Striking Read online

  I screamed again and punched at the airbag.

  When the dust settled around the car and the sound of emergency sirens closed in on me I could finally admit that I was probably going to be in huge trouble. I took in my surroundings through the cracked glass of the windshield and couldn’t help but smile.

  Fine, I had gotten drunk, stolen my date’s car and then totaled it plus a designer boutique.

  But I had two things to be thankful for.

  Bryce hadn’t been able to introduce me to his angry little penis. And the designer store I introduced to his car happened to be my mom’s.

  That meant she wouldn’t press charges and after I reported my near rape/abduction to the police Bryce wouldn’t be able to press charges either.

  I probably wouldn’t even have to cancel my plans to go clubbing with the girls tomorrow night.

  This was definitely best case scenario.

  Something hot and sticky dripped into my eyes, blurring my vision even worse than the alcohol. With a shaky hand I pressed my fingers against my forehead to investigate. The sirens were growing louder and louder and the world was turning in faster and faster circles. When I pulled my hand away and saw it coated in my own blood I did the only thing left to do at this point.

  I promptly passed out.

  Chapter 2

  Stockton

  Just add water—my ass.

  I still sucked at pancakes. Two damned years of mixing this crap up and it still looked like a substance I’d use to soothe a burn rather than slop on the griddle and attempt to feed to Will. She knew how to cook them and I was sure that any minute she’d come and save me from this lumpy glue mixture I’d stared at for the last ten minutes. I left it there in the bowl our mother had always used for pancakes, a scratched up, metal monstrosity, better suited for Will to use for slopping the pigs, and moved on to making sausage—now that I could handle.

  “Did you mess up the pancakes again,” She half barked, half yawned.

  “No, I left them for you to mess up.”

  She ‘Pssshh’ed in my direction and then started adjusting the temperature on the griddle. As I finished cooking up the sausage, she’d already stacked up six pancakes and was slathering them with butter.

  I heard the screen door slam and knew it was West. My youngest brother never missed breakfast when he was in town—never. He lived at school, in the dorms of Vandy, but came back when he could to visit. We all valued family like never before. Will divvied up the portions and dug in without a second thought. I reached under the lip of the old table our father built out of bartered lumber and shook it once to get her attention.

  “What the he—sorry Stock.” She put down her fork and she bulged out her eyes in what I knew was an attempt at not rolling her them at me.

  “Willa,” I used her whole name for affect, something I’d learned long ago from our parents that she hated, “why don’t you say grace since you’re so fast to eat.”

  She bowed her head and began, “God is great…”

  After we finished breakfast, I did the dishes and took a moment to remember the dishwasher I’d had in the university apartment just over two years ago—it seemed like I’d aged twenty years since then. I wish I had it now, sure would be a hell of a lot easier than hand washing everything.

  I dried the last dish and wiped down the cracking, burnt red, laminate counters. I had a new appreciation of all the years my mother did this three, four and five times a day while all we did was moan and groan at her. I missed them more than I could ever let on.

  “I’m off to school. I fed the pigs and the chickens, only eight eggs today. I’ve got a test Friday in Trig and…that’s all.”

  We chuckled together as she spouted off the outline of her morning as she once did to our dad, who demanded we all complete the same task every morning.

  “Ok, take the Jeep today. I have to go to town to pick up some supplies and meet with Mr. Daniels.”

  “Be careful, Stock.” She said as she took one glance back at me.

  “You too, Will.”

  We didn’t say we loved each other anymore—it was a given. We now told each other to be careful, or stay safe. Because I love you hadn’t helped my parents the night of the fire. My telling them I loved them over the phone didn’t stop the flames from engulfing the hundred year old barn and taking my parents with it. They knew I loved them. I should’ve told them to be careful.

  I went to the bedroom and shrugged off my gray sweatpants and white t shirt. I made my bed just the way they’d taught me and then put on a pair of heavy jeans and a navy blue hoodie over a gray thermal. It was still pretty cold outside even though most of the snow had started to melt. My boots were pulled on next. I grabbed the keys to the ’63 Ford pickup—my dad was the first and only owner and it still turned over every single morning like it was straight off the lot.

  I tucked my list into my back pocket along with my cell. I ran out, not even bothering to lock the door behind me—it would be in vain. No one within a hundred miles of my home would steal from us—and if I came home to something missing, in its place would be a note that explained who borrowed what and when it would be returned. There was a certain level of trust around here, my father had trusted the system and so did I. It hadn’t failed me yet.

  I got into the truck, cranked it up. The memory of firing it up to go to college sprang to mind and I had to refrain from running from the pain. This wasn’t what I always wanted—living in my parents’ house, raising my sister and making sure my two other brothers Bridger and West didn’t go completely astray. I’d once been a business major at Vanderbilt, hoping to expand my father’s blacksmithing to a whole new level—dreams of grandeur and all that garbage. I had been determined to take the bull by the horns and turn my father’s perfected trade into a world class entrepreneurship which would, of course, have us richer than six foot up a bull’s ass. Thank God my father knew better, training me and my brothers to smith when we were strong and burly enough to reach the anvil.

  So I took up my father’s hammer when they died, only three days after we buried them in the Constance Baptist Church’s cemetery. There were orders to be filled and I’d been whispered to by Mr. Oldham right after my father’s eulogy, reminding me that his iron gate was still incomplete and he’d already paid in full. And my father would never—ever—let an order be late. So that’s what I’d done. I’d taken up his hammer in the shop, his discipline tactics in the home, his truck in the driveway. I also took up his charity, the attitude, not the organization. And that was first on my list this morning. My brothers and especially Willa, didn’t know about how much my father helped the community or anyone who asked him for help. But as the eldest, I’d gone along with my father time after time, delivering food, straight from my mother’s kitchen and pantry, to single mothers or paid someone’s electricity bill. I knew what he did and it was just one more cross of his that I’d chosen to take up in his stead.

  I pulled up to Harper’s Grocery and walked into the crumbling, crackling painted, concrete building which somehow always managed to smell like cinnamon canned peaches and stale bread. Mr. Harper was behind the counter, holding my boxes, ready with the bill, just like we did every Tuesday. People around me, mothers with snotty nosed children and men, dragging themselves to work after a weekend binge probably thought I was picking up groceries for the family. And in truth, I was. One of those boxes was for me. We got by on the basics, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, oatmeal, pancakes and eggs—a lot of eggs. Being a blacksmith paid, but it was sporadic and sometimes I did work for trade. But we always got by. People dropped off apples, cabbages, potatoes, and sometimes casseroles at our house all the time. Willa hated taking it, she felt like she was a charity case herself, but I knew that somehow either I’d done a job for them already, or I would pay them back sometime in the future. It was a part of the same system I’d learned to trust.

  Two of the boxes today were for Mrs. Richter and Old Man Lambert. Mrs. Rich
ter’s husband had literally left her barefoot and pregnant—not to mention, five other kids in tow. She waitressed down at Emmett’s Diner which belonged to her brother. But she still had trouble making it from paycheck to paycheck. I helped her with what I could in between and others did the same. And Old Man Lambert? He’d been my father’s helper, not apprentice, as he ‘d had Palsy for years; I’d noticed his shaking when I was twelve, but he swept up around the shop and helped my father with the accounting. After the fire, he was out of a job. I’d offered him a place in the shop with me but he’d said it just wouldn’t be the same. And I didn’t blame him one damned bit.

  I drove out to Mrs. Richter’s place first. Her kids were in school and she was at work, so I walked in her house, put the milk up and left the box on the table. She knew who the groceries came from and so did I. But it was our secret. My dad used to say, “It doesn’t count if you run around telling everybody.” I eyed the electricity bill on the counter on my way out, the telltale red bolt of lightning letting me know what the paper was about. Yellow meant you were good, red meant you were past due. They tried to circus clown that shit up, adding a smiley face and a little ‘Did you forget’ logo with a light bulb, but unless you were a rich man, you’d seen that light bulb one too many times. I felt like a creeper but I picked it up. It was only seventy six dollars, which was about what was in my account. But I’d paid all of our bills for the month and beyond with my earnings from six iron gates some man in Nashville commissioned. I pocketed the bill and went on to Mr. Lambert’s place. I always stopped by his house last because he liked to talk about the old times when he worked for my dad. I felt like the least I could do was spare him thirty minutes of my time.

  I drove down the long gravel driveway and found Mr. Lambert sitting in a rocking chair, a squirrel leashed to his wrist, crawling and scrambling around his torso. I always thought he was looking for a way off of the leash but Mr. Lambert insisted he was searching for acorns hidden in his pockets. Either way it was plain unnatural to leash a squirrel. But he sat there most of the day, sipping ‘water’. My dad always claimed it was moonshine. Some of the old folk claimed moonshine was medicine and Old Man Lambert was pushing ninety. Who’s gonna deny him his pleasures? I put his groceries up inside his rickety shack and sat in the rocker next to him.

  “Where’s your wife,” he’d always ask me.

  “Oh come on, who’d want to marry a blacksmith? We’re always dirty and I drag more dirt in the house than a pack of pigs.”

  He laughed at that. He always laughed at that. It felt like we had the same conversation over and over. Who was I kidding? We did have the same conversation over and over.

  “That’s true, Son, that’s true.” He gabbed for a while about the weather and how his knees throbbed when the clouds rolled in.

  “Well,” he slapped my knee, “You’d better get to it then.”

  “Yes, Sir.” I got up and left, headed back home.

  I stopped back in town at the electricity company and paid Mrs. Richter’s bill on the way home and mentally got myself ready for the day. It was stifling working in my father’s shop day in and day out. The fire smothered me; the way his tools hung in their same precise places choked me; when I struck hammer to metal, I could close my eyes, seeing my father’s image in my mind teaching me with every clang of the hammer, every hiss of the hot metal as it was plunged into the water. The whole experience buried me face down in a pool of quicksand—the harder I struggled against it, the more it filled my throat. But if I didn’t fulfill his role, his legacy would be lost and more important, we’d starve.

  Rounded pebbles hit the undercarriage of the truck as it rumbled its way up the driveway to our home. Beyond the house were the Appalachian mountains in all their glory. As a child I thought them the most majestic sight in the world. But now they just guarded our land, knights, solid and solemn, standing between me and the world.

  Even the house my father built with his own hands—he got the wood from the very forest that surrounded the property and some bartered from people around the house. The fiber of each material item blasted my eardrums, reminding me of why I was there.

  I went into the shop and perused my orders one more time, re-prioritizing and shuffling things here and there. I stoked the fire West had started for me earlier, making sure it was the right temperature. I decided to work on a machete before beginning any new commissioned work. I usually made machetes, knives, and the occasional sword. They were taken to swap meets and flea markets for quick cash and leads on more business.

  I plucked a rod of scrapped metal from my junk pile and pushed it down into the hot coals. It heated to the perfect orange color for forging. I reached for the Nordic hammer. My father’s voice bellowed in my ear, “Nordic hammer for preliminary strokes.” I used the slamming of the hammer as therapy and before I knew it, I had a piece of metal flat enough to be a rudimentary cleaver. It would require further shaping but I could envision the finished product in the glowing metal before me.

  I took a breather beneath the awning of the shop, letting my lungs inflate with cold air instead of flaming coals. I looked out over the land until my eyes planted on the remnants of the barn. It had been a traditional styled barn, faded red in color with white trim. It was straight out of the Farmer’s Almanac. And as I allowed the flood of guilt tsunami over me, for a split second I wished I’d been in the barn instead of them.

  Chapter 3

  Cami

  “Please don’t make me go! Please!” I begged desperately as my parents pulled the rental car up the long, winding gravel drive. Gravel-because cement road systems were still a novelty out here. Winding-because I was in the freaking middle of a mountain range. “Daddy, please don’t do this!” I shook his head rest frantically, just to hammer in my point-I was so not Ok with this.

  Was I being ridiculously overdramatic? It was hard to say at this point.

  After what I referred to as my frantic-escape-from-the-psychopath and near-rape-experience, but what my parents wrongly dubbed my “cry for help,” I was packed up and deported. Goodbye sunny, perfect LA. Hello, hillbilly haven. God, what was I supposed to do here?

  If I was bored in the Hills, I would simply die here.

  There better at least be cable.

  Oh my god, did they even have TV’s this far removed from civilized culture?

  “Camdyn, calm down,” my mother intoned dryly from the front passenger’s seat. “This is for your own good.”

  “My own good?” I gasped in a voice laden with acid. “My own good?”

  “Camydn, I’m warning you,” my father glanced over his shoulder at me and gave me the look that used to make me cower as a little girl.

  Ok, it still made me cower.

  “But why not rehab? I would so go to rehab!” I shouted. I didn’t have time to let them win right now. I had to make my case and change their minds.

  I’d been right two weeks ago, when I said no one would press charges. Bryce hadn’t wanted his name muddied in the news-and believe me, I would have muddied it. He would have come out looking like a white-pants version of Christian Bale in American Psycho and I would have ensured the world he never got laid again. Well, the never getting laid thing might happen anyway, since I, of course, still let every single friend and/or acquaintance I had in the greater LA area know what a total douche he was. The gossip train was about to run his teeny tiny little pecker over. But that was beside the point.

  Because even though my parents did not press charges against me-I mean, they had insurance, it’s not like I did any permanent damage-they still banished me to backwoods country bumpkin county.

  “Cami, you’re not addicted to anything!” My mother whisper-shouted as if she were afraid the local rednecks would overhear. “Stop asking to go to rehab. It’s not happening.”

  “But-“

  “Cami, enough,” my father interrupted in his angry voice. “You’re not going to rehab. That would be like a vacation for you and it wo
uldn’t solve any of your problems. If anything, it would just make you more entitled. It’s time to face the facts, sweetie, you’ve hit an all-time low. You can’t keep living like this. You were lucky enough last time to come out with minor injuries and not to have hurt anyone else. But who knows what could happen if we keep letting you live your life like this?”

  I threw myself back against the seat and huffed out an impatient breath. Yeah, dad, I was lucky enough to get by with minor injuries. Lucky enough to end up with three bruised ribs, a sprained wrist and a severe concussion that needed eight stitches. Eight stiches that were going to scar. Did he not realize that? I was going to have a scar on my forehead!

  Granted, it was more like my temple and close enough to my hair line that I could hide it with some swoopy bangs. But seriously? I could never wear a high pony again. Did he not have any concept of what that would do to me?

  Oh and the great Tennyson Montgomery refused to fix me! He built his life on making people look better. Yet he claimed I needed a reminder of how I could have lost everything in a moment of dramatic overreaction.

  Trust me, I would remember. No more endless cocktails with guys who had member-insecurities.

  Problem solved.

  “Daddy, please take me home,” I tried one more attempt at pathetic.

  “Cami, now stop it. You brought this on yourself.” He shook his head and clenched his jaw. He was disappointed in me. Ugh! What a kick to the throat. I was twenty-one years old and still my father’s disappointment felt like the ultimate failure.

  In a meeker, but more determined voice I said, “You know, I’m an adult. I don’t need your permission to leave.”

  My mother sighed, long and exasperatedly. “You’re right Cami, you are technically an adult. But we’ve cut you off, so you have no money, you have no credit cards, you have no car, no ride home, no friends. We are dropping you off at your aunt and uncles house where there will be food, shelter and safety. If you’re so determined to leave, then go right ahead. Leave. I don’t know where you think you’ll go, but you are an adult, so I guess you can figure that out on your own.”