#doesn't-own-a-sportscoat

[luluwquidprocrow]

good things come in threes

harry, hawk, ed, margaret (mentions of frank and hank)

gen

5,874 words

One slow autumn afternoon in the fall of Harry and Hawk and Ed’s senior year.

for @countdowntotwinpeaks ’ wonderfulxstrange 2022, i got @doesnt-own-a-sportscoat, who asked for og bookhouse boys doing good deeds and having some hijinks! (margaret and frank wound up sneaking their way in, too.)

Hank had detention, so it was just Harry and Hawk and Ed that afternoon, walking through the school parking lot.

(Hawk frowned when Harry told him during lunch. “Again? What for?”

Harry shrugged. “You know,” he said. He hadn’t been there when it happened, but he could guess; some smart comment Hank’s trig teacher hadn’t liked. Mr. Simmons didn’t stand for any backtalk, and especially not for Hank’s. Senior year probably wasn’t going to make Hank any less of the good-looking troublemaker he’d always been, but Harry was holding out hope. Hank was one of his best friends, after all. Still time for him to turn around. And at least it wasn’t on a day with football practice. Coach had stood on the field for morning practice and looked at the sky and said, “Not today, men,” and walked off.)

“What’d you get on the English test?” Ed asked.

“90,” Hawk said. “Mrs. Garson didn’t like what I said about Keats. What about you?”

“I don’t know what you said about Keats.”

Hawk went in to push his shoulder up into Ed’s; Ed, one of the best defenses on the football team, dodged away from him, chuckling.

“Too much red pen,” he said, falling into step with Hawk again. “I couldn’t read a single thing she wrote. There might be an eight in there, somewhere?”

“Let me see it later,” Hawk said. “I’ve got pretty good at reading her handwriting.”

Harry lagged behind Hawk and Ed for a moment, and glanced over his shoulder at the long side window where the detention classroom was. He couldn’t see anything, not from this distance. He pulled the strap of his bag up higher on his shoulder and turned to Hawk and Ed.

“Hey Ed,” Harry said, coming up on Ed’s other side, “you see that new show the other night? Mod Squad?”

“Nah,” Ed said. “Been out with Norma a lot, must’ve missed it.”

“You sure she was with you?” Harry grinned. “Cause there was this girl on it that looked exactly like Norma—”

Ed raised both eyebrows. “No fooling?”

“Oh yeah, I saw that!” Hawk said. “Ed, you’ve gotta watch it next week. She’s the spitting image of Norma.”

“Huh,” Ed said. “That oughta be something.”

Harry and Hawk and Ed wove their way through the parking lot, coming to a stop a few feet away from Ed’s car. It was a deep blue 1960 Chevy Impala, and they stood there and took it in. It really was a honey of a car, Harry thought. She was, he amended. Ed never named the car, but he called every car she, like a true mechanic. The outside shone in the sun like the sea itself, the white hood and stripe down the side like hints of foam. It was like riding inside a wave, one that could carry the three of them away one day, riding across town and out down Highway 21. (Harry hoped it wouldn’t. At least, not all that far. He didn’t know for sure about Hawk and Ed, or Hank, but Harry had plans in Twin Peaks.)

Ed sighed. “Well, let’s get on to it,” he said. Harry and Hawk gave him neat salutes and got into position.

It went like this—Harry and Hawk and Ed took off their bags and piled them in a corner of the backseat. Ed got in the driver’s side, tried to start the Chevy, and the Chevy refused to start. There was one weekend, legend had it, in junior year, that Ed swore the car started completely on its own, but Harry and Hawk hadn’t been there and both doubted whether or not it happened. Harry and Hawk got around back, and Ed lowered all the windows, and the three of them steered and pushed the car off the slope Ed parked it on and down through the parking lot until it got enough of what Ed called umph that the engine stuttered to life and the Chevy started to pick up speed. Harry dove into the backseat, and Hawk leapt in the passenger side, and they were off, driving out of the lot and down the road.

(Hank—of course it was Hank—gave Ed a lot of grief about the Chevy, saying it didn’t make sense for a such a good mechanic to own a lemon. Actually, “lemon” was the most polite thing he said about the Chevy. Ed insisted it wasn’t that bad, it just needed an extra touch here and there, and Ed was willing to do it. Harry understood that.)

Ed always took the long way, whenever he drove. He cruised around through town, left arm leaning along the edge of the car door, right hand splayed over the edge of the steering wheel, and went at it with his usual casual confidence. Harry liked Ed driving around. It gave Harry a chance to see everything, make sure there wasn’t anything in town he’d forgotten about. Not that he ever could, but he had to keep an eye on it.

Hawk bent over the back of the passenger seat, motioning with his hand. “Hey Harry, could you—”

“Sure thing.” Harry dug around in Hawk’s bag until he found the little notebook with the pen stuck in the spiral and handed it over to Hawk. It was a word scramble book Hawk brought with him everywhere, with a puzzle on each page, blank on the other side. Hawk did a puzzle every day on the ride home, and on the other side, he wrote poems, in smooth, perfectly straight lines of blue ink. Hawk was never self-conscious about it, and even showed them to Harry and Ed sometimes, when he was real proud of them. Harry didn’t always get them—Hawk had a great way with words that Harry sure didn’t—but Hawk was his friend, and Harry was proud of his talent.

The Chevy slowed up. Harry didn’t have to look up to know where they were now—Ed went there practically every day. The shadow of the diner sign passed over the car, and Hawk and Harry grinned at each other where their reflections met in the passenger side rearview mirror.

“Be just a minute,” Ed said, and left the car idling while he got out and half-jogged into the diner. Harry could see him through the big glass window in the front, going up to the counter and leaning over it to kiss Norma on the cheek, like they hadn’t seen each other a whole half hour ago when school let out.

“He could just drive Norma here after school,” Harry said, sitting up and leaning his arms on the headrest of Hawk’s seat. He wouldn’t mind Norma crammed into the car with them on the way home. (Hank might mind, but—Hank wasn’t here today, anyway. Was it bad manners to ask a girl to push a Chevy? But they’d gone on enough dates, Ed and Norma, she knew how the Chevy worked. She probably wouldn’t mind.)

“He could just ask Norma to homecoming instead of just hinting at it, too,” Hawk said. He turned in his seat, putting his back against the dash. “You know, if I have to hear him talk to Norma about the homecoming decorations one more time, or how neat the theme is—”

“He thinks ‘under the sea’ is neat? Wasn’t that last homecoming too?” Harry would swear on anything that all of Frank’s homecomings were “under the sea” too.

“—I’m going to ask her to homecoming myself.”

Harry laughed against the headrest. “Yeah? How’s old Diane gonna feel about that?”

The previous summer, Hawk’s dad took him on a road trip, and somewhere along the way he’d met Diane Shapiro, on her own family vacation coming from the east coast. They sent each other letters regularly; Hawk wrote her real long ones.

(Once, Harry’d tried to write—something—for, well, someone. He didn’t think anyone would have given him a hard time for it, not really, but Harry had been so embarrassed at the thought of it all that he threw the paper away with only a doodle of a fir tree in the corner. He wasn’t that kind of person.)

“Old Diane has heard enough about Ed and Norma dancing around each other,” Hawk said. “She’d be glad to hear the end of it.”

“They’re not gonna do much dancing if Ed doesn’t ask her.”

Ed emerged from the diner a moment later with a big grin on his face and ducked into the car. “Norma says hi,” he said, a little breathlessly.

Harry leaned across the seat to the open window on the other side. “Hi, Norma,” he shouted, waving at the diner window. Norma couldn’t hear him, but she was definitely still watching the car, and she waved in return.

“Hey Norma,” Hawk called, stretching across Ed and towards his window, “about homecoming—”

“Aww, come on,” Ed said. This time he was the one trying to get Hawk in the shoulder, but Hawk, the best defense on the football team, dodged even better than Ed and dropped into the passenger seat. “I’m getting around to it—”

“Ed,” Hawk said, “I’m saying this because you’re my friend, and I care about you. You gotta just ask her.”

“I’ve got it covered,” Ed said. He reversed out of the parking lot and pulled onto the road, leaving the diner behind them. “I got it all planned out. Got a Tammy Wynette tape and everything.” He fished in the joint of the seat and the backrest and pulled out the cassette, jiggling it in its case, then put it back.

Harry saw Hawk roll his eyes in the mirror. He decided to spare Ed the commentary on whether or not a Tammy Wynette cassette tape was the right way to ask your girlfriend to homecoming. For all his and Hawk’s teasing, Ed must’ve been doing something right with Norma. They’d been together for four years, and asking her was just about the principle of asking your girl. It could be worse, Harry thought. There was this short red-haired girl with big eyes, whose name Harry could never remember, who he saw in the hallway sometimes and seemed to disappear whenever anybody walked by her. Whatever romance she wanted, it didn’t seem like it was going well.

(Harry wasn’t jealous. Not all that much, not really. He wasn’t the only senior without a girlfriend. He talked to plenty of girls, he—and Norma was a real sport to hang out with Harry and Hawk and Ed and Hank altogether sometimes, but it wasn’t—Harry had other things to think about.)

Ed drove on. Past the cleared lot the town wound up not building a house in, grass growing up out of the piles of dirt left behind. Past that tiny store that had had six different owners in Harry’s lifetime. What was it now? He squinted at it. An antique shop, with a bunch of porcelain in the window. Over to the busier parts of town and past the half-done foundation of the new department store, past Calhoun Memorial, down a short side street with houses lined with orange and yellow mums. Around to the residential streets again.

Harry saw a moving van sitting parked by the curb below a big white house with a sloping yard and concrete steps. All the doors and windows were open, and the front porch piled up with cardboard boxes. The Palmers, Harry guessed. Leland and Sarah Palmer got married earlier in the year up at Pearl Lakes, in a big lavish wedding. Dad had gone, because Dad went to every wedding in the area. They’d heard tell the Palmers were searching for a house in the area after. He watched the house even after Ed passed by, turning his head to see the hint of a curtain flutter in one of the windows. It was the strangest thing, all of a sudden. Harry couldn’t think if anyone had ever lived there before them.

The Chevy turned the corner, and Harry sank into his seat. They were in the last cluster of quiet streets before the road would take a sharp curve and cut through the nearby section of woods. Smoke stung in Harry’s nose, a surprising and sharp tang. He rubbed at his nose with the side of his hand and looked around again. White smoke wisped its way out of some of the chimneys along the road, fireplaces working away as the weather started to get chilly.

It wasn’t the same, but it always made Harry think about it again.

They’d been freshman, he and Hawk and Ed and Hank, and the school year had just started when the fire broke out. It only burned that night, one too-hot evening in the middle of September, when the four of them were sitting on the floor of Harry’s living room, pretending to do English homework but really watching The Fugitive and talking about how football tryouts went during the commercials. Frank was home for the weekend and supposed to be supervising while Dad was out, but he was as interested in The Fugitive as the rest of them, and gave pointers from his own football career. It was one of those good and slow nights, Dad liked to call them, spent with people you liked.

Hawk and Hank did their long-standing thumb wrestle for the last piece of dessert in Harry’s kitchen, and Hawk won, like he always did. Hank hovered behind him, trying to snag a bite of the danish from Wagon Wheel Bakery, and Hawk was fending off Hank and his fork with his elbows when they heard it. The fire siren, wailing out across town.

Frank opened the front door, and the four of them crowded behind him to see what it was. But there was no way they could miss it—a thick, black plume of smoke was billowing over the woods like a stain, spilling up into the clouds.

The smoke choked Harry then, too, the smell of burning wood filling up the whole house, even after Frank herded them inside and left to see what he could do. He looked back at Harry before he left their house, and they nodded at each other. Their unspoken agreement, what they’d always been taught.

Harry and Hawk and Ed and Hank got themselves ready. They checked the street for excess debris that might catch if the fire came their way, made sure the radios had working batteries, got the food and water ready, enough for them and enough to hand out to people who might need them. Harry even made Hawk and Ed and Hank call their parents. They already knew where they were, but it was worth it to double check and be safe, in the event of a fire.

(He hoped it might be like the last big fire, when he was nine. That was a night to remember. The Elk’s Club caught fire, and everything had been so dry that the blaze managed to spread and jump the river before it could even get close to contained; the Martell dogs got loose; a transformer blew and knocked out half the electricity in town; Mr. Packard broke his ankle trying to get to his car. He said he tripped over one of the hounds, and the Martells said Mr. Packard was a—Harry never exactly heard what it was they’d said, because Dad hadn’t wanted to repeat it, but he got the gist of it.

And the whole entire town came together to help in the aftermath. Mr. Packard commandeered rebuilding the foundation of the Elk’s Club with his own lumber straightaway from his hospital bed, and coordinated an effort to recapture the hounds, and people from out of town came to help restore the electric. School was canceled for a couple days, and Harry and Hawk and Ed and Hank had biked meals to the firefighters still cleaning up the ash.)

But it was like the fire was gone as soon as it started. Hours later, it was over, and Dad and Frank came back home, and Hawk and Ed and Hank went home. Dad said the fire was contained quickly, and just a few acres of wood had been scorched. None of the trees were even felled. But there was one casualty.

Harry didn’t know Mr. Lanterman very well, but Harry thought it was awful, that he’d died right after getting married. All the Trumans went to the funeral. Harry didn’t know Margaret Lanterman all that well, since she was older than him, and that was one of the first times he really saw her. She stood tall in her grief, wrapped up in black, her eyes red but her face dry. He hadn’t remembered her ever carrying a log before, though.

Dad had gone up to her, Frank and Harry beside him. He put a hand on Margaret’s shoulder and said something to her in his slow, deep voice. But Margaret’s eyes found Harry instead, staring straight at him. Almost like she could see right through him. Harry stood up a little straighter, because that was polite. Then Margaret shook off Dad’s hand and leaned down to Harry.

“Good things come in threes,” she said. Then she nodded at Dad and Frank and walked away.

He turned it over in his head a lot after she’d said it. Four years later, Harry still didn’t know what she’d meant. He thought about it sometimes when he was with his friends—they were three good things to Harry. But then Harry wondered where that left him. Harry wanted to be one of those good things too. All his life, that was the only thing he wanted, especially in a town like Twin Peaks. You took care of a town like Twin Peaks, because it was the kind of town that needed you to take care of it. And Harry wanted to do it with people he liked. That’s why he always roped in Hawk and Ed, and Hank. (And he could take care of them, too.)

But it was pointless to think about it, probably. Margaret said a lot of stuff like that, stuff that didn’t make sense, especially after the funeral. Some of the people in town called her the Log Lady now, and he’d heard the other things they said about her too. (The other things Hank said, too.) That she was crazy, that she deserved to live alone in the woods. Harry’s face scrunched up thinking of the way Dad would reprimand him if Harry repeated the things he’d heard. Harry didn’t agree with them, but he didn’t think Margaret was someone he was going to go out of his way to see, either.

Something flickered in front of him; Hawk, waving a hand in front of Harry’s face again.

“Where’d you go there, Harry?” Hawk asked.

“Hm? Oh, uh—just thinking,” Harry said.

They’d passed the curve while he was daydreaming. The trees bent over the road here, making giant patches of shadow, the afternoon sun only showing in the occasional gap. Ed hadn’t taken this road in some time, and it was like a split between two worlds—on the right side, remains of the controlled burn Hawk’s father had overseen back in the spring. The town had started doing a while ago to try and limit the amount caught up in forest fires. The bottom edges of the trunks were burnt black, but the brightest, most lush and green fledgling trees burst up out of the soil. On the left, though, was a pocket of the remains of a fire that had never grown back right. The leaves that were left weren’t like the changing autumn orange a lot of the town was now, but a burnt, cold orange, with thin branches hanging limp and broken along the ground. The bark wasn’t as dark, but the trees were withered and brittle, like any moment they could fall apart. Harry couldn’t take his eyes off it.

Then the road opened up again, the branches stretching away from the road, turning into strong, towering Douglas Firs, untouched by anything and spaced farther apart. It was like taking a deep breath. (Harry even took one himself.) Harry knew all of Twin Peaks, but this part in particular was familiar like the back of his hand. He and Hawk and Ed and Hank had gone through there a lot as kids. It seemed like a whole age since they’d done it, now.

“Hey,” Ed said suddenly, “you see that?”

Harry turned. “See what?”

Ed slowed the Chevy down to an idle again and stuck his head out the window, staring at the woods. “I don’t know,” he said. “Thought there was something in there.”

Harry and Hawk and Ed sat there, watching. Harry didn’t see anything suspicious, but, it wouldn’t do to let something like that go, now would it? Ed even turned the Chevy off completely, pulled the keys out, spun the keyring around his finger once and pocketed it. They looked at each other, one by one—and then the three of them jumped out of the car and ran together into the trees, laughing in turn as they each leapt over an old fallen tree trunk, dark and rotted out with time.

Autumn was really coming on fast now, wasn’t it? Red and yellow maple leaves crunched under their shoes as Harry and Hawk and Ed tromped along, and the chill Harry noticed earlier was more present in the shade there. The cool breeze kicked up, lifting sections of Harry’s hair, and he tried to smooth the curls back down. Maybe he should get a hat to wear, one of these days. A nice, big hat.

“You think I should get a hat?” he asked.

“Have to be a pretty big hat for all that head,” Ed commented.

Harry rolled his eyes. “What about, like a, like a cowboy hat,” he said. “How’d I look with a cowboy hat?”

“Like a cowboy,” Hawk said, shooting Harry a grin over his shoulder.

Ed started whistling that these from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Harry had begged Frank to drive them to Newport two years ago to see it, since it likely wouldn’t make its way to the town drive-in. Harry and Hawk joined in, whistling along until a high, warbling birdsong swelled out of the trees around them, louder than their whistling.

“Guess we’ve got some competition,” Hawk said. “Look at that—look!” He pointed up at one of the tree branches. Harry and Ed stood on either side of him and looked, just like he said. “I forgot my binoculars, but—”

Harry and Hawk and Ed could still see it. Picking along a tree branch was a small orange smudge of a bird, one of the varied thrushes Hawk was always trying to see when he went out birding with his family. It whistled down at them, once, and then twice, and then took to the air around them. Harry and Hawk and Ed turned in a half-circle to watch it go.

There was more to see. Harry and Hawk and Ed tracked a garter snake for a little while, walking alongside it a few feet away as it slithered through the underbrush, a weaving stripe of brown with white down either side. Eventually, they lost sight of it when Ed pointed out a nearby cabin. There were lots of them spaced out in the woods, not along any of the half-made paths, just wherever they wound up being. Harry swore, in fact, that some of them moved. He felt like he never saw the same cabin in the same spot twice. As Harry and Hawk and Ed wound their way around a cluster of firs, Harry felt sure there had been a squat, long cabin with a brick fence and thick red curtains drawn over the windows the last time they’d been through there. It couldn’t have gotten up and walked away, he knew, but it sure wasn’t there now.

But there was another one, up over a small hill. A dark wood cabin in the shade of a close ring of trees, with an empty clothesline strung out back. The windows were open, and a good-sized pile of wood sat by the far side of the house, but other than that, it seemed completely isolated and undisturbed, like nobody lived there at all.

Somebody could live there, though, Harry thought.

“Let’s go check it out,” he said, and Hawk and Ed followed behind him on either side.

They crept up slowly to the cabin, taking their time. It was probably the angle of all the trees, but it was even more shadowy up close, and the wood even darker. The front porch was stacked with possessions—an old butter churner, a dresser that had seen better days, a bench with a fringed blanket on it. Harry and Hawk and Ed peeked through one of the open windows at the front as they passed. It didn’t look all that scary on the inside. He could see big shelves in the walls with books tucked neatly on them and cozy blankets draped over the backs of chairs. In the center of the room was a circular wooden table with a scalloped teapot, white with a ring of orange butterflies.

With a loud, quick creak, the front door opened. Harry and Hawk and Ed jumped back, stumbling into each other, scrambling for balance.

Margaret Lanterman stood in the doorway, gazing at them without surprise or reproach, but with careful consideration. She still held that log in her arms. Harry felt Ed shuffle beside him, jamming his hands in his pockets. Ed didn’t care much for anyone he didn’t already know his whole entire life. Hawk looked curious, because Hawk liked and respected most people, unless he had cause not to. Harry was curious, too. This was the first time he’d seen Margaret since the funeral for her husband. He didn’t know why he thought she’d be the same, but she was a little older, like anyone would be four years later. She wasn’t wearing black, and her glasses had different frames, and she looked more stern than Harry had seen her before, but the corners of her mouth were soft. He could picture Dad again and the reprimand he’d imagined for thinking bad of Margaret earlier. Harry wondered what she’d say to him this time, if she’d say anything.

“You can come in,” Margaret said. “I’m having tea.” Without waiting for a response, she turned around and walked into the cabin.

“D’we have to?” Ed asked.

“It’s not gonna hurt to have some tea,” Harry said.

“I hope it’s chamomile,” Hawk said.

“It’s chamomile,” Margaret called back. “And I have cookies.”

That got Ed’s interest. Harry’s too—school lunch was some time ago now. The three of them filed in, Ed shutting the door. Margaret was already sitting at her circular table, fixing her skirt and setting her log in her lap. She’d brought out plates and cups for them, the same style as her teapot, and put a bigger plate near her piled with the largest chocolate chip cookies Harry had ever seen.

Harry and Hawk and Ed sat down in the wooden chairs around the table. Margaret poured them all tea, and then offered the plate of cookies to them in turn. Ed even took one with a “thank you, ma’am.” It was almost like eating with a grandmother, although Harry didn’t think Margaret was going to ask how they were doing in school.

“I heard you in the woods,” Margaret said.

Harry choked on the tea in his mouth. He and Hawk and Ed exchanged sheepish glances.

But Margaret took a sip of her tea. “You should be careful. But I think you know that. Did you see anything you liked?”

There was a great pause. Ed took an enormous bite of his chocolate chip cookie.

“We saw a garter snake,” Hawk said.

So they told her about the garter snake, and the cabins in the woods, and the burned trees by the road, and the varied thrush. Margaret didn’t smile a lot, and she didn’t laugh at all, but she seemed pleased to listen to them and tell them in return about a few of the things she saw in the woods too. It was nicer than Harry thought it would be, really talking to her. He still thought she was strange, and most of what she said still sounded odd, but it was better than Harry imagined. And the cookies were great, too.

As they talked, Harry got the strangest feeling. Something about Margaret’s house seemed so familiar, he thought. He and Hawk and Margaret, sitting in her cabin, drinking tea, the plate of cookies by her elbow. An afternoon in the woods, coming upon Margaret out of the blue. Everything felt like he’d done it before, even if that wasn’t possible at all. He’d dome some of those things regularly, though, without Margaret. Maybe that’s all it was. Harry did a lot of the same things all the time in Twin Peaks.

Margaret hadn’t expected them to drop by, so it was only fair that Harry and Hawk and Ed offer to do her dishes for her. They took the dishes into the small kitchen in turns, first the plates and the cups, and then Harry with the teapot last. But when he went to join Hawk and Ed in the kitchen, Margaret stood from her chair and stopped him. Harry was a lot taller than four years ago, but he still found himself staring up at her, suddenly apprehensive.

“Do you remember what I told you?” Margaret asked.

Harry straightened up again, like he had before. He shifted the still-warm teapot in his hands. “Uh—you said, good things come in threes.”

Margaret sighed. “I asked if you remembered, not what I said,” she said. “I remember what I said.”

“Well—I remembered,” Harry said. He balanced the teapot in one hand and scrubbed at the back of his head. “I did.”

“Good.” Margaret put a hand on her shoulders and steadied him, just like when Dad had put his hand on her shoulder before. Then she said, quietly—“Keep it close to you, when you go looking for the truth.”

“Uh—” Harry swallowed. “Thanks, Margaret.”

She dropped her hand from his shoulder and then pointed at the kitchen. “The dishes are waiting for you.”

The dishes weren’t the only thing waiting. It turned out there was a loose bulb in Margaret’s kitchen, one that flickered over the sink, and Harry and Hawk and Ed set about fixing it for her before they left. It was really the least they could do.

Margaret stood at the door and watched them go after. They all waved, even Ed, but Margaret didn’t wave back. Harry saw her nod at them. Just once, just like Frank always did. He smiled a little and waved again, and then turned away.

Ed’s Chevy was still right where they’d left it, by the side of the road where they’d entered the woods. Harry and Hawk and Ed stood there and looked at it again, and then got into positions once more.

Getting the Chevy up and running a second time proved more of a challenge than it had at school. Rolling it along didn’t help it to start, and Ed wound up with Harry and Hawk at the trunk, walking on Hawk’s other side, helping the Chevy coast into town, the sun on their backs as it kept slipping down through the sky.

“You two can go on home, if you want,” Ed said, somewhere around Sparkwood. “I can get her to my dad’s shop.”

“Nah,” Harry said, “I don’t mind.”

“Good exercise,” Hawk added.

“Gives you what you don’t got, and all that,” Harry said, because Ed’s dad had always said that when they were younger, and Harry and Hawk would go over Ed’s house and no one felt like eating his mom’s brussel sprouts.

“Better than the brussel sprouts,” Hawk commented.

Ed hid his face in his arm, but Harry knew he was smiling.

They got the Chevy back to Ed’s dad’s garage, and his dad gave Harry and Hawk a ride home in his own car. There was barely enough light by that time, and Harry saw his way up the front steps of his house by the porch light Dad always kept it. There were things he had to do now. Figure out something for dinner, for one. Homework, for another. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.

“Dad?” Harry called out. He waited a couple seconds, but there was no response. He hadn’t figured on one, but he always checked, just in case Dad came home early. He stayed real late at the station these days, and sometimes he was more tired than Harry ever remembered him being before. It meant Harry was usually alone in the house, unless Frank visited for the weekend, but it wasn’t all that bad, not always.

Hank should be home from detention by now, anyway. Harry dropped his bag by the front door and went to the hallway by the kitchen, where they had a small wooden shelf with the phone on it, and dialed Hank’s number.

The phone rang, and rang, and rang. Harry let it ring on for longer than he should’ve before he dropped the receiver onto the hook. He sat down on the floor next to the shelf, scrubbing a hand through his hair again.

(He didn’t want to think about it, but—sometimes that’s all Harry had the time to do.)

There was something Dad said a lot lately, when he was home, and it was the one thing Harry didn’t agree with him on. Dad said—sometimes you could care about something a whole lot, but that didn’t mean it cared about you back. But Harry didn’t know how to stop caring. He was going to make it matter, all that care, he had to. Because you had to take care of things, especially the things that might not always care about you. This whole town, with the new things and old things, with the fresh leaves and the burnt trees, with Margaret, with Hawk and Ed and Dad and Frank, with Hank. What else could he do? And somebody had to care. Somebody had to hold on.

Somebody had to do his math homework, too. Harry went and got his notebooks out of his bag, switched on the small light above the phone to see better, and sat down again with his back against the wall.

A while later, it rang. Harry scrambled to his feet and grabbed for it. “Yeah?”

“Okay,” Hawk said, sounding pleased. “Get ready—new poem, fresh from the notebook. I wrote it about pushing the Chevy home. Do you want to hear it?”

Harry smiled. “Lay it on me, Hawk.”

#twin peaks #doesn't-own-a-sportscoat #countdowntotwinpeaks #wonderfulxstrange