Work Text:
The truck had been up on blocks behind the shed for three days, and today Colter finally had all the parts he needed to put it back together. He'd spent most of the morning flat on his back in the dirt underneath it, working a stuck bolt loose one careful turn at a time, and by the time he freed it his knuckles were split and stinging where the wrench had slipped. He allowed himself thirty seconds to just lie there and breathe before he got back to work.
He'd been running the place alone for almost two years now. Ashton had been dead three years total, but it had taken about a year after that for the house to settle into whatever this was: him doing the wood and the water line and the meals and the fixing, and Mary doing whatever it was Mary did all day. He genuinely didn't know most of the time. She read on the porch. She made calls. She told him what needed doing and left him to figure out how.
He'd learned to cook because somebody had to, and it clearly wasn't going to be her. He'd learned to keep the generator alive past its expected lifespan, learned which parts of the roof needed patching before the snow came, learned to stretch what money there was so it covered gas and parts and whatever groceries Mary didn't feel like driving into town for herself. She still had her hair done every six weeks at a salon forty minutes out. He'd never once asked where that money came from. Some things he'd learned not to ask.
The truck was the thing keeping the whole operation running, so when it started stalling out on the incline up to the house, fixing it moved to the top of every list Colter kept in his head. He'd been under it since sunup.
He was reaching for the ratchet when Mary's voice drifted out from the porch, pitched in the particular register she used for phone calls with people she didn't actually want to talk to. Colter didn't mean to listen. There wasn't much choice about it, not from where he was lying, close enough to the porch steps that every word carried clean across the yard.
"No, he's fine, Melissa," Mary was saying. "He's just not much for phone calls these days. You know how he gets."
Colter went still under the truck.
He didn't know Melissa. Not really, not as anything more than a name attached vaguely to Dory somewhere in the back of his memory, an aunt he'd met maybe twice in his life. He definitely hadn't said anything to anyone about not wanting phone calls, because nobody had ever handed him a phone to decline in the first place.
"He knows you all care," Mary went on, syrupy in a way that didn't match anything Colter had ever heard directed at him. "He's just private. Always has been. I keep telling him he ought to call Dory back himself sometime, but you know Colter."
Call her back. Colter turned that over twice before he understood it wasn't going to make sense no matter how many times he turned it. There was no call to call back. He would have known.
He lay there another minute, listening to his mother describe a version of him that didn't exist to a woman he barely knew, and something in his chest that had been quiet for a long time started to come loose.
He slid out from under the truck the second he heard the porch door bang shut, wiping grease off his hands with a rag that wasn't doing much good, and by the time he stood up straight Mary was already coming down the steps toward him, a glass of tea sweating in one hand, unbothered, like she hadn't just spent five minutes lying to somebody about who he was.
"Who's Melissa?" he said, his voice coming out rougher than he meant it to.
Mary's face didn't change much. That was the thing about her. It almost never did. "My sister. You've met her."
"You told her I don't want to talk to Dory."
"You don't," Mary said, easy as anything, like she was correcting a fact he'd gotten wrong. "Do you?"
"I don't know," Colter said, his hands curling into fists at his sides without his permission, grease and all, "because nobody's ever told me she called."
"It's simpler this way." Mary took a slow sip of her tea, unhurried, the way she did everything when she wanted him to understand he was the only one in a hurry. "You know how Dory gets. Dragging up the past. Dragging up your father. What good does that do either of you?"
"That's not your call to make."
"Somebody has to make it." The glass came down against the porch rail hard enough to slosh over the rim. "You think your father would want you running back to whoever calls first? After everything he built here? After everything I've done to hold this place together since he's been gone?" Her voice had climbed now, sharp, all the syrup burned off it. "You'd just leave. Walk off and let it all fall apart, same as Russell did, same as Dory did."
"They didn't leave it to fall apart." Colter's own voice rose to meet hers without him deciding to raise it. "You made sure they couldn't stay."
"Careful." The word cracked across the yard like something snapping.
"Or what?" It came out of him before he could stop it, two years of quiet breaking open all at once. "What happens if I'm not careful, Mom? You gonna tell somebody else I don't want to talk to them either?"
Something in Mary's face went very still, very cold. "You have no idea what I have kept from you," she said, quiet now, which was somehow worse than the shouting. "No idea what your father would say if he saw you standing here talking to me like this."
"He's not standing anywhere," Colter said. "He's been dead three years."
The silence after that lasted long enough that Colter could hear his own pulse in his ears, could feel sweat gone cold on the back of his neck despite the heat of the afternoon.
"Get off my property," Mary said, finally, quiet and precise, each word set down like a brick.
"Gladly."
He set the wrench down on the tailgate hard enough that it rang against the metal, and turned before he could think better of it. His legs felt strange underneath him, like they belonged to somebody else, adrenaline running hot through every part of him even though nothing had actually happened, nobody had touched anybody, and still his whole body was shaking like it had.
"You won't last a week out there," Mary called after him, and there wasn't anything soft left in her voice, nothing left to pretend with. "You don't know the first thing about that world. He made sure of that. You'll come crawling back inside a month, you'll see."
Colter didn't turn around. He made himself keep walking, one boot in front of the other down the dirt track that led off the property, his heart still slamming against his ribs like he'd been running instead of standing still and shouting, and every step away from that house felt like it cost him something he wasn't sure he had enough of to spend. He didn't look back. He understood, somewhere underneath the adrenaline, that if he let himself look back even once, some old and well-worn part of him would turn right around and walk back up those porch steps, and he might never get another chance like this again.
By the time the house was out of sight behind him, the reality of what he'd just done had started catching up. He had the clothes on his back, work boots gone soft and cracked at the sole from three years of daily wear, and nothing else. No money. No phone. No plan beyond putting one foot in front of the other, the same way he'd have tracked anything else that needed tracking, except this time the thing he was tracking was some version of a life he didn't have any evidence actually existed out past the tree line.
The walk to town was long enough that his mind started working over old ground, the way it tended to when his body had a job to do and nothing left over for his thoughts to do but wander.
He thought about the Christmas two years back, the one time Russell and Dory had both come home at once since the funeral. It hadn't lasted. Something had happened between Russell and Mary that second night, low voices behind a closed door that Colter had never gotten the full shape of, and Russell had left the next morning before breakfast and never come back after. Mary made sure of that much herself, in her own quiet way, the way she made sure of most things.
But before all that, on the first afternoon, Dory had pulled him around the side of the house while Mary was busy inside, and pressed a scrap of paper into his hand.
"Memorize this," she'd said. "Right now. Today. I mean it."
He'd looked down at the string of numbers, not understanding what it was for. "What is it?"
"It's my number," Dory said. "If you ever need me, if anything ever happens, you find a phone and you call it. Don't write it down anywhere she can find it. Just memorize it."
He hadn't fully understood the weight of what she was asking, not then, but he'd understood that she meant it, and something about the seriousness in her face had made it feel important enough to take seriously back. He spent the two hours before she left running the digits over and over under his breath, out behind the woodpile, in the bathroom with the water running so it looked like he was just washing up.
Mary caught him with the paper still in his hand not twenty minutes before Dory's ride showed up. She didn't ask what it was. She just took it, looked at it once, and tore it into pieces small enough that no amount of putting it back together would ever have made the numbers legible again.
"You don't need this," she'd told him, and that had been the end of it, as far as she was concerned.
It wasn't the end of it for Colter. He said the numbers to himself every night after that, lying in bed in the dark, the same private ritual he'd have used for a bearing he needed to hold or a route he needed to keep clear in bad weather. He never fully knew why he kept doing it, only that some part of him had decided it mattered, the way some things mattered without needing a reason attached.
He hadn't thought about it in months. Walking that dirt road two years later with nothing else in his hands, it came back to him whole and unbidden, like it had been waiting the entire time for exactly this.
Town, when he finally reached it, felt like walking into a country he only half remembered the language of. He found a payphone bolted to the outside wall of a gas station, dust caked into the numbers on the keypad, and stood in front of it a long moment before he understood he didn't have a single coin to put into it.
He picked up the receiver anyway, because there wasn't another plan waiting behind it, and pressed zero. An operator's voice came on a moment later, flat and automatic, asking if he wanted to place a collect call.
"Yeah," Colter said. "I mean, yes."
She asked for a name to give the person on the other end. He gave his own, and then, when prompted, the number itself, reciting it the same way he'd recited it to himself every night for two years: steady, certain, like it had never once been anything but familiar.
The line rang twice. Then a voice he barely recognized as older than the one he remembered picked up.
"Hello?"
"Hey," Colter said. "It's Colter."
There was a silence on the other end long enough that he almost thought the call had dropped. "Colter?" Dory said, her voice cracking open around his name in a way that made something in his chest ache. "Oh my God. Where are you? Are you okay?"
"I'm okay," he said, though he wasn't entirely sure that was true. "I left. The house. I'm in town, I don't really know which one, there's a gas station, I."
"Stay right there," Dory said, already moving, he could hear it in the sudden rustle and clatter on her end of the line. "Don't go anywhere, okay? Stay exactly where you are."
Her voice pulled away from the receiver, muffled but urgent, calling for someone. "Aunt Melissa! Aunt Melissa, it's Colter, he left, he's at a gas station, we have to go get him right now."
There was more movement, a door, a car door, and then Dory's voice came back close to the phone again, breathless. "We're coming. Twenty minutes, maybe less. Just don't move, okay? Promise me you won't move."
"I won't move," Colter said.
"Promise," Dory said again, and it wasn't a question this time either, just a demand, the same steady tone she'd used two years back telling him to memorize the numbers in the first place.
"I promise," he said.
He stood at the corner of the lot after that, phone hung back in its cradle, and watched the ordinary traffic of an ordinary afternoon move past him like none of it had any idea what had just happened. A woman loaded groceries into a minivan. Two kids rode bikes across the street without looking either way first. Colter stood very still and felt, for the first time in longer than he could remember, entirely without a task to do, and it was almost worse than having too many.
It was closer to fifteen minutes than twenty when a sedan pulled into the lot fast enough to draw a look from the gas station attendant, and Dory was out of the passenger door before it had fully stopped.
She looked different than he remembered. Older, obviously, two years older, but it was more than that. She had on regular clothes, jeans and a jacket that fit her, sneakers that weren't falling apart at the seams, hair cut in some style he didn't have a name for. She looked like every other kid he'd glimpsed through the truck window on trips into town, and he was standing there in boots held together mostly by habit, in a shirt he'd patched at the elbow himself with thread that didn't quite match.
Dory didn't seem to notice any of that, or if she did, she didn't let it slow her down for even a second. She crossed the lot at something close to a run and wrapped her arms around him hard enough to knock the breath half out of him.
"You're okay," she said, into his shoulder. "You're actually okay."
"I'm okay," he said again, and this time it felt a little more true.
A woman and a man had gotten out of the car behind her, and Colter recognized them only vaguely, more from old photographs than memory. His aunt Melissa looked at him for a second like she was doing the same math he was, and then she just stepped in and hugged him too, quick and matter of fact, like it wasn't a thing that needed discussing.
"Let's get you somewhere warm," she said. "You hungry?"
"I'm fine," Colter said, out of pure habit.
"That wasn't the question," his uncle Dave said, not unkindly, already opening the back door for him. "Get in. We'll figure the rest out on the way."
The ride was a couple towns over, and for most of it Melissa kept twisting around in the front seat to check on him: did he need anything, was he warm enough, did he want the radio on or off, small questions that added up to something Colter didn't quite have a frame for. Mary had told him once, years back, that Melissa had only taken Dory in because she felt obligated, and had resented every minute of it since. Sitting in the back of that car, watching her fuss over the temperature of the heater vent aimed at him, Colter understood that whatever else his mother had lied about, she'd lied about that too.
Dory spent most of the drive on her phone, talking fast and low, and it took Colter a minute to realize she was telling Russell.
"He's right here, he's fine, we're bringing him to the house," she said, and then, a beat later, quieter, "I know. I know. Just get here."
Russell was standing in the driveway by the time they pulled up, arms crossed, and the second Colter climbed out of the car his brother crossed the space between them in about three strides and pulled him into a hug that lasted a lot longer than Colter knew what to do with.
"You're an idiot for walking that far with no water," Russell said, when he finally pulled back, "and I'm real glad you did it anyway."
Inside, the kitchen smelled like something Melissa had been cooking earlier, and Colter's eyes went, before he could stop them, straight to the cabinet door hanging crooked on one hinge above the sink. He was halfway to it, already reaching for the multi-tool clipped to his belt out of pure habit, before he registered how quiet the room had gone behind him.
"What are you doing?" Russell said.
"Hinge is loose," Colter said, like that explained everything, like it wasn't strange at all to walk into somebody else's kitchen and start fixing it. "Two minutes, tops."
"You don't have to fix our cabinet," Melissa said, gently, and something in her voice made him look up. She didn't sound annoyed. She sounded like she might be close to something else entirely.
"What do you mean?" Colter said. "Of course I do?"
He heard how strange that came out even as he said it, but he couldn't work out which part of it was supposed to be strange. There was a hinge. The hinge was loose. He had a tool that could fix it and two free hands. He genuinely didn't understand what other version of this moment everybody else seemed to be picturing.
"That's not the point." Dave had come to stand in the doorway, arms crossed, watching the way Colter's hand hadn't quite let go of the tool. "When's the last time you sat down somewhere and didn't fix something?"
"I don't see what that has to do with the hinge."
"He does this at home too," Dory said quietly. It wasn't really a question. "All of it. The house, the car, everything, all the time."
"Somebody has to," Colter said, and realized, the second it was out of his mouth, that it was exactly the kind of thing Mary would say.
"Nobody has to. Not tonight, and not you specifically, not ever again if you don't want to." Melissa reached over, gently pried the multi-tool out of his hand, folded it shut, and set it on the counter, well out of easy reach. "Sit down. Let the hinge wait."
Colter sat, though it didn't sit right with him, the crooked cabinet door still hanging there in the corner of his eye while Melissa got the rest of lunch onto the table and the five of them settled in around it, Colter waiting, out of old habit, to see somebody else pick up a fork before he let himself do the same.
"So what do you do for fun?" Melissa asked, passing the bread down the table. "When you're not working, I mean."
Colter thought about that longer than the question probably warranted. "I keep the truck running," he said finally. "Feels good when something that was broken starts working again."
"That's not really a hobby, though," Dory said, not unkindly. "I mean something you do because you want to. Not because it needs doing."
He turned that over. It hadn't really occurred to him that those were two separate categories of thing. "I fish, sometimes. Down at the creek behind the property."
"Yeah? For fun?"
"For food, mostly. Mary doesn't really keep the kitchen stocked the way she should, so I go out and get what I can. Rabbit, fish, whatever's around that week."
Nobody said anything for a second. Dave set his fork down carefully, like it needed extra attention not to make noise. Melissa's face had gone soft in a way Colter recognized now, the same look she'd given him over the cabinet hinge.
"That's not a hobby, Colter," Russell said quietly. "That's just more work with a different name on it."
"I guess," Colter said, not entirely sure why the observation seemed to cost his brother something to say out loud.
He was grateful, after that, for a reason to point the conversation somewhere else. "How's school going?" he asked Dory, mostly to fill the silence, and watched something in her shoulders ease at the change of subject as much as his own did.
"Fine. Good, actually. I joined yearbook this year, mostly because Priya wouldn't stop asking, but it turns out you get to skip half your classes for it to go take pictures at pep rallies, so." She shrugged like that settled the matter. "Junior year's supposed to be the hard one. We'll see."
"And you," Colter said, looking at Russell. "What is it you do, exactly? Nobody's ever really told me."
"Framing houses," Russell said. "Work for a contractor outside of town, guy named Miller. Decent pay, and he's teaching me enough that I could probably get licensed on my own in a couple years." He said it easy, like it cost him nothing at all, and Colter caught himself envying that a little, the plainness of it, work you did because you'd chosen it and could name a reason why.
Dave asked him a question at one point, something about whether he'd grown up using power tools or mostly just hand tools, and Colter answered it carefully, aware the whole time of a formality in his own voice that wasn't there when he talked to Dory or Russell, like some part of him still wasn't sure exactly how much room he was allowed to take up at this particular table.
When the plates were empty, Melissa started stacking them with a brisk, purposeful clatter. "I'll take care of these," she said, already moving toward the sink. "You three catch up. It's been a long day."
Colter was on his feet before he'd decided to be, reaching for the stack in her hands. It was the first thing all night that made sense to him without having to think about it. There were dishes. Dishes needed doing. He knew how to do dishes.
"I've got it," he said.
"I've got it," Melissa said, and didn't let go.
"I don't mind helping."
"I know." She eased the plates gently out of his reach anyway. "Sit back down."
Colter looked at Dory, then at Russell, waiting for one of them to back him up, but they were both just watching him with the same odd, careful expression, like he'd said something more complicated than he'd meant to.
"Why can't I help with the dishes?" he said, because he genuinely didn't understand it, and standing there half out of his chair felt worse than either sitting or helping.
"Just sit down, Colter," Dory said, gently, and put a hand on his arm to pull him back into the chair, and that was the only answer he got.
He sat, still not entirely sure what he'd almost interrupted. Dave found somewhere else in the house that needed his attention. Melissa ran the water hard enough that it covered most other sound, and that left the three Shaw kids alone at the table for the first time in longer than Colter could remember.
"So what happened?" Russell said, once the door had swung shut behind Melissa and Dave. "Start from this morning."
"Let him catch his breath, Russell, he just lost a fight with Melissa over who gets to do the dishes."
"I'm not interrogating him. I'm asking what happened."
"Same thing when you use that voice."
"It's fine," Colter said, mostly to get them both to stop. "I don't mind telling it."
He told it plain, because that was the only way he knew how to tell anything. The truck stalling out on the incline. Being underneath it when Mary's voice drifted out from the porch. Melissa's name, a stranger he'd apparently been described to like he was somebody else entirely.
"Wait, she was talking to Aunt Melissa?" Dory said. "When?"
"This morning. That's what set it off."
"She told Melissa you don't want to talk to me." Dory wasn't really asking, more trying the sentence out loud to see if it would hold together. "That's insane. That's actually insane, Colter, do you know how many times I've called that house?"
"I don't. Nobody's ever told me you called."
"Thirty times. Easy. Probably more, I stopped counting because it was making me lose my mind a little, and I write you every month, every single month, and I know that probably sounds like nothing, but it didn't feel like nothing, it felt like."
"You never got any of it," Russell said, cutting her off, not gently. "None of it. Did you?"
"No." Colter's voice came out smaller than he wanted it to. "Not one letter. Not one call. Nothing anybody ever told me was from either of you."
Dory made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and sat back hard in her chair, both hands pressed flat against the table like she needed something solid under them. "She told us you were fine," she said. "Every single time. That you were happy. That you needed space. That you'd call when you were ready, and we believed her, and I keep telling myself that's on us, we should've known better, except how were we supposed to."
"There wasn't anybody else to ask." Russell's jaw had gone tight, that same tight Colter half remembered from before their father died. "You weren't in school. No teacher. No counselor. Nobody outside that house who could've told us different than what she said."
"That Christmas, though." Dory looked at Russell. "We saw it. That whole weekend, we both saw exactly what she was like, and we still just."
"I tried." Russell's voice had gone flat. "Said something to her, that weekend. Direct. Didn't go anywhere except getting myself banned from ever coming back, which, in hindsight, probably could've gone better."
"You said something to her? You never told me you actually said anything."
"Didn't think it mattered. Nothing came of it."
"It matters that you tried, Russell."
"Well, it didn't work, so."
Colter sat there with all of it landing on top of him at once, too much to sort into any order that made sense. Two years of nights spent reciting a phone number he'd never fully understood the point of. Two years of calls and letters that had never once reached him. A version of himself that had apparently lived in his siblings' heads this whole time: stubborn, silent, fine. None of it true.
"Why are you both looking at me like that?" he finally said.
"Like what?" Dory said.
"Like I'm about to break. I'm not. I just didn't know. Any of it."
Russell looked at him for a long moment, something easing slightly in his face. "We know," he said. "That's kind of the problem."
Later that night, Colter ate a dinner he hadn't made himself, and it felt strange in all the wrong ways. Melissa took one look at the state of his shirt and quietly disappeared with it to the laundry room without asking permission first. Colter lay in a guest bed that was too soft, in a way he suspected he'd get used to faster than he wanted to admit.
Somebody, probably Dave, had left a stack of clean clothes folded on the dresser, plain t-shirts and a pair of jeans that looked like they might actually fit. His boots sat by the door where he'd left them, cracked and worn and entirely out of place against the clean carpet, and he found he didn't much mind looking at them there. They'd gotten him this far. That was enough.
He caught himself running Dory's number through his head out of old habit, the same steady recitation he'd used every night for two years, and it took him a second to understand why. He didn't need to hold onto it that way anymore. Nobody was going to tear it up in front of him. He could call it whenever he wanted, or write it down in plain sight, or just walk into the next room and find the person it belonged to sitting right there.
He said it over once more anyway, quiet, out of habit more than necessity, and then he let himself stop.