Page 5 of Gin and Bear It

I’ve been home for three days and I’m already dying to get the fuck out. Except this time, unlike my short-lived return home around Thanksgiving of last year, I’m here indefinitely. My grandfather’s passing brought me back and I can’t justify my wandering anymore.

I stare at the ceiling as the sound of my parents’ fussing gets closer. Their chocolate lab, Lady, lifts her head from where she’s been smushed into my armpit the whole night.

“It’s still early, John David. It’s Saturday,” Mom says outside my door, not even bothering to regulate her volume. Growing up, she was always awake at the ass-crack of dawn cleaning and banging shit around, so I’m not surprised. “Let Ashley sleep.”

“He takes too damn long to get dressed and he won’t embarrass us by being late,” Dad replies. The floor in the hallway groans underneath him as he lumbers by, knocking on my door. “Get up, Ashley. We’ve got to go to your grandfather’s will reading.”

“Honey…” Mom sighs.

“I’m not coddling him, Delia.” Dad coughs and clears his throat loudly enough for half the county to hear him. “He’s living in my damn house for free after screwing around his whole life. He’s lucky I let him back in.”

Three days. I’ve been home three days and he’s already exhausted by me. Then again, he’s been exhausted by me since I was a child, so I guess I’m not surprised.

“He did not screw up his whole life!” Mom says. I snort. “His band is just…going through something, I think.”

That’s an understatement. We’ve definitely “gone through things” in the past—namely the lead singer, Caro, being the most difficult person alive, or Gordon, our lead guitar, being spineless.

But this time, we’re broken and no amount of trying to push through will fix it. Not unless they give me and our drummer Dylan the money we earned for writing our hit albums. Which involves spending a shit-ton of money on a lawyer to actually sort out whatever contract fuckery they pulled on us years ago.

Money neither of us have because we’d all kill each other if we had to tour, which would be the best source of income for me and Dylan.

So, Mom is wrong. My whole life is completely fucked unless I come into a good chunk of money. And if I do, we still have to face the legal bullshit and fan bullshit, too.

Maybe my grandfather will leave me something, but given who he was, I don’t think the odds are in my favor.

One of my earliest memories is him throwing back the lid of his casket at his first “funeral” and scanning the crowd to see who showed up. He never let anyone who wasn’t there forget it, as if he was somehow in the right for faking his own death to prove a point.

I close my eyes and sigh as my parents’ footsteps fade down the hall and their bickering becomes more muffled by the walls. I really need to get dressed.

I peel myself out of bed, to Lady’s dismay, and drag myself to the shower. I’ve been a terrible sleeper my whole life, but it’s been particularly bad for the past year and a half. The band’s interpersonal drama, plus the creative block I still can’t get through, make every night borderline torture.

I’m dressed on time but drive my own car to the lawyer’s office in town. It’s an older car from the ’80s, but when I was loose with my money, I had it completely reworked to run like a dream.

The law firm where the reading is being held is near the center of town. Jepsen has been built up in the years since I left, but it’s far from what I’m used to now. I park in the building’s tiny lot and take another second to pull it together. My brothers know better than to ask me questions about my mood, but my cousins will be here, too. At least one of them is going to ask me some shit I don’t want to talk about.

I head inside a few minutes early. Thankfully, the cousins who would ask questions are too busy talking to each other to pay attention to me, and my younger twin brothers Wes and Waylon are already here. I like them more than I like my older brother JD, but being twins, they’re closer to each other than they are with me.

But now they’re both shacked up—Wes is married to Rose, who I thought he hated when we were growing up, and Waylon is engaged to Bianca, a former model.

I can’t help but feel like I recognize them, but if I look at them too long, I think, Who the fuck are these grown men with careers? Where did my little shithead brothers go?

“What’s up?” Wes says. “You ready for this mess?”

I shrug and flop onto one of the overstuffed leather seats. The space is exactly as I expected since my dad was probably the one to hire the lawyers—stuffy and old school.

“I mean, sure,” I say. “If he’s actually dead this time.”

“I don’t think you can fake your death twice and get away with it,” Waylon says.

“If anyone could, it would be him.” Wes snorts and stretches his legs out in front of him. “Can you imagine? Dad would probably drop-kick him back into the casket.”

I snort, and the secretary on the far side of the room glares at me. As if there aren’t a bunch of other people in here to glare at. She hasn’t stopped glaring since I walked in, though—she took one look at my tattoos and her eyes narrowed like I came in to rob the place.

More cousins file in, and my glares keep them from encroaching on our conversation. I don’t have much I want to talk about, but Wes is more than willing to fill the dead air with chatter about shit he and Rose have been up to lately. We’re only interrupted when the shadow of JD comes over us.

Like the rest of us, he’s tall, but he’s imposing in a way I’d only admit to under extreme duress. His beard is more peppered with gray than it was even a year ago, and his dark eyes narrow when he sees me.

“This is a somber occasion,” JD says as he approaches us. “You shouldn’t be laughing.”