Eduardo's Arc

Chapter 2 of 60

Eduardo mended the fence until his hands went stiff. Then he walked back to the porch and sat on the top step. The broken home leaned behind him. The sagging roof cast a crooked shadow across the boards. He had set the demon down inside, but now the house was quiet, and quiet was the thing he had run from his whole life. He pulled his cap off and set it on his knee. He thought he would rest a minute. Instead his life before Kiersten came up out of the floor and sat down next to him. He remembered the kitchen table when he was ten. His mother laughing too loud at a joke that was not a joke. His father calling him soft for crying when the dog died. His uncles trading insults and calling it love. Nobody in that house had ever said the word feeling out loud. They said tough. They said man up. They said what are you, stupid. He remembered what he did with all that. He gambled. He bought a truck he did not need. He wore new boots to places that did not care about boots. He took from friends and told himself they owed him. He met Kiersten and treated her like another thing he was owed. He had been angry at his mother for years and had never once said it to her face. He had only spent money and slept with strangers and won hands of cards to prove he was not the boy under that table. His chest hurt. He waited for the hum behind his eyes, for the old push to stand up and do something loud. It did not come. There was only the ache, and his own breath, and the sound of a bird in the field. He put his face in his hands and let it move through him. He did not name it this time. He just felt it. His shoulders shook. He let them. He cried the way he had not been allowed to cry at ten, and at fifteen, and at twenty-two on the night his reputation broke. He cried for the boy who learned to laugh at cruel jokes so he would not be the one laughed at. He cried for his mother, who had also not been taught. When he was done, his shirt was wet at the collar. His hands were still his hands. The porch was still the porch. Nothing outside him had changed. Something inside him had. He had sat with a feeling and it had not killed him. It had not owed him anything, and he had not owed it a performance. He stood up. The roof still sagged. The windows were still boarded. He went inside to find a rag and a bucket, because the kitchen floor was filthy, and tonight he wanted to eat at a clean table, alone, without pretending he was anyone but himself.