I’m Still Here by Corey Millard

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I took Barb over to Big Sky a few months back. The time had come to either figure it out or put it to rest between us. We did the whole thing—the skiing and snowshoeing. We got drunk and ate well: beef steaks and elk steaks and buffalo steaks, with all kinds of fixings. We made love almost like we used to. Like wild dogs. And we drove around with the windows open in the snow and the sun. We bought a pack of smokes for the first time in a decade, and we smoked and laughed and listened to everything we hadn’t listened to in God knows how long: Little Feat and Jackson Brown and Bonnie Raitt—the one song in particular.  I don’t know what it was for us–where it went sour, or sideways, whatever it was. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The point is you don’t quit trying. You just keep coming at it. You don’t take no for an answer. 

#

It’s early now, springtime, a month or so after our trip, and cold and grey and unrepentant. Rain like I haven’t seen in all the years I’ve been out here in Western Oregon—which is saying something. The washer and dryer are going in the basement. Me and Barb watch them rattle. The noise almost drowns out her father, Bill, whose snores bang around like a diesel engine in the guest room above us. 

Big Sky had failed, and Bill had come to help her move out. But what was supposed to be two days has turned into almost a month. Worse: Bill used to live in the neighborhood, and he walks around, talks at me, like he owns the place, like he knows all the things I don’t. 

Barb turns to me, angling her face the way she does. She’s in the teal jumpsuit, on the way to spin or some other thing. She looks good. Two kids from her first marriage, and still everything’s in its right place. But there weren’t ever any complaints about any of that. 

“I don’t like him here any more than you do,” she says. “I hope you see that.”

“I doubt it.”

She frowns. 

“It’s not just him,” I say. “It’s this house. I’m up against it.”

The gutter’s leaking. That’s the problem. And the roof.  Bugs are chewing apart the walls. You don’t hear much about whole houses coming down. But it happens. And they all say there’s an earthquake coming.

“Skip,” she says. She waves a hand in front of my face like I don’t see it. “You don’t have to be here.”

“It’s my house,” I say. 

“Oh, Skip,” she says, nearly rolling her eyes. “Can’t we do this without going crazy?”

#

The problem is there’s too much to keep up with. The Clam-man, Kristoff, for instance—he’s twelve days late on rent. He’s in the old house, the first one me and Barb went in on, where we lived for six years before we started this little game of buying and renting houses. The Clam-man’s under the carport, huddled around a fire and sipping a beer when I pull up in the truck. He raises a hand at me, chews his mustache. A swatch of unshaved hairs stretches from beneath the right side of his jaw to his chin. The Clam-man was a hockey player, a good one. He was drafted to play in the NHL. But a puck snapped him in the temple just out of college, and now he can’t see, or shave, a good portion of his own face. This is the problem. The team rescinded their draft pick. The Clam-man wasn’t a hockey player anymore. 

He started drinking semi-professionally then, moved back north of Boston, took a job digging clams. But unlike you and me, the Clam-man never saw it as a tragedy. I’ve even seen him get misty about it—after a few drinks, before he’s too far gone—talking about the clam-men, plugging these steel-toothed baskets early in the morning—forty, fifty feet into the water, and down then into the rocks and silt underneath. Kristoff says that up-close you can see their jaws tick, their eyes curled up inside their heads, combing through the mud, searching for the edge of a clam. They do all right by themselves, Kristoff says. He says he did just fine. But it’s long hours. And cold. And you need to haul. It’s not like some prize fish. You really need to fill the buckets. 

“Skip,” he says, spotting me. He doesn’t quite have the accent—New England—but you can hear it anyway. He shows me a beer. It’s just beer now for him. And from what I can tell it’s an improvement. 

“How we doin?” I say, joining him. 

“Well, Skip.” He pauses a long time. “I’m supposed to be gettin after something out here, but I can’t hardly remember anything anymore.”

His ex-wife came out here with their daughter, Josie, and even though he wasn’t wanted, the Clam-man pushed through it. He did the right thing. He left the clamming and came all the way out here. He kept his distance, but he did what he was supposed to and pushed through it. 

“Clam-man,” I say, steady as I can. “I can’t have you with a fire under the carport.” 

“Is that the truth?” he says. 

I nod at him. The rain comes down thick on the roof above us.

His eyes widen then. He nods, pleased, and points at me. “I know why you’re here,” he says, almost grinning. “I do. What is it, the fifth?”

“Right now it’s the twelfth.”

“Is that right?”

“Almost a full two weeks over.”

He pulls down his fly, turns his back and relieves himself. “Josie’s over there at her mom’s,” he says over his shoulder. “God. I think?” He finishes and shakes off a little, but he takes a long time to put himself away and turn back. “I don’t have one single bad word to speak about her mother, Skip. What do you think about that?” He cracks a new beer. “Hey Skip,” he says. “I can’t well enough have a fire out in the middle of a rainstorm. I need the cover, see?”

“We might just have to skip the fire, Clam-man.”

He bends in close to the flames, nods earnestly.

“I know it’s difficult.” I give him a moment to absorb what I’ve said. He needs it—the time, and the patience. “But it’s an agreement, Kristoff—between us.”

“Mmmm.” He nods. 

“The rent,” I say, just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. 

“Oh,” he says. “Right. That’s the truth.”

I point at a pile of lumber sitting in the back, under a green tarp. He’d asked if he could put a ramp in for the kid, whose legs had quit on her, almost out of nowhere, two years ago—not polio, but something like it. “Is this what we talked about?”

“Pine,” he says. “I can’t figure who’d use pine on something’s gotta support a seventeen year-old in a wheelchair.”

“Shoulda gone with cedar.”

“I woulda gone with cedar, Skip. But it all comes down through the state with the kid—the disability and everything.”

I wait for a moment.  I’m not an unkind man.  There’s business, and then there’s business. “You’re late almost every month, Kristoff.” 

“That’s the truth.” He blinks hard and swallows. “You think the pine’ll even stand up to it, Skip? I’ve got half a head to send it back and figure the difference out of pocket.”

I look with him at the lumber, and at the walk-up, where they’ll put Josie’s ramp. “Kristoff, you can’t keep rolling over me like this.”

He deflates a little, looks down at his feet.

“I can’t imagine,” I say. “With the kid. I really can’t—”

“Once I get this done, Skip.” He takes a sip of the beer, chews around a little and stokes the fire, keeping his eyes low and away. “After that, I promise.”

“Okay,” I say, and I reach out my hand, and he takes it. 

#

 

Barb’s father is feet up on the coffee table when I get home.  He’s got the TV on, a thick glass of brown liquor teetering on his lean old belly. The rain’s let up, but only some, and he’s opened the shades to draw in whatever light splits through the clouds. 

“Looks like you’re having yourself a day,” I say.

“I thought we might get us a little golf,” he says, flipping through the channels. “It’s the Masters.”

“Not yet,” I say. “Not yet, it’s not.” 

He turns slow and stiff in his seat.

“It’s not,” I say.

He pivots back to the television, flips and flips until he finds a basketball game.

“We’ve got a gutter needs fixing,” I say. “If you’re looking for something to do.” 

“Right,” Bill says. “Sure. Barb told me all about this.” He draws air like someone who’s never once considered his own lungs. “We keep ourselves busy, you and me—more than most men—so I understand your plight. But, Skip, I’m not here to help the both of you.” 

“Bill,” I say, “right now it doesn’t seem like you’re here to help either of us.” 

Again he turns, slow and stiff, in his seat. 

I change tactics: “What if I make the three of us some dinner?”

“Well,” he says. “It might be I’ve got some folks coming by.” The veins and tendons jut out his neck like a waterpark. “We wouldn’t say no to dinner.” 

But before I protest, or ask who, there’s a splash at the back window, over the kitchen sink—a muddy streak of leafstem and silt, pouring over the glass. 

Bill looks at me, thrilled, I’m sure. “Something else to fix.” 

“When’s Barb coming back?” I call after him, taking a broomstick from the closet and heading to the back landing. 

“Who said she’s coming back?” 

I poke at the gutter. It groans, heavy, like some ship waiting to sink. “Did she say she’s not coming home?” 

Bill doesn’t answer right away. But when he does, it’s loud and joyful and sanctimonious: “Skip. Reminder, Skip: she’s leaving you.”

I make a drink in the dining room and pour another for Bill. He’s still zipping through the stations when I sit next to him. His shoulders are stiff, disproportionate. Me and Barb used to joke that he was a victim of early-onset rigor mortis. 

“How ‘bout I stew a pork butt?” I say. I hand him the glass, and he takes it, and our fingers touch. 

He picks with his tongue and teeth at a loose piece of lip skin.

“You’ll keep an eye on it?” I say. “If I step out?”

He stops clicking the remote then. His eyes widen and a smugness settles over his face. On the screen, like a portrait in Fellowship Hall, is that little stone bridge, the azaleas and dogwood and pine: Amen Corner. 

“What do you know,” he says. “Skip? What do you call this little golf tournament?”

The Masters, Bill. The Masters. “You were right,” I say. And I try—truly—not to let my tail between my legs, but it’s already there. 

“Say it again,” he says. 

But I don’t. There’s more to life. I swear that to myself, again and again. 

Instead, I go to the kitchen and slice the onions and start them going in the Dutch oven. And I pull the pork from the fridge, solid still, and half-frozen. And I put it into the pot with some Dr. Pepper and chicken stock and thyme and lots and lots of salt. And I put the whole thing in the oven and call it good, or enough; or done—anyway—at least. 

#

The hardware store in town doesn’t have much. But I take what I can: a few tubes of roofing cement, some caulk, a couple joiners. A little cooperation from the weather and the gutter ought to be an easy fix. And then everything can get moving again, the way it used to. 

The Clam-man’s at the checkout with two boxes of nails and a new level. His trick eye is all milky. I meet his gaze, but he doesn’t seem to see me until I rap him on the shoulder. 

“Skip,” he says, looking down at my supplies. “A man in your position—I thought you’d have people doing this kind of thing for you.”

“I still work a little bit, Clam-man—from time to time.”

“Nobody gets a breath.”

I shrug. “It could be that’s the problem.” 

He laughs, lightly at first, then more intensely. 

“Rain’s let up,” I say. “I’m hearing it might stay that way a couple days—if you’re going after that ramp.”

“Oh boy,” he says, laughing still. “You can’t trust what they say. We been around long enough to know that.”

I nod. “Where are you off to next?”

“Honestly, Skip? I get in the truck these days and I go where it takes me. I’m not even kidding. That’s what it feels like.” 

“What do you say it takes you over to the bar, Clam-man? I’ll buy you a beer.” 

“Skip,” he says. His voice nearly cracks. “That’s gracious as hell. But I’ve got all these things going on.” He screws his face up, sniffles. “My fucking head. Right now? I can’t hardly keep track.” 

“All right,” I tell him. “But you’ll be careful? Clam-man? Is that fair to ask?” 

He laughs, harder than before. “That’s the truth,” he says. And he nods. But his brow droops, and his eyes go off someplace else. 

“Hey,” I say. “Let’s you and me get a drink. I’ll drive.” 

“All right, Skip,” he says. “Yeah. Okay. Sounds good.” 

#

The Clam-man orders a short glass of beer. He’s going back and forth between the two TVs—one with the News and the other with the Mariners. He breathes heavily, blinks too often. 

And when I clap for an inning-ending double-play, he looks at me and does a double-take, and says, “Jesus,” as though we hadn’t come together. “Who’s following who?”

“Who’s who?” I say. “Who’s anybody?” Because why would I correct him? What good would it do? 

He grunts, bowing his head. And when he comes back up, he looks bloodless. “Skip?”

“Clam-man,” I answer. 

He shakes his head, puffs his cheeks. He looks worried, confused. He looks lost. “I don’t know.” 

So I sit there with him, watching the TVs. We sip our beer. We watch the baseball. The Mariners are at the Red Sox. Except it’s in Coral Gables, Florida, or some such place. It’s preseason, maybe, or worse: a replay of preseason. Nobody’s really at home. Nobody’s playing for anything. 

After a few minutes, the Clam-man says, “Where’s Beth?” 

“Beth?” I say. 

“Your wife.”

“Barb, Clam-man.”

He snaps his fingers. He looks disappointed. “Barb,” he says. “Jesus.” He thumps himself in the forehead.

“It’s all right,” I say. “She’s probably working.” 

“What’s that she does?”

“She’s pivoted again.”

“What’s she charge?”

“You couldn’t afford it.”

“Yeah?” He laughs. “Well, whatever it is, I guarantee it’s not enough.” He rubs the puck-dent keloid on his temple and clinks his glass to mine. “You did it right, Skip. I would’ve did it that way if I could’ve.”

“I spend a lot of the day waiting on the mailman, Kristoff. Sometimes I go to the bank.  I don’t do very much.”

He nods at the TVs. His eyes—both of them—are glassy. “Even so,” he says. 

“Why don’t I take you home, Clam-man?” 

“It’s just beer, Skip. That’s all it is these days.” 

“Sure,” I say. “That’s all right. But the truck is the thing. You don’t have the truck.” 

“I’ve got the truck,” he says. “Somewhere close by.” He puts his hand over mine then, staring hard and still after the television with the baseball. “I used to be one of these guys,” he says. “Can you believe that?” 

“Hey,” I tell him. “You’re the Clam-man. You’re doing what you can.”

He squeezes my hand, looks at me crookedly, almost like Barb when she’s angry. “Skip,” he says. “What the hell are you doing here with me?” 

I take him back to his truck an hour or two later. We sit for a time in the lot at the hardware store. We don’t say anything. He breathes and wipes his eyes repeatedly. And when he gets out, he nods at me, and I nod at him, and together, at the same time, we say, “Goodnight.” 

#

Bill stands inside the doorway with an apron on and nothing else. Music booms through the neighborhood—Big Band stuff, Benny Goodman or something like it—and the street is flooded with poorly parked cars. It’s dark now and he’s got a drink in his hand that sweats down onto his toes. “I’m surprised you’re here,” he says.

I drop the bag of patching gear and look around him, under his shoulders, past his ribs, keeping my distance. The living room is scattered with older folks, twisting and turning in their bras and underwear. It’s a pungent odor of slow-stewed pork and onion, and the sick-sweet ripening of age.

“That gutter’s in wait,” Bill says, not quite slurring. He runs his tongue over his teeth. “You know as well as I do—” his eyes go off. He brings his teeth together and parts his lips, attempting, maybe, to smile. 

I slip around him, careful still. He doesn’t move. 

The kitchen’s littered with wine and liquor bottles, and the pot of pork sits on the stovetop with six or seven forks stuck into it. It’s cooked, maybe, but not yet done. They’ve eaten the tender parts from around the edges.

Two men and a woman sit robed at the dining room table. They’re younger, no more than thirty. The woman is busty and thin, with her hair and pink face done up something like Barb might have tried too many years ago. One man is sinewy and black, the other short, but bulky—strong—and white. They wedge closer together when they see me.  

I nod at them, attempt a smile.  “Who are you?” I call. 

They stare back. The girl adjusts her cleavage. Beneath her robe is a string-bikini, zebra-striped. “Is he your dad?” she says, nearly yelling over the music. “In the apron?”

“In-law.”

She nods, as though my answer has put everything into place. “I’ve been doing this long enough,” she says. “You don’t judge.” 

“Who are you?” I say again. 

“We strip.” She shrugs. “He called us out here.” 

“That makes as much sense as anything.”

“You can pay for more.” 

“Pay for what?”

“Whatever,” she says. “Whoever: you, anybody. It doesn’t matter.” 

I blush.  

“Like I said: you don’t judge.” 

I blush again, harder. 

“This kind of thing—you know, they get to a certain age, and…forget it.”

#

You’re not meant to stand on the top-step of a stepladder. Most of them have stickers telling you just that: Do not step on the top step; It is not a step. But it can be tempting. Some ceilings are too tall by only that much, and against your better judgment you go higher than you should. Many times, more often than not, you’ll be just fine. Catastrophes are few and far between. But they happen. I fell in my early twenties, for instance—twisted my back up for the rest of my life. I still have the ladder, but I don’t go all the way up anymore; I don’t use the top step—I made that agreement with Barb.

I stand now in the backyard with that very ladder by my side, watching my house writhe with naked strangers—amongst other things—sizing up the gutter. I haven’t cleaned it in God knows how long: ten years, maybe, at least since I stopped working, since me and Barb went in on our little real estate empire.

A few steps up I see the problem: the joiner, crooked under all those years of filth and weight, has split to the side and opened a seam beneath it. Higher still, the gutter brims with tree muck and sludge. I clear a spot, but the spot I clear just gurgles before roiling back in. 

I ought to clean it out proper, give it a chance to dry before attempting the fix. Otherwise, that wedge of water, when the gutter fills, will spill again onto the window, and find the gaps and seams and openings around it, and weave and weasel between the clapboards, swallowing the house from the inside. The problem is it’s the rainy season. Out here, it’s almost always the rainy season. 

I start at the corner, hoisting fistfuls of the stuff. It takes work, and for a while it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anywhere. But with time, it starts to move. The wet air feels good and cool around me. And it’s a strange sensation—nostalgia, maybe—when the mud, flung up on my forearms, begins to dry and stiffen. 

I’m maybe a third of the way through when the back door opens, and the strippers step out for a smoke. They stand close together, shoulders turned up for warmth, leaning in to catch a light off the same match. 

I tell them to try and keep it down, to shut the door to keep the smoke from the house. And I tell them, please, to make sure the match is out before tossing it: there’s been all this rain, but it’s dry under the soffit, protected, and those leaves there, and whatever else, are like tinder; it all wants badly for an excuse to go up in flame. And I’m about to tell them to keep the butts off the lawn, to toss them in a beer can or something, when headlights flash on the street, and a car door thuds. And I react. I twist and throw my balance. The ladder’s footing tweaks, and I put my hands up and out and try to steady, and I yell, to Barb, of all people—Barb. And I reach for the gutter, but I miss; and it’s a small eternity, suspended in the air, before I land on my back.

 

It’s not five seconds and the strippers are standing, staring over me in their robes, backlit in the tripped motion light. The slender black man crouches, and his robe flashes open. A spangly pink thong cradles his enormous package. “My friend,” he says to me. His voice is thick but soft. “I worked construction for my mother. And there’s an earthquake coming. And this house ain’t worth the effort.” He pokes and prods, asking what hurts, before nodding at his friends to help sit me up. My tail-end throbs, but nothing’s broken. And there’s no blood to scare anybody off.

The woman squats by me, flooded in fluorescence. I see now that her eyes are the color of her cigarette filter. “How’s your head?” she says. She smells like sour apple. She is enormously, suffocatingly beautiful. 

“Nothing,” I say. “Solid.”

“Vision?” She moves a finger in front of my face.

“Clear as day.” 

The scent is on her lips—a sticky gloss you could suck off like a lollipop. 

“Barb has pills,” I say. “Upstairs in the bedroom.” 

They puzzle for a moment, half-frozen and looking at each other.

“Hey,” I say. I’m not myself. I don’t feel myself. “Couldn’t we all use a pill?” 

The woman runs a hand through my hair, and the black man smokes, and the short white man, unspeaking, takes me by the shoulders and lifts me by himself. 

He brings me through the house. There are more bodies now, thirty I’d say, many of them fully naked—bras and underwear scattered across furniture and lampshades. Horns howl jazz, mad, through the speakers. One man’s long thin penis brushes my shoulder as we start up the stairs. 

 

The woman says I might be concussed. We’re in the bedroom, and the white man has put me to bed. 

The black man nods. “Concussed,” he says.

“No,”  the white man says.  It’s the first time I’ve heard him speak. His voice is extraordinarily high in pitch, effeminate. They look at him in a moment of protest, but he says it again: “He’s not concussed.” 

The woman sits beside me. “We go to nursing school together,” she says. “But Ryan,” she nods at the white man, “he wants to be a doctor.” 

The white man—Ryan—squints at her, lowers his head. “No names,” he says. 

The woman looks at the black man. He nods. And she nods. And they look together at Ryan, and he nods back. 

I nod, too, vindicated maybe, because of some idea I have that nobody’s only a stripper. 

The woman scoots me up the mattress, puts pillows under my head. “Where’s your wife?” she says. 

“Gone.” I say it almost instinctively.

“Trouble?” she says. 

I nod. “I don’t like to say it.”

The woman holds my face between her hands. She peers in at me, alarmingly close. “Do you have kids?” 

“Not my own.”

“Did you want them?” Her voice is soft. Her lips are wet. They’re all I can look at. 

“I don’t think so. I don’t know.” 

“And your name’s Skip?”

“How do you know my name?”

“I overheard it. Somebody said it.” 

“Skip,” I say. 

“What’s your real name? Your birth name?”

“I’m Skip,” I say. “I’m just Skip.” 

“That’s nobody’s name,” the black man says. 

“It’s a country club name,” the white man says. “It’s a nickname. It’s a country club nickname.” 

“Most of the time,” I say. “Probably. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. Who ever knows what their parents are thinking?” I stand now, and I wobble, but they let me do it, and I go to the cabinet and start looking for the pills. “Do your parents know about all this, by the way? What you do?” 

“Nursing?” the black man says. 

I laugh. 

“With respect,” he says. “My mother paid me eighteen bucks an hour to demo, to frame and hang drywall. They call that good money. But that doesn’t mean it’s any kind of life worth living.” 

I find the pills beneath a pack of extra-large band-aids: Oxycodone. 

Barb would take the pills in halves. She didn’t like the way they made her feel—queasy, away from herself—but the pain in her knee, after the last surgery, would sometimes keep her up at night, and we didn’t have many other options. 

I shake the bottle; I take two before tossing it to the woman. She pulls a bill from her top, and with a lighter, crushes a small palmful of pills beneath it, keeping the dust from going all over the place. She rolls the bill up, then, and makes little lines with her long, glinting fingernails, and they go one after the other, snorting until it’s finished.

“Do you get a lot of calls for this kind of thing?” I say.

The white man nods. He’s serious, always serious. “We get all sorts of calls. Some things you’d expect, other things you wouldn’t. We don’t judge.”

“I’m not,” I say. “I don’t.”  

He watches me. He looks almost wounded. His friends’ eyes are cast off elsewhere, but he keeps his on mine. “It’s nobody’s business,” he says. 

#

Bill is at the pork. It hasn’t cooked any longer, and he’s into the tough stuff, tearing like an animal at a kill. In the dining room, the nakeds stagger to the Grateful Dead. They sneak and fumble pokes at flaps of skin, pretending like they know the words, like there are words in the first place. The strippers mount the table, naked now themselves. They slither in space, serious about their work.

I make a whiskey and glide into the living room. I find my old spot on the loveseat, and everything’s just how I know it: the water ring where I set my drink on the side-table, the shape of me, pressed into the cushion. The lamps are on, and the light is big and kind. And even with everything happening, I can, at least for a moment, figure my place. 

 

Bill stands in front of me when I open my eyes. I don’t know how much time has passed. The apron’s gone. He just hangs there. “Does this make you uncomfortable?” he says.

I think hard before deciding not to answer. 

He starts swaying to “Candyman.” He laughs like he’s answering a question. 

“I didn’t take you for a Deadhead,” I say. 

“It moves,” he says. “Skip. It moves. You can’t listen to Dizzy and the Duke forever.” 

I watch him lumber, then, into the dining room, where he slumps into a chair, the haze of kitchen light only barely creeping onto him. He looks up at the young woman dancing before him, fusses with a mess of bills. The others are fading. Old skin presses tired against chair leather and wood floor. Somebody’s switched the record speed. It sounds blurred, undefined. 

The black man sits on Bill’s lap and whispers into his ear. I watch them, batting eyes like early lovers. They laugh and blush, turn away before turning back again and joining eyes. The man rubs his hands through Bill’s hair. He’s making money, but you can’t tell. Or maybe he’s off the clock. It’s as real as anything I’ve seen. He reaches one hand low to clutch Bill between the legs, and with the other he cradles Bill’s head to kiss the forehead, the cheek, the lips…     

#

The Clam-man’s on his back on the lawn. His knees are bent up with his hands on his chest. He breathes with great effort. Tufts of grass sprout up all around him. By the ramp, the saws are going. And the weather is good—dry, but it threatens. 

Josie is in the wheelchair by the house, six or seven nails sticking out her mouth. Next to her, a redheaded woman is on her knees, clutching a hammer inside the crook of her elbow. She wears a yellow t-shirt, cut off at the shoulders. Her hair, heavy with sweat, falls from behind her ears. She pushes it back again and again, but it sways always in front of her eyes.

“How we doin?” I shout.

The Clam-man sees me before leaning up and resting on his elbows. He grins. “Getting this ramp built, Skip,” he says. He breathes between the words.

“I don’t know, Clam-man. Doesn’t look to me like you’re doing anything.”

The Clam-man musters a laugh and coughs. “I’m struggling today, Skip. That’s the truth.”

“A few too many last night?”

“A bit more pain than usual. Behind my eyes.”

The redhead drives a nail into the pine with two strikes.  “He’s getting worse,” she says. 

“You’re the ex?” I say. 

She looks at me. “Josie’s mom,” she says. 

I look at Josie. Blond hair, dimpled cheeks. She looks like her dad. “I know a thing or two about these builds,” I say.

“You know about ramps?” Josie says. 

“The architecture—”

“The architecture?” she says. “How to get up from one place to another?”

I know when my balls are being busted. And typically, I don’t mind it. But right now, it doesn’t sit right. “It’s my house,” I say, “and I might have to—”

“I’ve got a business,” says the redhead—the mother. “I do repairs.” She stands up. “It’s not some kind of maze to me.”

“You’re covering over those stairs, and I’ll have to demo it when he moves out.”

“You gave approval.” She takes a step toward me. “Written approval. I saw it inside.”

“I’m just asking you see my side of it.”

She flips the hammer by her hip, purses her lips.

They’ve made headway. The ramp is more than three-quarters built. I don’t like it, but I say, “Okay.” I say, “All right.” And the two of them get back to it. Josie feeds the nails. She uses the tape measure, makes marks on the wood before putting it by the chop saw. Her mother takes the wood and makes the cuts. Josie holds the boards in place while her mother hammers nails and drives screws. Neither of them say much. They don’t move fast, but they keep a good pace. No breaks or dawdling. From time to time, I go over and offer my help. They decline at first, politely. But eventually they stop responding.

They work.

The Clam-man sits up more fully and begins to catch his breath. I join him on the grass, and we sit there together, watching the women work. 

They’re not far from finishing when the clouds fill back in. I tell them they ought to wait, finish it tomorrow. But they won’t listen. They ignore me. They move through it. And the clouds go darker still. And the wind whips and whines and won’t let up. And cracks of light split the sky; thunderclaps push the wind through the wood chips and dust of the yard—the first house I ever owned—but the two of them, Josie and her mother, finish. 

I get up, slow and damp and cold, from the weather. “Clam-man,” I say. “Take it off the rent: the lumber. Whatever it cost, after the government and the disability and all that. And anything else you’ve given me. Take it off.”

“That’s good, Skip,” he says. “Generous.”  

I point at the women. “Those two will outlive both of us by a good, long time.”

“That’s the truth.” The Clam-man’s eyes are watery, but I can’t tell if it’s tears or if it’s the same thing they’ve been milked with since he was snapped with that puck.  

“Will you take care of yourself?” I say. 

“I will, Skip. If you say so.”

“Clam-man,” I say. “Kristoff.”

“Skip,” he says. He’s sat like a child in the grass, with the skies mad and grey all around us, and the rain now really starting to go. “Are you all right, Skip?”

“Me?” I say. “Kristoff.” And despite everything, I ask him: “What kind of a question is that?” 

 

#

Back home, Barb’s car is in the driveway. She’s got the fresh signage—Destinations by Barb—on the passenger-side door. I don’t know what the new gig is, exactly. What I do know is that there’s life in front of her, and that instead of Big Sky, I’d have been better off—and we’d be better off—if I’d brought her to Paris, or Amsterdam, or better yet: San Sebastian. Some place I didn’t just think of, but a place I’d thought of.  

I say this to myself, out loud, to make sure I’ve heard it. 

 

We own five single-family homes—me and Barb. We own two multi-family homes. It’s done well for us.  We’ve had good tenants. They pay on time. They don’t cause problems. There’s no drama. We do what we’ve got to in order to keep them happy. Everybody understands the agreement. 

But then there’s Kristoff. He doesn’t do much of anything right. He doesn’t see anything the way anybody means for it to be seen. He thinks his own daughter would be better off without him. And I don’t have kids of my own, but I don’t, either way, see how he could have that last part right. Because despite his faults and failures, and his drinking, and his trick eye, and his lousy memory, and all the wrong choices he’s made, he hasn’t ever once quit trying to do what he felt needed getting done. 

I wonder about the two of us—me and the Clam-man—how we compare. It could be I’m nothing like him. It could be I’m nothing at all like the man I thought I was. It could be just bluster, for instance, when I, like my father, and Barb’s father, and every father I’ve ever known, say things like, you don’t take no for an answer. 

Maybe it’s our conditioning that makes us this way. And maybe, then, it’s not so much a plea as a reminder—maybe I just need to hear it out loud—when I tell you, whoever you are, that I’m still here, and I know there’s world to see, and I’ve got something left to give it. 

In the backyard, the gutter has come apart. It dangles from the ends of the house, broken in the middle. 

Out front: car doors.  Barb and her children, chattering as though it’s any other day. And they see my truck—they must—but nobody calls to me. 

 

                                                   The rain comes in a wave then. 

 

The water attacks, punching the clapboards, reaching after the plaster, the foundation.

                      The rain goes and goes.

 

And at first there’s only a faint rumble.

                                                   

                                                       But then it comes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Corey Millard writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, Kate, daughter, Alex, and dog, Dani. His novel, Occupation, is in its final round of revisions.

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13 June 2025