Chapter 19 Cooper
COOPER
The summer months were popular in my house.
I didn’t have to shuttle Ivy and Chase to Fallbrook every day…
at all. Not even for camp. This year they’d opted to do day camp with Reg’s kids, where their daily activities included swimming lessons and boating at the lake, dance and tennis at the rec center, and hockey camp for both of them in Elmwood. And of course, flag football.
Their schedule was better for me than Sarah by a long shot. I was surprised she hadn’t pushed back and insisted on doing some activities in Fallbrook. But then I realized there might be a motive behind her silence, and I wasn’t ready to unpack that just yet.
If I ignored the possible move she hadn’t mentioned in months and the niggling feeling that it wasn’t like my ex to go out of her way to appease me, I could admit that this summer was shaping up to be one of the best I’d personally had in years.
The kids were busy and happy, and I was in a rare zone where my work and home life seemed perfectly balanced. I had Silas to thank for that.
Everyone knew that we were friends by now and in the summer months when the whole town was in the streets, playing tag and football and organizing block parties, it was easy to blend in as buddies.
Well, maybe we hadn’t fooled everyone.
I’d thought it was a little strange the first time Reg suggested that I invite my neighbor to his place for a barbecue. But Reg was a friendly guy, and Silas was coaching his kids too.
And Aunt Rhona and Uncle Harry had been known to have total strangers over, so dinner at their house with Silas was…well, nice. Really nice.
Should I have been concerned that the invitation came while Ivy and Chase were at their mom’s? Maybe. But we went anyway.
“Oh, my God! Check out that hair. You’re like Mr. Grunge Lumberjack Man,” Silas hooted, pointing at the collage of family photos that covered every square inch of my aunt and uncle’s family room.
“He was in a band that year, weren’t you, Coop?” Aunt Rhona said. “Axe Life or Sex Life or—”
“Axin’ It,” I supplied in an appropriately mortified tone. “That lasted two months.”
Silas snorted. “What happened?”
My aunt beat me to it. “They were awful. Not one of them could play an instrument. Nails down a chalkboard, I tell you. Cooper slashing away at that poor guitar was almost as bad as Reg pounding on the drums like that furry fellow from the Muppets. Reg had more hair back then. See?”
She showed a high school pic of Reg and me sitting side by side in our football uniforms, legs touching and grinning like madmen. And another of Reg resting his head on my shoulder, drum sticks in hand while I posed with a borrowed guitar.
Silas hummed. “You guys were always tight.”
“They certainly were,” Aunt Rhona agreed, steering him toward a wall of embarrassing baby photos of my sister and me.
“Those two were so precious. Harry and I couldn’t have children of our own, but we got to spoil Coop and Elle and send them home jacked up on sugar whenever they visited. That was before they moved in.”
“You lived here? In this house?” Silas asked.
“After their dad passed away. It was best for everyone at the time, though I don’t think Coop’s sister, Elle, agreed.
” Aunt Rhona snickered. “She missed her friends in Fallbrook. But Coop had Reg. His folks lived right next door. Still do. Rose and Clark. Rose and I used to smoke pot at the lake with those cute Canadian boys who moved into town our senior year. Remember that, Harry?”
“That was me! I was the cute Canadian boy,” he yelled from the kitchen.
Aunt Rhona winked. “I knew that.”
Poor Silas had been subjected to a heap of family lore to go with his pot roast. My aunt and uncle had talked about their hippie days, hitchhiking clear across the country.
They’d lived in California, Oregon, Washington, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Maine, and a few other places they couldn’t remember.
“We wanted to do it all, see it all, but…it was nice to be home for Coop and Elle,” Harry said. “Family matters, eh?”
Later that night, Silas and I sat on Adirondack chairs in front of the fire pit at his friend’s house, sipping beers and listening to the forest animals chatter and the crackle of wood. He loved Rhona and Harry and their stories of their endless adventures.
“Were they really Hare Krishnas in the eighties?”
I shrugged. “Supposedly, there are photos somewhere. I was just a kid, so who knows? My dad thought they were a couple of nuts. He didn’t like us hanging out with them too much.
Part of me gets that, but they were good to us when he died.
They took care of us and made room for us… no questions asked.”
“That’s cool. You’re lucky.”
“I didn’t always feel that way, but yes, I am.”
Silas set his empty bottle on the ledge of the pit and tugged the sleeves of his sweatshirt to ward off the evening chill. “So…you and Reg?”
I let out a wry chuckle. “What are you insinuating?”
“I think you know.”
“Hmm.” I rolled the bottle in my hands, gazed trained on the fire. “Yeah, we were…not boyfriends, but secretly something more than friends in high school.”
“Ah. Well, I hate to break it to you, but Rhona and Harry clocked it. Do you think they knew way back then?”
“Yep. My aunt caught us fooling around on the sofa in the basement. Teenage nightmare come true,” I huffed.
“Poor Reg almost had a heart attack. He was sure she was going to tell his parents. She went out of her way to assure us that queer sex was a beautiful thing and even bought us condoms. He wouldn’t look at me for a whole week after that. ”
“Oh, man.”
I waved dismissively. “I didn’t blame him. His dad was strict, and times were different. We both married women, had kids, and got divorced before coming out as queer.”
Silas’s mouth fell open. “Really? I thought you’d been out for a while.”
“No. Maybe five years. Sarah knew, and obviously Reg…but that’s it.”
“Oh. So…did she care?” He winced. “Sorry. Maybe that’s personal. I just—no one knows about me. No one. And I don’t plan on coming out till I retire…if I do at all. But sometimes I wish I could tell somebody. It feels more real now, maybe. I dunno. I’m babbling. Ignore me.”
I reached out and linked our fingers. “It’s okay. It’s not too personal. I don’t talk about it either. With Sarah, it felt like something I needed to be honest about going into our marriage. I didn’t want any secrets, so I made sure she knew I was bisexual.”
“Did she care?”
“No, not at all. She’s cool. She’s…” I squinted, unsure where I was going with this. “Let’s just say my bi-ness wasn’t the reason we failed as a couple.”
Silas was quiet for a long moment, then blurted, “Oh, fuck it. I’m nosy. What happened?”
I bristled instinctively. I didn’t talk about that chapter. Ever.
But Silas’s expression was almost manically earnest. I wanted to laugh, though the story wasn’t particularly funny. It was heartbreaking and a little humiliating. And yet, if anyone knew what that was like, it was Silas.
“She fell in love with someone else,” I said, gaze fixed on the embers.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”
“Meh. She married him. Good guy, too. Frank sells life insurance or something equally boring, but more lucrative than logging. Or so she assumed.”
“She cheated on you.”
I froze as if I’d been slapped, then puffed out my cheeks and exhaled. “Yeah, I think so.”
“Fuck.”
“Sarah says that’s not true…that she met Frank later.
But I felt her pulling away, shutting down, and slowly exiting our marriage.
You’ve been through it too. The eye contact goes, the jokes never land anymore, the bed is cold.
It was awful, and I didn’t know why. According to Sarah, we didn’t want the same things anymore.
She wanted a bigger life than the one we had in Fallbrook, a bigger house, more time to travel, and she thought I worked too much.
I could have argued that you don’t get the bigger life without working for it, but…
I knew it was something else. Or someone else. ”
“That really fucking sucks,” he growled.
“It did. But it’s like you told me a few months ago…you can’t make someone stay if they don’t want to. The irony is that she still lives in the house we bought together in the town where I was born.”
“That’s messed up.”
I smiled softly, amused and pleased by his fierce stance. “Yeah, but I’m happier on my own.”
Actually…I was happier with Silas, but I wasn’t ready to go there, and we weren’t talking about us.
“You have Ivy and Chase too.”
“I do.”
Never let it be said that Silas Anderson wasn’t an intuitive man. He must have seen something in my expression in the dark that made him twist in his seat, his brow furrowed and body vibrating with barely checked angst.
“What’s going on? Your face is doing something weird.”
“That’s just my face,” I deadpanned.
“Bullshit.”
I met his gaze and lost whatever battle raged inside me.
I hadn’t confided in Reg or Hank or…anyone about Sarah’s impending move or what I was thinking of doing about it.
This was too important. I felt it too deeply.
And I’d gotten in the habit of guarding fragile pieces.
Or maybe I was just in the habit of dealing with hard shit on my own.
But maybe tonight, I didn’t have to.
“Sarah and Frank are planning to move. He’s applied to jobs with his company as far away as San Diego and as close as Pinecrest. But maybe Chicago or Burlington. The kids don’t know. Nothing’s definitive yet, and she’d rather not upset them till she has a plan in place.”
Silas’s jaw dropped. “Oh. Fuck.”
I sighed heavily. “Yeah. Fuck. I’ve been sitting on this for months, worrying myself sick. It’s been hanging over my head like a dark cloud, and I’m the only who sees it.”
Silas smacked my arm and glowered. “Jesus, asshole. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You have your own worries, and I didn’t want to burden you with—”
“Fuck that. Burden me. Tell me everything.”
I didn’t know more than I’d already shared, but I unloaded the stress and strain of the past few months like sheets of metal from a rusty suit of armor.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m being selfish. A good shrink would easily assess my abandonment issues, and they wouldn’t be wrong. My dad died, my wife left me for another man, and now she wants to take the kids. Christ. But no one wants to get left behind, right?”
“For fuck’s sake. Dude. You gotta play offense.
” Silas jumped to his feet and paced, gesticulating wildly as he worked himself up.
“Don’t let her dictate something this important.
You get a say too. You’re not some terrible deadbeat father.
You’re the best dad in the whole fucking world.
No one loves those kids like you. No one.
This is their home, you’re their dad, and you have rights, and—do you want me to talk to her? ”
I chuckled, charmed by Silas’s passionate exuberance. I left my beer on the arm of the Adirondack chair and went to him, cradling his face for a beat, then kissing him senseless.
“Thank you.”
He bit his swollen bottom lip. “I haven’t done anything yet.”
“You listened. That’s enough.”
Silas growled. “No, it’s not. It’s—”
“Hey, relax. I’ve had time to give this some serious thought, and I have a plan.”
“Good. Lawyer up. If you need someone tough, I can probably get a name for you. Alli’s guy almost took me to the cleaners. Thankfully, she told him to fuck off before I got screwed.”
“No, I have a lawyer, but I don’t want it to get ugly.”
He frowned. “You’re gonna let them go?”
“No, no. I want full custody. I want my house to be home base,” I said matter-of-factly.
“Oh. Okay. That’s…good. Do you think…”
“I have a shot?” I finished for him. “Maybe. We’ll see.
It could seem like a complication or a solution depending on how you look at it.
We’re finalizing funding to build retail storefronts—Wood Hollow’s answer to Home Depot.
We’ll sell treated wood for flooring, doors, paneling, fences, and so on.
We don’t like commercial conglomerates in these parts, but we need the products we’re selling to big companies.
So why not cut out the middleman and do it ourselves?
Anyway…if we get the funding, and we should—I’m going to be busier than I already am.
Sure, my kids are my priority, but I’m not a stay-at-home dad. ”
“So what? That doesn’t matter. You told me showing up is what counts. And you always show up, Coop. Always.”
I pulled Silas into my arms and held on tight. Yes, there were battles ahead, but I didn’t have to fight them now.
One thing at a time. One day at a time.
And tonight, I had Silas.