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I’d driven him to the hospital, going into the bathroom to clean up my own wounds.
It was right after that next detox facility that I told him I was done. Done driving. Done being scared at truck stops at night. Done chasing him down at bars. Done finding all the money I was earning suddenly missing, knowing it was in his system, assaulting his overused liver.
To his credit, he tried then.
Genuinely tried.
We’d headed back to Navesink Bank.
He’d gone to a halfway house where he’d gotten himself together. Did the program. Went to work.
It was the best I’d seen him.
And he was good.
For almost a year.
Then he decided he had to hit the road again where he could make better money than he was making while staying stationary.
Somehow, I knew it was a terrible idea.
But I was trying to get my own life together at the time.
“That when you started working at the sober house?” Voss asked.
“Yeah. I’d gotten to know Russ really well when my father had been a resident, and he’d offered me a job. I learned a lot about addiction then, understood a lot of the things my father had gone through and done.
“It gave my father a place to come back to when he was ready to.”
“But he never got clean for good?” Voss asked.
To that, I sighed hard.
It still hurt.
I guess grief always would.
“No. He was on the road. And then I got the call. Liver failure. He must have been dealing with liver issues for years and either ignoring it, or just not wanting to tell me about it.”
“Sorry,” Voss said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, it was rough,” I agreed.
“Doesn’t bother you, to work there after that?” he asked.
“It can be tough sometimes. Especially when one of the guys reminds me of my father. But I know that I’m doing good. It makes the bad days better when I know there are people who walk through our doors, do the work, then walk out and lead drug or alcohol-free lives for the first time in years. Lots of dads getting clean to raise their kids. That makes it all worth it.”
“I had me an old man who liked his drink too,” Voss admitted.
“I feel like that’s the start of a story,” I said.
And it was.
One that made mine look really tame.
CHAPTER NINE
Voss
I didn’t talk about my past.
Almost as a rule.
Even Valen, the best friend I’d ever had, only knew parts of it. Not everything. Not the finer details. Definitely not the earlier shit.
“Figure my story starts like a lot. Came from several generations of fucks who believed that kids need to have submission beaten into ‘em.”
“I don’t imagine that worked too well on you,” Sylvie said, looking me up and down, then gesturing around the clubhouse.
“I mean, you hit anyone hard enough, they submit. At least for a while.”
And he did.
Hit me hard enough.
With his hand, switches, his belt, his bottles of liquor, random heavy items lying around when he was in a mood and pissed at me for something, or simply because I existed.
“What about your mom?” Sylvie asked.
To that, I shook my head.
“Think he’d hit me and not her?” I asked.
Most of my lullabies as a kid were the sounds of my mom screaming as my father berated, beat, and did fuck-knew-what else to her.
“Didn’t the neighbors or teachers or anyone report it?” she asked.
See, maybe they would have.
But we lived in the middle of nowhere.
A decently new double-wide on a huge piece of property my old man’s old man left to him when he died.
We were surrounded by acres and acres of wooded property, great for all the hunting my father and his buddies like to do in the woods, mostly just getting drunk enough to scare away the deer instead of hauling any.
But it meant that there was a lot to muffle the sounds of our screams. No one was coming to save us.
As for teachers, I don’t know. I couldn’t say why no one reported it. Maybe they were used to it. I wasn’t the only kid getting beat. Or maybe it was because the worst of the damage was almost never on my face.
And when it was on my face, they just figured it was from the other kids.
“What other kids?”
“The ones that used to beat the shit out of me every fucking day of my life,” I said, still hearing the anger in my words. It was always there, the rage in my gut, for that kid I had once been. Beaten down so hard, it seemed like I would never get back up again.
“Really? You?” Sylvie asked, looking over me again.
“I was small,” I told her. “Short and skinny. Until I hit my teens. Shot up and widened out. But back then, I was an easy as fuck target. Everyone took advantage of it.”
