Chapter 19 #3
I pull my phone out, thumb over to a box store app, and order a casting kit.
“Order some prints for your walls while you’re there,” Cynnie suggests.
“Are my walls too bare for you?”
“Yes. And your chairs are too ouchy.”
“My chairs?”
“The ones around your dining table? Worse than sitting on the floor. I love your beanbags, though. So scrunchy.”
While I can’t believe I’m about to offer this, I say, “How about we go and do some shopping on your next free day? Replace those chairs and get some things you like for the walls. Bee prints? Cherry blossoms? I know you love those.”
She tips her head back to look at me, those dark eyes depthless. “Really?”
“Sure. I have no talent for decorating. None. Zippo. I let the decorator do everything. Those chairs are uncomfortable. That’s probably why I eat in my rig or in the beanbag.
But I like eating at the table with you, so let’s get some comfortable chairs.
And if you see something you want on my walls, I’ll get that, too.
Whatever you think looks good. I want you to feel at home. ”
“I do feel at home here. Too much. That’s why I blurted all that out. I shouldn’t have said it.”
I turn and pull her up onto my chest so I can look down into her eyes. “Cynnie, baby, I want to know those things. I want to hear what’s going on in your head.”
“No one wants to hear my worries—”
“I do.”
She bites her lip and watches my face for a moment, then says hesitantly, “Bees are endangered. Some bees in particular, but all bees are declining. They’re so important to our world, and they’re threatened.
I worry one day we’ll wake up and there will be no more buzzies.
I volunteer and give money to a bee conservation program, but it’s not enough. Would you help me?”
“Of course, I will. Tell me what to do.”
“We could start with some small things? Like the flowers in your planter. We could swap out a few of them with flowers that are more bee friendly. And we could make a little bee garden on the roof. And there’s a fund-raiser coming up in November you could help with?”
“I would love to do all those things.”
Her smile peeps back out. “Really? My family thinks I’m wasting my time on bees.”
“Then they don’t read enough. I’ve seen news stories on bee conservation. I know bees are important and in trouble.”
She slides her arms around my neck and hugs me. “Thank you.”
“Now tell me what’s fucked up and unfair.”
She sighs and buries her face in my neck. “Everything. Is that why you do it?”
“Is that why I do what?”
“Hack. Break into systems and take people’s data.”
I let out a long breath and cuddle her to my chest. No one’s ever asked me why I hack.
Logan and Manny and Mac assume it’s something I learned in the Navy that’s become my livelihood.
Squid and Lindy and the other hackers I know, we talk about the how of hacking, but very, very rarely the why of it.
“I told you about my Uncle Max. The one I wasn’t named after.”
She nods, looking up at me with those depthless eyes.
“He cared about me when no one else did. He made sure I went to school, did my homework, had enough to eat. He’d been in the Navy himself and when I followed in his footsteps, he was so fucking proud.
He came to my graduation from basic and watched with tears in his eyes.
It meant so much to me. I saw him a few times while I was enlisted, but I was stationed half-way around the world and I didn’t get back often.
When I was finally discharged, he was the first person I went to see.
” I take a deep breath, steeling myself to tell her the rest. “He was this huge figure to me. Larger than life. Now that I’m an adult, I realize he wasn’t that big a guy.
Probably not much bigger than I am now, but when I was a kid, he was huge.
He was everything. I came back and found this tiny, broken man.
He’d dropped to ninety pounds. Lost all his muscle mass.
When I was a kid, he had this booming voice.
I could hear him a county away. He could barely speak when I got out.
This thin, high, reedy sound. I hated listening to him talk because that voice .
. . it was the voice of an old man. He wasn’t even sixty.
He never got to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. ”
“What happened to him?”
“He had a disease no one ever heard of. Sporadic inclusion body myositis. It atrophies the muscles. There’s no cure; no treatment that’s covered by insurance.
All the people he’d helped in his life—not just me—he always had someone under his wing.
Everyone abandoned him when he couldn’t work anymore.
He was in this V.A. hospital, dying by inches.
I was the first visitor he’d had in months. ”
“I’m so sorry,” Cynnie whispers.
I nod. “It just made me realize how fucked everything was. This man who’d given of himself all his life.
Never asked for anything. His big reward wasn’t an easy retirement on some tropical island.
It was eating through a tube because his throat muscles stopped working.
It was having no control over his bladder or bowels.
That was my first hack as a civilian. Breaking into his medical records and finding out what he had and that there was no cure and that the drugs that could slow it down weren’t covered by insurance.
It made me so angry. I wanted to take him away and go to Canada or Mexico where I could get the drugs but he told me no.
He told me to sell everything he had, take his money, and live my best life with it.
He told me he’d lived by the rules and it hadn’t done him any good.
He told me to make my own rules. Do the best I could for myself and the people I cared about and not let anyone limit me or tell me what I couldn’t do.
I haven’t since then. I’ve lived the way Uncle Max wanted me to. ”
Cynnie pushes up my chest and kisses me.
“He’d be proud of you. It’s what attracted me to you.
Beyond this.” She tugs my beard and runs her hand down my chest. “When I saw you at playgroup with Mary Lisa. She was all over you. And I could tell you weren’t into her, but I thought you’d either be mean to her to drive her away or just let her fawn all over you the way some guys do because they like the attention.
You didn’t do either. You made her stop but you were nice about it.
You didn’t embarrass her or make a scene.
You did it your way. I liked that. That’s why I asked you to dinner.
I thought you should be rewarded for being so nice. ”
I crane my neck to kiss the tip of her nose. “I got my reward. I’m sorry I didn’t say yes when you asked me, though.”
“It worked out.”
I cradle her and look into those fathomless brown eyes. “I feel like I might have fucked up again.”
“No, you haven’t. Why would you say that?”
“Because it took you being big for a night to tell me all this. And for me to share with you about Uncle Max. If I was doing my job as your daddy, we’d have talked about this stuff already.”
She shakes her head, her hair swishing over her shoulders, tickling my arms where they’re left bare by my T-shirt.
“You haven’t fucked up. I need an escape from all my worries.
When I’m home, they’re all I think about and I hate it.
I hate being home and I hate feeling overwhelmed by everything.
When I’m here with you, I feel safe. I feel free.
It’s made me so happy. You’ve made me happy, Max.
Maybe we should make one night a week when we’re together for me to be big so we can talk about the hard things, but I don’t want it every day. ”
“Definitely not every day,” I agree. “Once a week would be good. Maybe on a Sunday night so we clear everything out and start the new week fresh?”
She tips her head to the side. “Every other Sunday night. On weeks when we’ve been to playgroup, I’d like to keep being little.”
“Of course. Sorry, I didn’t think of that. Monday nights on the weeks we have playgroup.”
“You’ll come to the next one, right? Mary Lisa didn’t put you off?”
“I’ll absolutely come to the next one. I can’t wait to take you to the mat at Twister again.”
She pokes me in the chest. “I only lost because you fell on me.”
I chuckle. “All’s fair in love and Twister, baby.”