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My favorite is with home:

However long it takes

Over days and weeks and months

My spirit will live in these walls

Even on nights when it’s hard.

“Your mom might not be a poet,” I tell her, rereading her words over and over. “But you sure as hell are.”

She looks at me with a rare soft expression. No eye roll. No smart-ass response. She takes my words for what they are: a compliment.

The wood, tarnished with old glue and scrapes is now also covered in words and bold letters. It’s pure magic. I can see the people that end up living here shuffling sock-covered feet over a floor that floats just above it. If they stand long enough over the right ones, some of that mystical energy might shoot right up into their toes and make their bones tingle.

As Ford’s truck pulls into the driveway, I barely notice the person I imagine standing in the socks is me.

Seventeen

“ThereisachanceI handled the canoe situation poorly.”

Ford gives me ago to helllook as he fills the bird feeders with seed. “That some kind of apology?”

He tosses the empty bag into the back of his truck with more force than necessary before opening a box of birdseed bricks and cages. He unwraps them, puts the bricks into the cages and hangs them up with the other bird feeders.Weird.

“Something like that.”

He grunts. “Needs work.”

“Fine.” I clench my teeth. “I’m sorry that you found the need to put me in a situation where I needed to make you swim across the lake.”

He tosses the empty box in the truck bed, slamming the tailgate closed. “You know what your problem is, Scotty?”

“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me,Ford.”

“You let the shit in your life ruin every good thing.”

I suck in a sharp breath. “Don’t you dare even pretend to know what I do or don’t do. You’ve been gone. You don’t get to strut back into town and start psychoanalyzing me like a shrink. You left. You. Left.”

“And you let me,” he shouts, hands in the air. “You ever think of that?” he demands, standing close to me as his chest rises and falls with his angry breaths. “I messed up, but you weren’t exactly breaking my door down finding out where I went.”

“Oh,” I huff in a near shout. “Oh. Don’t even do this. Don’t put this on me.”

He shakes his head with a disbelieving laugh. “You’re so full of shit!”

“Better than anything you could fill me with.”

He glares at me. “If you let me get in this truck without apologizing, I won’t come back. Not as a friend. Not as anything.”

“Well, leaving me in the dust is your specialty, so I’m sure you’d have no problem with that.”

“I’m sorry!” he shouts, shocking me to a mute stillness. “I don’t have a problem saying it and I have—over and over. I’m sorry I let your brother go in that house. I’m sorry—” He shakes his head, swallowing as if needing to regroup. “I’m sorry I didn’t go hunt you down in the woods to tell you when everything happened. I’m sorry I let you carry this alone. I’m sorry I loved you and I left you and it took twenty years for me to come back here and try to make up for all this. But Iamsorry. And I’ll say it as many times as you need to hear it. But you don’t get to do the things you do and playyour fucking mind games and not apologize. So, right now, say it or I swear to God, I’m gone.”

Despite the desperate look in his eyes, the fact my insides feel too big for my outsides, and the way his raw honesty peels the skin right off my skeleton, I say nothing.

Resignation fills his eyes and his voice drops. “Okay then.”

He walks to the front of his truck, opens the driver’s door and—