Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“They’re like bugs! Big bugs!” she announced.
“Not bad with drawn butter though.”
She nodded agreement and took another bite of her cheeseburger.
He drove her home in his ten-year-old Avalanche. She was seated closed by him, his arm around her and her head pressed to his side.
“Why doesn’t Granpa like you?” she said, not looking up.
“Oh, he’s a daddy like I am and your mommy was his little girl and he didn’t think I was good enough for your mommy,” Isaac said.
She thought about that for a while.
“Is that how you feel, Daddy?” she said. She shifted to look up at him.
“About what, honey?”
“Will you not like the boy I marry someday?”
“I’ll hate him.”
“You don’t know him.” She was smiling broadly now.
“Doesn’t matter, honey. I hate him already.”
“Even if it’s Kristoff?”
Kristoff was a hunky character from a Disney cartoon that Merry was currently obsessed with.
“Especially him. You bring Kristoff around and I’ll carve a canoe out of him,” Isaac said.
He could feel her shivering against him with suppressed giggles.
The Doctor had his BMW parked at the foot of the drive so Isaac couldn’t pull in. Just like every weekend. Isaac pulled up to the curb. The doctor, Merry’s grandfather and his father-in-law, stood on the porch, eyeballing the truck with distaste. He waited there at the head of the long walk, peering over the top of his glasses, a section of the Sunday paper in his hand.
“You’ll come for me next weekend?” Merry said breaking her embrace.
“You know I will,” he said. His rough hand gently brushed her hair back in place.
“Can we buy flowers and take them to Mommy?”
“We sure can. Any kind you like.”
She rose to her knees and he leaned from the wheel to accept her kiss to his cheek.
“Bye,” she said and let herself out of the truck.
He watched her run up the walk to her grandfather. He saw the doctor’s last withering glance before they stepped up to the porch and entered the house.
Isaac pulled away then and, on his way back to his apartment, stopped by the cemetery at Holy Christ to visit with Merry’s mommy.
“Joe Bob left a message for you to see him when you come in,” Candy said from behind her desk in the office shack. That’s what they called it though it was a tidy double-wide decorated like an uptown real estate office.
Isaac was clocking in for second shift.
“At the main office?”
“Naw. He’s on site today. I’ll buzz him.” She touched something on her desk and Joe Bob’s voice squawked from a speaker.
“Yeah?”
“Isaac Kane just showed up, Mr. Wiley,” she answered too loud.
“I’ll pull around. Tell him to step outside.” The speaker went dead.
Isaac stood on the roughhewn deck constructed in front the double-wide. The sun was low in the winter sky and there was a sense that work was winding down all over the site. Joe Bob Wiley’s jacked-up Dodge truck pulled around from behind the nearly completed Unit Eight. It came to a stop on the gravel before the office shack. Joe Bob waved Isaac over and leaned across the seat to shove the passenger side door open. Isaac climbed aboard and Joe Bob drove across the site to the through road and toward the highway.
He’d clocked in and was earning so it didn’t matter what the boss was up to. And Joe Bob wasn’t talking as he drove. The big man’s face was pinched. His eyes were red and tired behind his tinted Ray Bans. The muscles in his neck were tense. Joe Bob Wiley was a local football hero. A high school phenom who went on to more fame at Wake Forest until a wicked hit in his second season ruined his right knee joint beyond any repair that even modern surgery could affect. No limp and only a little pain but no more broken field running for this good old boy. So he came on board Manners Contract Builders as a gladhanding hometown celebrity and found out he liked construction and had a talent for planning. In twenty years he had his name on the company and was calling all the shots while Winston Manners retired to Florida to fish, golf and collect a monthly dividend from the growing business.
“You’re making what these days?” Joe Bob spoke up as he cruised the center lane south away from the city traffic.
“You pay me fifteen an hour,” Isaac said.
“I pay you a hell of a lot more than that,” Joe Bob snorted.
“Well, there’s overtime, sir.”
“Overtime, shit! You’re on site more than I am. You clock seventy hours a week sometimes. You earned a four figure check over Labor Day, son.”
“Guys call out. Sometimes we’re short so I come in.”
“You got no place else to be?”
“I’m widowed and my little girl lives with my wife’s father.”
“So, nothing but time on your hands, huh?”
“If I’m at work I’m not getting in trouble,” Isaac said and watched the endless lights gliding past in the opposite lane.