Axel
Axel Stone had grown up watching two people share a house the way you’d share a job you both hated but couldn’t afford to quit.
His parents had not fought, not really, not in any way the neighbors would have noticed. That was the whole problem. Fighting would have meant there was still something left worth fighting for. What he’d grown up inside instead was a long, quiet, mutual agreement to stop expecting anything from each other: his father in the garage most evenings, his mother in front of the television, the two of them meeting in the kitchen at dinner like coworkers politely dividing up a shift. He used to lie in bed as a boy and listen to that silence, and he had promised himself he would never let his own life go quiet like that.
He’d almost married once, in his thirties. Her name was Carol, and she was practical and pleasant and wanted, with a specificity that had unsettled him even at the time, a certain house in a certain neighborhood, a wedding of a set number of guests, a ring of a set size that she had, more than once, pointed out in jewelry store windows with a lightness that didn’t fool either of them. He had gotten as far as sitting in his truck outside the jeweler’s with a small box in his coat pocket before he saw that Carol wanted the shape of a marriage, and would have been just as satisfied with any man willing to fill it.
He had driven home without going inside. He’d returned the ring the following week and told her, as gently as he knew how, that he didn’t think he could give her what she wanted. She had cried, and been furious, and eventually married someone else within the year, which confirmed what he suspected rather than wounding him the way he supposed it should have.
After that he stopped looking. Not out of bitterness, whatever people assumed about a fifty-year-old bachelor mechanic with a truck older than some of his customers, but out of a contentment he’d worked hard to build and saw no pressing need to complicate. He had the shop. He had a small house he’d fixed up himself, room by room, over a decade, the way he fixed everything, slowly and correctly. He had a handful of friends he saw regularly enough to matter and rarely enough to never grow tired of. It was, he told himself, and mostly believed, enough.
He got the tattoo the year he turned forty, on a Tuesday, for no occasion at all, which was rather the point. LIVE EACH DAY LIKE IT’S YOUR LAST, down the inside of his left forearm, in plain block letters, no flourish. His friend Marcus had asked him, half-joking, if he was having some kind of crisis.
“No crisis,” Axel had said. “Just a reminder.”
“Of what?”
“That my old man spent thirty years waiting for a version of his life to start that never came, because he kept telling himself there’d be more time to get around to it. I don’t want to wait around like that.”
“So what, you’re gonna go skydiving?”
“No,” Axel had said, mildly. “I’m gonna keep fixing cars and going fishing on Sundays and not waste what I’ve got pretending I’m saving it up for later.”
Marcus hadn’t fully gotten it, and Axel hadn’t tried very hard to explain.
He was fifty years old, had never married, had never particularly wanted to, and would have told anyone who asked that this was simply who he was, fixed and finished, no further renovations required.