on you like you used to love.
MITCHELL: Couldn’t do it once I turned twelve.
BLAKE: Go to hell, Mitch. I mean it.
MITCHELL: No, you don’t.
BLAKE: I don’t. But I *could* take you.
That actually got a smirk out of me. My big brother wasn’t little, but I was a good three inches taller than he was, and outweighed him by at least thirty pounds.
Maybe more since I’d been here. Besides writing and drinking myself into stupors, I spent most of my remaining time doing laps in the pool and prison-style calisthenics out on the basketball court. It was punishing.
All of it was.
MITCHELL: She is pretty, though. Don’t know what she sees in you.
BLAKE: I would say maybe you should find your own woman to fall in love with, but I wouldn’t want to subject anyone to you.
That one hurt, even if I agreed.
We shot a few more jabs back and forth, and since I still wouldn’t tell him where I lived, I ended with loosely promising to visit him and Cassandra at some point.
Maybe never. I knew I was being fucking weird.
I loved the shit out of both Blake and our middle brother Conrad, back in Seattle. But I was isolating for a reason.
I tossed the phone aside, tipping my head back and pressing the heels of my palms to my eye sockets. The reason was to finish writing this book. But it wasn’t working.
Except for that one day that it had.
Monday—the day that fucking firecracker was in my house. That whole night, the words had flowed from my fingertips onto the keys of the typewriter in a way they hadn’t in months. The clack-clack sound was like water on some dying, parched part of my brain. The woman—
She has a name, asshole.
Winona.
Winona gave me fire.
Winona.
She was some kind of witch. That had to be it.
I stood up. I shouldn’t have given my number to Blake again. He’d only be a distraction.
But I was already fucking distracted. I strode to the kitchen, intending to get a beer for lunch.
Texting Blake was a distraction from the distraction that wouldn’t leave my goddamned mind.
Winona.
Her name bounced through my head like a heartbeat zagging on a monitor. Like ticker tape. At night, it rolled around in my brain, looping around my tongue like candy. Like something else I could almost taste.
I cracked the beer, this time keeping the cap in my hand.
I needed to leave it alone. To focus on the book.
But she’d made the words come.
I’d been so fucking elated after reading those pages, I’d put on that song she’d been singing. I nearly blew my eardrums out.
The next day, I wrote a few more, high off the day before.
But the next day, after working through a crisis call from Sal about the merger looming on the horizon I needed to be back for, I sat down ready, fingers on keys.
And nothing fucking came.
After that, I slid back into failure like it was my natural resting place. It hadn’t been, in life, except for this one part.
I’d paced so hard today, for so many hours, I was surprised there wasn’t a path burned into the pool deck. I’d swum a thousand laps, lifted a thousand pounds. Still, the familiar memory came rushing back like it always did when things went bad with the book.
What the fuck is this?
My dad’s voice in my head was a shock of cold water. I was brought back to that moment, seeing my awkward, stilted twelve-year-old handwriting open and exposed on the page, under the judging wrath of my dad’s gaze.
Don’t be an idiot, Mitchell. No son of mine is going to be a fucking pussy poet.
It’s not poetry!
Then the book, tossed into the fireplace, those earnest words melting into the embers.
Blake got a backhand for trying to defend me. I got blisters trying to pull the book out of the fireplace.
Dad laughed at us both.
I swallowed now, the taste of the memory, poisonous on my tongue. I was twelve.
“Fucking twelve,” I said out loud, my voice a startlingly low thrum in the silence of the kitchen.
I was writing this book as a fuck you to my father.
He was going to see my name in print. He was going to see the words I wrote about him in the preface.
He was going to see it all, and it would mean more than all the mergers and acquisitions I’d achieved in my business.
It would mean more than my first dollar earned without him and the billion earned since.
If I could ever fucking finish.
I pulled open the cupboard door with my foot, intending to toss the bottle cap into the trash. But my eyes went to the piping under the sink. I stared at it for a good minute. Then I looked back out across the pool to where I’d come from, to where that blank page sat on my typewriter.
Winona was the only thing that could fix this.
I looked back down at those pipes. My fingers were tight enough on the bottle I was sure it was going to crack in my hand. I set it down. Then I strode back to the pool house. Not to the writing studio inside, but around back, to the attached toolshed.
The sledgehammer felt solid in my hands; the weight delicious as I strode back into the kitchen, positioning myself next to the empty cupboard.
I swung. Hard.
It only took one hit for the pipe to come detached. Sink sludge splattered onto the interior shelf. I gave the pipe a few hits until the plastic splintered into shards.
I flipped the sledgehammer head-up, then took it back to the shed, hanging it on its hook.
That done, I picked up my phone. “Sal,” I said the moment she answered. “I’m going to need the plumber’s number.”