The Cabin Mix-Up

Brody drove the whole way while I watched the corn go by. Six hours of corn, basically, with a gas station break outside Salina where he bought jerky neither of us would eat.

"You're quiet," he said somewhere around hour four.

"I'm thinking."

"About what?"

"About how weird the house is gonna feel. You know. With the kids gone."

Brody reached over and squeezed my knee. His hand stayed there a second, then went back to the wheel. "The kids are in college, Timmy. Not dead."

"I know they're not dead."

"Then what's the problem?"

"It's just quiet, is the problem. You come home and the TV's off and nobody's yelling about a controller and I keep thinking, huh, this is it. This is the next twenty years."

He didn't say anything for a while. Then, "That's why we're doing this, right? The cabin. Reconnect. That was your word."

"It was your word first."

"It was a good word." He smiled a little. I could see it from the side. Forty-one years old and he still smiles like he did the day we met at the gym, when he asked me to spot him and I nearly dropped the bar on his head.

"Look," he said, "we've both been running on empty. You with the Guard thing, me with the office. Two days in the middle of nowhere, no phones worth having, a pool. We'll figure it out. We always do."

"We haven't figured it out in a while, though."

"I know." Quiet again. Then, "I know, okay? That's kind of the whole point of the trip."

Fair enough. We'd been together two years, lived together one, and somewhere in there we'd gone from can't-keep-hands-off to polite roommates who split the dishes. I didn't want to lose him over dishes. So when I found this place online, the Shady Pines, some old motel in western Kansas that somebody converted into cabins, I booked it before I could think too hard about the pictures. The pictures were not great. The reviews were worse, in that funny way, people posting about weeds and a green pool and laughing about it. Sounded perfect. Ugly and cheap and far from everything.

We rolled in around six, sun doing that flat Kansas thing where it just sits there. The Shady Pines had maybe four actual pines and a lot of everything else. Weeds up to the porch. A pool out back that was exactly as green as the reviews promised. Our cabin sat at the end of a gravel lot, number three, with a porch light that flickered like it was thinking about quitting.

"Romantic," Brody said.

"I never promised romantic. I promised nowhere."

"Fair."

I got the door open and stopped. Brody walked into my back.

"Ow. What?"

"There's a guy," I said. "In our cabin. On our couch."

There was. A guy about twenty-nine, maybe, sitting on the couch with his shoes off like he owned the place, scrolling his phone. He looked up and did not look thrilled.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. Are you the three o'clock people?"

"I'm the three o'clock people," I said. "Who are you?"

"Trey." He stood up, held out a hand, thought better of it, put it back down. "Trey Folsom. I booked this cabin. Like, a month ago. Confirmed and everything."

"So did we," Brody said from behind me. "Confirmed. Printed."

"Printed? Who prints?"

"I print," Brody said.

Trey showed us his confirmation on his phone. I showed him my printout. Same cabin. Same dates. Same price, forty dollars a night, which honestly should have been the first warning.

"Well," I said. "This is a booking error."

"This is a nightmare," Trey said, but he said it tired, not mean. "I drove four hours to be alone. That was the entire plan. Alone."

"Timmy, call the office," Brody said. "There's an office. There's a light on."

There was an office, a little trailer with a desk and a fan and a woman named Cath who looked like she'd been waiting her whole life for a problem this good.

"Double-booked cabin three," she said, reading the screen. "Well, shoot."

"Shoot is right. What are our options?"

"Well." She clicked some things. "Cabin one's got a leak we haven't fixed. Cabin two's got the leak from cabin one, if you follow me."

"I follow you."

"And the motor court rooms are, honestly, I wouldn't put a dog in 'em. So. Your options are all three of you share cabin three, or somebody drives four hours somewhere."

"Four hours," I said.

"Three and a half if you don't stop," Cath said, like that helped. "Look, I'll knock the rate down. Forty apiece for the weekend. That's the best I can do and I'll throw in the pool, which, between us, is not a selling point right now."

Back at the cabin, Trey was standing in the kitchenette with his bag packed up already, which made me feel like a jerk.

"Update," I said. "There is no other room. Cath says the whole place is basically condemned with a pool."

"She said that?"

"She said worse. She's knocking the price down to forty a night each. Money's settled, by the way, she rang it up separate, nobody owes anybody anything."

"That's not the issue," Trey said. He rubbed his face with both hands. "Okay. Look. It's two nights. There's a bedroom, right? One bedroom?"

"One bedroom," Brody said. I heard it in his voice before I turned around. Flat. Careful.

"So one of us takes the couch, or there's that fold-out, or..." Trey shrugged. "I've slept in worse. I was in the service for six years. I've slept in a lot worse."

"Timmy was in the Army," Brody said.

"Small world. What branch?"

"Guard," I said. "Twenty years in, still drilling. How about you?"

"Marines. Got out at twenty-five." He looked at Brody. "You?"

"Dental hygienist," Brody said.

"That's, uh. That's a real job. More useful than mine. I do IT."

The weird thing was how polite we were all being. Three grown men, twenty-nine, forty-one, and forty-seven, standing in a kitchenette the size of a closet, all apologizing to each other about a couch.

"Look," I said. "Trey takes the bedroom, he got here first. Brody and I will take the fold-out."

"We can take the fold-out," Brody said, but the way he said it had a splinter in it.

"We can," I agreed. "It's two nights."

Trey grabbed his bag. "I really am sorry about this. I'd offer to leave but I genuinely don't have anywhere to go. I just ended a three-year thing and my ex's stuff is still all over my apartment and the lease runs till November, which is a whole situation, so."

"We get it," I said.

"You don't have to explain," Brody said, and something in how fast he said it made me look at him. He was doing the jaw thing. The jaw thing means he's working through something and doesn't want help.

Trey went into the bedroom and shut the door, gentle, like he was sorry about the door too.

I turned to Brody. "Okay, say it."

"Say what?"

"The jaw thing. You're doing the jaw thing."

"I don't have a jaw thing."

"Babe. You've had the jaw thing since I met you at the gym. What's wrong?"

He sat down on the fold-out mattress, which sagged like a tired horse. "Nothing's wrong. I just had this picture, you know? Two days, just us, nobody around for fifty miles. Fix us."

"We're not broken."

"Timmy. Come on. We haven't slept together in six weeks. Not slept together slept together. Either kind. You know what I mean."

I did know. I sat down next to him and the mattress dumped us both toward the middle, which, fine, the mattress had a point.

"So the plan changed," I said. "We still got two days. We still got each other. We've survived worse than a stranger named Trey."

"Marines named Trey," Brody said, and I laughed, and after a second he laughed too.

From behind the bedroom door, muffled, Trey's voice: "I can hear you guys, you know. Walls are paper."

"Sorry!" I called.

"Don't be sorry, be quiet," he called back, but I could hear the grin in it. "Also there's no lock on this door, which is fine, I guess, since apparently we're all adults here. I'm gonna nap. Don't have a fight about me."

Brody and I looked at each other.

"We're not gonna fight about him," Brody said, too loud, definitely for Trey's benefit.

Then quieter, just to me: "Are we gonna fight about him?"

"No," I said. "We're gonna go sit by a green pool and drink the beer I brought and be married people on vacation. That's the whole plan."

"Married people."

"Married-adjacent. Don't quibble."

He kissed my cheek, quick, like he used to. Small win. I'd take it.

Outside, the sun was finally going down and the pool was still green and somewhere in the bedroom a former Marine was snoring lightly, and I sat on that saggy fold-out next to the man I loved and thought, well. This isn't the weekend I booked.

But it might be the one we needed. I didn't say that part out loud. Brody was already picking the label off his beer bottle, which meant he was thinking too, and some nights you just let a man think.

The wall between the fold-out and the bedroom was about as thick as a cereal box. We proved that around eleven.

I was lying there counting Brody's breathing, which had gone slow but not sleep-slow, when I heard it. At first I figured it was the wind, because out here the wind does stuff all night. Then it came again. A sniffle. Then a wet little breath, held down, the way a grown man holds a cry so nobody hears it.

Trey was crying in the next room. Quiet, controlled, the kind you learn to do in barracks.

Brody heard it too. I felt him go still beside me.

"Is he," he whispered.

"Yeah," I whispered back.

We lay there like a couple of jerks, pretending we hadn't heard anything, and the crying kept on, low, maybe five minutes, maybe ten. I stared at the ceiling. I thought about being twenty-nine and driving four hours to get away from a man you loved and finding two strangers in the only room in Kansas, and how you'd cry too, and how you'd do it quiet so you didn't bother anybody.

The thing in my chest wasn't pity exactly. It was more like recognition. I'd done that cry in a truck outside my old house seven years ago, windows up, radio on, so the kids wouldn't hear.

"He okay?" Brody whispered.

"No," I said. "But he don't want us to know that, so hush."

The crying stopped on its own. After a while the snoring started, and Brody's hand found mine under the blanket, and that was something. Six weeks of nothing and then a hand in the dark. I held it till I slept.

Morning came through the blinds all yellow and mean. Brody was up before me, sitting on the edge of the mattress with his hair sticking out sideways, doing the jaw thing again.

"What," I said.

"Nothing."

"You're doing the jaw thing at six in the morning. Nobody does the jaw thing at six in the morning."

Then the bedroom door opened and Trey came out looking as if he had slept on his face. He had a phone in his hand and a decision in his posture, the way soldiers get.

"Okay," he said. "I've been thinking. I ruined your weekend, sort of, by existing. So let me cook you breakfast. It's the least I can do and I make a mean scramble."

"You don't have to do that," Brody said.

"I know I don't. I want to. There's a little store a mile up the road, I saw it driving in. Eggs, bacon, coffee. My treat, and before anybody says anything about the forty bucks a night, no, this is separate, this is apology eggs. Totally different budget."

I laughed before I could stop myself. Brody shot me a look that said do not bond with him.

"He makes a mean scramble," I said.

Twenty minutes later the three of us were crammed into that kitchenette like it was a submarine. Trey moved around us like he'd cooked in worse, and honestly he probably had, six years of Marines will teach you to fry eggs in a helmet if you have to. The coffee was terrible and plentiful.

"So what do you do, besides ruin vacations," I said, sitting on the counter