CHAPTER FIVE
Age Twenty-Six
The paint was peeling away from the siding, chipping and flaking away to fall onto the porch’s warped floorboards.
I puffed away at a cigarette as I used my fingernail to scrape at a big chunk of loose paint, breaking it away to join the other pieces at my feet, just as a resounding boom of thunder rattled the windows and my unsettled nerves.
I’d need to get out here and paint at some point.
God knew Leonard would never pay a crew of men to come paint the place for him.
Why bother when he had three young guys living with him, fully capable of doing the job for him?
Problem was, as we were taking care of one issue, three others seemed to crop up underneath our noses.
That was life though, wasn’t it?
I turned to set my gaze out toward the parking lot at the back of the funeral home. It was empty, save for the two hearses, Leonard's old Lincoln, and the beat-up pickup truck Leonard had bought with cash for the three of us to share a few years ago.
"If you boys want your own cars, you can save your money," he'd said the day he presented us with the keys. "But until then, this is yours to take you where you need to go."
We hadn't asked him to do that. Hadn't even expressed an interest in having a car when the hearses served us just fine.
But that was Leonard for you. Always taking care of us, even when he was under no obligation to do so.
Even while this old place was slowly falling apart around us, he cared more about our well-being than his own.
I was twenty-six, and the old guy was still buying me a pack of cigarettes every week, despite the fact that I'd started buying them myself. I knew it was his way of feeling useful and needed, so I didn't say anything to stop him. I just said thank you and went on with my day.
Not like I won’t smoke them, I thought, narrowing my glare on something in the bed of our truck that hadn't been there before.
The rain hadn't started to fall yet, but the sky threatened to open beneath a thick blanket of black clouds.
I stomped down the porch steps, meandering toward the truck.
I dropped the finished cigarette to the pavement and stamped it out beneath the heel of my boot, never taking my eyes off the black plastic tarp fluttering in the mounting wind.
I hadn't been anywhere in days, apart from running across the street to the 7-Eleven to grab a cup of coffee—just to change it up from the usual Folgers crap Leonard kept on hand.
But Shawn and Isaac had both gone out at various times for school, dates, and a hangout with a couple of friends or something.
Their social lives were in much better shape than mine.
While I'd been through college without a single new contact in my cell phone, Shawn and Ike had managed to allure the attentions of girlfriends and friends alike.
All that nonsense seemed pointless to me.
Trivial and frivolous. I didn't need friends when I had my brothers, and I didn't care about nurturing a relationship with a girlfriend. They brought nothing but complications, baggage, and the uprising of memories I’d rather forget, and what the hell was the point of living with that headache?
But Shawn and Ike needed that type of interaction, a connection—even if it was, in Ike’s case, often toxic.
Sex with all strings attached.
Unnecessary, I thought, approaching the truck and reaching into the bed to lift the tarp.
I swallowed at the tall chest of drawers, a flicker of ancient memory standing at center stage in my mind's eye.
It wasn't the same one—couldn't be the same one—but it was identical.
The air left my lungs, as if I were just now being shoved against it as a young boy, my forehead smacking against the protruding lip of the dresser's top after I’d found the courage to confront our foster father, Jim, about the things Anna couldn’t say …
"And what are you gonna do about it? You think you can stop me, you little shit?”
“I’ll call the cops,” I warned, but I didn’t feel as tough as my words implied as his big body pressed against my back, crushing me against the dresser.
“And you actually think anyone would believe you?" he growled into my ear, and I felt his hot breath on my neck. "Or are you just jealous? Maybe you want some too, huh?"
No, I thought as his hands pressed against my back. God, please, no.
This wasn’t the Jim I knew.
The Jim I knew ran a tight ship, and he was strict.
He liked to swing his fists when we didn’t listen.
He used food against us, sent us to bed without dinner if we even looked at him the wrong way.
But that felt like normal adult stuff, and it was better than what other people had done to us before.
Those people had done things like this, what Jim was doing to me now—things he’d never done before.
I’ve never done this before either, I thought stupidly as he slid his hands down my body and touched me where I knew a grown-up should never touch a kid.
Yes, hands had been on me, and I’d been forced to use my mouth in ways I didn’t want to.
But I had never been touched there, where Jim was touching me now.
Somehow, it felt more wrong than anything had before.
Dirtier. So filthy, in fact, that I instantly wanted to take a shower as he squirmed his fingers around, poking and prodding.
But I wouldn’t fight him. I knew it would hurt less if I didn’t fight. But, oh God, I was angry. Angry and embarrassed and betrayed and so, so sick of living like this.
I’d thought Jim was different. I’d thought he wasn’t sick.
But I’d been wrong.
"Just stay away from her," I replied, gritting my teeth as his slimy hands tugged at my pants and underwear, letting them drop around my ankles. “I’ll kill you if you touch her again.”
Jim laughed at the empty threat as he forced my body to bend over, and I did as willingly as I could, holding on to the dresser with a white-knuckled grip, even though every part of my being wished to cry, scream, and beg.
God, I wanted to run away.
Far, far, far away.
But I’d be okay. I was always okay.
Because if he was doing this to me, maybe … just maybe … he’d keep his hands off of her.
I held the edge of the truck's bed until my knuckles whitened and ached, and for a moment, I thought I could crack steel.
My lungs forced the air in and out of my chest, pulling me back to the present and out of that bedroom from somewhere far away and long ago.
It's a dresser. Just a dresser.
Shawn or Ike must've seen it on the side of the road and thought it would be useful.
Leonard provided us with everything we needed, and anything else, we could buy ourselves with the money we earned from working at the funeral home.
We wanted for nothing. We were far from the boys we once had been, starved and abused, running away to the streets to find relief from the torture.
We didn't need to steal from stores or grab trash from the curb to get by, but no amount of time and love could remove those bricks from our core foundation.
I would always be wary of people, and I was unlikely to want physical contact with another human again.
Shawn would always flinch at unsolicited touch.
And Ike …
Ike was something else. Unpredictable. You never knew which side of him you'd see on any given day, and I supposed today, he was the garbage collector—assuming he had picked up this old dresser.
I deflated with a sigh and reached into my jeans for my pack of smokes and lighter when the back screen door opened and slapped shut.
"Bram," Leonard said. "You busy?"
Slipping a cigarette from the pack and between my lips, I turned to address him and shook my head, chasing away the evil specters of the past. "Nope. What do you need?"
"I need you to pick up an order from the printer," he said. "I'd go, but my back hurts like a son of a gun today."
"I can pick it up. No problem."
He held his hands on his hips, squinting his eyes toward the sky with an assessing nod. "It's gonna pour," he stated, as if I hadn't figured that out from the dark clouds or rolls of thunder rumbling through every few minutes. "You probably want to go soon so you don't get caught in the storm."
"I'll go after I smoke," I said, lighting up.
“All righty,” he replied, his lips curling into a smile that exuded kindness.
Then his gaze lingered for a moment, inciting a curiosity in my brain. He always looked at us like that, like he held such fondness and affection toward me and my brothers, and I couldn’t understand why.
Old habits died hard, and I considered sneering and asking him what the hell he was looking at because no matter how much time had passed, I still couldn’t believe that this old man had any business looking at me like that.
But before I had the chance, the thought crossed my mind that his son must’ve been the luckiest guy on the planet to have gotten the chance to call this man Dad.
And although I knew well enough that my brothers and I had won the lottery the moment we broke into his funeral home all those years ago, it hurt tremendously to know that Leonard would never be mine.
There was nothing I could ever do to change that fact, there was nothing he could do either, and suddenly, I couldn’t bear to look at him anymore.
I dropped my heavy gaze to the asphalt and sucked at the end of that cigarette until my lungs were full of poison, and I held it there, drowning in the burn and ache.
Leonard stood there at the edge of the porch for just a moment longer, and I only looked up when I heard him start to enter the house again.
Then I stopped him from disappearing.
“Hey, do you know anything about this dresser?”
He turned again in time for me to jab my thumb over my shoulder, implying the back of the old pickup.
He nodded with recollection. “Yeah, Isaac said he found it. He thought he’d sand it down and give it a new paint job. Why?”
I huffed a chuckle. Of course it was Ike.