Dylan walked out of the house with his box of mentionables and put them in the bed of his truck. The truck was covered in rough tanned skin, with noticeable blemishes dotting the front bumper and grill from when we took it into the ditch two years ago. It was a good looking truck, and Dylan had said the first thing he would do when he ran into some money would be to fix it up to make it a great looking truck. My feeling was that he wanted the physical value of the truck to match the sentimental value he had for it. If so, he'd need quite a sum of money.
Jerry, who, at this point, was my girlfriend, chased after him and got into the passenger seat. Words were exchanged and I don't know who reached out to who, but Jerry began to cry. A bird had **** on the front window and the Western sun was caking it to the glass. Jerry was very animated with Dylan so the shadow that was cast from the **** bounced around from her hair to her face to her neck.
I was sitting on the tailgate when they came out. Jerry stormed inside and the **** shadow didn't follow her, instead, planting itself on the black upholstery. Dylan swung around to the tailgate and sat next to me. The back tires sunk with his weight, whined and put the truck on an angle. "Big moves, huh?"
Dylan jumped off, nodded his head and fiddled with the tailgate latch. "I'm going to put this down," he said, and he did, with me still on it. I fell backwards into the truck bed onto a two-by-four but it was a short fall so no harm done. Dylan was laughing anyway. He laid back with his hands perched behind his head between the truck and him. I followed suit and the sky was a dull blue with heavy clouds covering the sun.hat
"So," Dylan said, and we both knew what it meant. So is a neutral statement when everybody knows what is coming so nobody has to take blame for it. I didn't want to, and he didn't have a reason to, so I replied in the fairest way I knew.
"So."
Dylan tapped his shoe on the end of the truck like a church bell. "Why did you do it?"
There it was. The last four weeks, condensed into a diamond. I was finally uneasy, as uneasy as Dylan was and had been since he anchored that unlucky thief at the track meet.
Jerry came back out the front with a box lid and two bungee cords in hand and came to the truck. It was a good thing because I had nothing to say to Dylan. She had cleaned herself up but the makeup around her eyes was still smudged. "If you're going to go," she whined like she was imitating a made-for-television movie, "at least say bye."
"I will," he said. "Don't worry about it."
"It really would be the least you could do."
"I will."
Jerry scoffed. "How charitable of you," she said, drawing up her cheeks like a coil, dripping in sarcasm that never quite hit the mark. "Thanks so much," cue obnoxious smile, "Dylan." She put extra stress on the name because that's how they did it in the movies. She gave the head tilt, the sassy smirk, and that's a rap.
Dylan exhaled. Jerry dropped the lid and the cords in the truck bed and stormed back inside.
"Are you really going, Dylan?" I finally stammered.
He ran his hands back through his head and sat upright. The sun was forcefully breaking out of the clouds only to be covered again moments later, struggling back and forth, casting a shadow or a light onto our world.
The only thing in my head was that you can't burn down a house made of stone. I built up my walls, rock on rock, bypassing windows and doors so no flame could ever get inside. And they didn't. It was never burned down, or even given the chance for a spark to. Dylan was a constant reminder that I could build a house around anyone I wanted to protect them, but in the end, I was going to end up outside of it.
I sat upright beside him. Dylan stared off down the street. He wasn't looking at anything because there was nothing to see. There was the truck, the truck bed, and Dylan's box with the lid and the cords to keep it shut tight. There was a two-by-four, there was Dylan, there was me, and there was everything we knew and everything we weren't sure of yet very close by.
As I just said, there was everything we knew, and we knew much about each other. I knew that Dylan had been with Jerry consistently for the last two months, which was long before the track meet. Dylan knew that I knew. He knew that I had stolen money from him, and he knew that I had lied to get at it. I knew that Dylan was leaving. Dylan knew that I had a jaw made out of cement. I knew that Dylan's right hand was a sledgehammer, and the sun knew that it was time to go back behind the clouds.
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