Page 15 of Out of the Storm

While unclipping his helmet, Gary took a breath to steady his nerves. Might as well see what he’d lugged across Niles, huh? Whatever it was would probably be relegated to the garage. No point in carrying everything into the house first.

Gary lifted the box and set it atop a barely used work bench, one that he’d inherited from the house’s previous occupants. The moment he opened the cardboard flaps, his knees nearly buckled, his breath leaving his lungs in one fast huff. For those first few seconds, Gary stood frozen, forgetting to breathe, only remembering to inhale once little colorful spots started to form in front of his eyes.

In the box, resting against a stuffed bear with mangy faux fur and one missing eye, was a photograph he hadn’t seen in years, one of a scrawny boy with short brown hair and a button-up plaid shirt—black and white in the photograph, but one Gary remembered as yellow and brown—cradling a baseball in his hands. Kneeling next to him was a man who couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than he was now—with a mustache and a receding hairline and a kind smile that was nothing more than a lie.

His entire body trembling, Gary picked the box back up and carried it over to the trash.

***

Gary stuck his fork into the bowl of freshly made potato salad for his seventh taste test. Moving the slightly mushy potato over his tongue, he tried to scrutinize the flavor—savory and tangy with a hint of sweetness—and wondered whether or not it was scrumptious enough to win Jeff over. Not romantically, of course. Well, okay,mayberomantically. No. Not romantically. Potato salad was not the way to anyone’s heart, no matter the circumstances. Especially notthesecircumstances. Jeff was a straight man coming over for a friendly interview. Nothing more. And to makesureit couldn’t possibly be misconstrued as romantic, Gary had taken out the worst set of bowls he had—white ones made with cheap plastic that had pictures of horrifying clowns on them (they were fairly standard-looking clowns, but to Gary, every clown in existence was horrifying)—to serve the food.

After tossing the fork into the sink with the pile of other taste-test forks, Gary took one of Mrs. Schmidt’s cookies and shoved it into his mouth whole. He hadn’t even chewed yet when there was a knock at the door, and then he sucked in a breath, nearly causing him to choke. Struggling to compose himself, Gary coughed and sputtered before forcing himself to chew, the taste of the cinnamon and chocolate hardly even registering.

Geez, that would have been an embarrassing way to exit the earth. Inhaling an entire cookie. What a bozo.

Swallowing both his nervousness and the mushy chewed remnants of the cookie, Gary hurried to the front door. When he answered, Jeff took one look at him and immediately cocked his head to the side.

“Uh, hi,” Jeff said.

“Hi!”

“Everything okay?”

Gary swallowed once more, his throat still tight and heart still pounding from his pathetic near-death experience. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You seem . . . frazzled.”

“Minor choking incident,” Gary said with a flippant shrug. He stepped aside to make room for Jeff to walk past him. “Welcome to the lair of the infamous Gary Graham.”

As Jeff came inside, he snorted and said, “I wasn’t aware of your villain status.”

“I’m only known to my nemesis...” Gary took a pause, crossing his arms over his chest as Jeff kicked off his shoes. “Hm, what’s the opposite of a graham cracker?”

Jeff shrugged off his coat. “Something healthy?”

“Graham crackersarehealthy. Or, they were supposed to be.” Gary took Jeff’s coat and hung it on the coatrack. “Did you know they were invented as part of the temperance movement? But, you’re right, they have a lot of sugar now.”

“You keep a lot of useless facts in your head.”

“Well, I wouldn’t sayuseless. I have to keep my listeners entertained.” Gary moved through the living space toward the room that had been repurposed as his radio studio and motioned for Jeff to follow. “I’d say the current graham cracker might be the nemesis to the original graham cracker. What do you think?”

But Jeff no longer seemed interested in Gary’s continued commentary on the protagonist-villain relationship of certain snack foods. Instead, he was looking around, probably trying to figure out how the heck Gary could operate a radio station in such a small space. Which, well, to be fair, it wasn’t easy. Still, it was fun.

Gary opened the door to the transmitter room.

“Want to see the transmitter?” he asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

Gary’s FM transmitter was located inside what was essentially a large storage closet (but had probably been a second bedroom for the previous owners). It was the most impressive thing in the room—a hair taller than Gary was himself with a lot of colorful flashing lights and important-looking buttons, some of which had functions that Garystilldidn’t quite understand. It was probably the piece of equipment that Gary was most proud of, but only because it was the newest, having cost him a good chunk of his savings.

“Generates a lot of heat, huh?” Gary said as Jeff ran his hand over the metal.

“Feels like it. It probably heats your whole house for you.”

“Yeah! Isn’t that neat?”

“Sure, radio man. Super neat.”

---