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ChapterOne
Jax
The yellow light breaks just above the horizon, bathing everything in that dewy glow of a new day. It feels…optimistic. Something I need right now.
“Incoming.” My brother’s voice grumbles from a dark corner of the tidy industrial kitchen where I’m making coffee. I know enough to put my hands up.
Or duck.
It only took one mistake of doing neither for me to learn. Back when Archer was seven to my five, and he beaned me with a soup can. He’s been throwing things at my head ever since, and now, thirty years later, I try not to take it personally.
Even if he means it personally.
“Asshole.” Looking down at the object I’ve just intercepted, I see a crumpled t-shirt with Taylor Swift’s face on the front. “Why?” I ask.
“Assume it’s yours.”
One time.One timeI slipped and sang a few lines from a Taylor Swift song, and my brother's been calling me a Swiftie and making sure anyone within earshot knows I like her songs.
There’s no point in fighting him. He’s older and grumpier, for one thing. And trying to get him back by making fun of his shitty taste in music is barely a sport. Who cares if he’s lost in the depressing grunge bands of the nineties?
I don’t need to look closely at the shirt to know it doesn’t belong to me. For one thing, I don’t buy concert shirts. Ever. For another, the shirt is tiny. Too big to fit my seven-year-old daughter, but barely worth pulling over my head to prove it can’t be mine.
“Must be one of your girlfriends left it in my room. Told me to say hi,” I mutter. He knows that’s not true either, but after my wife left two years ago, my family mostly avoids the taboo subject of my dating life. And ribbing him about his own lack of action shuts him up for now.
As I go about the business of slicing up yesterday’s sourdough to toast, Archer’s footsteps recede from the old brown barn, which sits in the middle of our family’s vineyard.
Archer has a house nestled at the base of the hill that gives Buttercup Hill Vineyards its name, and I live at the opposite end of the property, where the land is flatter and the vineyards are right outside my back door. Our father and our other three siblings also live onsite, mostly around the perimeter, which gives each of us some privacy.
Normally, at this hour, I’m the only one bustling around in the kitchen, which overlooks well-maintained raised beds of tomato plants, herbs, and creeping vines that teem with squash, cucumbers, and eggplant.
We have an entire team employed to care for the produce in the garden boxes and make sure everything looks just so, but I’m not interested in produce right now. I just want a cup of strong coffee and a bite of breakfast to kickstart my day.
In another hour, half of my family will be awake and barking things at each other in the name of business and bonding, and my productivity will be sunk for the morning. It’s why I always get up at four. Almost always. Just not today.
Today, I overslept. I’ve been sleep-deprived for going on two years now, so it’s probably not the last mistake I’ll make today.
Then I’ll hear about it from my siblings, who don’t know when to mind their own business, or my father, who’s losing his mind—his words, not mine. That’s how he characterized his Alzheimer’s diagnosis in the days when he could still joke about it. Funny guy.
Checking the time, I groan. Almost six. I should have tidy income and expense columns, along with a few items checked off my to-do list by now. Instead, I’m pushing yesterday’s lunches aside in the employee fridge, searching for strawberry jam.
“Meant to ask, have you been in to see Dad?” Archer returns with a pitcher of water, which he uses to fill three small bottles that fit into a belt he wears while running.
“Not in a few days. The nurse said he’s having a rough week, barely recognizes her.” I grind out the words, hating to be the bearer of news none of us wants to hear.
Archer’s face falls, and he nods.
“Goes in waves like that. Maybe today’ll be different.” I’m telling him something he knows, and I hate that I don’t feel more optimistic.
Crossing his feet at the ankles, Archer draws my attention to the brand new running shoes he’s wearing. Brown with fat cushy soles and an orange logo. “You jumping on that Hoka craze?” I ask him, surprised because my brother never does anything he hasn’t thought through deliberately, and I’ve seen him in the same brand of running shoes since college.
“Not jumping on anything. They make a good shoe.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s special about them?”
