The McLaurie Boy

The July sun was baking down through the front windows of the store, throwing a blinding glare on Jake’s monitor. He turned it away from the window and retyped the stock number for the igniter.

Jake hated this new computer system. Didn’t they understand managers needed a simple way to look up a part? It didn’t help that the customer, a gray-haired widow as tough as nails, stood with her arms crossed, waiting for an answer. “How long till I get the part?”

The woman had printed out the parts list for the water heater and even circled the item she needed.

“How old’s this thing?” Jake asked.

“Bush was president—the second one.”

Jake’s head was throbbing. He let out a sigh. “Might be time.”

“If you can’t get it, just tell me. I’ll go somewhere else.”

Jake almost laughed. This was the only hardware store for miles in this part of Utah.

She started drumming her fingers on the counter as Jake poked at the keys.

“Let me try.” Austin’s voice was only a murmur behind him.

And before he realized what he’d done, Jake had backed up a step and Austin was running his fingers over the keyboard. Jake was supposed to be training Austin, but more often Austin was showing Jake a better way. Like today.

The woman looked amused. “Just give it up, pops. This boy’s a tech native.”

Jake’s face grew hot. He had only two more days left before retirement, and he was spending them in cycles of sadness and humiliation at the hands of a twenty-five-year-old.

He’d worked thirty-one years at Fraonia Wares, twelve years on the floor, and the last nineteen as assistant manager. One day last month, he was working with an unruly customer and it was as though something had been sucked out of his chest. What always seemed to him important and noble became meaningless; he was done. He told Carl, his boss, but not before he met with the folks at Social Security in Montpiece. The numbers had to make sense, and they did.

Austin grinned. “We’ll have it for you in a week. Check back on Monday, but I can set it up to text you when it comes in.”

“You’re a sweet one. Thank you, son.” The woman reached over the counter and patted his hand, still moving on the keyboard.

Jake had about as much as his stomach could take, so he nodded at the woman, then drifted away toward the hand tool section. After the woman left, he came out into the center aisle. “You get her all settled?”

“Yup.” Austin’s face was buried in the computer monitor on the counter.

“Where’d you learn computers like that?” Jake walked over to stand behind him, watching the screen. The browser windows seemed to move in time with Austin’s mouse clicks and taps.

“Not sure. Always got them, I guess.”

Jake put his hand on his shoulder, and he turned and straightened up. Austin still had the smooth, unlined face of an adolescent, but with the broad shoulders and thick beard of a man. He stood a good six inches above Jake.

“Well, pay attention. What I know, you won’t find in a computer.”

Austin gave a quiet chuckle.

His peaceful air suited Jake. Didn’t talk too much. Maybe he’d be okay after all.

“Come on. I’ll show you how to inventory.” Jake walked to the back, and Austin followed through the swinging door that separated the store from the stockroom.

“We use these barcode scanners.” Jake held up one of the devices from a box along the back wall. “You’ve got to charge them up overnight or …”

Jake stopped.

Austin was staring at him.

“I knew Tina,” he said.

Jake almost dropped the scanner. The name stung him like a slap.

Tina was Jake’s daughter. But he hadn’t heard from her in over seven years. Everything was good between them until it wasn’t, and Jake didn’t understand why. There was a guy. Paul from Dearson, the next town over. She said she loved him, but Jake wouldn’t have it. She was too young, seventeen, and she said he was three years older. Now, it seemed like nothing, but when your daughter’s a minor, and she says she’s in love with a man of almost drinking age, a father can panic.

Jake opposed the relationship, though he’d never met Paul. She laughed at him, for how stuck he was in the old world. So he locked her up—figuratively. Denied her use of the car and monitored her phone until she got the message.

After graduation, Tina bought a cheap car and packed her things. Said she was heading west to the Bay Area to live with her mom. So he called his ex, and she said, “Yeah, she’s coming. She’s eighteen and this is what she wants.”

That was the last he saw her, the last he heard her name. Until Austin said it.

“How’d you know Tina?”

Austin’s eyes narrowed. “School.”

“High school?”

“Yup.”

Jake tossed the scanner back into the box and ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, searching for words.

Austin looked down at the floor. “But I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“I knew all her friends. She never mentioned you.” Fraonia Central only had 200 or so students; everybody knew everybody.

“We spent a lot of time together. But she was private about stuff.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Jake decided he needed to find out, not that he didn’t trust Austin. So that night, he went through Tina’s bedroom again. She’d taken much of the stuff, but not all of it, and he’d not touched anything after his search the day she left.

But now he saw her yearbook. On the little bookcase, by the window.

After clearing off the table, he brewed a cup in the Keurig and sat, the yearbook spread to the senior portraits. The sun had already blanched the color from the spine, but the inside still smelled as much like ink and paper as the day it was printed.

The graduating class, fifty-five in all. Jake had met most of them. The young men’s faces showed so much optimism. But no Austin.

Perhaps he was younger than Tina. Carl had said he was twenty-five, but he might have exaggerated his age, covering for his inexperience.

A group photo showed the junior class, with the boys and girls mixed throughout. Now the faces were small and hard to recognize. But then a tall one, in the back, his face half hidden. The broad shoulders and dark hair. Austin McLaurie, the caption said.

The McLauries were neighbors on the next road over.

Jake pushed his chair back from the table with a scrape.

He’d known Don and Sue for decades. Austin must be their boy.

Then he got it.

Carl’s wife was a McLaurie. Don McLaurie was Carl’s brother-in-law. Austin was Carl’s nephew.

When he stood and flipped the yearbook closed, his coffee mug sloshed a puddle onto the table. Let it go, he told himself. Only one more day.

Lying in bed, he had different thoughts. If Austin was Tina’s good friend as he said, and Tina kept that friendship from Jake, perhaps she and Austin were more than that. Like Paul.

And what was it Austin said. He hadn’t seen her in a while. A while being years or a few weeks?

His chest hurt, churning through it all. He’d always believed his heart had died. It had been burned black, first by the divorce, then by losing Tina. But if it were dead, how could it hurt so?

✧ ✧ ✧

Austin started his shift at noon the next day.

“Where is she?” Jake didn’t even say hello. As soon as Austin walked into the store, the words tumbled from his mouth.

Austin blinked a few times. “Tina. Uh … Stockton last, I think.”

Jake stepped in front of him. He could smell the young man’s cologne. “When’s the last you heard from her?”

“She texts me every few weeks. But she doesn’t always say where she’s at.”

Now Jake got in his face, and Austin stepped back. But Jake caught himself. He took a breath. “Next time she texts, tell her her dad misses her.”

Austin’s face softened. “Of course.”

“We didn’t part on the best of terms.”

“I’m aware.”

Jake stood for a moment, then turned and hurried through to the storeroom and into Carl’s office. Carl was sitting behind his gray steel desk, so Jake dropped into the chair opposite.

Jake gave the front of the desk a kick. The metal roared like a thunderclap. “How come you didn’t tell me?”

Carl pretended not to notice Jake’s entrance, but after a moment looked up from the invoices that were spread across the rubbery desktop.

“You could’ve told me,” Jake said.

“Look, you’ll be gone in another day, and Austin’s a good kid. He’ll do a good job. And I didn’t want to dredge up the past. You don’t need that.”

“What does Austin have to do with my past?”

Carl’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t know Austin?”

“Never met him before.”

“He knows you … and Tina.”

Jake leaned forward on the desk and asked, “What does he know about Tina?”

“Come on. They dated in high school!”

“She mentioned a Paul …?”

“The only person she ever loved was Austin.”

“She said he was older, from Dearson.”

Carl leaned forward in his chair, its springs creaking. “Paul is Austin! She was protecting him from you.”

Jake closed his eyes, his mind racing to reinterpret the past. When he opened them, all he could see was the dusty red footprint his boot had left on the desk.

Carl asked if he needed some water, but Jake rose without a word. He shuffled through the store and out the front door and just walked into the stifling noon air.

✧ ✧ ✧

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing in front of the Clip House, Fraonia’s only barber shop, but when Greg came out, he looked away down the empty street, avoiding his scrutiny.

“You going to come in, or you just going to stand there and sweat? You’re scaring away the customers.”

Jake liked Greg. He was the only barber he ever knew. His dad cut his hair until he was eighteen, then the army kept him neat. After that, it was Greg.

“Come on. Do I need to take your hand?” He turned and Jake followed him inside.

Jake slid up in the chair, and Greg billowed the cape and snapped it tight about his neck, always with a little pinch.

“You on lunch?”

“Mmm.”

“I thought you’d be done by now.”

“Last day.”

“Hmm.”

Greg took the clippers from his station and turned them on. They sprang to life with a hum that always gave Jake a shiver. His dad wasn’t the gentlest barber.

After a few passes around the sides, Greg grabbed the comb and scissors and started snipping at the top.

“Hard, I bet. Don’t know what I’d do if somebody said I couldn’t cut hair no more.”

“Remember Tina’s boyfriend?”

The snipping stopped. “Sure. Everybody knew him. Great fella.”

Greg turned the chair so that Jake was facing the mirror and their eyes met in the reflection.

“I didn’t,” Jake said.

“Nah. Sure you did. We talked all about him when you was so upset.”

“But I didn’t know who he was.”

Greg’s arms dropped to his sides. “Hmm. That’s heavy. Sounds like a whole lot of confused signals.”

Jake nodded, his throat choked with emotion.

“How long she been gone?”

“Seven years.”

“That’s a dang long time.”

“Mmm.”

They spent the rest of the time in silence as Greg put the final touches on the cut. He unsnapped the cape and shook the hair onto the floor.

The door jingled, and Austin walked in and sat in one of the empty chairs along the wall.

“I’ve something I got to check on.” Greg hung the cape on a hook and hurried through the doorway into the back.

“Greg cut your hair too?” Jake asked as he went and sat next to Austin.

Austin nodded but didn’t meet his eyes.

“You’ll do a good job at the store. Carl needs somebody with some tech sense.”

“Tina said thanks—that she misses you too.”

Jake’s heart raced, but he couldn’t raise his gaze from his boot. They looked so worn. The dust had stained the leather orange. It seeped into everything.

“But she’s not ready to see you yet.”

Jake nodded.

“I hated you.”

Austin shifted. “I know.”

Jake couldn’t find the next thing. They had said so little, but so much.

So Austin rose and opened the door, holding it for Jake. The blast of dry air almost stole his breath, but he blinked into the blinding sun and they left the shop, turning toward the hardware store.

✧ ✧ ✧

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