Joe put the board down and dusted his abdomen free of sawdust. "Hey, Willy. Slumming in the neighborhood?"
Kunkle shrugged, looking around the small barn that his boss had converted into a woodworking shop attached to his house. "Something like that."
"You stand a cup of coffee?" Joe asked. "I made it an hour ago, and I'm having some anyhow."
"Sure," Willy answered, pointing at the table saw with his chin. "What're you making?"
Joe laughed, removing the thick apron he wore. "If I'm lucky, an end table for Lyn's daughter, Coryn. Her apartment is supposedly like a sixties college museum of stacked bricks and orange crates."
They left the shop for the living room next door and the kitchen beyond. Joe lived in what might have been a gatehouse had it not been stuck onto the back of a Victorian monstrosity fronting the street. In any case, it was also inexplicably and oddly proportioned, so that anyone taller than five and a half feet looked shoehorned into the place.
"You two still tight?" Willy asked.
"With Lyn?" Joe responded, taking out a mug. "So far, so good. I take it you're asking because Sam just threw you out."
"Fuck you," Willy said without emphasis. He watched Joe pour out the coffee in silence. Only after he accepted the mug did he add, "We just had a fight. I left. She wanted to talk-as usual."
Joe poured his own mug and sat on a stool near the counter. "You do talk sometimes, though, right?"
Willy took a sip and answered, "Yeah, Mom. We talk. I wasn't in the mood this time."
"It's tough," Joe commented vaguely, knowing his audience. "The price we have to pay for companionship. Still worth it to you?"
Willy stared a moment into the depths of the mug. "I guess."
A thumbs-up, given the man, Joe thought.
"How's your brother doin'?" Willy asked, changing the subject.
"Close to good as new. Using a cane only, driving on his own. He's even back at work half days."
"That was a weird deal."
"You mean Dan Griffis going after him?" Joe asked. "Yeah. I never thanked you properly for doing what you did, by the way, getting close to E. T. In the long run, that probably saved all our bacon the night Dan came hunting for me and mine."
Willy nodded. "No sweat. Got me to hang out in a bar again. I always liked bars, even if what they had in them didn't like me."
Or liked him too much, Joe thought.
"E. T. was a good enough guy, though," Willy continued unexpectedly. "A fucked-up dad, maybe, but okay in the end. Did you ever get together with him after?"
Joe shook his head. "The night he called, I could tell it was about all he had left in him. The local scuttlebutt has it he hasn't left his house since-not to see Dan in jail, not to run the business, not even to have a drink. From what I hear, the lawyers are gathering to figure out all his businesses."
Willy laughed. "Any lawyers left over after the Leppman-Gartner clan got through hiring?"
"Good point," Joe agreed.
Willy put his coffee down and gazed at his host. Joe had rarely seen him in such a contemplative mood. "This family shit is so weird."
Joe smiled at him. "How so?"
"I don't know. Getting ticked off at Sam tonight and driving around, I got to thinking. Seems like all we do is piss and moan about breaking up or sticking together, and when we're not doing that, it's family, family, family. I mean, what do you get out of that whole deal with Gartner using the death of one daughter to screw up the other? Or E. T., for that matter? He puts Andy in jail to spare Dan and then has to drop the dime on Dan because the bastard's about to kill a cop and his entire family. How messed up is that? How wrong can you get it?"
Joe absorbed all this, knowing that an answer wasn't requested. But it did make him think of Lyn and her family, half destroyed by the sea; of his own mother and brother, almost lost through capricious malice; and of how fragile and tenuous even the best of bonds could become, through no fault of one's own.
None of which considered the other, more willful human dynamics that Willy was talking about: divorce and abandonment, revenge and paranoia, murder and mayhem.
"How bad is it with you and Sam?" he asked.
Willy made a dismissive face. "Just a pissing match. No big deal."
Joe nodded and gazed out the darkened window for a while in silence. "I guess we just do the best we can," he finally said, "and keep our fingers crossed."
Willy took a final sip, put his mug down, and slipped off his stool. "Okay, Obi-Wan. I'll go home now. Thanks for the java, if not the bullshit."
Joe nodded. "Take care, Willy. I'll see you tomorrow."