I have a list of things I need to do with the house about a mile long, but all I can do since seeing Daisy at the bowling alley is sit on the couch and flip through a seemingly endless loop of infomercials for male hair loss products and advertisements for attorneys who specialize in slip-and-falls and weather-related accidents.

A disembodied voice on the TV comes through, shouting at me to call now if I’ve been injured during a winter storm.

What the hell am I going to do, sue God?

I get up, thinking that I need to take my mind off the TV and do something more productive. But I’m afraid if I unchain myself from the TV, I’ll spin toward something bad. I consider picking up the phone to call Alec, but it’s Monday night at ten and he has a young daughter at home to care for. He’s probably watching TV with Jess right now, or maybe they’re lying in bed together, each reading a book. Alec always had his nose in books back in high school. I imagine he has plenty of time to read now that he’s a stay-at-home dad, and he must love it.

I feel a smile pull at my mouth, and my heart warms when I think of him sitting on a rocking chair in the corner of his daughter’s room, with her across his chest and reading something to her. He probably doesn’t even read kid books to her. He’s probably training her on War and Peace or other classics. That’s the stuff he loved in school. He was always so far ahead of all our other classmates.

He shouldn’t have tried to throw it away in an instant of anger, no matter how justified his anger was. What he did wasn’t justified.

He’s fucking better than that.

I walk into the kitchen and grab a beer from the fridge. There’s not much else to do. I pop the metal cap off with a bottle opener from my keyring, and look around the room at everything and nothing. I don’t know when I ate in the past few days, but there’s a stack of bowls piled up in the kitchen, along with a few bottles and glasses. I start pulling open a few cabinets, but everything’s empty except for one which houses a few packets of instant oatmeal and cans of soup, stuff I picked up at the gas station on Friday night before Alec and I hit the bowling alley bar.

I go into the bathroom and strip off my clothes. It’s been a long couple of days. It’s been a long time since I’ve had the chance to talk to Daisy. I wonder if she is still working down at the police station. If she is, I’ll be able to see her again, and often.

When Mom got sick, she took a second mortgage out on the house to cover the stacks of medical bills piling up.

I tried to save the house, and I succeeded, and now I have to preserve it. It would be a shame if I were to allow it to fall into complete disarray now that I’m back home. I spent enough time away from it, and saving it, to see it fall apart now.

My eyes travel along the ceiling in the kitchen as though I’m not controlling them. As though something inside me is searching for a secret hidden a long time ago.

The ceiling hasn’t been upgraded since the 1970s. Wooden slats cover the ceiling and long incandescent bulbs run the length of the ceiling between the beams, covered with cheap plastic slats. Mom always talked about replacing them. The wallpaper is peeling off in places at its corners, the result of humid summers and damp winters.

I should gut the place and sell it, and get the fuck out of here.

But Daisy keeps pulling me back.

The next best thing would be to gut it and keep it for myself. Live here and keep it as the home I’ve always known.

I sink down into one of the chairs at the circular wooden table, rings all over the surface from years of hot bowls of food and desserts placed on it. I put my beer down, not worried about the condensation getting onto the table and damaging the wood.

I can’t stop thinking about Daisy. She came over to the house all the time back in the day. She practically lived here. She was a staple in my home, especially after Dad left. She treated my mom as good as she treats her own. And I know that even if she had to travel farther than just across the lawn to get here, she would.

She would have done anything for me, for my family.

I close my eyes, taking a long pull from my beer and tilting my head back, letting the cold carbonation sting at my eyes and fill up my belly, and let the memory of her laughter bouncing around the house, and the silence that filled it after Mom got sick, fill my brain.

I can’t do anything now but think.

I slip my hand into my pocket and take out the ring. Her ring. I have to make sure she’ll wear it again.

My phone starts buzzing inside my pocket and I pull it out. It’s Alec.

I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing right now. Jessica is at her mom’s house with the baby. Want to go to some stupid party?

I punch in my response, telling him that I’ll pick him up in ten minutes.

When I get to his house, I don’t honk because I don’t want to wake the whole fucking neighborhood.

Alec lumbers out of the house when he hears my car drive up over the gravel onto his driveway.

I lean over the center console and jimmy the door open for him. My ride’s old, and I’m not certain the door on the passenger side will open from the outside. Lowering the volume on the radio with my other hand, I look at him through the window.

“You alright?” I ask. He looks like shit, like he hasn’t slept or taken a shower.

“Yeah. Me and Jessica got into it a little. She took the baby to her ma’s house. Not a big deal.”

I hold my pack of reds to my lips and shake out the end of one of my smokes, pinching it in my mouth and pulling the pack away, tossing it down onto the console. Alec picks it up and takes a cigarette from it.

“So where is this party at?” I know that his family is the most important thing to him, and I don’t want to pry into his business. I know from school that his wife can be a little bit controlling, so I figure the fight was nothing. They probably got into an argument about some petty bullshit like which sheets to put on their bed.

“Thompson’s.” Alec looks out the window at the streetlamps rolling past us, their dim light flashing inside the car. “Do you think we’re too old to be going to parties like we’re still back in high school?”

“Parties like the ones at Thompson’s probably. I don’t even think I’m supposed to be going to any parties right now. Probation, you know?”

“Right. You can just drop me off if you want.”

“It’s fine. No explicit rules against it. I just want to stay out of trouble.”

“You were never in trouble to begin with.”

“If you ask her father, you’d get a different answer.”

Alec chuckles. “There’s no way to please that guy.”

We roll up to Thompson’s house and I cut off the engine. The guy always had the best parties in high school. When I think about Alec egging on two girls who were making out with each other, I shake my head and laugh. Never would have thought he’d become such a family man, which is why what he has is so precious. Like it’s dangling by a thin string that can be cut at any moment.

Thompson comes outside and greets us.

“It’s been a year, hasn’t it?” he says.

“A year too long,” I say, reaching out my hand and giving him a shake and a pat on the back.

“So are you a new man now?” I shove past Thompson and make my way into the kitchen. The ceiling is covered with multicolored Christmas lights, even though it’s not the right time. It’s either way too early to have lights up, or way too late, but either way, he doesn’t seem to care.

In the kitchen, I look around at the place. There’s a line of liquor bottles set up on the counter, along with red plastic cups.

“You know that the inventor of these plastic cups died last year?” I ask, taking one off a tall stack and unscrewing the cap of one of the bottles. I choose something dark. I don’t know what it is. Either whiskey or bourbon.

“No shit,” Thompson says as he and Alec come into the kitchen. I look down at their feet as I steady myself against the kitchen counter and take a sip of my drink, letting the hot burn flow down my throat and soothe me with its sting. It shouldn’t feel good, but it does. But it’ll take more than this to make me forget the past two days.

Now that I’m out, I feel more trapped than I was before, either a year ago or a week ago. I counted down the fucking seconds to when I could see her again, but I guess I was too arrogant when it came to how everything would shake out. I thought I would be able to pick up where we left off.

I never counted on her giving me back the ring.

I slip my hand into my pocket and palm the ring, the hardness of the diamond digging into my hand. I’m an idiot for keeping it in there. I’m not keeping it safe. I could lose it.

Alec comes up beside me and claps a hand onto my back. We used to get into a lot of shit back in the day at parties like this. Alec was always the guy who fell in love hard and fast, and he didn’t care who it was with. He was a serial monogamist back in high school, and he always had a new girl he was in love with and would never let go.

A true fucking romantic. It didn’t stop until he met Jess and took her to senior prom. She was the last girl he was in love with, and he’d argue with me if I brought it up, but I think he was the first girl he was really in love with, too.

He cried on my shoulder so many times when it came to girls, and he was stuck in the friendzone often.

“He hasn’t changed a bit. Same old man you knew a year ago, right Trav?” He reaches past me and grabs his own cup to fill up with some poison to make him feel good. I consider whether I should tell him to stop. I don’t know when Jess will be back with the baby.

“I think it’s pretty cool, what happened to you. You beat up a guy who was trying to mug an old grandma, right?” Thompson says with a smirk, flicking a broken light switch up and down.

“Right,” I say, breathing into my drink. Only Alec and I really know what happened that night, but I’m not about to tell the truth. I need to take the truth on this to my fucking grave. There’s no do-overs with this.

Alec chuckles and hooks a hand around the back of his neck, peering out the window at the sway of headlights coming down the road, narrowing and spreading out as a car speeds past the front of the house without slowing down.

“He was looking out for the common man, lets just say.” Alec looks over at me and pinches his brows together in a pained expression.

“And Daisy?” Thompson asks, cocking his head to the side and cracking his knuckles. I don’t know if he’s trying to seem like a neandertal on purpose. Her name flows over me like lava, and suddenly I feel all the air escape from the room.

“What about her?” I ask, staring down the bottom of my plastic cup. I take another shot of the dark amber liquid into my flimsy plastic cup and toss it back. The lights on the ceiling are seeming more and more fucking ridiculous by the second.

“I thought she was with that guy Colin, this douche bag cop who works the traffic beat.”

My heart contorts in my chest at the thought that Daisy could have given me the ring back because there’s another guy in the picture. The idea that she could have been holding it and not wearing it for the past year because of someone else makes me feel sick to my stomach.

Let her give it back to me because of me. Because I have to work to get her back. Because I have to prove my worth to her.

I’ll never stop proving myself to her. I’ll never stop trying.

“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a grimace cross my face. “I only saw her for a few minutes.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about Colin,” Thompson says. “He’s a fucking traffic cop. He goes around writing tickets. And he’s her old man’s partner’s son. It’s probably an obligation fuck.”

But I know my Daisy hasn’t been with him, not like that. I know it. I knew it from the look in her eyes when she saw me. That momentary glimmer. She’s still mine. I just have to make her see it

“No, man,” I say, the warmth inside my chest from the liquor growing down to my belly. “I’m not worried about him. Not one fucking bit.”

And it’s true. It’s the absolute truth. There’s nothing that can stand between me and her. Not now. Not anymore.