Meanwhile, as he chopped and dug and stomped and cussed, Al was strolling about, flapping mulch bags like pillowcases and spreading the cedar shavings with dainty kicks of his sneakers. Whereas Henry’s lungs had scalded him mute, Al had been jabbering nonstop this entire time. Talking shit about the skinnies, repairs to the Bonneville, Fridays long gone. Now he was going on about his next hustle, which he was planning to start making moves on as soon as he’d stacked up a couple bands from this buckthorn shit, involving a black-market pill press and something called fentanyl—Henry didn’t care. He was hardly listening. A minute into Al’s monologue, Henry’d figured out the best way to relieve this strain and rationalize all this sweat and ache was to think about Michelle.

A tenacious, buried fiber refused to let go, no matter how hard Henry pried and threw himself into the shovel handle. It was the last root system left to dig out, so naturally it was determined to make things difficult. He threw the shovel down, squatted over the stump, and gripped the chopped nubs with his bare, blistered hands. He was yanking and twisting it, boot heels burrowing into the dirt, molars clenched and about to splinter, when Al asked if Henry’d heard back from that one bulimic bitch he was so obsessed with.

The root snapped. Henry fell flat on his ass, pulling the freed root system after him and into his lap. Swift with rage, he sprang to his feet and made a single, hammer-throw spin before hurling the dense tangle down at Al, who simply sidestepped the projectile. It thumped once against the earth, then tumbled into the river with a coffee splash.

“Fuck me. So sensitive, dude.” Al smoothed mulch over the fresh divot. “That girl, broad, woman, lady, whatever. That better? So?”

Henry spiked the shovel into the ground. Leaned. “So what?”

“You ever gonna see her or what?”

“Yeah, no. Said she wants to hang out this weekend.”

Al stopped. Looked wounded. “But I thought you and me was, this weekend, you know.”

“Who’s the sensitive one now?”

Al kicked at a hill of mulch. Spat. Muttered something about friendship, loyalty and shit, but Henry wasn’t listening, at least not to Al. In a remote corner of his mind, there was a conversation under way. A flurry of eager whispers, his and Michelle’s. They had so much to say. He recognized the vinegar pitch of her intonation but couldn’t decipher her words, not even the general topic up for discussion. A drumming cut through the noon sun’s swelter and lent their murmurs a happy beat—his pulse. It thumped as if from outside him, keeping time in some faraway place, cool and gauzy, where their imagined reunion was taking place, and so precisely where he wanted to be.

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