"
He fell silent and looked at them. Adam held his breath.
Sara nodded and broke the silence. "You know, that sounds pretty cool,
actually."
#
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.
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