Al scrubbed at his fingernails with a brush. That was one thing he hated about ironwork—the rust and grease in the creases of his palms and under his nails, the way his hands took a beating and were rough against Angie’s skin. He wished he could make them a little more presentable for the Thanksgiving meal.
Other than that, he was pretty happy with his business, in spite of the chaos yesterday. Normally, he thought Beverly Lane was an okay location—fairly safe with a school there. He was a lucky man, doing what he loved: making sculptures. The bigger, the better. Ideally, he would create something a few stories high, a sculpture that erupted into the sky.
Not that he could climb up to work on a piece like that. He wasn’t tall and had legs like tree trunks. He weighed a lot. Too much.
After drying his hands on the towel, he hung it up straight the way Angie liked. He inspected his shaving job in the mirror. Dropping his head, he checked his scalp. He’d been shaving his head since he was thirty, when his hair started falling out.
The meal would be just Angie, him, their daughter Stella, and her husband, but Angie had been preparing the Thanksgiving meal since yesterday, baking apple pies from scratch. So it was a big deal. Al rinsed out the sink. Angie hated when he left a ring.
He went out to the kitchen. The smell of roasting turkey filled the room. Pressed against the sink, Angie was peeling potatoes, her face rosy from the heat. She turned a little and smiled. “Hi, Sleepyhead.”
He kissed the top of her thick honey-colored hair. Her fragrance and the roasting turkey were so much more pleasant than his everyday smells of propane for the forge and microwaved shop food.
“Stella, why don’t you help your mom with these potatoes?”
Stella’s and Chris’s heads showed over the back of the cream-colored leather couch. In front of them, images of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade flitted across the flat-screen television.
“I’ve got it,” Angie said.
But irritation welled in him. Stella and Chris were kicking back while Angie was sweating in the kitchen. They weren’t exactly guests. Their daughter had moved back in with them, husband in tow.
Al plopped heavily into his La-Z-Boy. Residual tiredness hit him so hard on holidays that sometimes he thought it would be better to keep rolling through the week. Yesterday had been especially grueling, trying to make a table for a woman who didn’t actually know what she wanted. Then his former customer Ben came screaming down the street, pursuing a thief. His young worker had scrambled off like a hound, chasing after adventure, and later, the cops came by to ask questions. They never did get back into the groove of their projects. His apprentice was so jacked up he kept making stupid mistakes. Al may as well have closed the shop.
Angie had put a dish of salted peanuts on the coffee table. Stretching forward, he scooped up a handful. “What is that balloon supposed to be?” He pointed at the screen.
“Sonic the Hedgehog.” Stella and Chris answered in unison. They huddled against one another and both gave him an incredulous look.
“The Sonic Hedgehog, huh?” His words had a bite to them.
“Al,” Angie warned from the kitchen.
He couldn’t help it. The whole situation irritated him, going back to Stella majoring in music. How did she expect to find a job with a degree in music? If you wanted to do art, you needed to start with a practical skill like he had. He’d learned to weld and had done that for years, pursuing his art on the side.
And then there was her husband—Chris—he was nice enough, but he played bass in a band that gigged mainly in San Jose and San Francisco. He claimed that he couldn’t fit in a job with a regular schedule between gigs. So, when Stella and Chris had received a rent hike, they’d moved in with him and Angie until “they got on their feet.” Two months already.
He reached for another handful of peanuts.
“Don’t fill up on those,” Angie sang from the kitchen. “We’re going to have turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and homemade apple pie with ice cream.”
Al crunched the peanuts. The grinding soothed him. It was tough for young people now, vying for jobs with older laid-off workers and retirees whose 401Ks had been obliterated by the stock market crash. He’d lost a bundle himself, but at least he’d had the good sense to leave his money invested. Buy low; sell high. Most people didn’t have the balls for it and got out at the wrong time.
He regarded the young couple staring at the television. The housing bubble burst had driven up rents. The situation wasn’t all Stella and Chris’s fault. Kids moving back home was so common they had a name for it—Boomerang Kids.
The longer he gazed at his daughter, the more she dissolved into his baby, the five-pound preemie, whose difficult birth meant she’d be their only child. They’d both treated her like a little dewdrop that might evaporate. But Stella had been oblivious to the miracle of her life, dancing around the house and singing with the voice of an angel. They’d spoiled her.
Blushing, his daughter glanced over at him as though she could read his thoughts. With her perfect skin and blue eyes, she looked like Angie about the time they got married.
Chris turned his way, too. “Angie told us what happened at the shop.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe this will persuade you to come out to Baker’s and shoot a few rounds with me.”
Big Al’s gaze fell critically on his son-in-law, the long dark hair gathered into a curly pouf. Metal discs stretched out the kid’s ear piercings like he was some kind of a wanna-be tribal native.
“I prefer golf.” People never guessed he was a golfer. He was built like a football tackle, disliked wearing shorts, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a peach-colored golf shirt. Ironwork and golf didn’t, on the surface, seem to have any connection. But when he clamped a red-hot rod of steel into a vice, gripped the rod with a crescent wrench, and bent it into a graceful arc, he imagined explaining: “Here’s the connection, buddy. It’s all about how you get something to move through space from one place to another.” Al had a talent for that—assessing distances, calculating the tricks of perspective—a spatial intelligence.
It made him a good shot with a gun, too, although he didn’t care about guns—one way or the other. He owned a Smith and Wesson, but hypocritical as it may be, he didn’t like the idea of Stella with a guy who kept a firearm. When they’d moved in, he had insisted Chris store his gun in the garage.
“I wasn’t thinking about the sport of it,” Chris said. “I was thinking that burglar could have broken into your place.”
“The shop’s alarmed.” And he kept his revolver there.
“Okay,” Chris said, “but a guy with a gun was like twenty feet away from your shop. When it was open.”
“I don’t have time,” Al snapped. “When you own your own business,” he added pointedly, “you work pretty much twenty-four seven.”
“Alan, would you come here, honey,” his wife called from the kitchen.
Uh-oh. He tilted the La-Z-Boy forward and circled around the partial wall to the kitchen. Steam rose from a pot on top of the gas stove. Angie banged a frying pan next to it, probably for the gravy. The aroma of turkey filled the house, but it hung most heavily here in the steam. His mouth salivated. He felt bad. He wanted Angie to have a good Thanksgiving.
“He’s trying to reach out to you,” Angie hissed at him.
“So you think I should waste my time with target practice?”
She smiled tightly at him. “Not target practicing. Bonding.”
If he stripped away the bullshit, she was right. He was stubborn. He’d been to the shooting range before and enjoyed it. And seriously, if he meant to deter some punk from robbing his shop, he needed to keep up his skills.
Angie opened the oven and checked the turkey. “Take a four-day weekend like other people do.”
“I have workers, Angie, who expect some hours tomorrow.”
She rested against the counter, her blue eyes bright in her flushed face. “I know they need the money, but you, Mr. Boss Man, can leave whenever you want.”
Angie smiled at him, and his resistance melted. He’d never been able to say no to her. He didn’t want to say no to her. “You’re right. I’ll see if Chris is up for Baker’s tomorrow.”