Jessica was halfway through her second beer when she heard tires crunch over the gravel in front of the barn. She set the dark brown bottle down on her reclaimed butcher block countertop and let her fingers slide over the wet glass before she stood up. Her sneakers squeaked on the hardwood floor as she walked across the open loft space she had converted into an apartment above the barn. Jessica looked out the window and saw David’s red Ford truck idling beside her Jeep and glanced at the large clock hanging above her television. He was right on time, as usual.
She walked over to the refrigerator, a little GE from the 1950s that she had found on the side of the road and had refurbished and painted a bright, fire-engine red, and pulled a fresh bottle of Bud Light out of the top shelf. She only drank beer from a bottle, and she kept them there, next to the freezer box, so they’d be extra cold. She set it out on the counter and twisted the top off while she listened to David’s heavy footsteps as he came up the stairs. “Hey, little sister!” he called, knocking on the half open door to Jessica’s apartment as he walked inside. “What’s up?”
“Not much.” Jessica leaned against the refrigerator and crossed her arms over her chest. “How was your day?”
“Long.” David tipped up his faded Braves baseball cap to scratch his forehead and stretched his neck from side to side. “We had three car wrecks, one house fire, and a little girl called because her cat was stuck in a tree.”
Jessica smiled. “Seems like I remember a little girl calling the fire department for that same reason,” she said.
David laughed, remembering the afternoon he’d come home from school and found a fire truck, a police truck, and an ambulance in his yard, all there to help a little girl with tangled blonde curls get her favorite grey and white kitten out of a tree. “You know that’s not really our job, right?” he asked.
Jessica shrugged. “I thought it was when I was seven,” she said. “And I’d be willing to bet that you climbed the ladder and got the cat.”
David laughed again. “Yeah, I did,” he admitted, tugging a bar stool out from under the bar and sitting down. “Is this beer for me?” he asked, pointing to the beer Jessica had just opened. She nodded and he picked it up and took a long drink. “How was your day?”
Jessica shrugged. “Kind of slow. Everything is finished at the bakery that we can do for right now, and it will be a few days before my appliances come in, so I just hung out here and did some cleaning and stuff.” She pushed herself off of the refrigerator and walked around the butcher block counter where David was sitting into the adjoining living area and picked up a thick black book off the coffee table.
“What’s that?” David asked.
“A scrapbook,” Jessica said. She opened it and scanned the pictures as she flipped through the pages. “I found it in the attic.”
“What were you doing in the attic?”
“Looking for some of Granny’s old cookbooks. Cortnie said she thought you put a box of them up there when you were remodeling the house.”
“Did you find them?”
“No.” Jessica walked back across the room and dropped the book onto the counter in front of David. She scanned his face with her ice blue eyes “Who is this?” she asked, pointing to a large family portrait that was centered in the page.
David glanced down at the picture, took another sip of his beer, and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
David snorted and shook his head. “Why would I lie about that?” he asked.
Jessica took a step closer. With him perched on the barstool, her face was almost level to his. “You tell me,” she said.
David looked down at the picture again. “That’s Dad,” he said, pointing to a tall man in a navy blue suit and white shirt. “And that’s me.” He pointed to a little boy wearing plaid pants and a yellow shirt and bow tie. “And Jonathan,” he continued, pointing to a smaller boy wearing an identical outfit.
“And?” Jessica prodded.
“And that’s you,” David said, pointing to the baby in the picture. “This was your first Easter. Jonathan was mad because he said it wasn’t fair that you got to wear that white dress and we had to wear those stupid plaid pants.”
“Who is this?” Jessica asked, pointing to the woman holding the baby in the photograph. The woman was slim, with long blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and a wide, welcoming smile.
David looked down at the picture and clenched his jaw.
“Who is it?” Jessica asked again.
David slid his barstool back a few inches and stretched his legs out, kicking the back of the old cabinets that Jessica had saved from her grandmother’s kitchen when David and his wife, Cortnie, remodeled the old farmhouse.
“Who is she?” Jessica asked.
David blew out a long breath. “Why are you trying to stir things up, Jess? It doesn’t matter who she is.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Jessica pushed the book towards David and pointed at the picture. “I’m not an idiot, David. This,” she punched her finger over the woman’s image, “is my mother.”
“My mother!” she repeated. She walked back across the room and jerked the lid off a box that was sitting beside the couch.
“Olivia Danielle Hunter,” she said. “I looked her up. She was an artist from New Orleans.” Jessica pulled a poster advertising an art show out of the box and held it up. “Does she look familiar?” she asked, holding the poster of her mother’s face beside her own. They were almost identical - long, blonde hair, full lips, high cheek bones, freckles splashed across their noses, and piercing blue eyes. Jessica looked at the picture and touched the image of her mother’s face as if it were her own reflection. She shook her head and set the poster on the coffee table.
“My mother was a good person,” Jessica said, pulling more photos and mementos out of the box and spreading them out on the coffee table and the floor. “She helped people. People liked her.” She looked up at David. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”
David just looked at her.
“You let me think, for this entire time,” Jessica paused and swallowed hard and cleared her throat. She walked back over to her brother. “You let me think that my mother was strung out on meth, that she hated me and you and Jonathan, that she never wanted me.” Jessica angrily wiped a tear off her cheek and poked David in the chest. “You lied to me,” she said.
David set his jaw and stared out the little window above the sink into the darkening sky.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Can I have another beer?”
Jessica narrowed her eyes at him and crossed her arms over her chest. “Not until you tell me the truth,” she said.
“The truth? Baby girl, you don’t want the truth. It’s way too ugly.”
“Ugly? How is the truth uglier than the lie you let me grow up with?”
“So you found a few scrapbooks that Granny made of Christmas cards and Easter pictures. Big deal. This,” David pounded his fist into the scrapbook that was still open in front of him, “this isn’t how it was all the time.”
“So how was it?”
David shook his head. “Do you remember when we came here?” he asked.
Jessica bit her lip and thought about the night she and her brothers had run away from their home in New Orleans and come to live with Granny. “I remember,” she said quietly.
“Do you remember why we left?”
Jessica unconsciously reached for David’s arm and rubbed her fingers over the rough, round scars on his forearm where their stepfather, Lenny, used to burn him with cigarettes as punishment. “Because of Lenny and Mama.” Jessica shook her head. “I mean, Shana. Why did you let me call her Mama when I was little?”
“We had to leave,” David said. “We had to leave that night.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
David let out a long sigh and rubbed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “Just because,” he said. “Trust me.”
“I used to.”
David reached over and grabbed Jessica’s chin and pulled her face up so his eyes met hers. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. How am I supposed to trust you? You’ve lied to me for my whole life.”
“I kept you safe,” David said. “And I’ve sacrificed a hell of a lot for you. So don’t you get an attitude with me.”
“Are you going to tell me the truth, or not?”
“No.” David stood up and tugged his baseball cap down tight.
“Fine. I’ll find out on my own. I’ll go to New Orleans and...”
“No, you won’t,” David interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“You will not go to New Orleans. You will not ask questions about this. You will put all this crap up and forget that you ever saw it. Do you understand?”
“You’re not my father,” Jessica said, crossing her arms over her chest and standing up straight. “You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m telling you that you are forbidden to go to New Orleans. And I don’t want to hear or see anything else about this.”
David turned and walked towards the door. He heard Jessica jerk the refrigerator door open and heard glass clink as she pulled a beer out of the top shelf. He shook his head as he pushed the loft door open and walked down the stairs. He was almost to the bottom when a bottle flew by his head and crashed into the wall, shattering into a million pieces and covering the walls and floor with a thick, white foam.
“You forgot your beer,” Jessica said. She was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs with her arms crossed over her chest. David looked up at her for a few seconds and was about to reply when she turned around and slammed the door behind her.
He sighed and walked out to his truck. It was hot, too hot for early April. He squinted through the dusky dark as he drove the rest of the way down the gravel drive to his house. The porch light was on and Cortnie was stretched out on the porch swing with a fat yellow tabby cat in her lap when he walked up the front steps. “How’s Jess doing tonight?” she asked.
David shrugged.
Cortnie shooed the cat out of her lap and sat up so David would have room to sit beside her. “What’s the matter?” she asked, sliding her hand up his back and scratching between his shoulders when he sat down.
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
David pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and rubbed his fingers over his scars. The night air was thick and muggy.
“You look like you’re thinking hard about something,” Cortnie said.
David shook his head and looked across the pasture towards the barn. Thick black clouds had formed on the horizon and a bolt of lightning flashed across the sky in the distance. The lights in Jessica’s apartment went out and he heard her Jeep crank and peel out of the gravel drive. “There’s a storm coming,” he said.
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