“Don’t forget to take your vitamins this morning. ’Kay, dad?”
He nodded once, an indulgent grin spreading his thin lips.
“I’m gonna hop in the shower then take the Jeep into town. I have a friend I think might be able to fix that radiator for cheap…” My words hung heavy in the air when I noticed something else had caught the old man’s attention, and he was shuffling back to his semi-permanent placement on the couch.
I shook my head, vowing to stop by the VFW on my way into town and see if any of the old guys would be willing to come out and visit my dad a few times a week. I also wanted to ask if any of them had a lead on some construction jobs. The few gigs I was getting in town weren’t near enough to pay for dinner, much less anything else.
It was hard for me to keep regular hours when I was helping my dad so much of the day, but my sister had promised to start stopping after work a few days a week to check on him if I found regular work.
If I was going to make a life with Augusta, I’d have to start lining up my cards early.
I had less than a year to make sure my dad could and would be good on his own in this place if I had any chance of getting Augusta Belle out of hers. I didn’t have much saved, but between what I did have and a full-time job, plus singing for tips on weekends, I figured I could afford to keep a roof over our heads while she went to college. I’d already decided wherever she wanted to go, I was game. From LA to New York, and anywhere in between.
I was stepping out of the shower not much later when the idling of a car engine caught my attention.
I cracked the old crank window in the bathroom, wincing when the rusted hinges protested, before a flaming orange ball of light crossed my vision.
The sound of shattering glass splintered my senses a moment later, a little dark car spinning off around the corner and up the hill.
Adrenaline pummeled my body as I pulled on my dirty clothes and launched out the door and down the hallway.
Fire engulfed the kitchen, a bottle with a heavy white rag still rocking on the linoleum floor as pieces of the faded flower tile melted around it.
My muscles tensed as I saw my father cast sideways on a couch that was already quickly becoming swallowed in flames.
I breathed into my T-shirt and tried to remember where Dad kept the fire extinguisher.
I gnashed down on my teeth, realizing I didn’t have time for that before I launched across the living room and pulled the heavy weight of my father through the front door.
I heaved in fresh lungfuls of air as his face turned a worrisome ashen color.
I looked back up at the house, seeing flames lick out the window now, realizing I could either start CPR on my father, or run back into that trailer and hope to find my phone in my bedroom to call the fire department.
I didn’t have time for both.
I looked up at the sky, eyes watering from the smoke now cascading out of every window of our trailer.
If I thought I knew devastation before, it was dim in comparison to what was about to come next.
The darkest days of my life, creeping by one agonizing instant at a time as we tried to recover, as I tried to rebuild. Just when everything was fallin’ apart.
THIRTEEN
Fallon
“I didn’t disappear.” Her eyes welled up with tears, one salted track trailing over the arch of her cheekbone. “That’s not…” More tears started to flow, her voice choked with emotion. “If you only knew what happened when you left me on the road that day.”
Her words battered my heart with their raw pain. “Christ, don’t cry, Augusta Belle.”
I groaned, pulling over into the first parking lot I found, a hotel chain I’d stayed with a few times in the past. “Could never stand it when you started crying. And I didn’t just leave you on the road.”
I slid her over the seat toward me, her tears growing stronger as I enveloped her quaking form in my arms. “I wish I was there for you that night, Fallon, more than anything, but I can’t go back in time and change it. And trust me when I say I’d rather be with you any day than where I was…”
I shook my head, not even giving a shit anymore about the years of hardship that had fallen on my shoulders, all beginning with that night.
I’d moved to Chickasaw Ridge to help my dad. The irony was that by the time I left, he was already in the ground, that little burned trailer hauled off to the junkyard, every piece of evidence of my life in Chickasaw along with it.
“If I would have known that happened… Well, if I could have come back, I would have. You know that, right, Fallon?” Her brandy eyes gazed up at me, pleading for some sort of absolution I didn’t know I had it in me to give.
