Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lyman steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of “cousins.” They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long dead.So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and toppled backward. It was only Kurt’s wild bark of panic that got Adam to instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of Kurt’s fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.“You okay?” Alan said once he’d gotten his breath back.“Oof,” Kurt said. “Yeah.”They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman and Sara bent to help them apart. “Nice catch,” Lyman said. Kurt was helped to his feet, and he declared that he’d sprained his ankle and nothing worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him the stats for the day’s network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole while.
Kurt insisted on putting up that access point, while Alan and Lyman steadied the ladder. Sara came out and joked with Lyman, and Alan got distracted watching them, trying to understand this notion of “cousins.” They had an easy rapport, despite all their differences, and spoke in a shorthand of family weddings long past and crotchety relatives long dead.
So none of them were watching when Kurt overbalanced and dropped the Makita, making a wild grab for it, foot slipping off the rung, and toppled backward. It was only Kurt’s wild bark of panic that got Adam to instinctively move, to hold out his arms and look up, and he caught Kurt under the armpits and gentled him to the ground, taking the weight of Kurt’s fall in a bone-jarring crush to his rib cage.
“You okay?” Alan said once he’d gotten his breath back.
“Oof,” Kurt said. “Yeah.”
They were cuddled together on the sidewalk, Kurt atop him, and Lyman and Sara bent to help them apart. “Nice catch,” Lyman said. Kurt was helped to his feet, and he declared that he’d sprained his ankle and nothing worse, and they helped him back to his shop, where a couple of his kids doted over him, getting him an ice pack and a pillow and his laptop and one of the many dumpster-dived discmen from around the shop and some of the CDs of old punk bands that he favored.
There he perched, growly as a wounded bear, master of his kingdom, for the next two weeks, playing online and going twitchy over the missed dumpsters going to the landfill every night without his expert picking over. Alan visited him every day and listened raptly while Kurt gave him the stats for the day’s network usage, and Kurt beamed proud the whole while.