Nick and June Were Here by Shalanda Stanley

Author:Shalanda Stanley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2019-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

It was the first summer I’d spent at Hank’s since my dad had gone to prison, and the sound of wood splintering was my new favorite sound. The hammer became an extension of me. There was a moment when I brought the hammer down on the furniture and found the weak spot in the wood and I knew it would only take a couple more hits before it would break. I was in the workshop behind the cabin. I’d busted up four chairs already. They were ones I’d built, so I figured they were mine to break.

“What are you doing?” John asked.

He came in from the back door and dropped a pile of wood at his feet. He walked toward me, but I thrust my arm out so he’d see that he needed to stop where he was. There was a hole at my feet, and if he got too close, he’d fall in. We’d both be stuck in this pit. Uncle Hank walked in right after him and took in the scene around him, me pointing the hammer at John, the splintered heaps of broken furniture all around me. He came right for me, like he couldn’t see the hole I was standing in, or if he could, he didn’t care. He jerked the hammer away from me and tossed it to the side.

“Get out of here,” he said to John. He didn’t take his eyes off me.

Once we were alone, he kicked at the broken chairs at our feet. “Is there a reason you’re undoing all of your hard work?”

“They weren’t good chairs anyway,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Sure you do.” He bent down and started picking up the wood. “Help me,” he said.

I didn’t move. He stood.

“Help me,” he repeated.

He thrust his gathered pieces of wood into my hands. “We’ll get this cleaned up and then you’ll go out back and help John cut the rest of the wood.”

“What’s the point?” I asked.

“The point is I need the wood cut. You can’t make furniture without cutting the wood first.”

“Then what?” I asked.

He knew I wasn’t just asking him what to do after the wood was cut.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out right now,” he said.

My nose burned. I was going to cry and I didn’t even know why. I had so much anger in me. There was so much that was out of my control.

It was my hardest summer at the cabin, but by the end of it, I was feeling better. The Ozarks held a special kind of quiet, the kind of quiet I wanted to take with me back to Creed.

“There’s no place like this at home,” I told Uncle Hank.

We’d been outside, stretching canvas all day. We always spent our last day of the summer doing this, so he’d have plenty to paint on during the year.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Someplace where I can just be and not worry about everything.”

I’d made a lot of progress over the summer and I wanted to hold on to it.

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