Read 100 Days for Free Online

put the roof on this place, and I’ve tried to help you out, but this is a change that’s going to happen. As I said, I can still give you every other weekend. Take it or leave it.”
    I can’t even begin to imagine what I’m going to tell Mom. Probably, I’m going to tell her nothing. Probably, I’m just going to have to step up wood sales, and now that spring is upon us, elk skull and antler sales, too. I’ll have to go out and scout for racks as often as I can after school and on the weekends. Park the truck in one of the abandoned lots in town and set up my painted plywood sign nearby where it faces oncoming traffic: BARGAIN BONES: Antler & Skull Sales . Maybe Mom doesn’t have to know about my hours being slashed. It’s not like she checks up on where I am, anyway.
    My boss is waiting for an answer.
    â€œI’ll take it,” I tell him.
    *   *   *
    As usual, I haul a load of water after work. The Chevy’s suspension hasn’t been sounding right lately, and the five hundred gallons of water loading it down don’t help. We’ll be completely screwed if the springs flatten out. That’s a major repair. I try not to think about how carefree Saturdays used to be when I was a kid, but images from that time rise up in my mind anyway. Me lazing around in the hammock, watching Mom teach horseback riding lessons all day. Dad coming home from his job as a roofer, opening up the smoker at dinnertime and pulling out elk or buffalo steaks from animals he’d hunted and processed himself. The three of us sitting around the kitchen table laughing about whatever funny things we’d seen or done or thought about that day. I took it all for granted.
    Back then, whenever my parents argued about something, my dad always had enough sense to simply leave the house and go hang out in the tack room or work on the backhoe’s engine. Once he’d cooled down, he’d come back inside and apologize to her. Maybe I’d find them hugging in the kitchen, smiling at each other. Maybe I’d find them sitting on the couch holding hands, her head resting on his shoulder. Whatever it was, they’d always make up. Things would always go back to normal.
    Then, one overcast day when I was in seventh grade, he slipped on some wet leaves and fell off the roof he’d been finishing as a private side job to supplement his regular income with the construction company. Had it not been for the stack of tarped shingles below that broke his fall, he might have died. “Concussion,” doctors said at first. “Maybe a bit of mild brain swelling.” They saw nothing amiss on his scans and ordered him to take it easy for a couple of weeks. But when he developed a nonstop headache that got worse and worse, they finally said, “Brain injury. It doesn’t always show up right away.” The question then became whether or not my dad would feel better and how long it would take.
    The owner of the construction company he worked for tried to keep him on after the accident, but the economy wasn’t doing well. “People just aren’t building as many houses as they used to,” he told my dad when he finally let him go. My dad was convinced he was really fired because he kept making rookie mistakes, like misplacing the nail gun and forgetting to check on the delivery of shingles and lumber to the worksites. His balance was off, too, and his boss had already expressed concern that he might fall off another roof. “He’s just afraid I’d file a workman’s comp claim and raise his premiums, the cheap SOB,” my father said.
    Mom gave as many riding lessons as she could to help pay the bills until he could find other work. She also picked up some part-time work as a cashier at the dollar store and started taking antidepressants. “Just to take the edge off these rough times,” she told me when I asked about the