5. Logan
Logan
The fence doesn't need me.
I've known that since the day I started. It's a half-day job at most, a couple of rails and a wobbly post, the kind of thing I could fix before lunch and never think about again. Instead I've been at it a month. I re-set a post that was fine. I sanded the top rail smooth enough to serve dinner on.
Because the fence runs along the back of Little Hollow Preschool, and at some point every afternoon, Josie Porter crosses the window with a kid on her hip and the whole day makes sense for a second.
I'm aware of how that sounds.
Hudson's aware too. He hasn't said a word about it, which is how I know he's noticed. Hudson not commenting on something is Hudson screaming.
“Mister Logan.” Bodhi's at his post on the inside of the fence, arms hooked over the rail he is not supposed to climb. Behind him the rest of the afternoon crew lines up, six kids supervising me in a row. “Why does that one go bzzzz?”
“It's a sander. It makes the wood smooth.”
“Does it hurt the wood?”
The honest answer is no. “The wood likes it.”
Bodhi nods, satisfied, like I've cleared up something that's been weighing on him, then leans in, drops his voice, and delivers today's intelligence report. This is our arrangement. I give him a sanded scrap of pine, he gives me the news.
So far this week I've learned that the class fish is on his third secret name, that Posy can do a cartwheel “but only at home,” and that Miss Josie said a bad word on Monday when the laminator jammed, and then turned the color of a stop sign and made everyone promise not to tell.
“And did everyone promise?”
“Yes. I promised I wouldn't tell. I'm good at keeping secrets,” Bodhi says.
I make a note never to tell this child anything, and hand him his scrap of pine.
He takes it in both hands and runs it back to the others, and I get maybe four more minutes of pretending to check a level before the pickup bell rings and the yard empties out, kid by kid, into the row of cars along the side street.
I should pack up. The light's going gold and I've sanded everything that can legally be sanded.
The side door opens, and Josie comes across the yard.
I know it's her before I look up. That's the embarrassing part, the part I'd never say out loud in this town or any other. Brown sugar on the afternoon air, a little warm, a little nervous around the edges, and my hands go still on the rail.
A man my size isn't supposed to go a little unsteady over a woman crossing a yard. I've done it every time for five years, quiet enough that nobody's ever caught me. I've gotten good at wanting her with my face doing nothing at all.
“Hey, Logan.” She's got her bag over one shoulder and her hands doing something complicated around a coffee cup that's been empty for hours, knowing her. “Got a minute?”
“Sure.” I've got a minute. I've got a month of minutes invested in this fence. “What's up?”
And she squares her shoulders, and takes a breath like she's about to read a prepared statement, and says…
“I need to tell you something insane, and I need you to let me get all the way to the end before you react.”
“Okay.”
“I told my mother I have a pack.”
Something in me goes very quiet. A month of afternoons, and she's got a pack, three alphas who got there while I was out here sanding a rail and not saying a word. “Okay.” It comes out level. I don't know how.
“I don't have a pack.”
The quiet thing lifts its head. I keep my eyes on the rail and my voice exactly where it was. “Okay.”
“Stop saying okay, this is a crisis.” She sets the cup down on the rail I sanded for her, which she doesn't know, and never will.
“The reunion's in a month. In Pine Valley.
My whole family, my mother, a banner. I need three alphas to come with me and pretend to be mine, convincingly, in front of people who've known me since birth.”
Pretend to be mine. She doesn't hear it the way I hear it. I keep sanding a rail that's been smooth for a week.
“Hudson said yes. Finn said no. I need three and I've got one, so I'm asking you. There are rules, real ones, we go through all of it Friday, but the short version is after the reunion it ends quietly and we never speak of it again, and that's the whole deal.”
“Yes.”
She stops. Blinks. “You haven't heard the rest.”
“Doesn't matter.”
“There's a whole second page.”
“Josie.” Her name comes out steadier than anything else in my body currently is. “Yes.”
She stares at me. Out on the side street a car door slams, somebody calls see you tomorrow, ordinary town sounds going on like the ground didn't just move.
Her eyes have gone big and suspicious, like a yes this fast must have a catch in it, and I watch her look for the catch, and I keep my face as still as I can while my pulse does something that probably violates a building code.
“Hudson said you'd say yes fast.” She's looking at me like she came in braced for a fight and the door just swung open. “He really wasn't kidding.”
“Was I supposed to make it harder?”
“A little? Maybe? This is a terrible plan, Logan, objectively, and you didn't even blink. You're supposed to at least think about it.” She's talking faster now, the way she does when something's gotten away from her. “Finn made me work for the no. You just handed me a yes like it was nothing.”
I look down at the rail. There's a right answer here and a true answer, and the right answer is something easy, something Hudson would say, happy to help, sounds like fun, what's a fake pack between friends.
I rub the back of my neck, which my mother says I do when I'm about to be too honest, and I am, as usual, about to be too honest.
“You help everybody,” I say. “Whole town.
You take the class hamster home every Christmas break because you don't want to put it on anybody else's vacations.
You make Pete feel like breaking news. I've watched you carry this whole place around on your hip for five years, and I've never once seen anybody carry you.” The neck rub isn't helping.
I keep going anyway. “So your family wants to see somebody take care of you for a weekend.
I can do that. I'd be glad to do that. That's the whole answer. There was nothing to think about.”
The yard is very quiet.
Josie's looking at me like I'm a math problem that came out to a weird number, and the nervous edge has gone out of her scent, gone soft and warm in a way I'm doing my best not to notice. She picks up the coffee cup. Puts it down again.
“Okay,” she says, and her voice has gone a little rough, and she clears it, professional again in half a second flat.
“Okay. Great. You and Hudson, that's two.
Welcome to the fake pack. Planning session Friday, my place, Hudson's bringing a legal pad, it's already a whole thing. I just have to find a third before I lose my nerve.”
“I'll bring dinner.”
“You don't have to do this.”
“Rehearsal,” I say. “Somebody's going to ask what I cook for you. Better have an answer.”
She laughs, surprised, the real one with the dimple, the one I've heard through the window all month over the sound of my own sander, and it's even better at close range, which is information I'm going to have to live with now.
“Friday,” she says, backing toward the door. “And Logan? Thank you. Genuinely.”
“Don't thank me yet. You haven't had my cooking.”
She goes inside. The door bangs. Through the window I can see her and Lily collide in the hallway, and Lily's hands come up in a question, and Josie nods, and Lily does a silent scream with her whole body, and I turn around and start packing tools into the truck like a man who wasn't watching.
The drive home is four minutes. I spend all four of them being honest with myself, since there's nobody else in the truck to perform for.
Here's the truth. I've spent a month rebuilding a fence that didn't need me, for a woman who never asked, on the chance she'd cross a window.
And tonight she walked across a whole yard and asked me to hold her hand in front of her family, to learn her coffee order, to kiss her cheek like I've done it a thousand mornings.
To be, for exactly a month, the thing I've been not saying out loud since the first time she told a four-year-old that the window licks back.
And then it ends quietly, and we never speak of it again.
I pull into my driveway and sit there with the engine ticking.
My grandfather used to say you should never build something you can't stand to tear down. He was talking about decks. I'm going to choose to believe he was talking about decks.
A month. Whatever her rules turn out to be, and there are rules, she made that much clear.
I can do that.
I carry the level and the sander inside, and I leave the last spare board in the truck, because the fence is finished, it's been finished for a month, and starting Friday I don't need an excuse.
That's the part I keep arriving at, sitting in the dark of my own kitchen, eating cereal at nine at night because I forgot to make anything real.
Starting Friday, pretending is the job.
I'm going to be so good at it. That's the problem.