Chapter 2
TWO
ASH
Waking up to the faint sounds of my parents bickering is not the kind of nostalgia I’m interested in. But it’s the nostalgia I’m being force-fed first thing in the morning.
I’ve been home for three days and I’m already dying to get the fuck out. Except this time, unlike my short-lived return home around Thanksgiving of last year, I’m here indefinitely. My grandfather’s passing brought me back and I can’t justify my wandering anymore.
I stare at the ceiling as the sound of my parents’ fussing gets closer. Their chocolate lab, Lady, lifts her head from where she’s been smushed into my armpit the whole night.
“It’s still early, John David. It’s Saturday,” Mom says outside my door, not even bothering to regulate her volume. Growing up, she was always awake at the ass-crack of dawn cleaning and banging shit around, so I’m not surprised. “Let Ashley sleep.”
“He takes too damn long to get dressed and he won’t embarrass us by being late,” Dad replies. The floor in the hallway groans underneath him as he lumbers by, knocking on my door. “Get up, Ashley. We’ve got to go to your grandfather’s will reading.”
“Honey…” Mom sighs.
“I’m not coddling him, Delia.” Dad coughs and clears his throat loudly enough for half the county to hear him. “He’s living in my damn house for free after screwing around his whole life. He’s lucky I let him back in.”
Three days. I’ve been home three days and he’s already exhausted by me. Then again, he’s been exhausted by me since I was a child, so I guess I’m not surprised.
“He did not screw up his whole life!” Mom says. I snort. “His band is just…going through something, I think.”
That’s an understatement. We’ve definitely “gone through things” in the past—namely the lead singer, Caro, being the most difficult person alive, or Gordon, our lead guitar, being spineless.
But this time, we’re broken and no amount of trying to push through will fix it.
Not unless they give me and our drummer Dylan the money we earned for writing our hit albums. Which involves spending a shit-ton of money on a lawyer to actually sort out whatever contract fuckery they pulled on us years ago.
Money neither of us have because we’d all kill each other if we had to tour, which would be the best source of income for me and Dylan.
So, Mom is wrong. My whole life is completely fucked unless I come into a good chunk of money. And if I do, we still have to face the legal bullshit and fan bullshit, too.
Maybe my grandfather will leave me something, but given who he was, I don’t think the odds are in my favor.
One of my earliest memories is him throwing back the lid of his casket at his first “funeral” and scanning the crowd to see who showed up. He never let anyone who wasn’t there forget it, as if he was somehow in the right for faking his own death to prove a point.
I close my eyes and sigh as my parents’ footsteps fade down the hall and their bickering becomes more muffled by the walls. I really need to get dressed.
I peel myself out of bed, to Lady’s dismay, and drag myself to the shower. I’ve been a terrible sleeper my whole life, but it’s been particularly bad for the past year and a half. The band’s interpersonal drama, plus the creative block I still can’t get through, make every night borderline torture.
I’m dressed on time but drive my own car to the lawyer’s office in town. It’s an older car from the ’80s, but when I was loose with my money, I had it completely reworked to run like a dream.
The law firm where the reading is being held is near the center of town.
Jepsen has been built up in the years since I left, but it’s far from what I’m used to now.
I park in the building’s tiny lot and take another second to pull it together.
My brothers know better than to ask me questions about my mood, but my cousins will be here, too.
At least one of them is going to ask me some shit I don’t want to talk about.
I head inside a few minutes early. Thankfully, the cousins who would ask questions are too busy talking to each other to pay attention to me, and my younger twin brothers Wes and Waylon are already here.
I like them more than I like my older brother JD, but being twins, they’re closer to each other than they are with me.
But now they’re both shacked up—Wes is married to Rose, who I thought he hated when we were growing up, and Waylon is engaged to Bianca, a former model.
I can’t help but feel like I recognize them, but if I look at them too long, I think, Who the fuck are these grown men with careers? Where did my little shithead brothers go?
“What’s up?” Wes says. “You ready for this mess?”
I shrug and flop onto one of the overstuffed leather seats. The space is exactly as I expected since my dad was probably the one to hire the lawyers—stuffy and old school.
“I mean, sure,” I say. “If he’s actually dead this time.”
“I don’t think you can fake your death twice and get away with it,” Waylon says.
“If anyone could, it would be him.” Wes snorts and stretches his legs out in front of him. “Can you imagine? Dad would probably drop-kick him back into the casket.”
I snort, and the secretary on the far side of the room glares at me. As if there aren’t a bunch of other people in here to glare at. She hasn’t stopped glaring since I walked in, though—she took one look at my tattoos and her eyes narrowed like I came in to rob the place.
More cousins file in, and my glares keep them from encroaching on our conversation. I don’t have much I want to talk about, but Wes is more than willing to fill the dead air with chatter about shit he and Rose have been up to lately. We’re only interrupted when the shadow of JD comes over us.
Like the rest of us, he’s tall, but he’s imposing in a way I’d only admit to under extreme duress. His beard is more peppered with gray than it was even a year ago, and his dark eyes narrow when he sees me.
“This is a somber occasion,” JD says as he approaches us. “You shouldn’t be laughing.”
“So a regular day for you?” I shoot back.
He just raises an eyebrow at me in his usual vaguely condescending way and looks at his phone.
He was up Dad’s ass-crack our entire lives, being his shadow and his perfect successor.
Then something blew up between them last Thanksgiving.
Apparently things are still rough, because the air among all of us gets icy when Dad comes in.
Almost late, by the way, but he’d never admit that he ever does anything wrong.
He and JD exchange a few terse words about the business, even though Dad’s retired now. Maybe if Dad hadn’t ground himself into dust for decades, putting his health at risk, he’d still be in charge.
Eventually someone calls all of us back to a conference room.
The Stryker side of my family is smaller than my mom’s side—Mom has a lot of sisters, who all have a lot of kids, while my dad only has two brothers—but it’s still a tight fit.
An older man comes in last, shuts the door, and stands at the front of the room.
“Welcome.” The lawyer couldn’t look more like he was typecast for this job. He probably graduated from law school before Hawaii became a state. “We’re here to go over the will and testament of John David Stryker the Second.”
He doesn’t waste any time and gets right into it. He runs through the terms for my father and uncles, which is surprisingly extensive. Shit about the business and all its assets bores me to tears, but JD nods along, his frown deepening sometimes.
“Please note that the following is a quote from the deceased, and not my own words,” the lawyer says, adjusting a button on his suit jacket.
“‘I have special conditions for each of my grandchildren. You all were born into this position, and most of you didn’t do a damn bit of work to get the good fortune I can bestow upon you. So each of you have to work for this.’”
“Figures he’d be a dick beyond the grave, too,” Wes mumbles.
“Quiet,” JD says, without much heat to his words.
The lawyer reads off our individual conditions for getting our inheritances. Each one is an individualized “fuck you.”
The conditions are varying degrees of awful, probably because Grandpa played favorites.
Wes, I guess, did okay in his eyes, because he just needs to increase the company bar’s profits by 10 percent by a certain date, which he’d already do as manager.
But in contrast, our cousin Andy, who literally travels around the world for a living, has to live in Jepsen for a full year straight without a vacation.
I brace myself when the lawyer reads off my name.
“‘For you, Ashley, I have two requirements,’” the lawyer reads. “‘The first is that you work for the family business. You will receive twenty-five percent of your inheritance upon starting your work, and the rest after successfully working for the company for one year.’”
My shoulders relax a little. Have I ever wanted to work for the family business, under my father or JD? Fuck no. But since I’m technically unemployed and need money, I’ll take it. And probably hate it, but that’s not the point.
“The second condition is that you need to get legally married, and continue to be legally married, for the first year of your time at the company.”
My stomach drops through the floor.
I’m usually a “never say never” kind of guy. My two exceptions are cave diving and marriage. And if someone forced me to choose, I’d put on scuba gear and dive into a crevice insome lake that no one needs to explore.
Fuck.
My chest tightens and I bite the inside of my cheek. The money I’d get would cover all of my problems. But I can’t get fucking married.
Even if I were in love with someone, why would I tie myself to them forever? What happens when the shine wears off?
Nothing good. Maybe—a huge maybe—we could hold on for an entire year, but at what cost?
I barely listen to everything else the lawyer and my family say for the rest of the session. My brain feels like it used to when I stupidly did shows without much hearing protection early on in my career. Like everything around me is muted and three steps removed from my actual consciousness.
My body gets up on autopilot when everyone else does, and we go into the lobby again. My cousins who got fucked over even harder than me are openly having meltdowns, but I’m still numb.
“Call me when you’re ready to start working, Ash,” JD says to me, pulling out his phone. His lock screen photo is of his dog Bubba being snuggled by his fiancée Katrina.
I swallow and pull out my phone, too. I have more emails that I don’t want to look at, but how long can I run from my problems?
The fans will find out that the band is basically done.
Caro and Gordon are probably planning their PR to make themselves look good.
Dylan will want to make moves to get our royalties.
I can’t wait for a solution to fall into my lap.
I need to figure something out. I need to get that fucking money, even if it means getting married.