AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His own father’s comments came steamrolling into his memory from four years past, before his dad had died. After Matt’s birth, Dad had come to see his grandchild. The man was semi-sober at best, stumbling into the trailer house smelling like cheap vodka and week-old man sweat. After peeking over the bassinet, little more than an impassive nod to acknowledge the baby, he began counting months on his fingers.
He stopped at eight and shook his head. “Knocked her up before you married her, didn’t you, boy?”
Kevin couldn’t form an answer and begged whoever might be in charge of the planet, if there was such a being, that Helen hadn’t overheard from their bedroom.
“Becoming more and more like your old man every day. Hopefully, she won’t stick you with him.” With that, his dad had left.
Man, he’d come from bad stock.
Two perfectly horrible moments, spread apart by years but blended by the same scathing sensation of disdain and utter hopelessness. If Kevin had still been a drinking man, he might have followed his dad’s path to the grave that night after Helen’s parents had left. Instead, he sat in a chair, alone in the dark while his three sons slept and Helen waited tables at a truck-stop diner.
Hands pressed hard against his temple, Kevin couldn’t stop the seeping of hot tears. “God, help.”
Into the misery of his self-loathing there came an image of the shack. Kevin pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and tried to will it away.
He hated his childhood home. It was tiny and dark and stank of liquor, vomit, and human filth. It held memories of him hiding under his bed from his embarrassingly drunk father, and the ironic fear that would electrify his veins when he would find the man passed out on the floor the next day.
What if that was the day that he found his dad dead? He would be alone in the world. What would happen to him then? Though Kevin had lived with sharp humiliation at having the town drunk for a father, he couldn’t imagine what would happen to him if his dad died.
Even as a grown man, one who was saved and seeking to live as God would have him to—now free from his father’s legacy of drunkenness—Kevin felt the thundering panic and smothering shame of those long-ago memories. How could he ever think to go back to the crappy house that contained every horrible moment of his life?
But that shack belonged to him now. Left to him along with twenty-five acres, by some strange twist of fate Kevin could not comprehend, by his worthless dad who had died shortly after Jacob had been born.
Seemed his father’s death should have been a relief, and to a measure it was. But the loathing Kevin had for the man didn’t die with the man himself. Nor did the fear, shame, and loneliness that stupid little house provoked. For much of the time since his father’s death, Kevin had said he didn’t want to look into that inheritance, because heaven knew what he’d find. Likely a debt of back taxes or something that would only drag him and Helen further into the pit.
But try as he might to push away the image of a place that haunted him, Kevin knew it had been pressed into his mind for a reason. By the One he’d just cried to for help.
Because there wasn’t a debt of back taxes on the property. Another mystery he couldn’t work out but knew now for a fact after the county had told him a year ago that he needed to do something with the place. His father had passed the property to Kevin free and clear.
A man can only have property. And if he has that, he has everything.
Words pressed into a vague memory somewhere around Kevin’s tenth year. He couldn’t remember why his dad had said it, but the voice carrying the words was his father’s. Apparently, that land was the only thing the man had truly valued in his entire life.
And he’d left it to Kevin.
The solution lay in front of him. But that required Kevin to face the ghosts that lay in his past. He hadn’t been sure that he could.
Helen had been exhausted when she’d come home from her shift. Seven months pregnant with baby number four, a full four hours on her feet had taxed her to a breaking point. Her legs ached, ankles swollen and hot. Her back spasmed at intervals, and all she wanted was to fall into bed and let sleep claim her.
Though it was after ten, Kevin was still awake when she slid gratefully between the sheets beside him. He rolled toward her, kissed her forehead, and reached to flick on the lamp on her side of the bed.
“Hi,” she murmured sleepily.
His gentle kiss found her lips. “Hi, babe.” His pause felt somehow disappointed. “You’re tired.”
“Hmm.” Helen pushed her fingers into his hair. “Very.”
Silence stretched between them as Kevin remained hovering over her. Helen felt his study behind her closed eyes. “You okay?”
“Not really.”
At his starkly honest answer, her eyes fluttered open. Once again she reached to finger his hair, this time at his forehead. “What’s wrong?”
“I think we need to move . . .” His swallow bobbed at his neck, and hesitant emotion passed through his intense gaze. “Move into the cabin.”
“The cabin?” He couldn’t mean what she thought. It simply wasn’t within him. Sure, she’d thought of it—the fact that there wouldn’t be any rent. No plot dues. It would mean speeding up paying off his hospital bills from two years past, not to mention the fees for this next baby. If everything was only a financial decision, moving into his childhood home—the place his dad had left for him—made sense.
But everything wasnotabout money. The last thing Helen wanted for her husband—a man who was growing more and more into someone respectable, someone she’d once only hoped he could be—was for him to be tossed back into the emotional chaos of his childhood.
