Heck of a kiss

Chapter Seventeen

            “Oh my goodness, how many of these USB drives did Chad have?” Incredulously I tossed the small black drive to Jabe who in turn placed it in the bowl with the eight others we had found while cleaning the office.

            It was Sunday afternoon and Jabe and I had decided to attack Chad’s abandoned but far from empty office. Since his death, no one had really been in the room. I had never had the time or inclination and Lesley couldn’t get up the stairs, so it had sat for almost three years, collecting dust and spiders.

            I was cleaning out his filing cabinets and Jabe was seated at Chad’s desk delving through the piles of papers and folders littering the top. Sorting through some financial invoices I began stack them trying to make some order out of the chaos.

            “Well, we know who didn’t inherit the clean gene.”

            Jabe grinned over a pile of paper and I tossed a stack of old bank statements into the trash.

            “Still, I think we found out a lot more about Chad from our search.”

            “Other than the fact he loves portable drives and never threw a piece of paper away in his life.”

            I shut the now empty top drawer of the file cabinet and opened the next one, notes, from every class and seminar Chad had ever attended. Pulling out a handful, I scanned the page. “I never knew Chad took anatomy.”

            Jabe made a grunting noise and I put the notes in another stack. “You know I recognize we shouldn’t technically keep them because they are useless, but I want to save some of these for Mila. The bank statements and bills, they’re official and printed so I don’t mind throwing them away but these notes are hand written, they contain part of his soul and all that.”

            Jabe didn’t answer and I looked over to see him staring at something. “What did you find?”

            Wordlessly he handed me a battered photograph. In it, Chad, Jabe and I smiled out, squinting in the sun and all three of us as tan as Indians in our bathing suits. We were about seven when the picture was taken, Chad and Jabe had their arms slung over each other’s shoulders and I was standing beside Chad, all three grinning like crazy.

            “I never knew he had this.” I stared at Chad’s happy face, the same features mirrored on my own. He even scrunched his nose when he smiled. His hair stuck up in a stubborn cowlick giving him a rooster tail. His smile was gap toothed and wide, his two front teeth missing making him seem like a little old man. Staring at our happy faces, I sighed. I missed my big brother. Setting the picture aside, I took a deep breath, trying to keep the knot in my throat at bay. I met Jabe’s gaze and saw the same pain on his face. “Sometimes I think I’m used to him being gone, and then I find something like this and it hurts all over again.”

            Pressing a hand to my mouth, I nodded, screwing up my face trying to keep the tears at bay. After a few moments I went back to sorting through the notes keeping some and throwing away others. When the file cabinet was rearranged and sorted through, I began picking up the floor, gathering the strewn papers into a pile and throwing away the empty candy wrappers and broken pens which were numerous.

            An hour later, Jabe and I had finished going through the papers; so far, we had found nothing which pointed to the rodeo or illegal activity. I had gone through the reams of loose paper and now had a small stack of papers I was keeping for sentimental reasons. Everything else was going to be thrown away. I had no idea how many pictures Chad had collected. There seemed to be one from every occasion all having either us three in it or Lesley and Chad together. Birthdays, Graduations, Weddings, any event where we had a good time, the photos from rodeos were so abundant that I had to make a separate pile of them.