Not next week. Not after graduation. Not when things “settled down.” That day.
The words came in the kitchen of a rental house on the west side of Wichita, where the cabinets never shut right and the linoleum curled at the corners. Rain tapped against the window over the sink. A half-packed box of Luke’s mother’s things sat by the back door, still sealed with the cheap brown tape Wade had slapped across it the morning after the funeral.
Wade Brannigan stood with one hand on the counter and the other wrapped around a coffee mug that said WORLD’S BEST BOSS, even though he’d been fired from his construction foreman job two months earlier. He wore jeans, work boots, and the hard, tired look he’d started wearing the last year of Luke’s mother’s life. The house smelled like burned coffee and old cigarettes.
“I did what I could,” Wade said, not looking at him. “You’ve got a temper, you don’t listen, and I’m done carrying dead weight.”
Luke stared at him from across the kitchen table. “Dead weight?”
Wade finally met his eyes. “You heard me.”
Three months ago, Luke’s mother, Claire Mercer Brannigan, had still been alive. Weak, yes. Pale, yes. But alive. She’d sat at this same table with a blanket around her shoulders, smiling whenever Luke came in from school like just seeing him was enough to pull her through another day. Then the cancer had done what it had been doing quietly for nearly a year. It had taken her anyway.
