Chapter Six
The trucks started rolling in a little after midday.
Avery watched from the loft window as they filled the gravel lot one by one, coolers hauled out of truck beds, folding chairs unfolded on the grass strip beside the workshop, kids running for the dock before their parents had even parked.
By early evening the place he'd stumbled into two nights ago, soaked and half out of his mind, had turned into something else entirely — strings of lights someone had hung between two porch posts, a radio playing from somebody's tailgate, the smell of charcoal drifting over from a grill set up near the tree line.
"Didn't realize this was a whole event," Avery said, coming down the stairs in the only clothes he had left that weren't stained — a collared shirt that had survived the trunk of his car, slacks that were absolutely the wrong choice for standing on gravel.
"Best view on the lake." Hayes didn't look up from the cooler he was restocking. "People've been coming here for it since before I ran the place. Just how it goes."
"You don't mind? All these people in your space?"
"One night a year." He straightened, glanced over, and something crossed his face at the sight of Avery's outfit that he didn't bother turning into words. "You're gonna want different shoes."
"My sneakers are still soaked from the lake," Avery said. "I found these shoved in the back of my trunk. I'd completely forgotten they were even in there."
"Then you're gonna have gravel in 'em by dark. Your call."
He was already moving off into the crowd before Avery could answer, swallowed up almost immediately by a group of men who greeted him with the kind of easy familiarity that came from twenty years of the same conversation every summer.
Avery watched him go. Watched him take a beer from someone without being asked, watched a kid run straight into his legs and get scooped up onto one shoulder without breaking stride, watched three separate people call him by name like it was the most natural word in the world.
Avery stood near the workshop door in his wrong shoes and his one clean shirt and felt about as out of place as he'd ever felt anywhere, which, given the last few years of his life, was saying something.
***
The generator was around the side of the building, small and loud, and Hayes had shown him where to plug in his phone that morning without much comment beyond charge's slow, don't expect miracles.
Avery had forgotten about it until the crowd thickened enough that standing alone by the water started to feel worse than standing alone with a task.
He crouched by the outlet, unplugged the cord, and held down the power button to boot it up after its long, slow charge.
He sat down on an overturned crate at the edge of the lot, phone in both hands, and waited.
The screen stayed black for several agonizing seconds before the manufacturer logo finally appeared.
Once the device found a signal, it lit up all at once — a solid block of notifications stacking on top of each other faster than he could read them, the counter in the corner climbing past what the display could even show cleanly.
Missed calls. Messages. A voicemail icon with a number next to it that made his stomach drop before he'd opened a single one.
His thumb hovered over the glass.
The first message was from his mother. Sent the night before, timestamped somewhere around when the storm would've still been going strong two towns over.
Where are you.
No question mark. He scrolled.
Your father is asking everyone if they've heard from you. This is not how the day was supposed to start.
Diane is already commenting on the seating chart being off by one. I don't know what I'm supposed to tell her.
I called the marina twice and no one answered. I don't know what you expect me to do with that.
He kept scrolling, and the messages kept climbing in the same direction, hour by hour, and none of them — not one, all the way down through a night and a morning — asked if he was okay.
If the storm had caught him. If the car had made it.
Just the schedule, and Diane, and what people would think, laid out one text at a time like a ledger being kept against him.
The voicemail was worse. He knew it would be before he even played it, and he played it anyway, phone pressed to his ear while the radio two trucks over blared something upbeat and a kid shrieked laughing somewhere behind him.
"Avery. It's four in the afternoon on the Fourth and we still haven't heard from you.
I don't know what to think at this point except that you decided this wasn't a priority, which — fine.
That's fine. But I would like you to understand that I have spent the entire morning fielding questions about where you are, and I am tired of covering for you.
Your father is embarrassed. I am embarrassed.
If you can't be bothered to plan around one day a year that matters to this family, I don't really know what to say to you.
Call when you get this. If you get this. "
The message ended. Avery sat very still with the phone against his ear for a few seconds after the line went dead, the tone in his mother's voice still sitting somewhere under his sternum like something swallowed wrong.
The noise around him didn't stop. If anything it seemed to get louder — someone cranking the radio up, another truck pulling in with its horn giving two short taps of greeting, the crowd on the dock swelling as the light started going gold and low over the water.
Avery's chest had gone tight in a way he recognized immediately, an old, familiar tightness, and his hands had started doing the thing they did, a fine tremor he couldn't stop by pressing his palms flat against his knees.
He should call her back. That was the thought looping through everything else — you should call her back, you should apologize, you should explain about the storm and the car and the phone dying, you should fix this before it gets worse — except every time he tried to picture actually dialing, actually hearing her voice do the disappointed thing it did, his throat closed up another degree.
The phone buzzed again in his hand. Her name on the screen, live this time, not a message.
He didn't answer it. He couldn't make his thumb move.
He just sat there on the crate with the phone vibrating against his palm, the noise of the whole lot pressing in from every direction, and felt the specific, cornered panic he hadn't let himself feel in two days rise up all at once, like it had just been waiting for an opening.
***
Hayes saw him before Avery even knew he was being looked at.
He was midway through a conversation with someone about a boat trailer when his eyes cut across the lot out of habit, doing the kind of scan he did without meaning to, checking his property, checking the crowd — and he caught the shape of Avery sitting alone at the edge of it, spine curled forward, phone gripped too hard in both hands, and something about the stillness of him read wrong even from thirty feet away.
He didn't excuse himself from the conversation so much as simply stop being in it. Crossed the lot in a straight line, cutting past a cluster of teenagers and a woman trying to flag him down about extra chairs, none of it slowing him down.
"Hey." He crouched down in front of the crate, blocking most of the crowd from Avery's line of sight without seeming to think about doing it. "Look at me."
Avery's eyes came up, glassy, unfocused in a way that had nothing to do with the fading light.
"Can't — " Avery started, and didn't finish it. His breath was coming too fast, too shallow, catching somewhere high in his chest instead of going all the way down.
"Give me the phone."
Avery didn't fight him on it. Hayes took it out of his hand — still buzzing, his mother's name lighting the screen again — and closed his fist around it without looking at the display, and stood, one hand under Avery's elbow, pulling him up off the crate with no urgency in the motion at all, just steady weight guiding him upright.
"Come on."
"People are going to —"
"Nobody's watching you." Hayes had already turned him, one broad shoulder angled to cut through the thickest part of the crowd, and Avery followed the line of him without arguing, because arguing required more air than he currently had.
They cut behind the tool shed, past the last cluster of parked trucks, into the gap in the pines where the property backed up against the ridge.
The noise didn't die completely — the radio was still audible, the low murmur of eighty people talking at once still carried on the wind — but it thinned out fast the deeper they went, muffled by the trees until it was just a hum somewhere behind them instead of a wall pressing in from every side.
Hayes stopped at a spot where the trees opened enough to see a slice of the lake through the branches, dark now, catching the last of the color draining out of the sky.
He didn't let go of Avery's arm until Avery had somewhere solid to lean — the trunk of a pine, rough bark against his shoulder blades — and even then he stayed close, close enough that his voice didn't have to carry.
"Breathe."
"I'm fine."
"You're not." No heat in it. Just fact, same as always. "Breathe anyway."
Avery's hands had found the front of his own shirt, twisting a fistful of fabric near his collar, and his breath was still coming too fast, shallow enough that his vision had gone a little blurry at the edges.
"She thinks I did this on purpose," he said, and it came out cracked. "She thinks I just — decided not to show up. Nobody asked if I was okay. Nobody asked about the storm, or the car, or — they just wanted to know why I ruined the day."
"That's on her. Not you."
"You don't understand, this is — this is what happens every time, this is the whole —"
"I know." Hayes hadn't moved. He was close enough that Avery could feel the same steady heat from him that he'd felt in the boat slip, in the water, except this time there was nothing charged in it, nothing waiting to happen.
Just presence. Solid and unmoving, planted there like he had nowhere else on earth he needed to be. "Doesn't make it right."
Avery pressed the back of his head against the tree trunk and closed his eyes.
His breath was still ragged, but it had started to slow, just slightly, dragged down by something outside of his own control — the low, even sound of Hayes's voice, the fact that nobody was asking him to explain himself or apologize or perform anything at all.
"I don't know how to stop doing this," Avery said, eyes still closed. "Every single time. I know what it's going to do to me and I let it happen anyway."
"You didn't let anything happen. Storm did that. Not you."
"That's not what it feels like."
"I know." Hayes's voice had dropped lower, rougher at the edges. "Doesn't mean it's true."
The first firework went up somewhere out over the lake — a low whistle, distant, and then the sky beyond the tree line flared white-gold for half a second before fading, a delayed crack rolling across the water a beat later.
Avery flinched at the sound despite himself.
Hayes didn't move away. If anything he shifted a half step closer, close enough now that his shoulder was nearly against Avery's, close enough that Avery could feel him there without having to look.
"You don't have to watch it," Hayes said. "We can stay right here."
"I want to." Avery opened his eyes. Through the gap in the pines the sky was catching color now, streaks of red and green blooming and dying one after another, the sound rolling in half a second behind each flash. "I just don't want to be standing in the middle of all those people right now."
"Then we won't."
Another firework went up, closer to gold this time, and it lit the small clearing enough that Avery could see Hayes's face turned toward the sky instead of toward him — steady, unbothered, the same face that had looked at a dead radiator and a stranded phone line with the exact same lack of alarm.
Nothing about him was rushing Avery toward being fine.
Nothing about him needed Avery fixed before the night could move forward.
Avery's hand, without much thought behind it, found the sleeve of Hayes's shirt and held on — not gripping, just resting there, fingers curled loose against the fabric — and Hayes didn't pull away from that either.
He glanced down at the contact for half a second, and then back up at the sky, and let it stay.
"They're not gonna stop being like that," Hayes said, after a while, low enough to sit under the next crack of sound rolling in off the water. "Your family. Not because of one bad phone call, not because of one good excuse. That's just how they are."
"I know."
"Doesn't mean you have to keep answering on their timeline."
Avery looked over at him. In the intermittent light his face was unreadable in the gaps and lit gold in the flashes, a rhythm that made it hard to read anything except the fact that he was still there, still standing close, still not going anywhere.
"You keep saying that like it's simple."
"Never said it was simple." A firework went up bright enough to catch the color of his eyes for half a second before the dark swallowed it again. "Said it's true."
Avery let his head fall back against the tree trunk.
His breathing had leveled out somewhere in the last few minutes without him tracking exactly when it happened, the tightness in his chest loosened by something that had nothing to do with the fireworks and everything to do with the fact that for the first time all day, nobody was asking anything of him at all.
"Thank you," he said, quiet, mostly lost under the next round of noise from the lake. "For coming to get me."
Hayes didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had gone rougher again, like the sentence cost him something to say out loud. "Wasn't gonna leave you standing there like that."
They stayed in the clearing through most of the show, shoulder to shoulder, the phone forgotten somewhere in Hayes's closed fist, the noise from the party a distant thing on the other side of the trees. Avery didn't let go of his sleeve. Hayes didn't ask him to.