Page 2 of Harts & Hurts

Present Day - July

I chose not to ride to the funeral in any of the family cars, the limousines packed tight with my family members—not because I didn’t want to be around my family, but because I wanted to get myself together before I saw my mom. She had her own grief to bear, losing a son. I didn’t want her carrying mine as well.

Fisher was gone. It was still unreal to me. Like, I believed it, but at the same time, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that my big brother was no longer on Earth. He and his wife, Ashlynn, had been killed in a vehicular accident with an intoxicated teenager.

“You okay, Griff?” my youngest sister, Marissa, questioned from the passenger seat.

“Nah. My heart is shattered,” I admitted, feeling less self-conscious about being honest with my sister than I would’ve felt about being honest with either of our parents.

“Mine too,” she said with a sniffle. “But I know how close the two of you were. He was so proud of you. You were like his hero.”

“He was my hero.” I thumped my chest. All I did was play professional football for eleven years. Fisher was the one who sustained a marriage and excelled at fatherhood. He had only been a father for a few months, but in that time, he’d killed it. That made my thoughts turn to his four-month-old baby girl. She’d been left without either parent because some reckless-ass teenager had decided to get drunk and get behind the wheel of a car.

That teenager didn’t understand the magnitude of her actions. She didn’t understand what she’d taken from our family, . . . from the world. She’d taken a son, a father, a brother, a husband, a lover, a fighter, and an all-around good man. He was gone.

Marissa and I rode the rest of the way to the church in silence. The parking lot was packed, and I had to make my way to the next to last row to find a spot. I wasn’t surprised by the volume of vehicles. Fort Jackson was a small town, and even though Fisher and Ashlynn had moved away more than a decade before, they still belonged to Fort Jackson. The people of Fort Jackson had watched them grow up, celebrated each of them as they left for college to pursue their respective futures, and been shocked when the two found each other and started up a relationship. Of course, the entire town would show up for the double funeral. They were burying two of their own.

“And on top of everything else, now we have to deal with her family.” The way that Marissa said “her” let me know exactly whose family she was referring to. Ashlynn’s family. The Hurts. Well, Ashlynn had been a “Hurt” before she married my brother, but she was a direct descendant of the Melrose family. Our family, the Harts, and the Melroses had been at war since the beginning of time.

Apparently, back in the 1800s or something, my five-or-six-times great uncle, Cecil Hart, had jilted Ashlynn’s five-or-six-times great aunt, Anna Clara Melrose, at the altar. Back then, something like that was a huge scandal that had ruined Anna Clara’s name and made her damaged goods or something. It was equally disgraceful that Cecil had shown back up in town a few years later for a visit with a new bride and no excuse as to why he’d ditched the first bride. Needless to say, the Melrose family didn’t fuck with us. And in turn, we didn’t fuck with them.

Personally, I thought the entire thing was well past its prime. The two people who were the most affected by the jilting were long gone and had been asleep in their graves for close to a century. Why was the animosity still as fresh as the morning dew? I didn’t get it, and I refused to participate in the shit. If a Melrose was cool with me, I was cool with them.

Clearly, my brother felt the same way; he had married a Melrose. He told me once that he had loved Ashlynn since elementary school but didn’t work up the nerve to talk to her until he was sixteen. Even then, he thought she would reject him. Ashlynn’s spirit was too sweet for that, and that wasn’t just something I’d heard. That was something I knew. As an older sister-in-law, I got to know her. She and Fisher would come to my football games when I was in college. They would sit in the stands on game days when they knew my parents wouldn’t be there. Ashlynn cheered louder for me than my brother did sometimes. She always wore the same top to the games—a blinged-out jersey she had bedazzled and decorated by hand with my name and my number on the back. The first time she donned it, a Melrose wearing the Hart name on her back, I fell a little bit in love with her. I started praying that God would send me a woman with a heart and spirit just like hers. And it wouldn’t hurt if she was just as gorgeous as Ashlynn was to me.

I chuckled at the thought that I’d had a crush on my sister-in-law.

“And the nerve of that Tara Hurt to act like our family shouldn’t be allowed to see Melrose. It’s bad enough that they named her that, but to act like our time with her should be rationed? She’s our niece too.”

Fisher and Ashlynn had named their daughter Melrose Marie Hart. Fisher told me once that it was their attempt to join the family together—bring forth the first life that was a combination of both families. She was the best of both families. Ashlynn’s family had been ecstatic. The Hart family had hit the ceiling. Fisher and Ashlynn’s attempt didn’t go over well, but the baby was here now, and that was her name. What could anybody do about it?

“Why the hell are you invested in this feud, Riss? None of the people alive now were even thought about when that situation happened. If some of the younger generation would stop acting like it happened yesterday, maybe the family could move on from the drama.”

She rolled her eyes. “Tell that family to move on, then I’ll talk to my family about moving on.”

I waved my hand dismissively and sighed. I didn’t have the bandwidth for stupid shit. I was about to walk into the church and bury not only my brother but my sweet sister-in-law as well. My heart was shattered.

I let her walk ahead of me. I wasn’t up for all the drama. I just wanted to mourn my brother and sister-in-law in peace. I wasn’t trying to have to mourn while also trudging through the bullshit of family politics and dysfunctions.

The inside of the church was as packed as the parking lot had been. One side of the church was teeming with Harts, the other side with Melroses. If it weren’t for my brother’s funeral—if it was a wedding or something—maybe I would’ve sat on the side with the Melrose family just to shake things up.

The whole “you stay over there, and we’ll be over here” mentality was so damn dumb to me. It was dumber to me after my grandmother had explained the context of the situation to us, recalling the level of shame that Anna Clara Melrose must’ve felt being left at the altar the way she was. That alone made me feel like the Melrose family probably was in the right to feel like our family was fucked up. How did we have a leg to stand on?

My grandmother explained that old boy’s wedding day disappearance was embarrassing for the Hart family as well. Old Cecil’s ass cast a shadow of mistrust on the entire family with that stunt. None of his younger brothers were able to marry a girl from Fort Jackson because fathers no longer trusted the men in our family to keep their word. It was apparently a shit show.

The Hart family got mad at the Melroses because they never spoke up on the Harts’ behalf when our name was being dragged through the mud. Personally, I thought it was ballsy as hell for my six-or-seven-times great-grandfather to expect the family that was harmed to be the same family to run interference. But he did, and he was pissed when they wouldn’t, and thus was born the feud. I still felt like the Hart family was on the wrong side of history with that one, but whatever.

I found my mother fiddling with the guest book with her left hand while holding a sleeping Melrose in her right arm. I breathed in an inaudible sigh of relief. At least Ashlynn’s mother was playing nice and letting my mother have time with Melrose.

“Hey, Ma,” I said softly before lightly caressing Melrose’s sweet cheek. She was such a beautiful baby. At four months old, all her looks hadn’t come in, but she was still a beauty.

“Hey, Griff.” She stopped fiddling with the book and pulled me into a hug with her free arm.

“I see you’re getting to spend some time with your granddaughter.”

“Yeah. Right before Mark and I were about to contact the lawyers, Tara called, saying we could have the baby tonight.” I was about to say how cool I thought that was of Mrs. Hurt, when my mother spoke again. “The nerve of her, acting like she gets to tell me when I can and can’t have my granddaughter. If she thinks I’m giving this baby back to that family, she’s crazy. I have her now, and she will stay with us. If they want her back, they need to sue. But until they do, we’re keeping her.”

“Ma!” What the fuck? “That’s not cool. She operated in good faith, letting you have time with Melrose. Shouldn’t you do the same?”