Smothered Excerpt - October 2nd

Sundays mean excerpts! This is a scene in Mike's point of view from Chapter Seventeen, when he finds out his ex-wife's new beau has hit his daughter:
----------

Mike stepped out of his truck and into the oppressive heat and smothering humidity. He looked at the house in front of him. Sitting on a cul-de-sac, it looked exactly like the ones on either side of it, just with different paint and facings. Even the grass, with mosquitoes floating up from it to greet him, had been cut to the same length.

Mike saw the damage right away. The front gutter had ripped from the roof over the garage and now hung from one end, blocking the door. The homeowner—a twenty-something woman with her blonde hair in a ponytail—stood inside her garage, talking on her cellphone, gesturing wildly for Mike to come closer. Mike left the truck unlocked and strolled up the driveway, mopping at his brow while she chatted.

Denver technically sat on a high plains desert, so humid days were a rarity, but today he could have sliced the air with his packing knife and eaten it like pizza. With the heat came the mosquitoes, another rarity at 5,280-feet elevation. It made him love Denver even more: the lack of mosquitoes and cockroaches. They were around, but not nearly like they were in other places he'd lived.

Still, on this day, with leftover rain pocketing in low spots and still dripping from trees, the city had turned "muggy and buggy," according to one local meteorologist. And this neighborhood in Centennial had taken the brunt of both.

"Oh, thank you for coming so quickly," the blonde said, said, stuffing her phone in her back pocket. "My husband is deployed and I need to get to work. My boss is already pissed. I've had to take so much time off since Brad deployed. I think they might fire me. I'm Christine Stanley."

Mike looked around the garage. Posters of F-22 Raptors, B-2 bombers, and other aircraft plastered the wall. Hanging by the door into the house, a dark blue jacket gathered dust. A tricycle sat in one corner next to a two-seat stroller.

"Your husband's in the Air Force?"

"Air National Guard," she told him. "F-16 pilot at Greeley. They sent him to the desert again, covering for some active guys to come home. Of course, like every deployment, they botched up his pay. I hope you take credit cards."

"Well, to thank him for his service," Mike told her, "I'll get this fixed and you won't owe me until he comes home."

The relief on her face transformed her. Gone was the stressed-out woman trying to make ends meet while her husband was gone, and in her place stood a woman who seemed, for that instant, to have everything together.

"Thank you," she said.

"From one veteran to another," he said, "it's no problem. Now let me get this out of the way so you can get your kids to daycare and yourself to work."

Mike held up the gutter while she backed out under it, her kids waving. When she was gone, he surveyed the damage while cars whooshed by outside and birds sang in the trees. It looked like someone had jumped up and hung on the front lip of the gutter, pulling it down. The gutter was bent in the middle, forming a "V," and all the nails holding it had torn loose from the roof edge except for two at one end where the downspout held it up.

Mike set up his folding ladder and had climbed three steps when his cellphone rang. Normally, he'd have ignored it, but the ringtone was assigned to Maria. He never ignored her calls.

"Hey, munchkin," he began. The sound of sobbing stopped him.

"Daddy, can you come pick me up?" she asked through choked-off sobs.

"I'm on a jobsite right now, sweetie, what's wrong?"

She said nothing, which by itself put Mike's senses on high alert. In the background he heard Michelle's shrill voice yelling, the same shrill voice that had been directed at him more times than he could count.

"Maria, what happened? Where are you?"

"We're at Pitt's house." Now Pitt was yelling, presumably back at Michelle. Mike couldn't make out the words, but he knew rage when he heard it. "Daddy, he hit me."

Mike's world stopped. He no longer heard cars passing by, birds in the trees, or anything. His mind filled with the sound of Maria's voice and nothing else.

"He did what?" He kept his voice as even as he could, but his hands were shaking and he had somehow stepped down off the ladder without knowing it.

"He slapped me."

"Where?"

"On my butt. There's a hand print, Daddy. I took a—"

The sound of a scuffle reached Mike over the phone, and he held his breath until he heard Maria yell, "That's mine! You can't take it!"

She sounded distant, so Mike knew she didn't have her phone.

"Who pays for this phone, you ungrateful brat?" Pitt's voice still quivered with rage. "I do, so I will take it anytime I want, you understand?"

"That's my dad on the phone." Her voice was quieter this time. Confident. She knew Pitt stood on thin ice. Too bad Pitt didn't.

"Oh, so that's how it is? You go running off to your daddy every time things go wrong here?"

"At least he doesn't hit me."

Mike had heard enough.