Chapter 33
MAC
The sound of a hammer on wood, multiplied by three, echoed off the trees. Three different rhythms, three different levels of skill, three boys learning the same lesson at different speeds.
Kace hit the nail like he was trying to drive it through the board and into the earth’s core. Every swing was a full-body commitment, enthusiasm compensating for accuracy, the nail bending sideways on every third strike.
“Easier,” I said. “You’re muscling it. Let the hammer do the work.”
“I am letting the hammer do the work!”
“You’re attacking the nail, Kace. It’s not personal.”
Boden, two feet away, drove his nail in cleanly within four strokes.
Straight, flush, the satisfying thunk of metal meeting wood.
He’d picked it up fast—my hands, apparently, or at least my hands’ instincts.
He held the hammer the way I held it, loose grip, wrist doing the work, and every time I noticed the similarity, it hit me somewhere below the ribs.
Jules was the surprise. He didn’t have Boden’s natural affinity or Kace’s brute enthusiasm, but he had patience.
Extraordinary patience. He studied each nail before he struck it, assessed the angle, adjusted his grip, and drove it in with methodical, unhurried precision.
His nails weren’t as clean as Boden’s, but none of them bent.
“Good,” I told him. “You’re reading the grain.”
Jules looked up. The rare, small smile. “The wood tells you where it wants the nail to go. You just have to listen.”
I stared at him. Fourteen years old and he’d just articulated something it had taken me fucking forever to learn. “Yeah. Exactly.”
We were building a table. Nothing fancy—a simple four-legged table with a plank top, the kind of project I’d normally knock out in an afternoon alone.
With three teenagers, it was a two-day endeavor that involved a lot of bent nails, one smashed thumb—Kace, who’d handled it with more drama than the injury warranted—and a surprising amount of collaboration.
Boden measured. Jules cut, after I showed him the saw and supervised the first few passes.
Kace assembled, his enthusiasm finally finding its proper outlet in the physical satisfaction of fitting pieces together.
And I moved between them, guiding hands, correcting grips, demonstrating angles, teaching the way I’d been taught—through doing, through repetition, through the patient transfer of knowledge from one pair of hands to another.
The mountain was in full summer. Two weeks of July heat, the creek running lower than spring but still steady, the meadow above the campgrounds thick with wildflowers.
Arek’s car had been parked next to mine for six days now, the boys’ stuff scattered across the cabin I’d set up for them—sleeping bags, books, Kace’s portable speaker, Boden’s guitar, Jules’s e-reader.
Three teenagers in a twelve-by-sixteen cabin, and against every reasonable expectation, it was working.
Kace and Boden had bonded over a shared appreciation for bad action movies and an inexhaustible capacity for junk food.
Boden and Jules had formed a friendship over books, music, and the quiet understanding of two kids who processed the world internally.
Kace and Jules had the established shorthand of brothers, and Boden slotted into their dynamic like a third instrument joining a duet—changing the sound, enriching it, making something new without disrupting what was already there.
And Arek on the mountain, in my space, for two weeks.
Arek sleeping in my bed every night, drinking coffee on the porch every morning, existing in the landscape that I’d built as a fortress and that was now, with him in it, becoming a home.
He was different up here—slower, quieter, the performance dialed down to a hum that faded a little more each day.
I’d caught him sitting on the porch yesterday with no phone, no book, no task, just sitting.
Watching the valley. Being still. He’d looked up when I came out and the expression on his face—surprised by his own peace—was worth more than anything I’d ever built.
The table took shape. By late afternoon, the top was planked, the legs were solid, and the whole thing stood level on the gravel outside the cabin without a shimmy.
Not perfect—the joints were rough, the top needed another sanding, and Kace’s nails were visible in a way that a professional would’ve hidden.
But it stood. It held weight. It was real.
“We built a table,” Kace said, pressing both hands flat on the surface and leaning his weight onto it. It didn’t move. “We actually built a table!”
“It’s not bad,” Boden said, running his hand along the edge with a critical eye.
“It’s good,” Jules said quietly. High praise from Jules.
“It’s yours,” I said. “For the cabin. You built it, you keep it.”
Three faces looked at me. Kace’s delighted, Boden’s surprised, Jules’s doing the micro-adjustment that meant something significant had registered.
A table they’d built with their own hands, in their space, on this mountain.
An object that would exist after this summer ended, that would hold the evidence of their time here in every nail and plank.
Boden looked at me with Fay’s brown eyes. “Thanks, Dad.”
The word. Casual now, almost easy, the way it fell out of his mouth after weeks of practice.
Not testing it anymore. Using it. My son, calling me Dad while standing next to a table he’d built with two boys who were becoming his brothers, on a mountain that was becoming something other than a hiding place.
“You’re welcome,” I said, and my voice held.
The campfire was Arek’s idea.
“The boys want marshmallows,” he said as if it constituted a compelling argument, which I suppose it did. We built the fire in the ring I’d made from river rocks during my first month on the mountain, which I’d used exactly twice in two years, both times alone.
Tonight, the ring held five people. Kace and Boden on one log, shoulder to shoulder, arguing about which marshmallow roasting technique was superior.
Jules in a camp chair, his marshmallow held at a precise distance from the coals, rotating it with methodical patience.
Arek next to me on the second log, his thigh against mine, a beer in his hand and firelight on his face.
He was so beautiful. I had a hard time looking away.
I’d made campfire food. Hot dogs, beans from a can, heated in the pot at the fire’s edge, and corn in the husk, buried in the coals. Simple, good, the kind of food that tasted better outside, in the dark, with smoke in your hair and people around you.
“Mac,” Kace said through a mouthful of marshmallow. “Were you really a paratrooper?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, you actually jumped out of planes?”
“That’s what paratroopers do, Kace.”
“How many times?”
“Training jumps, probably a hundred. Combat jumps, twelve.”
“Twelve times you jumped out of a plane and into a war zone.” Kace’s eyes were enormous. “What does it feel like?”
I looked at the fire. A year ago, this question would’ve triggered a cascade—the memory of the jump, the noise, the wind, the ground rushing up, the knowledge of what waited below. The cascade would’ve pulled me under, and I would’ve gone silent or left.
Tonight, the cascade started and I watched it happen from a distance.
Noted it. Named it. Let it pass. “Loud. The plane is loud, and then you jump and it’s louder because the wind hits you, and then the chute opens and it goes quiet all at once.
That part, the quiet, is the best part. You’re hanging in the air, the world is below you, and for about sixty seconds, everything is still. ”
“That sounds amazing,” Kace breathed.
“It is. It’s also terrifying. Those sixty seconds of still are followed by the ground coming at you very fast.”
“Did you ever land wrong?”
“Once. Sprained my ankle on a night jump in Afghanistan. Landed on a rock I couldn’t see.”
“What did you do?”
“Taped it up and walked six miles to the rally point.”
“On a sprained ankle?”
“It was a mild sprain.”
“That’s insane. Boden, your dad is insane.”
Boden was watching me across the fire with an expression I’d been learning to read over the past weeks, that complicated mixture of admiration, anger, love, and grief that constituted his feelings about his father.
He wasn’t ready to let go of the anger. I didn’t want him to.
The anger was honest and earned, and he’d release it when he was ready, not before.
“Tell us another one,” Boden said.
So I did. I told them about the time my squad got lost in a sandstorm outside Kandahar and ended up at a goat herder’s camp, where a seventy-year-old Afghan man fed us tea and bread while communicating entirely through hand gestures and facial expressions.
I told them about the prank wars between the platoons, about the sergeant who kept a stray dog named Corporal Biscuit, about the care packages from home that always arrived with crushed cookies and melted chocolate.
I told them the good stuff, the human stuff.
The stories that existed alongside the horror without negating it, the proof that even in the worst places, people found ways to laugh, connect, and be absurd.
I’d never told these stories. Not to Fay, not to Fraser, not to anyone.
They’d been locked in the same vault as the dark memories, contaminated by proximity, and I’d sealed the whole thing shut rather than sort through it.
Therapy had given me the combination. Sarah had helped me understand that the vault wasn’t one container. It was many, and I could open some without opening all of them. The good memories were mine to keep. They didn’t belong to the war. They belonged to me.
“Corporal Biscuit,” Kace repeated, wiping tears of laughter from his face. “That’s the best name for a dog I’ve ever heard.”
“What happened to him?” Jules asked. He always asked the questions that went deeper.