Here I Go

by Jamie Bennett

  Here I Go

  Jamie Bennett

  Copyright © 2022 Jamie Bennett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author, except as used in a book review. Please contact the author at JamieBennettBooks@gmail.com. This is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental. Book cover by Angela Haddon Book Cover Designs.

  Some people are happy right where they are, thank you very much!

  Aria McCourt is, that’s for sure. While other people seem to need more than what they’ve got, Aria is fine with what she has: a family that loves her and a good life in Tennessee!

  The only thing is, she wouldn’t mind adding a few people to that life. Like, a boyfriend would be fun! Maybe he might turn into a husband that would lead to a few kids, too. It’s just that no one has ever lived up to her requirements for that position…or maybe, she hasn’t lived up to what they want, either.

  So yes, she’s looking, but when she finds Cain Miller, it’s immediately clear that they aren’t going to be a couple. Despite how gorgeous he is, despite how much she admires him for so many things, despite him giving her heart palpitations when he stands too close…no, there’s just no way. It doesn’t make any sense at all: he’s the town success story now but his past is full of darkness and problems that no one can overlook, and on top of that, he lives all the way across the country in California. It’s just not meant to be.

  But suddenly, it’s happening! Life pushes Aria and Cain together in a way that they can’t be separated. Then the real question becomes, do they want to be? Are they better together or apart? Is it true love, or just circumstances forcing a relationship that never should have been in the first place? With her heart in the balance, Aria has to decide—how far will she go for love??

  Prologue

  I’m five years old in Sequatchie County, Tennessee

  One step. Two steps. So far, so good! I was doing it. I felt a smile start to turn up the corners of my mouth and I looked over at my sisters to check if they had noticed how well things were going. This didn’t always happen and I wanted them to pay attention to me, for once.

  But they were playing with Aubree’s little game machine, the one I wasn’t allowed to touch, and hadn’t seen. “Hey,” I called to them. “Hey!”

  “Shh! Keep your head up and your eyes on your feet, Aria. Focus on the walk.”

  Ok, yeah. Mama was right and I had to be very careful. Soon, I’d be able to wear these special shoes with the pointy, high heels and not have to worry. I would be able to look at the audience and smile rather than focusing on the walk like she’d said, and everyone would see me and clap and say, “What a beautiful little girl!” But for now, I had to keep my head up but eyes down to watch where I was going so I could learn to do it right. These shoes were hard.

  Step. Step.

  “She’s stomping again, Mama.”

  I didn’t dare look up from the shoes to shoot my big sister Aubree a dirty look, but our middle sister shushed her for me.

  “She can’t help it! She has those fat little legs,” Amory argued. “It’s ok, Ari,” she said to me. I nodded but it threw off my balance and the heel underneath my right foot seemed to give in and give way. I waved my arms in big circles, hitting a lamp and making it wobble, but it was too late for me. I landed on my bottom on the floor and Aubree laughed.

  “Girls!” our mother said. She picked me up and shook her head at Amory. “Your sister will grow out of her baby fat soon enough,” she announced. “Don’t say she has big legs.” She didn’t seem to have heard that Bree had laughed at me, even though we weren’t supposed to tease each other.

  “Her hair’s getting frizzy,” Aubree commented, pointing at my head, and then held up her hand to look at the pink nail polish we all wore. Mine had chipped already, but Bree’s nails were still perfect. “Why does Aria have such funny hair? It’s like the safety clown that came to school to tell us to buckle up when we go in the car and to look both ways before we cross a street.”

  “I don’t have hair like the safety clown!” I yelled. I wasn’t old enough yet to go to the big school with my two sisters to have seen for myself, but I was sure that it was true. My hair was a different color from their shiny, blonde curls, but it wasn’t like a clown. I pulled a long, red strand over my shoulder to check. Was it?

  “Aria, that’s enough.” Mama sighed like she was tired. “Give me those shoes.” She held out her hand and I took them off my feet. “I need to go and rest my eyes until Daddy gets home,” she told us.

  My two sisters looked at each other and I knew what they were thinking. Mama going to rest her eyes meant that she was getting a headache and would be asleep for a while. When that happened, Bree turned on the TV to shows that we weren’t allowed to watch, and I opened the refrigerator and climbed up on the counters to look in the cupboards and taste everything I could find. We would have the run of the house until our daddy got home from the station.

  This was how I already knew that I didn’t care for dried pinto beans (way too hard to chew) but I loved, loved, loved chocolate chips. It turned out that they were just about as good plain as they were in cookies, which we didn’t have very often. So that Mama didn’t know what I was doing, I tried to limit myself to only one or two little chips each time she went to rest her eyes, but it was hard. They were so delicious!

  We watched quietly as Mama walked back to her bedroom. Her steps were slow and dragged across the carpet because it was the end of the day, and she’d been working at the store since she’d dropped off my sisters at their big school and me at my little one. We’d been busy in the afternoon, too, because first Bree and Mory had dance class, and then Mama had to start dinner, and finally, us girls had to prepare for the pageant next week. My mama always liked to prepare. I said the word again, testing it. “Prepare,” I whispered. It felt fancy and grown-up in my mouth.

  Actually, my biggest sister Aubree didn’t have to prepare very much. She just needed a few reminders, Mama said. My other big sister Amory was ready, too, I thought, because even if Bree could pose the best of us, Mory was prettier. That mattered. It wasn’t everything, Mama said, but a pretty face could take you pretty far. She liked to say that a lot. I said it too, quietly, nodding my head with some of the words just like she did: “A pretty face can take you pretty far, Amory.”

  “What?” my sister whispered back, but I just nodded again.

  It was probably me who needed to prepare the most. I didn’t always remember my poses—mostly I didn’t, I admitted to myself. And I wasn’t sure if I was as pretty as Amory or even Aubree (who wasn’t quite as much, but she still looked very nice). But I didn’t think I was like the safety clown, that was for sure!

  “Come on, Mory!” Bree hissed, and they settled next to each other on the sofa. Soon I heard the quiet sounds of their favorite show, Sorority Spring Breakers. TV, clothes, and makeup were the areas that my sisters mostly agreed on.

  “I love her dress!” Bree looked down at what she herself wore, a pink sweatshirt with a unicorn and a jean skirt with ruffles. Someday, that outfit would be mine. It would come to me after Mory had it, because that was how clothes went through our family. “When I’m old, I’m going to be on TV and get a dress like that one,” my biggest sister told us, pointing at the screen. That meant that I would have that dress too, someday, after she and Mory were done with it. It was very exciting to think about!

  “Watch her do the lipstick,” Mory s
aid. “This is the time when she uses the peachy gloss we liked.” They leaned forward and Mory rubbed her finger on her own mouth.

  But I wasn’t interested in Sorority Spring Breakers, because I was busy trying to get up on the counter. First, I had to take the chair from the table and pull it over so I could climb on it, and that was what I was doing when I saw the patrol car pull into our driveway. “Daddy’s home early!” I yelled, and the TV went off fast.

  My sisters crowded me at the window. “That’s not Daddy’s car. That’s the sheriff,” Bree told me, rolling her eyes. I elbowed her but she suddenly got a funny look. “I have to get Mama. Mama!” she shrieked, and ran down the hall. “Mama!”

  The doorbell was ringing and Mory looked at it. We weren’t supposed to open to strangers, but I knew Sheriff Toney. I ran to the door and my sister said, “No, Ari!” But I already had it unlocked and was pulling it hard.

  “Hi, Sheriff!”

  He looked down at me and took off his sunglasses. They looked like the ones that my daddy wore, too. I checked to see if Daddy was there, and then I looked up at this other man, wondering why he had come by himself. He just stared at me, until finally he said, “Aria, go get your mother, sweetheart.” And his voice was all strange. I shook my head, because I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to get her.

  I heard Mama’s feet running toward us, anyway. “Marvin? Why are you here?” she asked the sheriff, like she was mad at him for coming. That wasn’t good manners, I didn’t think, but Mama’s face showed me that something was wrong and she didn’t care about her manners right now.

  “Where’s Dawson? Where’s my husband?” she asked Sheriff Toney. And then she started to scream, saying no, and he was wrong, and where was Dawson? That was my daddy, Dawson McCourt. Where was he? The sheriff was just shaking his head and Mama kept screaming, and then she fell down suddenly, like I had from the shoes, and Sheriff Toney grabbed her.

  I ran. I ran past my sisters, standing next to the sofa and crying, hugging each other and crying. I ran through the kitchen, past the chair I’d pulled out to get the chocolate chips. I ran through the door to the back yard, across the porch, and all the way to the swing set. The low one, the pink seat, was mine. It would swing really high but I couldn’t pump very well to make it go. I needed Daddy to push me.

  After a while, when it was starting to get dark, Aubree and Amory came out. They were holding hands and not fighting like they usually did and that made me feel even worse in my tummy, like I was made of Jell-O, all shaky and quivery. They stopped in front of the swing set.

  “You have to come inside,” Bree told me. She always told us what to do because she was the oldest, but right now I wasn’t going to listen.

  “You’re not my boss,” I sassed her. “I’m waiting out here. I’m waiting for Daddy to get home.”

  “He’s not coming, Ari,” Mory told me. She started to cry again and Bree put her arm around her.

  “Get off that dumb swing,” Bree ordered.

  “I’m waiting here,” I yelled. “You can’t make me!”

  She couldn’t, either. I wasn’t going to go anywhere until he came home. Then we’d have dinner, and he would ask me about my day, and Aubree and Amory would interrupt to talk about theirs, and Mama would tell us we had to clear the table and not to dawdle. That was what was going to happen and I was going to wait out here until it did.

  Finally, my sisters stopped trying to boss me and went inside themselves, and it got darker and darker and colder, too. I was hungry and I had to go to the bathroom and my toes hurt where the fancy shoes had pinched them. Lights were on in the house and I could see my relatives through the windows inside, aunts and cousins and uncles and my memaw. Our little house was stuffed with people, just like it was on one of our birthdays, but I could also see their faces and it wasn’t the same.

  I didn’t want it to change.

  The gate at the back of the yard swung open and a boy came in. “Hi, Aria,” he told me. I knew him, so it was ok. He was a big boy, bigger than Bree, even, but he was our neighbor, Cain. My daddy had to go over to his house sometimes to help his aunt, the lady he lived with, because Mama said that Cain was Trouble with a capital T. I could sound out part of that word and it did start with a T, for sure. A T, then an R, then -ubble. Trouble.

  “Hi, Cain,” I answered.

  He sat down on another swing, the yellow one that was Mory’s. The whole swing set tilted over when he did and it creaked real loud.

  “Don’t break it!” I said anxiously.

  “I won’t.” He pushed a little with his feet, because he could reach the ground. “How are you doing?” he asked me.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” I told him, just like I was supposed to when I got asked that question. I could tell Bree later that yeah, I sure did have my manners! “How are you?” I remembered to ask him back. I wouldn’t tell her I’d forgotten that part at first, because I had gotten to it eventually.

  “I’m real sorry about your dad,” he told me. “I’m real, real sorry. He was a nice man.”

  “I’m waiting here for him,” I said loudly. “I’m waiting until he comes home. He pushes me on the swing.”

  “I know,” Cain said. “I can see y’all sometimes through the fence when I’m on Aunt Liddy’s porch.”

  This boy seemed nice, not like Trouble with a capital T. But I’d heard Mama and Daddy talking about him, how he made his Aunt Liddy cry, how Elodie Miller was a good woman for taking him in but all he gave her back was Trouble. I didn’t know, actually, if that one had a capital T.

  I tried to make myself go by rocking back and forth, but I couldn’t get my seat to move much. “I can’t make it swing without Daddy,” I explained to the big boy. “He has to push me.”

  “You want to wipe your eyes?” He pulled a dirty old bandana out of his pocket and I took it, because I was crying a lot. I rubbed it over my face but I kept on crying, just like a baby. That was what Bree always said, that I was a silly baby, but today she’d been crying, too.

  “I want Daddy,” I told the boy. “I want him to come home!”

  He nodded at me. “I know. Can I push you instead?”

  “It won’t be the same!”

  “I know,” he said again. He got off Mory’s yellow swing and stood behind me. “Hold on, Aria.” He picked up the chains and pulled me way back, way up high, and then he let go. I flew through the cold air, right up into the darkness above me. Stars were just starting to come out and I watched them get near and then draw farther away. Cain pushed me again and again and I kept flying, closer and closer to the stars.

  “I want Daddy,” I said to them. “Please, can he come home?”

  The stars were so pretty, sparkling in the black sky. But they didn’t answer me.

  Chapter 1

  I’m twenty years old in Chattanooga, Tennessee

  One step. Two steps. So far, so good!

  “Come on, Aria!” My cousins on the dance floor yelled and motioned me over but I had to be very, very careful in these shoes. The last thing I wanted was to end up on my bottom in this club! So I walked slowly, one foot after the other, and I kept my head up but my eyes down to make sure I wasn’t going to trip on anything or anybody. Maybe it hadn’t been the best choice to wear these tonight, but when I’d tried them on at the shoe outlet, my cousin Kayleigh had said that they made my legs look longer.

  That had been all I’d needed to hear to buy them and as she had said, they were made for a place like this! Actually, Kayleigh had said that they were “chase me, have marital relations with me” shoes, only she’d used a different phrase, not “have marital relations with me.” She’d used one that rhymed with “truck fee.”

  I’d worn the “chase me, have marital relations with me” shoes even though it had taken me a few extra minutes to limp from our apartment to the car, and a few more to wobble over into the line to enter this club. But it had been worth it, totally worth it, because I’d glimpsed myself in one of th
e mirrors at the bar and my legs did look longer! I patted my hair (carefully, so I wouldn’t break the iron bonds of spray that my other cousin Cassidy had applied). No frizz yet, but it was getting humid as the crowd packed in, and the night was young. Now was the perfect time to meet someone, before I had clown-wig hair.

  Step, step. Almost there.

  “Hey, baby. Want to dance with me?”

  I sized up this man quickly. He was about my age, which was a bad sign, because guys my age weren’t interested in the same things that I was. He wore what my memaw called “those flashy clothes,” which made sense for a club (just like my shoes did). But he looked too comfortable in them. I needed a man who was most at ease in his jeans and toolbelt, not one looking like he usually wore this get-up, the silky shirt with a big collar and sleeves rolled and pinned with cufflinks, tight, shiny pants and polished shoes. I preferred dirty work boots.

  “No, thank you,” I answered his question, and continued taking my small steps toward where my cousins Kayleigh and Cassidy were already rocking hard with two other guys very similar to this one.

  “Bitch,” the man announced, and he brushed past me as he walked away and I got very unbalanced in the shoes. Darn them!

  And darn him, too. I wasn’t that word! I’d been polite when I’d told him no! I stuck out my tongue at him but that was rude and also, it might have messed up the pretty pink lipstick that Kayleigh had let me borrow. I patted my hair again and kept going.

  “Aria, why’d you wear those dumb things?” Kayleigh yelled over the music as I finally reached them. Her guy was grinding up against her, his hands clutching her hips. She didn’t seem to notice him as she pointed at my shoes and made a face.

  “They look good, don’t they?” But they did make it awfully hard to dance. I performed a little shuffle step, back and forth, and tried not to wobble again.