“Again, for when you’re ready,” Bear said, this time with a sly smile. He handed me two more boxes, that had been sitting next to his saddle bag on the deck, the smaller one on top contained smart phone and the larger one on the bottom a laptop. The boxes looked new, but the plastic wrapping had been removed.

“Thanks man.” I fished out a joint from the baggie and rolling it under my nose, inhaling deeply. “God I missed that smell.”

“Well, the weed and smokes are from me and King. Ti and Ray picked out the clothes. Ti even went as far as taking the laptop to the geek guy at the tech store and had him bookmark all sorts of weird porn sites for you. I looked at some of them, made my skin crawl so I think you’ll dig it.”

Fuck, I was kind of a dick to her...

“I met your girl the other day, she seems...interesting,” I said. Bear smiled. “She told me she was the one who pulled the trigger on...” I couldn’t bring myself to say his name. “That true?”

Bear nodded. “Yeah, she saved my fucking life, too. I’ll tell you this, you don’t know what love really is until you see your girl wipe your evil old man from the face of the fucking earth for you.”

“Fuck, I think I kind of love her too.” Bear was looking off into the distance like he was recalling a memory. “Think she’d be down for a pity fuck?” I asked, holding up the box of condoms.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t fucking say that,” Bear said, his nostrils flared. He knocked the box from my hands.

“You’re such a brute,” I said, placing the joint between my lips and held my hand out for Bear’s lighter.

Bear shook his head. “No fucking way, man. You’re gonna have to go to the garage and hide in a fucking corner like the rest of us have to. Dead or not, Ray will toss you off the fucking balcony if you smoke weed by the house.”

“Since fucking when?”

“Since we got Sammy, Max, and Nicole running around here and are about to add to the litter with my kid. No smoking that shit until the kids are either asleep or at school, and even then it’s still only in the fucking garage.”

“Sammy?”

“You don’t know the kids’ names?”

I leaned over the railing, grateful that the sun was setting because it meant the pressure behind my eyes would ease up once it was tucked into the horizon for the night. “I mean, Doe told gave me the cliffs notes about the kids and I’ve heard them yelling at them. I knew the girl was Max and the boy was Doe’s...I mean, Ray’s, kid, but I never really thought about his name before.”

“Yeah, turns out she named her kid Samuel years before she met you, how ironic is that? Now we got two of you running around. He’s a good kid. Funny as shit too. One week he’s trying to copy me by wearing his own little cut and wanting to ride a bike and the next week he’s got belts around his arms ‘cause he wants to be like King. Get to know him. And the girls.” Bear turned sideways to face me, leaning his elbow against the rail. He pointed his smoke at me as he spoke. “Those kids are the best things that have happened to this place in a long fucking time.”

I absentmindedly went to light the joint again and Bear raised his eyebrows. I pulled it from my lips. “I can’t smoke a fucking joint in my own house? How do you people live like this?” I asked, appalled.

It’s not your house anymore.

He slapped me on the back. “One fucking breath at a time, brother.”

“I don’t think I was just gone for a while,” I said, tossing the joint back into the bag. “I think I fucking upset the space time continuum. You’ve got a girl, and I can’t freely engage in my love of illegal narcotics. What the fuck?” I realized I sounded like whiny kid, well, a whiny kid who wants to smoke a joint on his porch, but I was unable to stop the very real confusion that I was feeling.

A part of me, a VERY selfish part of me, always hoped that while I was gone the world was somehow on pause. But it wasn’t. The world moved on.

They all moved on.

“This bullshit, Prep, is called being an adult,” Bear said, slapping me on the back. “Fucking sucks, don’t it?” He laughed but his expression told me he thought it anything BUT fucking sucked.

“I can’t believe you’ve got a girl,” I said. “If I had to bet between you settling down and the zombie apocalypse, my money would’ve been on the zombies. So much has happened while I was...gone.”

Bear flashed me a sad smile. The kind of smile everyone was giving me since I’d woken up. The kind of smile that was making me both furious and sick to my fucking stomach. “So does your girl know you’re in love with me?” I asked, looking at his neck again before tucking the joint behind my ear.

“Prep,” Bear warned. “Later.”

“Buzzkill,” I muttered.

“And yeah I got a girl. Good one too. Knocked her up and everything,” Bear said proudly. He lit his cigarette and tossed me his lighter.

“Wow, you waited until I was gone to become the grand marshall of white trash?” I tapped the bottom the fresh pack against my hand a few times before pulling one out and lighting my own. The first inhale of smoke filling my lungs felt fucking GLORIOUS and gave me an instant high I hadn’t had from a cigarette since I was a kid, toking on my first smoke behind the portables at school.

“Nah, cause I put a ring on her finger, too.”

“There goes the parade I was gonna throw you.”

“Prep, Ti and I have been staying in the garage apartment while the club is undergoing a little bit of a makeover,” Bear said.

“What kind of makeover? Like a Renovation?”

“It’s a little more involved.”

I shrugged and took another drag. “Well, that place was always a shit hole. It could use some paint or getting rid of the swamp you guys call a pool in the middle of that damn thing. What did you start with?”

“Hazmat suits and blood removal.”

“Good call.”

“I thought so,” Bear leaned forward on the railing, looking out onto the ground below. “But since Grace...”

“Yeah...” I interrupted, letting him know there was no need to finish his sentence in order to site the grim obvious.

“Ti and I are gonna move over to Grace’s house real soon. I’m thinking ‘bout eventually buying some property on the other side of the bay and building something over there. Word is old man Jenson’s looking to sell, but I figured for now we’ll post up over at Grace’s house so we have some room after the baby’s born.”