Trouble is a Friend of Mine

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘I’m fixing your closet,’ he said. ‘You had this bar just kinda balancing on these pegs. How does this not collapse every time you reach for something, Princeton?’ He pulled off a little plastic bag of spare parts that was taped to the bar.

‘What are those?’

‘These are wall anchors. I’m making pilot holes for them.’

I remembered something Bill said about liking watching men using tools. I snorted.

‘What?’ Digby said.

‘Nothing … just something my friend Bill Lowry said about guys who are handy. She’d probably hyperventilate if she saw you right now. She already thinks you’re sexy,’ I said.

Digby stopped what he was doing and turned to me. ‘Oh, so Bill thinks I’m sexy.’

‘Yeah. Bill’s this girl in school –’

‘I know who Bill is,’ he said.

‘Anyway. Yeah. She likes you.’

‘Oh, yeah? Maybe I should check out that situation. I haven’t seen her since middle school.’

‘She’s nice. Really nice,’ I said. The insincerity in my voice surprised me.

‘Okay, but is she really really nice?’ Digby said. ‘You girls are all so political …’

‘Ha-ha. Do you know what you’re doing, by the way?’ I said. ‘That doesn’t look right.’

‘How would you know it doesn’t look right? You didn’t even know what an anchor was just now,’ he said. ‘Yeah, I know what I’m doing. You got a hammer?’

I didn’t feel like admitting it to him, but I was sick of the closet bar collapsing every time I pulled out something from the back. When I got back with the hammer, Digby was holding up a blue Oxford shirt with the Prentiss crest on the breast pocket.

‘Dad got that for me … the rest of the uniform’s in there too,’ I said. I put on the shirt to show him how ridiculous it looked.

‘He’s pretty confident you’re going, isn’t he?’ Digby said. ‘So what would happen if you didn’t get in?’

I didn’t want to say it because I knew it’d sound melodramatic, but from my experience, people did what Dad expected of them or they just kind of stopped existing for him. I’d seen him tough-love a whole branch of his family into nonexistence this way.

‘His way or no way, huh? I’ve heard that song before.’ Digby hammered an anchor into the pilot hole. Impressively, he sunk it in only three blows. I started to see Bill’s point about guys who were handy around the house.

‘I helped my father build a tree house I didn’t want and a doghouse on the lawn for a poodle mix who hated getting mud on her paws just to get the guy to talk to me.’ He looked embarrassed. ‘Hey, I was twelve years old.’ Digby hammered in the other side. Something about the aggressive way he was working discouraged conversation. Finally, after he’d screwed in the supports and installed my closet bar, he said, ‘I finally spoke up about not really enjoying doing construction. That conversation turned out to be the last we’d ever have.’

‘So just because you don’t have the same hobbies, what? He hates you now?’ I said.

‘Not like he hates me, exactly … more like he figures we have nothing further to discuss,’ Digby said. ‘I mostly just “Yes, sir” him when he orders me around. Luckily, he drinks, so he forgets, like, two-thirds of what he tells me. After I figured out how to tell which third he’d remember, we were on easy street.’

We hung my clothes back on the rod and, as had become our routine, I put on an episode of Twin Peaks for us to watch while Digby ate. It was awkward, though, when instead of sitting in his usual place at the desk, Digby plopped down on my bed.

He patted the spot on the bed beside him and said, ‘This plate looks awesome.’

‘It looks like something frightened villagers offered up to an angry volcano god,’ I said. I tried not to be weird when my bed sagged and pushed us up together.

I don’t think Digby noticed. He plowed through the chicken and didn’t stop until he was scraping sauce off the bottom of the pie plate with his dinner roll.

‘Maybe tomorrow I should defrost a pizza too,’ I said.

‘Uh, actually, I have plans tomorrow night,’ he said.

My heart immediately started to race. After years of watching Mom get played by Dad, I was used to looking for the real reason behind the excuse. ‘Working late’ really meant a romantic dinner with someone else. ‘Urgent injunction application to be filed in the morning’ really meant overnighters in a hotel. I couldn’t help it. My mind started parsing the phrase ‘plans for tomorrow night’ until I realized what I was doing. But it was too late. The emotional roller coaster had left the station. I felt close to tears. I hoped Digby didn’t notice.

‘I guess I could bring Felix here instead. Work on our thing here … the catering’s good.’

Why did I feel relieved to find out he was just hanging out with Felix?