Chapter 9 #4
My brother reaches around Mom to grab a biscuit, and she smacks his hand with the towel so fast it cracks through the kitchen. “Sit down like you were raised with manners.”
He jerks his hand back, laughing. “Yes, ma’am.”
Something in my chest loosens. Not relief, nothing that clean, but enough to notice.
Mom’s gaze shifts back to me, softening again, and that damn softness is harder to take than anything else. “Sit, baby.”
I don’t argue, moving to the table, pulling out the same chair I used to sit in when I was younger.
The wood creaks under my weight, familiar and strange all at once.
My brother drops into the chair across from me.
Dad takes the head of the table. Mom brings over the food as if she’s feeding an army instead of four people.
Maybe she’s feeding all the years I missed too.
She sets the basket of biscuits in front of me first. “Eat.”
I pick one up and break it open. Steam rolls out, warm and buttery, and for a second, I’m a kid again, sitting here before school, half awake, Dad already smelling of motor oil, Mom rushing around with lesson plans tucked under one arm and coffee in the other.
I smear gravy over the biscuit and take a bite. Damn. I forgot what this tasted like, or maybe I made myself forget. Mom watches me too closely. I chew, swallow, and nod once. “Still good.”
Her smile breaks wide. “That’s all I get?”
I take another bite. “Damn good.”
For a few minutes, we eat. There’s no heavy talk, or ghosts dragged in and set between us.
Mom asks about the bar, and I keep it simple. I tell her it’s busy, the club keeps me working, and that New Orleans doesn’t sleep.
“That place is too wild,” she says, shaking her head as she cuts into her eggs. “I’ve seen videos.”
My brother grins. “You watching Bourbon Street videos, Ma?”
“I know how to use the internet.”
Dad grunts. “Barely.”
She turns that look on him, the one that probably kept classrooms full of kids in line for decades. “I use it well enough to order truck parts when you forget.”
Dad points his fork toward me without looking at her. “She’s meaner since you left.”
Mom laughs, and the sound fills the kitchen. Breakfast stretches longer than I expect. Coffee gets refilled. Biscuits get passed.
Mom tells me about the school, even though she’s retired from it now, about how the new teachers don’t know how to handle kids with “too much fire and not enough direction,” which is her polite way of saying no one has patience anymore.
Dad talks about the shop, about how he keeps saying he’s gonna slow down, but everyone in town still brings him their broken-down trucks and busted lawn mowers because they don’t trust anybody else.
My brother talks about work, about a woman he was seeing for a while who apparently ‘had ‘strong opinions about everything except where she wanted to eat,” which makes Mom laugh. Dad mutters that every woman alive does that to keep men humble.
I don’t say much. Don’t have to. For once, nobody seems to need more from me than what I can give.
That’s the part that gets under my ribs.
No questions. The space. They let me sit here with them without asking me to explain why I stayed away for so long.
Mom keeps putting food on my plate. Dad keeps sliding tools and truck talk into the silence as if he’s handing me something familiar to hold onto.
My brother keeps running his mouth, but now and then, his gaze cuts to me, checking without making it obvious.
This is where I came from.
Not blood and prison bars.
Not courtrooms and concrete cells.
These are my roots.
A kitchen full of noise.
A mother who loves too hard.
A father who says little but means all of it.
A brother who knows when to joke and when to shut the hell up.
I used to think coming back here would crush me. Maybe it still will. But sitting at this table, with gravy on my plate and coffee warming my hands, it doesn’t feel like the walls are closing in.
Mom reaches for the biscuit basket, sees it empty, and gives my brother a pointed look.
“What?” he says around a mouthful.
“You ate the last one.”
He looks at me. “He’s bigger than me.”
Mom gets up, already heading for the stove. “I made another pan.”
I lean back in my chair, coffee in hand, and for the first time since I walked through that door, the tightness in my chest eases enough for me to breathe without thinking about it.
Things feel… almost normal.
By afternoon, the house fills up, cars crowd the driveway and spill into the yard, and neighbors and old friends all show up for one reason—my parents’ anniversary.
It’s not fancy, no catered spread, no decorations that don’t mean anything, just homemade dishes on every surface, music low, and laughter spilling onto the porch while people talk over each other.
Mom moves through it all with a smile that never fades, and my dad is standing off to the side, taking it in with that quiet pride he carries in everything he does.
I keep moving, helping where I can, shaking hands, nodding, and taking the claps on the shoulder. Some looks linger a second too long. Small towns don’t forget. But nobody says anything. Not today anyway.
At some point, I slip out onto the porch with my brother, needing a break from the noise.
The back porch creaks under my boots when I step outside.
The night air hits me immediately, cooler than Louisiana, cleaner too.
Crickets hum loudly in the dark while the yellow porch light spills across the weathered boards beneath my feet.
Home.
Or whatever the hell home is supposed to mean after years of trying not to think about it.
I lean against the porch railing and drag a cigarette from the pack in my cut.
The first inhale burns all the way down.
I let the smoke roll slowly from my mouth while staring out across my parents’ backyard.
Same old tire swing hanging from the oak tree. Some things survive time. Some don’t.
The screen door groans open behind me. “You still smoke those nasty things, huh?” Dean says.
I don’t turn around right away, just flick ash into the yard. “You still ugly?” I mutter.
He snorts as his boots thud across the porch until he stops beside me, shoulder bumping mine once in that quiet way brothers do instead of hugging each other like damn normal people, and I glance over at him, finally.
Gray is starting to touch his temples. More lines are around his eyes. Still built solid from years of working with his hands. Still the same guy who used to bloody my nose, then help me hide it from Mom afterward.
He notices me looking. “What?”
“You got old.”
“Says the asshole with enough scars to look like a road map.”
Fair.
I grunt and take another drag. For a while, we stand there listening to the wind move through the trees. It’s easy. I figured coming back here would feel like trying to breathe underwater. Some of it does, but not this part. Not standing beside my brother while the world goes quiet around us.
Dean hooks a thumb toward the far end of the porch. “Still got ’em.”
My eyes track over. Two acoustic guitars sit against the wall near the old porch swing. My chest tightens instantly.
Jesus Christ.
I haven’t touched one in years.
Dad taught both of us when we were kids. Cheap guitars, callused fingers, country songs, and old rock played badly until we finally learned enough chords to fake our way through them.
Dean walks over and grabs one, tossing me a look over his shoulder. “Don’t be a bitch about it.”
“I ain’t touched one since…” I trail off.
Hannah loved hearing me play. She used to sit cross-legged on the couch, smiling while I butchered old Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in our living room. After she died, I put the guitar away, and never opened the case again.
Dean’s expression shifts slightly. No pity. Just understanding.
He grabs the second guitar and walks back over before shoving it toward me. The wood settles heavy in my hands, but familiar, as if picking up a piece of another life.
I stare down at it for a while. My thumb brushes over old scratches near the sound hole. I remember putting those there when I was sixteen. The memory hits low and mean.
“You gonna hold it all night or play the damn thing?” Dean asks quietly.
I sink into one of the porch chairs with a grunt. Wood creaks beneath my weight. Dean sits beside me and absently starts strumming something soft in an easy rhythm. Then I recognize it… “Simple Man.”
Of course, it’s that damn song. I huff a humorless laugh. “You’re an asshole.”
“Probably.”
The notes drift out into the yard slowly and steadily.
I sit there listening for a while, a cigarette burning between my fingers while memories crawl all over me whether I want them to or not, of Dad teaching us chords in the garage, and Mom yelling through the screen door that dinner was getting cold.
Hannah would curl against me on the couch while I played quietly for her after work.
The pale yellow nursery walls, and tiny socks folded neatly in a dresser drawer.
I close my eyes briefly while the weight of the guitar settles heavily across my thigh.
Dean doesn’t push or look at me. He just keeps playing.
Finally, before I can talk myself out of it, my fingers move, clumsy at first. The strings bite at calluses that haven’t existed in years, but muscle memory comes back slowly. I pick up the rhythm beneath his.
I feel the weight of Dean’s stare, but he never says a word.
Good.
Because if he does, I might stop.
The porch fills with music that sounds old and worn around the edges.
Two grown men carrying ghosts through guitar strings under a Midwest sky.
The sound drifts out across the yard toward the dark fields beyond the fence.
I stare straight ahead while I play because looking anywhere else feels dangerous.
“You remember when Dad broke his ankle trying to hang Christmas lights?” Dean suddenly asks.
I bark out a laugh before I can stop it. “He fell off the damn porch rail.”