Chapter One
Fall
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M el Lind finished splicing the last wire. He sealed the splice, double-checked each connection, and stepped back. “CLEAR FOR POWER!” he yelled, though it was the end of the day and he was probably the only one still working.
He always called out a warning—sometimes he even did it when he was home alone, working on his own house.
He was glad the habit was so ingrained; he’d learned the hard way that safe was better than sorry.
When he was a young apprentice electrician, on the very first job he’d been point on, he’d brought the breaker board online without any kind of heads-up.
He’d thought he was the last one still working.
The power had flared on for a nanosecond, then a loud bang and a shout from the second floor of the subdivision house they’d been building.
Mel had crossed a wire. It was neither the first nor the last time; mistakes happened, and no amount of experience or expertise could make a human perfect.
On that day, unfortunately, one of the guys had still been packing up his gear upstairs.
He’d noticed a loose screw in an outlet box and taken it upon himself to tighten it at exactly the wrong time—and he’d used his ‘lucky’ old screwdriver with a metal band around the wooden handle.
Just enough metal-to-skin contact for trouble.
A whole house of power went through his hand.
He’d lost the hand, spent three months in the hospital recovering from the internal damage, and had been on permanent disability for the rest of his life.
Mel always called out a warning. He learned his lessons the first time.
He gave it a couple beats to be sure, then flipped the master switch.
The tenant of this particular commercial space, which would soon be a pen and watch shop, had chosen high-end pendant lights with brushed nickel housings and LED elements that emitted a soft golden light like old-fashioned incandescent bulbs.
“Looks good,” Nolan said, surveying the room.
Mel looked around, too. The lights were beautiful, of course, he was great at his work, but otherwise, they still had a ways to go before anything here really looked good.
Signal Bend Construction was just beginning the second phase of the Signal Bend Pavilion project.
Phase One: basic exterior construction—the actual building.
Phase Two: basic interior construction—electrical, plumbing, HVAC, anything else that went inside the walls, then the walls themselves.
Phase Three: exterior and interior finishes.
Phase Four: cleanup. At Phase Two, it took a lot of imagination to think anything looked good yet.
But the electrical was great. Obviously.
“Of course it looks good,” Mel said, turning to grin at Nolan. “Everything I do is beautiful.”
Nolan smirked back. “Your self-confidence itself is a thing of beauty, my brother.”
Mel laughed and slapped the kid’s back.
Was it confidence? He supposed so, but he didn’t think he was anything special.
Certainly nothing he’d ever done, nor any ambition he had for the future, would change the world or even get it to look up and take notice.
But he was hardwired to see the value in the mundane as well as the great.
The great stuff got all the attention, but the mundane kept the world rolling.
And even the most basic person was important to somebody.
Too many people were too damn snarled in worry about what other people thought, let other people determine their own value. Always seeing the world through somebody else’s goggles was no way to live.
Mel loved being alive. Sometimes the world was pretty shit, but there were always folks around trying to make it better.
He figured as long as you were trying to be a decent person, trying to help and not hurt, trying to make up for the hurt you do, and looking for the good and the beautiful, then you were just as important and special as anybody else.
And a damn sight better than the billionaires and politicians who were embedded so deep in their own asses they’d forgotten that wealth and power might be assets, but they damn sure weren’t virtues.
While Mel crouched to put his tools away, Nolan collected his personal shit, his lunch box and whatnot, from the corner. He and Zaxx had finished off their workday prepping for drywall installation in the morning, now that the electrical and other systems were rigged in the framework.
“You headin’ over to the clubhouse?” Nolan asked as he headed over to the open rear door.
The Night Horde MC comprised most of the staff of Signal Bend Construction, and most of those who didn’t wear the Flaming Mane wanted to.
Thus it was typical for everybody to head over to the Horde compound after work, especially on a Friday.
Mel had long embraced that tradition; he enjoyed little else as much as he enjoyed hanging with his brothers: good company, good booze, good food, good pussy.
Lately, though, sometimes he had a thing he’d rather do. Tonight was one of those sometimes.
“Yeah, later. Got something to take care of first.”
Nolan didn’t answer for a beat, and as Mel stood up, he glanced over at him. Nolan was at the door, grinning like he knew a secret. Before Mel could ask what that was about, the kid nodded once and went on out the door and about his business.
Adding that little moment to his collection of life’s lesser mysteries, Mel grabbed his gear and headed out and about his own business.
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~oOo~
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A fter a full shift on a warm day he smelled like sunbaked roadkill, so first Mel went home.
Home was a small log cabin he’d built himself on his grandparents’ property, not far off from a pretty little pond. Peaked roof, nice porch, plenty of room to meet his needs, and a spectacular view. The scene made a nice postcard of a country life.
Mel wasn’t a county guy, not originally.
He’d been born and raised in the suburbs of Kansas City, and for the first part of his life, almost half of it, ‘country’ had been a destination—a place for recreation and vacation, somewhere to camp, or fish, or hunt.
When he was fresh out of high school and arguing with his folks about going to college (they wanted it, he didn’t), his grandfather, in his late sixties at the time, retired from his job with the post office, and his grandparents suddenly announced their decision to sell their suburban rancher and move out to the country.
After a lifetime of working and being in the world, Grampa was ready to escape.
They bought twenty acres of rough woodland about eight miles outside Signal Bend and dropped a shiny new double-wide on it.
Then they set about building their version of a quiet country life.
A few years later, as Mel was finishing his electrician apprenticeship (he’d won the college fight), his father, an insurance executive, had been transferred to Florida, and poof!
there went his parents. Nobody had died, yet it still felt like, all at once, Mel and his younger sister, Tara, had been abandoned by all the people who’d taken care of them.
They were on their own—barely grown, still mostly clueless, Mel looking to get his career started in earnest and Tara trying to get through college.
At first, they’d lived together in a two-bedroom apartment with walls like cardboard and an ant problem. Mel had supported them while Tara focused on her studies, and it had worked well, especially at first. For each other, they’d filled in most of the gaps their elders had left.
A week before Tara’s college graduation, when she was twenty-two and Mel twenty-five, their grandparents had an accident on their way into town. Grampa had gone around a blind turn and swung over the double yellow line.
That shit happened to every country driver everywhere, just about daily, with no damage to anyone.
Unless another car happened to be coming the opposite way on that turn at the exact wrong time.
Even then, country drivers were usually able to correct; you know a road you travel on routinely, you’re ready for what it gives you.
But not that day. That day, Grampa hit the oncoming driver nearly head on.
The other driver’s old Suburban took significant front-end damage, but she’d walked away with a few cuts and bruises.
Grampa’s Buick was totaled, and neither he nor Gramma walked away.
Gramma died before an emergency crew could get there.
Grampa’s legs, pelvis, hips, and lower spine were crushed. But he’d survived.
Mom and Dad were in Florida, with new jobs, a new mortgage, a new life, and a complicated relationship with Dad’s parents.
Tara was just receiving her degree and about to start a fancy new job as a microbiologist at a research lab in the city.
Mel, on the other hand, had been trying and not yet succeeding at getting his own business up and running.
Of everyone in the family, his life had been the most elastic.
So he’d packed up that stretchy life and moved in to take care of his grandfather. As a caretaker for a seriously physically disabled person, he’d done things he’d never imagined he’d have to do for anyone.
When Mel was a kid, that old man had been Santa, Gandalf, and Captain America all squeezed into the body of an introvert mailman who loved model trains.
While he’d been a difficult father—and Mel had seen some of that—he’d been endlessly patient with his grandkids’ antics and always enthusiastic about their activities and accomplishments, no matter how small or mundane.
Mel had adored and revered that man. But after the accident, Grampa had sat in his wheelchair and stewed in a hot sludge of guilt, grief, and bitterness. The wonderful grandfather steadily diminished inside the self-flagellating old man who believed he’d killed his wife.