Page 32 of Man Advantage

Cole looked through the doorway at the tree.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m happy.”

She was quiet long enough that he could hear her breathing. “Okay. You’re telling me everything in January.”

“That’s fair.”

“Hang on. Mom’s coming.”

He got twenty minutes of Mankato after that, most of it people saying his name and handing the phone off. His father had it for two.

“You sound good,” his mother said, like she was checking her work.

“I am good.”

She let that sit a beat. “Okay, honey.”

When he hung up, Britt texted again.

Britt

we are not done

Figured

He put the phone face-down on the counter.

Ford came down and stopped in the doorway.

“That was a long one.”

“Britt handed me around the room.”

Ford poured himself the last of the coffee, and they ended up on the couch with the lamps off and the tree still on. He put his arm along the back of it, Cole leaned into his side, and Ford’s hand came down on his shoulder and stayed. Upstairs, the floor didn’t creak once.

“She had a good day,” Cole said.

“Best one she’s had.” Ford was quiet for a second. “The helmet mattered. She wouldn’t have put one on if it came from me.”

“Sure she would.”

“You weren’t here when she was four and I tried.”

Cole didn’t answer that.

Ford sat forward, elbows on his knees, his arm coming off Cole’s shoulders on the way. The quiet went on past where it should have stopped.

“My dad was a millwright,” Ford said.

Cole didn’t say anything. A year in that house had taught him that Ford would talk his way around a thing forever if you asked him about it straight.

“Thirty-one years at the mill in Rhinelander. Both knees. One shoulder. A back that quit on him around the age I am now.” Ford turned the mug in his hands. “He came home hurting every day of my life. He never said so. Not once.”

The tree was behind him. Cole could see the set of his shoulders and not much else.

“So the four of us learned to read him. Nobody taught us that. You just knew.” Ford’s voice stayed flat. “Bad night, you didn’t ask him for anything. Real bad night, you took it outside.”

“He get mean?”