“Just waiting on you, as usual.” Mitch led the way down the hall and into a large room that had great windows looking out over the yard.
It also had fresh paint over new Sheetrock and trim, and new switches, outlets and plates. Even the light fixtures were in place. “I thought you needed help finishing this room.”
“Wait until you see the garage.”
“This can’t be good,” Drew muttered, but they both followed Mitch back through the house and out the side door into the garage.
There was an army of massive cardboard boxes in front of them, all with photos of a different piece of office furniture pasted on the sides.
“Oh, hell no,” Josh said. “This is above and beyond, Mitch. And you know it, too. That’s why you didn’t tell us up front.”
“You can’t put together furniture?” Mitch gestured at the boxes. “They all come with directions. And there are pictures even.”
“You couldn’t just go buy shit at the furniture store so they’d deliver it all put together?” Drew asked.
“Paige saw this stuff online and fell in love with it. It was less expensive than some of the stuff I looked at, so I told her to order it.”
Josh snorted. “It’s less expensive because it’ll take you three days and a bottle of Valium to put it all together.”
“Or three guys only one day.”
“Jesus, Mitch.” Josh hated this stuff. It was like doing a big, heavy 3-D jigsaw puzzle that required tools.
“I’ll beg if I have to,” Mitch told him. “When they started rolling these cartons off the delivery truck, I lost all my pride.”
“How do you start and build a successful business blowing up buildings and not know better than to order assemble-yourself office furniture. A small bookcase is okay in a pinch, but that big-ass box over there has a picture of a desk on it.”
“There are two,” Mitch admitted. “His and hers desks.”
Josh and Drew both stayed silent, staring at the line of boxes.
“It’s for my wife,” Mitch said. “If I don’t get these done, she might try to finish building them while I’m away and hurt herself.”
Josh laughed. “Really? That’s low, even for you.”
“I told you I’m not above begging.”
“Fine.” Josh threw up his hands in surrender. “Which one are we doing first?”
“The bookcases. They take up the most floor space to build, but the least amount of room space while building other stuff,” Drew said. They both looked at him and he shrugged. “Mallory loved this shit.”
Josh and Mitch each grabbed an end of a bookshelf box while Drew held the door. When Josh passed by him, he paused for a second. “How’s that going, anyway?”
“The divorce is final. I’m now officially a middle-aged guy with no wife, no kids and a killer loan so I could buy Mal’s half of the house.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Their marriage had ended right around the time Mitch and Paige had gotten together and, looking back, it was hard to say which had created the bigger buzz around town.
Shortly after their tenth wedding anniversary, when Drew had pushed, Mallory had confessed she not only didn’t want children, but she never had. It had gone downhill from there.
Once they got started building Paige’s furniture, it wasn’t as bad as Josh had feared it would be. They got a good rhythm going, almost like an assembly line, and managed not to jab any fake wooden corners through her new walls.
They were about halfway done when Drew brought up the subject Josh had managed to go almost an entire half day without hearing about.
“I was glad to hear you decided against selling the lodge, Josh.”
Josh focused on setting the screw in his hand in the right place before he responded, so he had time to moderate his tone. He kept telling himself people were bound to get it out of their systems at some point. “Yeah. It was the right thing to do.”
“I’ve got a lot of memories of the Northern Star myself, since I was always running around with Mitch.”
Josh remembered. Sometimes it seemed like everybody had memories of the lodge, or at least a good reason for him not to sell it. Of course, none of them wanted to run it, but everybody was glad he’d be sticking around to take care of what was important to them.
“I saw one of the rooms down the hall is empty,” he said, because changing the subject was something he was becoming very good at. “If you buy assemble-at-home furniture for whatever that room’s going to be, it’ll be assemble-alone furniture.”
“That’s going to be the baby’s room.” Josh and Drew both stopped what they were doing to stare at him. “When she gets pregnant, which she’s not. Yet.”
“But soon, huh?” Drew asked.
“That’s up to Mother Nature.” Mitch grinned. “We’re certainly doing our part to make it happen.”
“I don’t want to hear anything about sex,” Drew muttered. “From either of you.”