Page 228 of What We Brave
"Scrubs!" Laine calls back. "Any color. I'm not picky anymore."
I hear his door open. Footsteps. The third bedroom door — the junk room, the catch-all, the room where Laine's flea market dresser that looks like a million bucks lives alongside moving boxes she hasn't unpacked and a couch that doesn't fit anywhere else.
I finally release the pillow and drag myself vertical. Pull on shorts. Follow the sound of drawers opening and closing.
The third bedroom looks like a storage unit had a baby with a thrift store. Laine's dresser — the one Blake found at a flea market and spent two weekends refinishing — is pushed against the far wall. Her couch is angled in the corner. Three boxes are stacked by the window, stilltaped shut. A laundry basket sits on top of a suitcase she never fully unpacked.
Blake's standing by the chair in the corner. The one that has my dumbbells on it. He lifts the dumbbells.
Scrubs.
Neatly folded, underneath thirty pounds of iron. Because at some point I apparently used that chair as a weight rack and buried her work clothes under my equipment.
"Oh," I say.
Laine stares at the scrubs. Stares at me. Stares at the dumbbells in Blake's hands.
"How did my scrubs get under your dumbbells?"
"I... don't know."
"In a room that none of us sleep in."
"That's a fair question."
She takes the scrubs from Blake. Holds them to her chest. Closes her eyes.
"Thank you." It's directed at Blake. Then she opens her eyes and looks at the room — the boxes, the dresser, the displaced couch, the general chaos of her life since she. moved in. "I have stuff in every room of this house and none of it is where it should be."
She's not angry. She's tired. There's a difference, and I can hear it.
"I know," Blake says. Quiet. Like he's been thinking about it too.
She gets dressed. Grabs her bag. Kisses Blake on the cheek, kisses me on the mouth — quick, distracted — and she's out the door.
The house goes quiet.
Blake looks at the room. I look at Blake.
"She needs her own space," he says.
"Yeah."
He nods once. Heads for the workshop.
I stand there for another minute, looking at the flea market dresser and the boxes and the couch that doesn't fit anywhere. Three weeks she's been here and her life is still in boxes. Not because she hasn't committed — because we haven't given her anywhere to land.
Fix it, Garrison.
Tonyand I grab lunch in the rig between calls — sandwiches from the gas station, the kind where you don't look too closely at the expiration date. We're parked in the shade behind the station, windows down, engine off.
"You look like shit," Tony says. Lovingly.
"Thanks, man."
"No, like — more than usual. You okay?"
"Yeah. Just..." I pick at my sandwich. "Laine stuff."
