“Your dad’s a fucking asshole, Kane. Don’t know why you give a shit about this place.”
I finally let out an annoyed huff and turned to face him, planting my hands on my hips. “Seriously?” I snapped, my voice loud and angry. “Last thing I need is the nursing home releasing him to me, so I can try to figure out how to deal with an old man with brain damage who wasn’t nice to begin with and is now an even bigger asshole than he was before his brain decided to blow up. Medicare doesn’t seem to think he’s critical enough to need long term care yet. The disability approval process is taking forever, and I have no hope of getting him on Medicaid until he’s declared disabled. The whole fucking thing is a nightmare. What that means is that selling this fucking place is the only way I can pay to keep his ass in. I’d like to actually make enough fucking money off it to do that.”
“Yeah?” Shawn muttered. “And then what?”
I shrugged. “Then…” I ran my hand through my hair, pushing it back. “I’m … going away for a while.”
“Gonna disappear for another eleven years again?”
“It really won’t be up to me,” I muttered under my breath.
Shawn scoffed, but it wasn’t humored. “What the fuck does that mean? Who the hell’s it up to?” His voice was irritated. “You ain’t been home since the day you ditched this town when you were seventeen, and you’re already planning your escape. What the fuck you even come back for, man? I mean, shit, ain’t like you and your dad ever got along.”
“Then what happens? They release him, and he becomes the crazy hobo sitting on the street corner,” I snapped. “I just need to take care of business. Make sure he’s squared away.”
Shawn drained his beer in one long gulp, burping loudly as he tossed the bottle toward the large fifty-five gallon garbage can I had in the middle of the floor for my scraps. He missed, and the bottle bounced off the side, clanking to the floor and splattering beer on the subfloor I’d only just finished repairing the week before.
“Shit,” he grumbled. What he didn’t do was pick up the bottle. “I gotta go. I’ll catch ya later.”
I followed him to the front door, and as I pulled it open, relieved to finally be rid of him, I found myself face to face with another piece of my past—this one a far kinder and prettier piece known as Helene, or Hell as I liked to call her for no other reason than she hated it and I’d always loved getting under her skin in any and every way I could.
Her hand was lifted as though she were getting ready to knock, and her lips parted as our eyes met, locked on one another, and then refused to look away.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Shawn asked me as he pushed past me and reached for the screen door.
Helene glanced at him, her eyes widening for a moment, and then she stepped away from the door, letting Shawn pass through. Shawn and Helene hadn’t been friends growing up. In fact, it was probably safer to say, very few of my friends had been Helene’s and vice versa. Shawn looked her up and down, and when he looked back to me, he smirked.
“Don’t remember you looking so good back in high school,” he commented to Helene.
She crossed her arms. “Don’t remember you looking so ugly.”
It was true. Some people fell apart after high school. Some blossomed. Hell had definitely blossomed. Shawn had definitely not thanks to a beer gut, unkempt hair, sloppy clothes, and too many cigarettes. The odd thing was, I couldn’t say seventeen-year-old Helene was any less beautiful than the statuesque version standing in front of me with more curves, thinner cheeks, and a more composed stature. She was just Helene, and regardless of the package she came in, she still felt like my Hell.
Shawn snorted rudely as he walked past her and down the rickety old wooden porch steps. “Nice, coming from a doctor,” he muttered over his shoulder. “Knew I didn’t like your uppity bitch attitude.”
Helene’s eyes that had been following Shawn over her shoulder suddenly snapped back to me. I wasn’t stupid. She’d caught it. He’d called her doctor, and she knew full well the only way he’d have known anything about that was if I’d mentioned it—which all meant I’d been talking about her—to Shawn no less.
I held the door open for her, and she stepped through, glancing sideways at me as she passed into the living room. I’d already gutted this room down to studs, re-drywalled, taped, and partially mudded the walls. The floors had been taken down to the sub, and the sound of her sandals brushing the rough exposed OSB echoed in the small space.