Pulling into his driveway, he climbed out of his truck and headed inside through the kitchen door. He stepped over boxes and sucked in his body as he wiggled past the small desk in the corner of the already cramped kitchen. His assistant/aunt Carmen was on the phone, and she glanced up in time to catch her coffee cup from spilling as his hip hit the desk.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

This definitely was not ideal working conditions. He desperately missed having an office. Moving them into his kitchen was supposed to have been temporary when he’d lost the lease on his office space, but it was going on three years now, and there were no concrete plans to move out of his home anytime soon.

“I’ll schedule you in for a quote next week,” Carmen said, rummaging through the papers on her messy desk to find a pen.

Next week? What was wrong with this week? Tomorrow, even. He grabbed a piece of paper on her desk and wrote: Why next week?

Had a new job miraculously popped up that would keep him booked until then?

She took the pen and wrote back: The illusion of being busy.

More like a delusion, if anyone in town believed that.

If he was busy, he wouldn’t be coaching every Little League team in town and teaching surfing lessons during the summer months to camp kids. There were tons of small jobs around town—deck repairs, painting, roofing…but he couldn’t bring himself to charge his friends and neighbors enough to be profitable after cost of supplies and paying his crew.

He was great at construction work. Not so great at the business side of things. Everyone in town still treated him like the local football star he used to be, and maybe he wanted to preserve that image somehow. Still feel that rush of being the guy everyone could depend on…if in a different way.

“Great. Looks like he has an opening on Tuesday at nine a.m.,” Carmen said. She disconnected the call and turned to him. “How’d it go at Mrs. Miller’s?” She stood to write next Tuesday’s job on the whiteboard behind the desk.

She’d sent him to pick up a check from the eighty-year-old widow for the work he’d done on her fence the week before. “Let’s just say her payment was delicious.” He’d eaten six of the chocolate zucchini muffins already that day.

Carmen wagged the dry-erase marker at him. “Stop letting them pay you with baked goods. Baked goods, homemade knit scarfs, signed author copies of their self-pubbed books, these things don’t pay bills.”

“I know, I know,” he said, running a hand through his hair and over his face. He reached for the coffeepot and poured the lukewarm liquid into his cup that was still sitting on the counter since that morning.