I ran into the kitchen and demanded answers.
“Who’s gone, Pop?”
“Your mama, she’s gone,” Dawson responded.
“Gone where?” I needed to hear them say the words because my mind was spinning as I tried to make sense of what was happening. The last thing I remembered, she’d come in to check on me after I was already asleep. Or at least, I thought she had. It was all blurry.
“Your mama was in an accident. She’s gone.” Dawson said.
“What do you mean gone?” I shook my head back and forth. “What to the hospital?”
“There was a car accident. She didn’t make it. She’s dead.”
Dawson’s blunt statement caused my dad’s sob to turn into the most wretched, gut-churning cry I’d ever heard before or since. He sounded like a wounded animal, which I supposed he was. After hearing that cry, things got blurry.
I still have flashes of memories of my brothers and sister waking up the next morning and having to try to figure out how to explain it to them. My dad was a bottle of Jack Daniels deep by the time they came downstairs wanting breakfast so he was no use to anyone.
I don’t remember exactly what I said. I do remember Cheyenne crying, Billy hugging her, and Jimmy, who was only two at the time, wanting pancakes.
The next few days all sort of run together in my mind. I remember certain things so vividly and other things I remember as if I were outside my body looking in. It was like they were happening to someone else. I’ll never forget having to go into my mom’s closet and choose what she was going to wear to be buried in.
That wouldn’t normally fall on a thirteen-year-old, but Pop was no use to anyone. I had to pick out his suit for the funeral, too. And get my siblings dressed and presentable. I was the one that had to go over what Pastor Lee would say during the service.
Thank God for Mrs. Birch, who had been my babysitter growing up. She arranged all the food and made sure that things ran smoothly on the day we laid my mom to rest. After that, she helped me with my brothers so I could work and go to school. She never charged me a dime to look after them.
I’d done what I could to pay her back for all her help but it would never be enough. I wouldn’t have made it without her help. I had to become a parent, income earner, caretaker of a drunk father, and run the business side of things at the bar and I wasn’t even old enough to drive a car.
Everything in my life was different and I grew up real damn fast. And it all started with one moment where everything changed. There was life before I came down and found my dad and Dawson in our kitchen and life after. They were two entirely different realities.
That was the same phenomena I’d felt when Skylar had walked up the steps of my porch. It was as if the world as I knew it shifted on its axis and nothing was the same.
It wasn’t just her beauty that had struck me. Although, I couldn’t deny that her curves had made my mind go places it had no business going. And it wasn’t just the way she’d scooped her daughter up and held her tightly, though seeing how nurturing and loving she was had made my heart swell. It wasn’t just the way that she’d squinted up at me in the most adorable and endearing way. It wasn’t just the zap of electricity I’d experienced from the softness of her skin when I shook her hand.
It was more than those things. There was something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was as if she was a part of me that I hadn’t known existed. I knew that as crazy as that sounded there was one person that would understand.
If I wasn’t waiting around for this damn family meeting, I’d have jumped in my truck and driven out to the cemetery to sit a spell at my mama’s grave. I went there once a week to keep her updated on things. But if anything happened that was significant, she was always the first person I’d tell.
I reread the text sent from Isabella, my brother Jimmy’s fiancée, calling a family meeting. Everyone would be showin’ up soon. There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, that the only people that had the power to call family meetings were Billy, Jimmy, and me.
Now, not only did Cheyenne, our baby sister, have that authority, apparently, it extended to fiancées as well. Thankfully, I liked both of my brothers’ other halves more than I liked my brothers so I didn’t mind the change in dynamic.
It struck me as strange that for decades it seemed like talking about our mama was the last thing either of my brothers had wanted to do, and now that’s all they wanted to talk about. Which would have been fine if it was her they were discussing. But it wasn’t, it was the night. The night that everything in my life changed.
Pop passed away months ago and at the reading of his will, our long-lost sister showed up and inadvertently opened up a can of worms I’d have rather kept a lid on. Two cans, actually. The first being that Cheyenne wasn’t our full sister. Turns out she was a half-sister. And the second can was that our mama had left us fifty million dollars in a trust. A trust that was being challenged because there was suspected foul play surrounding her death.
Feeling restless, I paced my living room, unable to relax as I waited for my brothers and sister to show up. I wished that they could just let the past be the past, but it seemed like they were hell-bent on finding out the truth.
I went to the kitchen to grab a beer from the fridge and stared at the photo that my sister had put up with a magnet. It was of all my siblings standing in front of the bar on the day of Pop’s funeral. When I looked at Billy and Jimmy I still saw the rug rats I’d had to raise. Sure, they were both grown men now who were engaged to be married. But when I looked at them I saw the toothless kids that I had to force to eat vegetables, do homework, and get in bed before ten p.m.
And then there was Cheyenne, my baby sister. If I were being honest, it was difficult for me to look at her. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Cheyenne, I did. But my maternal grandparents had swooped in after my mother’s funeral and taken Cheyenne to Connecticut when she was barely five.
I hadn’t watched her grow up. She walked back into our lives as a young adult. So when I looked at her I saw one thing, my mother. She was the spitting image of her. The same long blonde hair, huge blue eyes, and smile that lit up brighter than the lightning bugs Firefly Island was renowned for. Sometimes when she walked into a room, for a split second it was like seeing a ghost. It didn’t help that they also shared the same mannerisms, and their voices were identical.
Seeing her and hearing her brought feelings to the surface I’d rather keep buried. Not only because of how badly I missed Mama but also because of the secret I’d been keeping from my siblings since the day after Mama died. A secret I was scared I’d have to share with them if they kept up this damn hunt for the truth about the night she died.
My head was all over the place when I heard a loud knock at the door. I knew who was standing on the other side. My youngest brother always knocked like he was SWAT and this was a trap house.
Before I even opened the door all the way, he was inside askin’, “Where’s the food?”
“Didn’t call the meeting.” I shouldn’t have to explain that to him since it was his fiancée that had. The rule was, whoever called the meeting provided the food.
“Haven’t ya heard? Your house, you’re hostin’.” Jimmy winked and headed to the kitchen.