Chapter 2
Skye
“You have to go to the hospital.” Skye struggled to keep hold of her father without hurting him further as she eased him into his recliner. Carefully she undraped her arm from his shoulders. “This is going to be one of those nonnegotiables. Like paying taxes. Stopping at crosswalks.” She waved a hand at his slumped shoulder. “Seeing a doctor when part of your body has been crushed into a thousand tiny fragments.”
He looked at her as though she’d just pushed a three-weeks-expired crab cake into his mouth. “Nonsense. It’ll heal itself—”
Skye glanced down to his shirt. “Is there something pokingoutof your arm right now—”
“My arm’s just like a starfish—” her father continued.
“Dad? Is yourbonecoming out of yourbody?”
“It’s made to grow back on its own.”
“That isincrediblyinaccurate. You are welcome to look at any amputee as a living example—”
“Just need to give it time.” He exhaled sharply as he pulled the lever with his good arm and the recliner popped back. He nodded to her. “You go look it up, honey. You’ll see. I’ll not be wasting my time on a bureaucratic system trying to take my money.” He picked up the remote and flicked on the television. “Won’t fall into their trap...”
Skye threw her hands out as she spoke over the television. “Sure. I bet all those doctors hard up for money were just lying in wait to push your tractor over while you weren’t looking. It’s probably some grand ploy happening all over the country. The headlines will be splashed across the news tomorrow: ‘Desperate Surgeons Discovered Hiding in Cornfields from Sea to Sea.’”
He nodded, his eyes on the TV. “Now you’re starting to think.”
Skye bit her bottom lip to keep from wasting her breath on a fruitless response. It was time to get her mother.
She’d been inside her parents’ house almost every day for the past three months; before that, years had passed since she left her childhood home. The strangest thing about being gone and coming back, however, wasn’t how much things had changed. It was how much things hadn’t.
The blue-and-white wallpaper, the pale-pink couches, the old flamingo table lamps—these were all as they had been when she left for Seattle fourteen years ago. The same lemony Pine-Sol smell permeated the air. Even the flickering television, boxy and crying out to be used as a prop on some set for anI Love Lucymusical, was the one she had watched throughhigh school. Everything in Skye’s life had changed in the past fourteen years. But for her parents? Nothing.
Well, nothing except for the dozen landscape oil paintings covering every square inch of wall space above the couch.
Skye’s eyes drifted to the glimmer of a poker chip on the shag carpet, now visible beneath her father’s reclined chair. She frowned. Frowned deeper as she picked it up and the wordsBristol Casinoglinted against the lamplight. A one-hundred-dollar chip.
Terrrrrific.
Nothing here had changedat all.
Her father’s attention and expression shifted as he realized what she held. He started to reach for it, winced, and settled back again.
“Now how’d that get there?” he said gruffly, eyeing it as if it had slithered in like a lizard and taken post beneath the chair of its own accord. “Must’ve slipped out of my pocket and been stuck in this chair for ages.”
Sure. Because her mother—tidiest woman in all of Appalachia—would’ve let a singledaygo by without vacuuming under the furniture.
No, if that coin was under the chair, he’d gone today. Maybe last night.
She’d only recently come to terms with the reality of her parents’ extreme financial situation. It was the very reason she’d packed up her successful, vibrant Seattle life three months ago and headed back to Whitetop, Virginia, population 412—now 413. At the moment she was going to have to remember the stubborn man was missing some very critical functions in his limbs.
Medical attention first, Skye. Kill him second.
“I’ll take that.” He held out his hand, grinning at her as though she were a kindergartener who’d accidentally picked up a cigarette.
“Don’t you worry about it,” Skye replied with a tight smile, clamping the coin deep inside her fist and then shoving it into her back pocket. She gave his knee a heavy-handed pat as she spoke. “You. Just. Leave. It. To. Me—”
A rapping on the front door cut her words short. Skye’s eyes moved from the door to the clock on the wall to the blank expression on her father’s face. Her parents always had their little church group over on Thursdays, but who would be knocking on their door at 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night?
“Are you expecting someone?” Skye said, crossing the old, familiar carpet. She opened the door. “Theo?”
The television in the background dimmed as Skye spoke the name she’d refrained from speaking for just about as long as the carpet beneath her feet had been in existence.
