7. Chapter 7
“The usual?”
“Just the coffee for now,” Jase said. “Thanks, babe.”
At a diner down the street from his apartment, Jenna—the waitress with a butterfly tattoo on her ankle and a shooting star on her left ass cheek—filled three cups of coffee, and Lindsey squeezed out of the booth to go to the bathroom.
After watching Jenna’s tight jeans disappear behind the counter, Jase found his brother staring down his nose.
“Babe?”
“What?” Jase shrugged. “I’m a regular.”
“Regular. Sure.” Graham grunted.
“Did you put on weight?” Jase asked.
“What’s it to you?”
“You look bigger. Bulkier.”
“I’ve been working out. So what?”
“Hey, just making conversation.”
“I think we should get something straight,” Graham said. “This isn’t a vacation. It’s not like any of us actually want to be here.”
“I want to be here,” Jase said with a mocking lilt he knew would piss off his brother.
Graham tapped his thumb ring against the mug in front of him. “I’m being serious. Can we just make this trip as painless as possible?”
“Whatever you say.”
“Fine.” Graham peeled open a single-serve creamer and dumped it into his coffee. “Where were you?”
“This morning? I had last-minute business.”
“Oh? Shot of penicillin for the road?”
Jase let the jab roll off his back. There were probably plenty more coming.
“And I meant—”
“I know what you meant. What’s it to you?”
“It’s nothing to me, but Dad—”
“Let me stop you there,” Jase said. “You wanted painless, right?”
Graham flicked the spent creamer across the table. “Fine.”
Jase nodded toward the bathroom. “What’s with the girl?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is she here?”
“It’s what Dad wanted.”
“Are you going to marry her or something?”
“No.” Graham’s shoulders shook as if shrugging off the thought. “I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it.”
“You been together long?”
“A year and some change.”
“And you don’t know if you want to marry her?”
“Asks the man whose longest relationship took place in a motel that rents rooms by the hour,” Graham said with a sigh. “No, I don’t know, and I don’t see how it’s any of your business. Lately it’s been all about Dad and it didn’t leave much time for anything else. Or didn’t you notice?”
Jase put up his hands. “Let’s not get into it now.”
“Fine. Then get off my ass about Linds. Dad wanted her here, end of story. They spent a lot of time together since…” He trailed off. “They got close.”
Jase wasn’t sure why it bothered him. How much time was a lot?
More than I did.
“She know there’s an inheritance to work for?” Jase asked into his mug.
“Fuck you.” Graham lowered his voice, adding, “She doesn’t know about the money, and I want to keep it that way.”
“You’re kidding me—” Jase broke off, spotting Sundress heading back to the table. Graham moved over and she slid into the booth beside him.
If she was willing to take this trip without knowing about the money, Jase figured it meant one of two things. Either she was a total idiot—she’d been with Graham for a year, so that checked out—or she was waiting for a ring.
“A waitress in the bathroom asked me to give this to you,” Lindsey said, sliding a small piece of paper across the table to him.
“Blonde hair with a nose ring? Or a brunette with glasses?” Jase asked. He unfolded the note. Dick, was all it said.
“Brown hair, nose ring,” Lindsey said. “She also told me not to fall for a free ride.”
“Okay, yeah, thanks.” Jase crumpled the note and tossed it to the far side of the table.
Sundress was smirking. He wanted to tell her she could do worse than a free ride on his bike with Graham for a boyfriend.
“You sure you don’t need that penicillin?” Graham uncrumpled the paper to read it himself and snorted a laugh.
“Can it, asshole. What are we doing? What’s the plan?” Jase asked.
“Oh!” Sundress exclaimed. She dug into a purse that was bigger than the duffel he packed for the trip. “Give me a second.”
“Careful, you could get lost in there,” Jase said.
“Ah ha!” She came up with a black envelope with a white number one written on the front. “Here we go.”
“How do we time-stamp it?” Jase asked. “Do you have Whitlock’s number?”
“Yeah, I got it,” Graham said. “He’d better not charge triple for texts today. Greedy bastard.”
Lindsey set her phone beside the envelope.
While the screen showed the date and time, Graham used his phone to take a picture of the envelope sealed, then another after the black wax seal was cracked, and sent the pictures to Whitlock per the instructions they were given at the will reading. Then he unfolded the letter inside.
“‘Welcome to day one. You’ve heard the old adage: It’s the journey, not the destination? It’s a load of horseshit.’”
Jase laughed at his old man’s voice ringing loud and clear in the letter.
Graham stumbled over the word companions as he continued reading and looked up at Jase.
“Were you supposed to bring someone?”
“Fat chance.” If his old man suspected Jase was sleeping with his dad’s favorite nurse, Jason Sr. never said. “You’re reading it wrong.”
“It says companions. And what’s this about the Smokies? I never went to the Smokies.”
“You weren’t born yet,” Jase said. “Those were happier times.”
Graham finished reading and picked up the map. A Polaroid fell from between the folds and landed facedown on the table.
“What’s this?” Graham turned the photo over.
It was their parents as young as the Young brothers now, standing beside a motorcycle in front of a small white building with a neon sign for Tuck’s Tennessee Barbecue.
The map carved a jagged black path from Ohio to Chattanooga, Tennessee. “They were bikers? When? For how long?”
Jase shook his head. “No idea.”
He sipped his coffee around the lie. A Polaroid of his folks posing with their bike beside a rock wall on a country road was burning a hole in his back pocket.
“There was an old bike collecting dust in the back of the shop, but it didn’t run,” Graham said. “Did it?”
Jase’s guilt mounted. The bike Graham remembered did, in fact, run and was the very bike Jase had been driving for years.
He downed the rest of his coffee and said, “We should probably get the check. Head out.”
“Right,” Graham said. With an inflated Southern drawl, he asked Lindsey, “Well, darlin’, ever been to Tennessee?”