Page 3 of Guitars and Cages

I groaned and scrubbed a hand down my face, lamenting the sleep I’d now most definitely lost. “I meant to sleep,” I tried, entertaining, for a moment, that old fantasy of our entwined, sheet-wrapped bodies splayed across my bed.

“I don’t have time for that, and who could sleep in this pigsty anyway?” she complained as she finished her coffee and stood, caffeine and stubborn will propelling her. Damned woman. I had half a mind to point out her son sleeping quite peacefully on the couch in a room just as trashed as this one, but thought better of it, figuring I didn’t have enough coffee in me for the blow-up that would inevitably follow.

By noon I found myself the caretaker of the eight-year-old nephew I hadn’t seen in a year, complete with a fridge and cupboard full of “proper” groceries, laundry detergent, fabric softener, and a ton of quarters to do wash with. The kitchen was cleaner than it had been when I moved in, and everything had somehow managed to find itself into its own little place in crates or on top of shelves and furniture. She’d even found my favorite knife, handing it back with a stern admonishment not to leave sharp objects where Rory might hurt himself on them. I’d held the knife tight in my hand, remembering the summer Cole had given it to me, and wondering if she remembered, too.

She also left me with a couple of phone numbers with the hope they might land me a “respectable” job—her words, not mine. Where she’d gotten them from I could only imagine, but she’d lingered awfully long in front of the bulletin board at the supermarket while I’d been loading everything into her rental car, so likely she’d found them there. I’d try them later, after I got an hour or two more sleep, because seriously, if I didn’t get some soon I was gonna cut my head off to make the pounding go away.

Why the job, one might ask, especially since I now had a kid to look after for an indeterminate length of time?

Well, for one, the advance I’d paid on my rent was about up and it wouldn’t do for Rory and me to get kicked out into the street, and for two, Kimber seemed convinced that playing guitar in a bar and bartending when I wasn’t on stage was a waste of my talents at my age. I didn’t think I wasthatold, but hell, I guess to her twenty-six was supposed to be a grown-up. It’s not like she really wanted to leave the kid with me given the shape I was in, but she had no family, so when Chase had married her, she’d kind of married all of us, and when he’d died...she had nowhere else to go but to one of us. Still, for a few minutes there I was wishing bad sushi on Michael, a shortage of tequila on Cole, and unspeakable horrors on Alex for leaving me holding the bag, or in this case, the nephew.

And hey...did ya know it only takes sixty-three seconds for an eight-year-old to inhale a Snickers bar? And three hours and forty-five minutes for them to stop bouncing off the walls. Note to self: Never,evergive that kid chocolate at bedtime again.

Chapter Two

Children are interesting creatures. They don’t care how much sleep you’ve recently lost, they don’t care if you’d rather not get up and make them breakfast, and they are certainly not predisposed to staying inside or being quiet. In fact, I’m not sure they even have another level of volume besides loud. They’re incapable of sitting still, and ask five thousand questions a day. In short, they’re miniature humans all wrapped up in a tiny hybrid package of curious and rude. I was in hell, or at least that’s what it had felt like since the moment I was awakened with a request for food.

“Hey, Uncle Asher, can we go to the movies?” Rory asked around a mouthful of ham and cheese.

“I’m broke,” I informed him, grimacing and looking away as he chewed. “Besides, have you seen how much movies cost lately? It’s cheaper to wait for them to come out on video and buy them than it is to go to the theater.”

“Well then, can we rent a movie?” he suggested. “You’ve got nothing for me to watch.”

I looked around at the stacks of movies in crates in the corners of the living room and rolled my eyes, willing to concede that my collection might be a bit lacking in ratings lower than PG-13.

I drummed my fingers on the tabletop. “Define broke, Rory.”

“Not having any money,” he said hesitantly.

“Exactly, which means we can’t rent movies, either.”

He pouted. “So what are we gonna do?”

“What do you like to do?”

“Watch movies,” he said, continuing to frown. Well, that had gotten us nowhere.

“Besides that?”

He paused, thinking about it a bit.

“I like watching football, but it isn’t football season yet. I like watching hockey, but hockey season is over. I like wrestling, but it isn’t Monday night...”

I groaned. “Okay, okay, I get it, all things that involve the TV.”

When I was a kid we maybe watched an hour of TV a night, if that; we were so busy outside playing sports, games, and anything else we could think up. Maybe it was an only-child thing. There’d been five of us boys tumbling around, so we always had someone to hang out with; it kind of sucked to think that maybe the TV was this kid’s only friend.

“I play checkers,” Rory volunteered.

“Really? I haven’t played checkers in years; we’ll have to get a board.”

“But you’re broke.”

“True,” I said, pausing for a moment to think. “But we could make one.” I started looking around the room. Kimber had picked up all the beer bottles, rinsed them, and put them in a box for recycling, along with the caps, which she’d dumped in a jar. I unscrewed the top of the jar and fished out the caps, glad I bounced back and forth pretty regularly between my two favorite beers. There were just enough of each to make up the red and black, with a couple left on the side for kings. I cut the side off a cardboard box and dug around for something to color with.

I came up empty-handed, but Rory had crayons and a coloring book in his bag, so we used the edge of the book to make straight lines on the cardboard, and red and black crayons to color them in. He admonished me twice to stay in the lines, and I laughed, because I don’t think I’ve ever stayed in the lines with anything. He finished the last square and stepped back, looking down at our makeshift game board.

“It’s kinda lumpy,” he commented critically.

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