Chapter 1 Ella #2
I reached into the plastic container in my cup holder and dug out a few treats for them as a reward. Yes, I had trained them to bark in response to that exact question. And yes, I still laughed every time. You have to find creative ways to keep yourself entertained in rural areas.
The light turned green. In just a few miles, we were back in the woods, starting the long climb into the foothills.
Jack’s place was on the opposite side of the valley as my sister’s.
He lived close to the top of a hill about twelve feet shy of mountain status.
The most direct road was so steep that I wouldn’t risk taking it now.
This soon after a snowfall, you had to begin the ascent going about sixty if you had any hope of keeping enough momentum going to get to the top.
I hadn’t been driving fast enough the last time I attempted it, and the tires had lost their grip halfway up the hill.
Thank God for the house I had just passed and my years of experience on ice-slicked roads.
I’d managed to steer the truck into their driveway during the slide.
To anyone watching, I would have looked like a demolition derby queen with nerves of steel, but the truth is I’d been terrified.
My hands shook for nearly an hour after, and I’d stayed far away from that road in bad weather ever since.
Taking the long way added another ten minutes to my trip, but I didn’t mind; I wasn’t in a rush.
Plus, the views were nicer along this route, especially after a storm.
Two-hundred-year-old stone fences marked the property lines of the houses.
Here and there, a merry spill of golden light shone through the forest, offering a brief glimpse of a log cabin or an A-frame in a clearing beyond.
I caught sight of twinkling Christmas lights down a long driveway and had a brief flashback to a snowball fight I’d had there as a kid. The Masons had owned it then. They’d sold the place to the Andrews when I was in middle school and moved to New Hampshire in search of better jobs.
That was a common theme in my area. People moved away to find jobs, or go to school, or to get away from the suffocating monotony of small-town life. Few ever returned, and our population was a dying one as a result.
The truck’s engine whined as I navigated switchback after switchback on the climb up.
Soon even those brief glimpses of homesteads fell away.
Pine trees replaced oaks as I neared the top of the hill, butting right against the road.
Their branches crowded out the star-strewn sky and dropped clumps of snow on the roof of the cab.
The road opened up again when I crested the summit.
I slowed the truck to a crawl so I could take in the dizzying view.
Mountains loomed in the distance, their jagged outlines only visible because of the absence of stars.
Resting far below them on the valley floor was the town.
Its lights glimmered like the swirling mass of some small galaxy, the pinpricks of white that spread out from it the planets it had pulled into its orbit.
“Would you look at that,” I said. I’d lived here most of my life, but sometimes the beauty of my hometown still stole my breath away.
I brought my focus back to the road and shifted into four-wheel low to begin the descent. Jack’s was the first driveway on the right. There weren’t any streetlights here, so I looked for the red reflector on his mailbox.
The dogs got antsy when I turned off the road. We were at Jack’s, and that meant bear hugs and dog treats were about to happen. Fred pulled at his harness. Sam whined as he strained to look out the front window.
“I got it, I got it. Just hold on,” I told them. “And don’t even think about howling out here.”
God only knew what might answer if they did. This side of the valley bordered the wilderness. Like, no one lives beyond this point, you will die if you don’t know what you’re doing out there, wilderness.
Aroostook County, Maine was the largest east of the Mississippi, with over four million acres of mountains, trees, and waterways.
Beyond our town, there was nothing but rugged, mostly impassable terrain dissected by roaring rivers.
Instead of humans, it was populated by coyotes, moose, fishers, bears – who were thankfully fast asleep in their dens – wolves, and probably, though the US Fish and Wildlife Service would deny it too, mountain lions.
With the thought of wolves still plaguing me, I drove slowly, searching the tree line on either side of the truck for the tell-tale reflection of eyes. Jack’s driveway was unpaved, and thanks to my glacial pace, I gave him plenty of time to hear me coming.
He stepped out onto the front porch as I pulled up.
In his mid-sixties, he still stood ramrod straight, with broad shoulders, salt and pepper hair, and a face that was tan even during winter thanks to snow glare.
The few wrinkles he had were clustered around his eyes and mouth, a dead giveaway for how much he smiled.
He looked like an instafamous hipster grandpa.
One that could out bench-press men half his age.
The women of our small town, many much younger than him, considered Jack to be one of the most eligible bachelors in the area.
I knew him well enough to say that those women would forever be disappointed.
Jack had loved his late wife in a way that would make any other relationship pale in comparison.
She’d died the same year as my grandfather; the year Jack would tell you was easily the worst of his life.
When I was younger, I’d called him Uncle Jack, though he was more of a great uncle. Once removed. I think. His father had been married to my grandfather’s mother for a few years, so whatever that would make him. Ex-great uncle, maybe?
Their parents’ marriage hadn’t stuck it out, but even though they were over a decade apart in age, Jack and my grandfather’s brotherly relationship had endured the split.
Jack had been a constant fixture in my life because of it.
After my grandfather’s death, I spent a lot of time on this hill with him and his wife, Renee, who had already accepted the finality of her cancer diagnosis and had given up fighting it.
I practically moved in after she passed.
Jack and I spent those days felling trees, clearing a swath of forest beyond his home for planting, coaxing tillable soil out of the rocky terrain, and basically working ourselves to the bone to keep from succumbing to grief.
Now, three years later, I still came over at least once a week.
Jack yanked open the passenger door as I rolled to a stop. “Where are my boys?”
The dogs barked like mad, nearly deafening me in the enclosed space of the cab. I turned the truck off and freed them from their harnesses, and they shot out of the backseat to race circles around him.
“Nice to see you too, Jack!” I yelled over the racket.
He totally ignored me. “Do you want some…TREATS?”
The dogs fell over each other in their excitement.
I rolled my eyes and went around to the passenger side to join the fray. Jack and I were just pulling apart from a hug when a set of lights flashed through the trees, followed by the sound of tires crunching over gravel.
“That’ll be Ben,” Jack said. “New neighbor just down the hill. He bought the old Reynolds farmstead and is fixing it up. He’s from out west and doesn’t know anyone, so I figured I’d invite him over to meet you. You’re close in age. Maybe you can introduce him to the other youngins in town.”
I glanced toward the vehicle – a lifted Jeep – as it rolled to a stop and the lights cut out. “Sure. They could use some fresh meat. Gossip is running dry with everyone shut up from the storms.”
Jack snorted. “Well, go easy on him. Like I said, he’s new, and not used to small-town life. I think you’ll like him, though. He’s artsy-fartsy like yourself.”
I grinned. To Jack, artsy-fartsy could mean a couple of things: Ben was either an artist or a craftsman, or identified as a liberal. Which was funny, because while Jack identified as an independent, his political views were pretty “artsy-fartsy” by today’s standards.
Jack reached down to ruffle Sam’s ears. “Why don’t you wait here and introduce yourself? I’ll go get these monsters a treat and try to calm them down so they don’t maul the poor bastard as soon as they see him.”
It was my turn to snort. “Good luck with that.”
He disappeared inside the house with the dogs while I readied myself to play the part of Ambassador to the Youngins.
I even prepared a brief speech: “Hi, I’m Ella.
Welcome to the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Next town is forty minutes thataway. Good news!
They have a Walmart there. Oh, and did I mention that I’m one of only fifteen people near your approximate age in this area?
Hope you like us, otherwise you’re shit out of luck. ”
The vehicle door opened, and my nice, witty speech went up in flames, because a very broad shadow stepped out from it. Not down from it, like any normal-sized human would from a jacked-upped four-by-four, out from it. Like the Jeep had to be lifted to reach a height more comfortable for the driver.
He shut the door and ambled into the halo of golden porchlight, and my brain short-circuited for a second. Because I knew who he was: Benjamin Kakoa. Benjamin freaking Kakoa. Walking up to me. In my once-removed (possibly?) great uncle’s driveway.
To be clear, I didn’t know him, know him. I just recognized his face. And his hair. From television. And print ads. And the packaging my running shoes came in. Because he was a famous person. A very famous person.
Two years ago, he’d starred in sports gear commercials and repped luxury watch brands and had even been plastered across magazine pages in shampoo ads.
He’d been one of the biggest football stars in the country.
And then his older brother, Zach Kakoa, also a football pro, had suffered a seizure while home visiting family in their native Hawaii.
He’d been driving at the time. With his wife and son in the car.
Tragically, all three had succumbed to their injuries in the resulting crash.
Their deaths had shocked the sporting world, but that was nothing compared to what followed. During Zach’s autopsy, the coroner found significant scarring from past traumatic brain injuries, caused by his years of contact on the field. She ruled that these TBIs had been the cause of the seizure.
Ben quit the US Football League the day the findings were released.
He was one of many young men who realized the money they were being paid wasn’t worth the true cost to themselves.
But that wasn’t all Ben did. He became a vocal advocate for better safety gear in football, tougher rules that would help protect the players, and higher fines for illegal, dangerous tackles.
Instead of appearing in commercials for luxury brands, he now starred in PSAs paid for by his parents, who were the beneficiaries of Zach’s life insurance policy. They had joined the fight alongside Ben, dedicating Zach’s money to furthering the scientific study of brain injuries.
The last article I’d read about him said that he was out on the west coast battling the juggernaut that was the USFL. So what the hell was he doing in East Nowhere, Maine?
He strode closer, and my brain short-circuited for an entirely different reason this time, because, and I didn’t know how it was possible, he was somehow better looking in real life.
I mean, he looked like a football player, sure – well over six feet tall, abnormally wide shoulders, long, heavily muscled arms and legs, an obscenely broad chest – but his face.
Yea gods.
It was his face that landed him those advertising contracts.
His father was of Hawaiian and Samoan descent, and his mother was Swedish and Brazilian.
He had light brown skin, pale green eyes, impeccable bone structure, arched brows, and a thick head of riotous curls that fell to his shoulders.
In all the pictures and videos I’d seen him in, his face had been shaved clean.
He wore a short, neatly trimmed beard now.
I needed to snap out of it and greet him, but the sight of him made me worry that if I opened my mouth, all that would come out was a lust-filled, “Hrrrrrrnnnnnn.” It had been way too long since I’d had sex, and I was starting to develop some troubling symptoms of my unintended abstinence.
No way in hell could I introduce him to anyone in town. First off, the last thing this place needed was to be invaded by a horde of paparazzi. Secondly, the women would murder each other over him.
Ben extended a hand toward me. “Hi. You’re Ella, right? Jack’s told me all about you.” His voice was also different from the videos: smoother, less stilted, maybe even a little deeper.
I put my hand in his. He had a firm grip, and though he was no doubt trying to be gentle, my knuckle joints still ground together.
Thankfully, it was just the right amount of discomfort to jar me out of my lusty thoughts.
“I am,” I told him. “And you must be the artsy-fartsy Ben that Jack said I would get along with.”
He released my hand and glanced toward the house. “Artsy-fartsy, huh?”
“I’m guessing you don’t consider yourself an artist?”
“I’m getting pretty good at woodworking, does that count?” he asked. A smile spread over his full lips as he turned back to me.
I forgot my own name for a second, staring up at him.
Brain, I know this is hard right now, but I need you to please ignore how handsome this man is and process the question he asked me.
Belatedly, it complied.
“Hmm…it might,” I said. “Tell me, have you ever confessed a deep, undying love for Barack Obama when in Jack’s company?”
He frowned a little in response. “I don’t think so?”
“A deep, undying love for labor unions?”
His frown deepened. “Huh?”
“Told him you even once voted democrat?”
“We haven’t really discussed politics.”
I tapped my chin with a gloved finger. “The mystery deepens.”
“Uh…” He seemed unsettled, not being in on the joke. I liked that. It put us on more equal footing.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ben. I apologize in advance for my dogs. They lose their minds around new people.”
With that, I led him up the porch stairs and into the house.