Rival Roots

The wall between my apartment and Joe's is about as thick as a wet paper towel, so at 2 a.m. I got to listen to him argue with his brother about who was supposed to pick up their mom from the airport. It was a rerun. Their mom had been picked up already, apparently, three days ago, but neither of them could admit they'd both forgotten the first time.

"You said Thursday," Joe said, muffled, like he was talking through a pillow.

"It was Tuesday. Why would Mom fly on a Tuesday?"

"Why would *you* think Thursday? Nobody flies on a Thursday to Portland."

I stared at my ceiling and thought, sincerely, that I would trade my truck for one night of actual silence. Then I thought about Dev, because apparently my brain had scheduled that. Six months now since he moved out, and my brain still ran his highlight reel at the worst hours. Dev laughing at the breakfast table. Dev saying *Milt, this isn't working, you know it isn't.* Dev taking the good blender.

And underneath that, older and more annoying, was the other reel. The one from five years ago, the city competition, the alley behind the staging tents where Neil Gavin had grabbed my sleeve and said my name in a way that had kept me up at night ever since. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-four, and already insufferable, and we'd gotten about half an inch from kissing before I said something stupid about his design stealing my drainage concept and he said something stupider back and we fought. We were good at fighting. We'd never been good at the other thing.

So I lay there between Joe's airport saga and the bartender downstairs yelling at somebody about a tab, and I thought, *you're twenty-eight, Milton, and you still want the same two things you wanted at twenty-three, and you have neither.* Then I finally slept, if you can call it that.

* * *

Rico found me at the shop at seven with a rolled-up site plan tucked under his arm and the expression of a man delivering bad news he didn't write.

"Morning, boss. New park contract came through. Full package."

"Full package? I thought we were doing the planting beds and letting the city handle the rest."

"So did I. Apparently the architect finished early and they're folding everything in." He set the plan on my desk and backed up half a step, which was odd. Rico doesn't back up. "You're gonna want to sit down for the name."

"What name?"

"Just look."

I unrolled it. Top right corner, title block, architect's signature line. Neil Gavin, licensed landscape architect, city project number whatever. My stomach did something I didn't appreciate.

"Okay," I said. "Fine. Sure."

"That's it? Fine, sure?"

"It's a big city, Rico. People run into people."

"Portland is not a big city and you know it." He crossed his arms. "I heard things, okay? The gardening circle talks. Five years ago you two nearly got arrested behind a competition tent, or whatever actually happened, and now he's designing your park."

"Nobody nearly got arrested."

"So something happened."

"Nothing happened. That's the entire problem with the historical record." I rolled the plan back up, mostly to have something to do with my hands. "It's a job. I'm a professional. He's a professional. We'll build a park."

Rico looked at me the way you look at a guy who has clearly not thought about the thing he's clearly thinking about. "Right. A park."

"Go load the truck."

* * *

The site was a dead lot off SE Division, fenced chain link, gravel and weeds and one heroic tree nobody had managed to kill yet. Tuesday morning, gray, the usual Portland sky doing its flat thing. We'd been at it two hours, staking out bed lines, when the black Audi pulled up and Neil got out of it with a tube of blueprints under one arm.

He was twenty-nine now and had somehow gotten worse. Tall, dark hair pushed back like he'd done it in the car without looking, a jacket that cost more than my entire wardrobe. He saw me across the lot and stopped walking for half a beat. Then he came over.

"Milton."

"Neil."

"You look good," he said, and then immediately, "for a guy pushing gravel around at eight in the morning."

"You look the same. Money just changed the clothes."

Something went through his face, fast, gone before I could name it. "Yeah. Well. The city pays architects actual money these days, believe it or not." He unrolled the blueprints on the tailgate of my truck and weighted the corners with two stones. "So. Revised grading plan. The swale moved twelve feet east after the survey, which affects your bed lines."

"Moved twelve feet east." I looked at the drawing. It was good. Of course it was good. "That puts my plantings into standing water in February."

"It puts your plantings into a bioswale, which is the point. Sedge and rush, wet feet, they'll thrive."

"They'll thrive if your elevations are right."

"My elevations are always right."

"Sure. Like your drainage concept was right in 2021?"

There it was. Five years and my mouth went straight for the same sore tooth, and Neil laughed, one short exhale, not really a laugh. "That's still how you want to play it? After all this time?"

"You grabbed my sleeve in an alley, Neil. That's in the record too."

"I grabbed your sleeve," he said, quieter, "because you were walking away."

Rico, ten feet off, suddenly developed a passionate interest in the truck's tie-downs. The lot noise filled in around us, traffic on Division, somebody's radio, and Neil and I stood at the tailgate not looking at the blueprints.

"Look," he said. "Can we start over? Professionally. This is a six-month project. I'd like us both to survive it."

"Fine. Professionally." I pointed at the swale. "Show me the section."

He showed me the section. His hand moved along the contour lines and I watched it instead of the lines, which was a problem, and I fixed my eyes on the paper like a professional. He smelled like cedar, which was new, and unfair.

"The understory here," he said, "I left it open for you. Didn't spec it. Figured you'd want to."

That stopped me. "You left me the understory?"

"You're better at it than I am. Always were." He said it flat, no bait in it, and that was somehow worse than bait. "It's on the drawing as TBD, contractor's selection. That's you."

"Since when do you concede anything?"

"Since I got tired." He rolled the blueprints slowly, not looking at me. "Six months, right? I heard about you and Dev."

"The gardening circle talks."

"It talks. Yeah." He capped his pen. "I'm around the site Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email works for everything else. Okay?"

"Okay."

He picked up his tube and got four steps toward the Audi before he turned around. "Milton."

"What."

"The alley. Five years ago. I've thought about it more than is reasonable for a grown man with a career." He said it evenly, like reading a meter. "That's all. Tuesday."

He drove off. I stood there at the tailgate with a dead lot and a heroic tree and my heart doing something unprofessional, and Rico came up beside me.

"So," Rico said. "The park."

"The park."

"You good?"

"I'm great. I'm a professional." I grabbed a stake and a mallet and went to go argue with the ground about it, which at least was a fight I knew how to win.

Three nights later, on a Thursday, somebody knocked on my door hard enough to rattle the chain. I looked through the peephole and there was Neil, standing in my hallway with a laptop bag and an expression like he'd rehearsed being casual.

I opened the door. "It's Thursday."

"It is."

"You were at the site this morning. You emailed me at four. The email had a bullet list."

"I know." He shifted the bag to his other hand. "Can I come in? There's a thing with the budget I'd rather not do over email."

Joe's door next door cracked open about an inch. I could feel him listening. "Sure," I said, and stepped back, and Neil walked into my apartment for the first time in his life.

He stood in the middle of my living room and looked around like it was a site survey. My place is one bedroom, cramped, over a street that never shuts up, and the bartender downstairs was already doing his Friday-eve warmup yells. There were boxes I still hadn't unpacked from when Dev moved out six months ago.

"You've got a good view of a parking structure," Neil said.

"Rooftop amenity. Want a beer?"

"Sure."

I got two beers and we sat at my kitchen table, which still had Dev's old chair at it, and Neil opened the laptop and actually showed me the thing with the budget, which was real, which was annoying, because I'd been braced for it to be fake. We argued about contingency lines for twenty minutes and it was almost nice, arguing about numbers with him, because numbers don't have histories.

Then the budget was done, and neither of us closed the laptop.

The silence got long. The bartender downstairs yelled something about a tab.

"You still live above a bar," Neil said.

"You still show up places unannounced with a pretext."

"It's not a pretext."

"It's sixty percent pretext."

He turned the beer bottle around on the table a quarter at a time. "I need to say something and you're going to want to fight me about it."