12. Brooks
Brooks
“Man secretly in love with his disaster of a neighbor.
See also: idiot.”
— Crossword clue
The radiator on the tractor is clogged with thirty years of dried chaff and birds’ nests, and the heat rising off the engine block is boiling the grease straight off my knuckles.
I’m leaning into the engine bay, my socket wrench balanced against the manifold, when the high, melodic chime of a car horn echoes across the pasture.
Sophie instantly drops her small plastic sandbox shovel and screams, her purple glittery boots skidding across the gravel as she bolts toward the driveway.
“Mommy! Mommy’s here!”
I drop the wrench onto the rag, wiping my hands on my jeans as I straighten up.
A shiny, clean white Nissan Rogue is idling by the mailbox, and before the dust can even settle, the driver’s door flies open.
Lauren steps out, her arms already wide open, a bright, silver bangle bracelet clinking against her wrist.
She’s wearing a long, flowy orange skirt that looks like it belongs in a market in New Mexico, her dark hair cropped short around her chin, and she’s grinning so hard her eyes are just tiny crinkles.
“Oh, look at my bug!” Lauren shrieks, catching Sophie mid-air and spinning her in a wide, dizzying circle that has both of them laughing until they’re breathless. “You got so big! Did you grow three inches? Brooks, did you feed her a growing solution?”
“Just regular pancakes, Lo,” I say, a genuine smile breaking through as I walk over to the car.
Lauren sets Sophie down, smoothing out the kid’s pigtails with quick, maternal hands, and then turns her energy toward me. She steps right into my space and throws her arms around my neck.
We were twenty-six when we had Sophie, two kids in a small town who didn’t know the first thing about a mortgage or a baseline fire grid. It took us exactly seven months of bickering over grocery bills and screaming at the television to realize we made incredible friends but a terrible couple.
When she packed her canvas bags to go to the design institute in Chicago, there wasn’t an argument. There was just a mutual understanding that she belonged in the world and I belonged in the dirt.
“Look at you,” Lauren says, stepping back and swatting my shoulder. “You’ve got grease on your nose. You look like a mechanic in a calendar. Are you eating real food or are you just surviving on Marge’s secondary sugar production?”
“I had a salad on Tuesday,” I say, reaching into the backseat of the Rogue to haul out her massive, paint-splattered duffel bag.
“A salad. Incredible. Progress is being made,” she laughs as she reaches for Sophie’s hand. “So, Soph, show me the garden. Show me everything before your father ropes me into changing the oil on a municipal vehicle.”
We spend the next two hours doing the loop.
Lauren is exactly the same as she was when she left—full of high-octane creative energy, talking about a gallery opening she just did in Santa Fe, her fingers constantly moving as if she’s trying to sketch the clouds while she talks.
Sophie is practically vibrating, hanging onto her every word, showing her every lizard hole and interesting rock between our property line and the old creek ridge.
It’s around three o’clock when we hit the upper pasture fence, the sun high and yellow over the valley.
“Brooks, what is that sound?” Lauren asks. She tilts her head, her earrings jingling in the breeze. “Is someone… singing?”
I listen for a second. The sound is faint, but it’s definitely coming from the Gilded Goat property across the line.
It’s a high, clear, slightly off-key rendition of an old song, accompanied by the regular, rhythmic clack-clack-clack of a plastic wheel turning.
I shield my eyes against the sun, looking across the pasture.
Ember is currently executing what looks like a high-stakes agricultural maneuver.
Nothing she does ever looks normal.
Every task somehow turns into a one-woman off-Broadway production about rural determination.
She’s wearing a pair of bright yellow overalls today—completely unfastened on one side, naturally—with a white top underneath, her gold curls tied into a massive, messy topknot with a piece of pink caution tape.
She’s pushing a manual, vintage lawn aerator—the kind with the heavy iron spikes—across her overgrown front yard, and she is giving it everything she’s got.
Every three steps, the spikes get stuck in the thick clover, and she has to put her entire weight into the handle, her boots lifting off the ground as she hitches her hips to clear the turf.
Kevin is trotting right behind her, occasionally chewing on the hem of her yellow denim strap.
Lauren’s mouth drops open, a slow, delighted grin spreading across her face as she watches the spectacle. “Oh my god. Brooks. Who is the golden sunshine creature currently battling the lawn?”
“That’s Emmy,” I say. “She bought Arthur’s place.”
“Emmy,” Lauren repeats, her eyes narrowing as she tracks the way Ember stops, wrinkles her nose, and yells something at the goat before giving the aerator an aggressive, hip-checking shove.
Lauren turns her head, her eyes fixing onto my face with a sharp, terrifyingly perceptive look that she only uses when she’s about to read my entire subconscious mind.
“The city girl Davis told me about on the phone? The lottery one?”
“Yeah.”
“And you… fixed her stove last weekend?” Lauren asks, her tone dropping into a low, sing-song lilt that makes my jaw instantly tighten.
“Her thermocouple was shot, Lo. It was a fire hazard,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest and staring very hard at a fence post. “I was doing my job.”
“Uh-huh,” Lauren says, a massive, knowing smirk breaking through her features. She looks back at Ember, then back at me, her eyes tracking the rigid line of my shoulders. “Brooks Lawson. You have your ‘operational crisis’ face on. Are you guys friends?”
“We’re neighbors,” I say flatly. “She doesn’t know how to use a hammer and she has millions in the bank. I’m just keeping her from burning the hollow down.”
“Oh, you are such a liar,” Lauren laughs, her silver bangles clinking as she claps her hands together. “Soph, is that the donut lady?”
“Yes!” Sophie pipes up. “She has many different overalls and she let me eat the pancake with the smiley face!”
“That’s it. I’m going over,” Lauren declares, already throwing her leg over the low wire fence before I can reach out to stop her.
“Lauren, don’t,” I warn, my heart doing a sudden, panicked skip. “She’s working. She’s… conceptualizing her exterior landscape or whatever she calls it.”
“Brooks, she’s pushing a manual spiked roller in eighty-five-degree heat while wearing caution tape in her hair,” Lauren calls back over her shoulder, her long orange skirt sweeping through the tall grass as she bolts across the property line.
“She needs an intervention, and I need a creative peer in this valley who isn’t ninety years old! ”
I let out a long, defeated groan, rubbing my temples with my palm before grabbing Sophie’s hand. “Come on, bug. We have to go make sure your mother doesn’t start a corporate text thread.”
By the time I clear the fence line and catch up, Lauren has already breached the perimeter.
Ember has stopped the aerator, leaning her hips against the heavy T-bar handle, her face flushed a bright, pretty pink under her gold curls. She’s staring at Lauren like a rare bird has just landed in her clover patch.
“Hi! I’m Lauren,” Lauren says, holding out a hand covered in rings. “I’m Sophie’s mom, and I am currently rescuing you from that iron torture device.”
Ember’s eyes widen, her mouth doing that little O-shape before she breaks into a massive, relieved grin.
“Oh thank God. I’ve been out here for forty minutes and I am ninety percent sure I’ve permanently dislocated my left hip. Emmy. It’s so nice to meet you. Your skirt is gorgeous.”
“Right?” Lauren beams, gesturing down to the orange fabric. “I found it in a thrift shop in Laos. So, you’re the graphic designer?”
“I was!” Ember says. She lets go of the handle and steps around the machine, completely ignoring me as I stop a few feet away with Sophie.
“I spent years explaining to men named Marcus why sans-serif fonts have more emotional transparency than serif fonts. It was an absolute nightmare.”
“Oh my god, Marcus,” Lauren gasps. “They’re always named Marcus or Julian, and they always wear those minimalist gray cardigans that cost more than my monthly rent.”
“Yes! The gray cardigans!” Ember shrieks, her hands flying in the air. “And they always say things like ‘let’s lean into the friction of the negative space’ when they really just mean they don’t want to pay the illustrator!”
I stand there, my hands tucked into my back pockets, watching the two of them instantly merge into a single, high-frequency creative entity.
They become instant best friends in under ninety seconds.
It’s honestly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever witnessed.
Sophie is standing between them, her head turning back and forth like she’s watching a tennis match.
“They’re talking about fonts, Daddy,” she whispers, looking up at me with total confusion.
“I know, bug,” I mutter under my breath. “Just don’t look ‘em in the eye.”
“Brooks told me you bought the place from Arthur’s estate,” Lauren says, turning her eyes toward the old house. “The bones of this house are incredible, Emmy.”
“It’s beautiful, right?” Ember says, her tone dropping into that sincere, softer register she used when we talked about the mill fire. “It’s falling apart, and money is the only thing keeping it from returning to the soil, but… it feels real. I wanted to build something I could actually touch.”
Lauren looks back at her, her expression softening into something genuinely sweet. “I get it. I totally get it. Brooks is a pragmatist—he just sees dry rot and code violations—but this place has a soul.”
“Hey,” I interject. “I see functionality. If the porch collapses, the soul doesn’t keep the rain off the floorboards.”