Free This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry

single decision about anything.
    She’s up for tenure in the fall, and she’ll get it. Which means they’re here forever, which means he’s tied to PM&T. Which is fine. He’s proud of having made something, of having dropped a fully functioning business onto a gravel lot. Soon, the two of them will be making enough money to where they’ll be able to pay the bills without having to keep close track of the bank accounts. He’ll sell the house across the street. He’ll go to work. Pine needles, pine bark, chipped pine pallets. Christmas trees in December, fruit trees in the spring. Marigolds, impatiens, pansies. Yes, we deliver. Yes, we’ll be sure not to block the driveway. Maybe they’ll hire a third guy, someone who can manage the greenhouse. Someone who can grow the bare-root mail-order stuff, send their profit margin through the roof. Mulch for the rest of his life. And Beth will end this thing with Canavan, will come back home. She’ll have to. Everything will work out perfectly, perfectly fine.
    Jack cranks the engine, drops it in first, and edges the truck up onto Canavan’s lawn. What’s called for here, he’s suddenly pretty sure, is something on the order of the grand gesture. You can’t just sit in your truck in front of your wife’s boyfriend’s house. You have to do something. You have to be a man of action. So he drives across the yard, cuts the wheel, and rumbles slowly along the front of the house, taking out the line of shrubs Canavan’s got planted there. Azaleas and boxwood. A couple of hydrangeas, which he feels a little bad about. But he puts it in reverse, backs up to make sure he got them all. If he’s going to do it, he’s going to do it right. The branches snap under the wheels. It doesn’t take long. He’s careful not to hit the house itself. Vandalism only. At home, Hendrick’s probably dreaming the list of Deputy Secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, or of prime numbers spooling endlessly across reams of paper. On his way back out, looking for something extra, a grace note, Jack lines up the mailbox, drives right over the top of it, over the top of the garden Canavan’s got going there. No lights come on in the house. No one comes flying out the front door. No one starts in yelling at him, asking him what the hell he thinks he’s doing. Nothing happens. Jack, his wife somewhere back there in Canavan’s back yard, drives away. He’s done what he needed to do. He puts the truck through its gears and heads for 70, for a little bar out there that’s on the way back into Greensboro. After all this hard work, he’s pretty sure he deserves a cold beer.

    The Brightwood. It was the old roadhouse and inn back before the interstate came through. A low-slung brick building, a gravel drive they’ve got the contract on. Thirty yards of crushed gravel every eighteen months. Six or eight trips in the undersized dump truck. There are two dead Pontiacs, one on blocks, off to the right of the door. Roosters live, seemingly, loose on the property. Neon sign on the roof, all caps: BRIGHTWOOD. A smaller one hangs on the brick front wall: SIZZLING STEAKS.
    Inside, the place is small, shotgunned, smoky, a rectangular room that runs front to back with the bar set along the right-hand side. A TV hangs off a mount that drops from the ceiling at the far end, tuned to one of the forensic crime dramas where things get solved because someone sneezed and forgot to cover his mouth. A pube on the carpet, the half-moon of a fingernail. This is how they’ll get him for Canavan’s lawn: A single fiber from his shirt. There’s another room on the other side, a dining room, from the days when the Brightwood was a supper club. It’s closed down now, tables stacked on their ends. There are pictures everywhere on the walls. Lieutenant Governors, baseball players, Elvis—signed. And back behind the bar, on built-in shelves that run the length of the room, more pictures: Sears store family portraits,