36. Briggs
brIGGS
The June sun is blazing hot, and my new rental has a kitchen window that faces directly into the glare. It’s a four-bedroom I don’t technically need, but it’s the first place I’ve signed for without checking a travel schedule first.
I timed the drive to Evie’s twice—once at rush hour and once on a lazy Sunday. Nine minutes flat. It’s nearly the same distance to my father’s place, smack-dab in the center.
I’d asked her to move in here, of course, but Evie’s stubborn. She insisted on keeping her apartment for at least another year, claiming she needs a smaller space while I’m gone during the season.
But her spare key does sit in the bowl by my door. Her sketchbook lives at the end of my dining table, too, and there’s a coffee mug in my cabinet that she rotated out of her own kitchen three weeks ago.
At 5:40 a.m., my phone vibrates against the nightstand, Evie’s name flashing on the screen. I answer before I’m fully awake.
“Baby?”
“Briggs,” she says. “You up?”
“I am now. What’s wrong?”
“Phil’s having a back problem again, and Tomás is in Reno for a family thing.” I hear her car door thud shut. “We’ve got a nine o’clock at Palm, and the hole isn’t open yet. My dad wants some help.”
I’m already halfway into my pants. “Where am I going?”
She hesitates, the line going quiet for a beat. “Actually, you don’t have to do this.”
“I want to.”
“Okay.” She breathes out a sigh. “Maintenance gate on the east side. Wear something you don’t mind ruining.”
When I arrive at Palm Cemetery, Ray Sutton is leaning against the tailgate of a removal van. He’s wearing faded work pants and a shirt that’s seen better decades, watching me cross the gravel toward him.
“Ray,” I say. “Good morning.”
“Hey, Briggs.” He reaches into the back and tosses me a pair of heavy work gloves. “These are going to be small on you.”
“I’ll make them work.”
That’s the extent of our conversation. He turns and starts hauling boards off the truck bed, and I step in to take the weight of the next one without being asked.
Evie appears around the side of the van, hair scraped back into a ginger knot. She’s wearing steel-toed boots and black from head to toe. I’m in sweatpants, a bright red Kings charity shirt from two seasons ago, and gloves that barely clear my knuckles.
“You look ridiculous,” she says.
“I followed directions. You should be proud.”
“Mmm.” She’s fighting a smile, her eyes softening at the edges. “Come on. Let’s get to it.”
Ray runs the excavator for the first part. I stay clear of the swing, watching the machine bite into the dry earth until there’s a rough, rectangular gap in the lawn. It takes twenty minutes to clear the bulk of it out—a raw wound in the grass with loose dirt piling up at the edges.
Then the engine dies, the silence of the cemetery rushing back in, and Evie hands me a spade. “Machine gets you eighty percent of the way there,” she says, testing the edge of her own shovel. “But it doesn’t get you square.”
“Square.”
“The vault has to sit perfectly level. If the sides aren’t clean, the whole thing settles wrong. Two years from now, there’s a dip in the turf, and someone’s daughter notices it while she’s standing here.” She drops down into the hole. “Come on. You’re built for moving dirt, Maxwell. Use it.”
I join her at the bottom. The walls are close enough that our shoulders brush as we work, and she’s twice as fast as I am because she has the technique, and I only have the strength.
“Too much,” she says, stopping my arm after ten minutes.
“I’m just digging, Evie.”
“You’re taking it out of the wall. The wall is the boundary.” She taps the blade of my spade. “Shave it. Don’t dig. You aren’t trying to make it bigger; you’re trying to make it right.”
By six thirty, the temperature has hit ninety, and my shirt is a lost cause. Ray hands down bottles of water at regular intervals, watching the progress without comment. I drink mine in three gulps and get back to the north wall.
Around seven, Evie stops to wipe her brow. She just ends up smearing a trail of caliche across her forehead.
“You’re doing okay,” she admits.
“I’m being defeated by a hole in the ground.”
“Happens to everyone the first time.” She goes back to the corner. “You should’ve seen Tomás. He actually puked.”
“I’m not going to puke.”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes of shaving left to prove it.”
I stop for a second to look at her. She’s covered in dirt to the elbows, hair falling out of its knot, working a wall in a seven-foot rectangle at sunrise. Still, she looks entirely, perfectly at home.
“The morning before I met you,” I say, “you were doing this.”
“That’s right.”
“For Ziggy.”
“For your brother.” She squares the final corner, checking it against the string line. “It was fifty-four degrees that morning. Much better conditions. You’re getting the advanced players’ edition.”
We finish just before eight. Ray inspects the corners in silence, which Evie whispers is the highest form of praise her father offers. The three of us stand in the gravel lot drinking water from the cooler while the desert sun turns the horizon white.
“You’re going to be sore tomorrow, son,” Ray says, capping his bottle.
“I’m sore now, Ray.”
I kiss Evie goodbye—a minor workplace offense that earns me a wink from her father—survive a scalding shower, and scarf down a massive breakfast.
By nine thirty, I’m idling at the curb for my father with four bunches of berry-pink dahlias in the truck bed, picked up from the florist on Eastern, where they knew the order before I said his name.
He does the flower run the first Saturday of every month. For over a year, Danny or Evie has been the one to navigate the traffic. Today, I agreed to do it, a fact he’s been remarkably smug about since Wednesday morning.
“You smell like a landfill,” he notes as he hauls himself into the seat.
“I dug a grave this morning, Dad.”
“The hell you did.”
“I did. Palm, section fourteen. Ray was short-handed.”
He looks at me across the center console, his expression shifting through three different versions of surprise before he finally turns back to the windshield. He doesn’t say anything, but I catch the way his mouth hitches at the corner—that slight, stubborn lift of satisfaction.
“Which section?” he asks after we’ve cleared the first mile.
“Fourteen. East side.”
We drive for a while in silence. The truck’s A/C is losing its battle against the June glare, and neither of us mentions the sweat tracking down our temples.
“So it’s finished,” he says finally. “The contract?”
“Signed it on the ninth.”
“And you told Evie first.”
“I did.”
“Hm.” He adjusts the cane against the door. “Twenty-nine years I’ve been your father, Briggs.”
“You mentioned that yesterday.”
“I’m going to keep mentioning it. It’s the only card I’ve got left.” He looks out at the passing palms, his gaze steady. “What’d you get?”
“Four years.”
“I know it’s four years; I saw it on the television. I’m asking what you got.”
“Less than I’d have gotten if I’d hit the market on July first.”
“How much less?”
“Enough that my agent asked me three times if I was certain.”
I brace for the lecture about leaving money on the table, because he’s a man who spent forty years in HVAC and has very strong opinions about the price of a decision. He knows the value of a dollar better than anyone.
“Good,” he says instead.
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you, son.”
Sierra Vista is nearly empty at ten thirty. Anyone with any sense came at seven, and anyone without it is smart enough to stay in the shade. The desert heat is already shimmering off the gravel in heavy waves.
I park on the main path and get the buckets out. My father brushes me off when I move to assist, getting himself out of the truck with a grimace and standing there until he has his balance, his knuckles white on the cane.
Then he starts walking.
He covers the forty yards to my mother’s marker without stopping and without letting me take the flowers. It’s a slow process, but I walk beside him, matching his pace until we reach the granite.
“You want to sit?” I ask.
“Don’t start with the bullshit,” he grumbles.
He gets down on the stone bench beside her headstone. I fill the vase while he starts his thing—a low-volume conversation with a woman who’s been gone for twenty-four years. It’s a dialogue I’ve never been invited into and don’t need to be.
After a few minutes, he waves me away without turning his head.
“Go on. He’s right there, and you’ve been staring at him since we parked.”
I walk the ten feet over.
The grass has completely taken now, a seamless green carpet where the sod line used to be. I take the ceramic swift out of my pocket and set it at the base of the stone, where the granite meets the border. Evie found it at a swap meet in Pahrump and told me I should keep it.
I sit on the concrete border, the sun hot on my neck.
“Hey, Zig. Thought we could chat. I signed four years in Charlotte. Four million a year. I could’ve gotten more on the market.
” I pull a stubborn weed from the grass.
“We made it to the playoffs but lost in the first round. Six games. I got two goals and a lot of bruises, and Dad called after every single one to tell me what I did wrong.”
A car crawls past on the access road and disappears into the distance.
“I fired Ted. I’ve got a new guy now who’s about forty and visibly terrified of me, which I’m currently working on.”
I scrub a hand through my hair, feeling the grit of the morning’s work.
“My girlfriend’s name’s Evie. She’s the one who made this hole nice and pretty for you.” I put my palm flat on the grass. “Now she has a key to both my condo and my rental house.”
The swift is already leaning a little in the grass. I straighten it, and it goes right back to the tilt. Symmetry is overrated, anyway.
“I wish you two could’ve met.” My eyes start to burn. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “I miss you, Zig. We had a good run, didn’t we?”
I stay until my legs go pins and needles from the concrete, and then I stay a little longer.
When I finally look back, my father has moved. He’s on his feet, working his way slowly along the row toward a bench two plots down, doing a lap because he can and because he’s decided he’s going to keep doing it.
He gives me all the time I need. When I get up and join him, he’s sitting with his hands stacked on the head of the cane, looking out at the flat brown hills past the fence.
“Alright?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“You’ll come back next month?”
“First Saturday,” I tell him.
“Is your girl coming over for dinner?” he asks.
“She’ll be there.”
“Good,” he replies. “Tell her not to forget that pie.”
He extends a hand with a single, sharp nod. I pull him up to his feet, and we walk back to the truck together, taking our time under the white sky. There’s no reason for us to hurry. Today, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.