I look up from the axes I'm inspecting. "At cleaning up? Yep."
"No,teaching," he says. "Most people don't know how to talk to kids without talking down to them." He shrugs, his broad shoulders barely moving.
"She just needed a lighter axe…andmaybea little guidance."
He holds my gaze for a beat, and something passes between us that I don't have a name for. Recognition, maybe.
Then he turns and walks off toward his workshop.
Friday, I meet Jamie, Connor and Teagan's little boy made entirely of rambunctiousness and opinions. He comes barreling around the corner of the dining hall mid-morning, small legs pumping, a toy truck clutched in one hand and what appears to be half a granola bar in the other, heading directly for the equipment shed at a speed that suggests he has somewhere very important to be. Teagan's half a step behind him, laughing and exasperated.
"Jamie Leigh, if you touch that axe rack, I swear?—"
He doesn't touch the axe rack. He sees me instead, skids to a stop on the gravel, and stares up at me with an intense assessment I've only ever gotten from foremen deciding whether to hire me.
"You're really tall," he announces, not shy about it. Just stating a fact for the record.
"Yeah, buddy. I am."
"Are you taller than my daddy?"
"I think we're about the same."
He considers this, tilting his head like a small, sticky-handed professor weighing the evidence. "My daddy's the tallest. But you can be second tallest." He holds up the truck. "This is Blue Truck. He's a rescue truck. He saved a bear yesterday."
"That's impressive."
"It was a BIG bear." He stretches his arms wide, granola bar flinging crumbs across the path. "And Blue Truck wasn't even scared."
Teagan catches up, slightly out of breath. "Sorry—he's supposed to be in the office with me, but he has the attention span of a hummingbird and the escape skills of a convict." She chuckles, clueless to the irony of it, and waves a hand. "He just runs."
Jamie tugs on the seam of my jeans. "Do you know how to build roads? My daddy builds roads for Blue Truck but they're not very good."
"Jamie," Teagan warns.
"They'renot, Mama. They fall down."
I kneel down, and the kid immediately shows me Blue Truck up close, pressing it against my leg and making engine noises.
"I know a little about roads," I say. "You need good dirt. Packed tight."
"And rocks," he adds. "Small ones. Not big ones because Blue Truck's tires aren't big enough."
"That's solid engineering."
He grins—wide and gap-toothed and completely trusting—and my heart squeezes a bit in my chest.
This kid doesn't care about my record or the fourteen years I spent running from myself. I'm just a tall guy who took Blue Truck seriously, and that's enough.
"Jamie, come on, sweetie. Let Dean get back to work." Teagan picks him up, and he goes willingly, but keeps talking over her shoulder as she carries him away.
"Bye, Dean! I'll show you the roads later, okay? Daddy's making new ones, but I need a helper since he's alwaysbusy?—"
His voice fades around the corner of the office building, still chattering.
I stand in the yard for a minute, watching the space where he was.
Kids don't ask about your past. They don't weigh your history or calculate your risk. They just decide you're worth talking to or they don't, and Jamie decided in about four seconds that I was someone worth showing his truck to. I don't know what to do with that kind of trust. Especially when I haven't earned it.