9. Chapter 9
Graham drove the first shift out of Dayton, with Jase riding shotgun to navigate the black line on their dad’s paper map, and Lindsey in the back seat in a pair of sunglasses too big for her face.
Three million.
He would do just about anything for his cut of the inheritance, and this was proof.
After they opened the last map, he would ditch this ridiculous car and hop a first-class flight home with Linds to claim his check.
He didn’t care if he ever saw Jase again and, knowing his brother’s affinity for disappearing at even the most critical times, he probably wouldn’t.
That was fine. This trip was fine. Three million dollars made everything fine.
The Elvis tape stuck in the deck clicking endlessly from A-side to B was fine.
Jase falling asleep after Owentown, snoring like a bastard and shirking his navigation responsibilities, was fine.
Quitting the insurance job he hated, and still getting text messages from his twenty-two-year-old former boss with questions about paperwork and accounts was fine.
It was even fine when his phone chimed reminding him he forgot to pay his credit card bill, and a late fee was automatically added to his balance.
Everything was fine until outside of Georgetown, Kentucky, on a quiet country road, his father’s precious Nadine started to clunk.
“What? No. No.” Graham punched the steering wheel. “Come on.”
Lindsey leaned over the front seat. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t do this to me, Nadine, you bitch,” Graham said as the car petered out at the shoulder.
Jase yawned. “I thought her name was Lindsey?”
“The car is Nadine,” Lindsey said.
Graham smacked the dash and noticed the fuel gauge for the first time.
“Damn it.” He shook his head at the sheer stupidity of it. “I think we’re out of gas.”
“You serious?” Jase leaned over to check for himself. “Who doesn’t get gas before a road trip?”
“All of us, apparently,” Lindsey said.
“My car was ready to go. I didn’t even think about it.” Graham fumbled below the dash for the lever to pop the hood. “Why would Dad ever make it easy?”
“The gas tank is in the back,” Jase pointed out.
“Thanks, dickhead, I’m just checking for anything else,” Graham said.
Squinting in the midday sun and sweating through his button-down shirt, he lifted the heavy metal hood and stared at the engine.
It had been, what? Twenty years since he helped his dad in the shop?
For the first time since he was thirteen, Graham wished he spent more time in Jay’s Garage, turning screws and wheeling around on the creeper while his old man fixed cars.
He might’ve picked up a few tips that would’ve helped them now.
It smelled like the shop under the wagon’s hood. Dirt, oil, grease. The engine blurred in front of him.
“Damn you, Dad,” he muttered, his knuckles turning white from kneading the vise around his heart. There was nowhere he could go where the loss didn’t find him.
Lindsey appeared at his side. “See anything?”
“I don’t know what I’m even looking for.” He wiped his nose and hollered around the hood, “Jase?”
“Shoot.” Lindsey swiped her phone’s screen. “I don’t have service.”
Graham pulled the cell phone from his pocket. No service…or new messages.
“I don’t either.”
She squeezed his arm. He didn’t always appreciate her touches that felt more motherly than anything he was used to. He’d rather bend her over the engine, grip those hips—
“I’m going to check for service down the road,” she said, and Graham’s fist caught air instead of her dress.
Jase, unconcerned as if this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to him today, rubbed sleep from his eyes and unzipped his pants toward the ditch.
“You know our old man is laughing his ass off,” he said.
“Hilarious.” Graham sighed. Even holding his phone above his head, there weren’t any bars. “I’ve never run out of gas in my life.”
“You sure that’s what it is?”
“You’re welcome to check it out. You fix…stuff.”
“Nothing this old. Not in a long time.”
Graham scratched the knotted curls at the back of his head. He couldn’t remember his last haircut. “You’d think Dad would’ve serviced it before sending us out here.”
Unless this is his way of testing all the things I never learned from him.
“He had other, more important things to think about,” Jase said.
Right. Other things, like dying.
“Put your junk away and check that tin can you call a phone,” Graham said. “I can’t believe there’s anywhere left in this country without cell service.”
“You don’t think that’s exactly why he took us off the main road?”
Jase zipped his pants and leaned underneath the hood.
He touched a few things, ducked farther beneath it—Graham couldn’t help picturing the hundred-pound hood crashing down on his brother’s back, Jase’s legs kicking out and flailing like something in a cartoon—and wiped his sweaty nose on his shoulder.
“Anything?” Graham asked.
“Nothing obvious. It’s not smoking,” Jase said. “It probably is just out of gas.”
“Wonderful.”
Jase lowered the hood and gave it an extra push at the bottom.
“Hey, does that tree look familiar to you?” he asked.
“Tree?” Graham followed where his brother pointed past a barbed-wire fence to a dead tree beside a rock wall in the field across the road. “It’s a warning. If we stay out here too long, we’ll shrivel up and die too.”
“There’s a farm.” Lindsey pointed back the way they came. “They’ve got to have a phone.”
Graham shielded his eyes against the sun and peered through the heat ripples distorting the country road. He made out a barn that used to be red and a few dilapidated buildings beyond a copse of trees.
“And rope to tie trespassers up in the barn,” he surmised.
“No fucking way.”