Chad pulled the dingy handkerchief from his back pocket as the screen door snapped against his heels. The Carolina heat had about as much mercy as Mrs. Jan giving the stink-eye from her seat behind the pulpit on Sunday mornings. 

“When the devil fell from heaven, he fell straight into the choir loft,” Frank would say, with the jab of an elbow to Chad’s side and a smirk across his face. He loved to quote that straight from J. Vernon McGee. His father had never much been a churchgoing man, only went to appease the missus, but something about evangelicals reminded him that his life could always be worse. 

“The only thing worse than listening to an evangelical is being an evangelical,” he would say. So Frank would listen to Pastor McGee on the AM dial after the sun had long set, a sort of penance for his lifetime of dried-up faith. He would sip an IPA and lean for hours under the hood of his old pick-up.

Chad spent the day working on Frank’s 1952 Chevy Silverado, one of the many things his dad never had the chance to mend. Fifty years of smoking and drinking led to a faulty liver and set of lungs. He buried Frank out next to the barn last fall, alongside his mother, and promised him he would get it running again. 

He had been busy those last few years of Frank’s life. 

Dad. 

That word was too personal. It suggested a childhood spent tossing the baseball in the front yard, riding shotgun in the truck on midnight fishing trips, and sitting around a campfire between Miller’s Pond and Highway 183 in the middle of summer. After his mom passed when he was seven, Frank took to the drink. When she left, she took Chad’s childhood with her.

His own kid was grown now. Graduated from high school two springs back. First one in the family to attend college and with a full ride, no less. No way in hell he could have afforded tuition without it.   

Chad pulled a glass from the cupboard and reached for the bourbon from the cabinet above the fridge. He continued to store it up and out of sight, even though it had been years since Caroline packed her bags and left for the West Coast. 

Shit, had it been a decade? 

He shook his head at the thought, poured honey-colored liquid to the top of the diamond etched in the crystal rocks glass, and walked out onto the porch. He raised the glass to his cracked lips and sank into the seat next to the porch swing. 

Last time he saw Caroline, the yellow hard case sideswiped wood as she stormed off, leaving a crack in the corner of their swing. The bench they had hung together the summer after exchanging vows. The same season life had taken hold within her and he traded confidence for indifference. 

He reached for the bench and ran his thumb and index finger over the crack in the wood. He would sand the splinters down again in the morning and spend the rest of the day working on the Chevy. He rested the glass on his knee and listened to the cicadas as the fog rolled in over the foothills and the bourbon rolled pastime memories to rest. 

If he were unable to save his own marriage or raise the dead, he would do the next best thing. If life had taught him nothing else, it was to love broken things.