by Vivian Wood
I poked the box again. Immediately Ginger latched on to it, kicking her back feet in a wild attempt to murder my foot. "Ow!" I yelped. "Stop it, you little assassin!" I scooped her up and crossed back into galley kitchen and plopped her in front of her food bowl. "Shit, you're almost out of this," I sighed, scraping the last bits of food out of the bag I'd brought home with her from the shelter.
Ginger crunched her kibble as I stroked her back and scratched between her eyes, setting off a thunderstorm of purring. Then I poured a glass of water and went over to sit on the only chair in my living room. I propped my foot up on the box.
Today would be a good day to hear Gid's voice. I could do it right now. I could pop a tape into the ancient tape recorder I still had from my Dad, and I could let Gid's voice fill the room and pretend he was right here with me.
But I couldn't do it. The wound was still too fresh. I was still trying to get used to the feeling of him being gone. Hearing him again would only make that harder.
"I should give it to the Kings, shouldn't I?" I asked Ginger. She trotted over, happy now that her belly was full and took a flying leap into my lap. "It's his legacy, right?" I ran my hand down her fuzzy back and set off another round of vibrating, and I smiled, and then...
Then I cried.
"He was supposed to come meet you," I sniffed, wiping my hand down my cheek. "He was going to come... Jesus, it'd be today he was gonna come." Ginger purred like a boat motor and I leaned over and buried my face in her tummy. "Gid," I sighed into Ginger's fuzzy fur. "The hell were you even doing out there, anyway?"
He was always doing stuff like that. Driving off to some unknown purpose. It was hard to see through the lens of how kind he was, but he had a stubborn, mean streak to him. A fierce kind of world-view that didn't allow for much room for others. Izzy, with her wispy, wistful ways was probably the perfect woman for a guy like him. The kind to be wholly absorbed into her man.
All the Kings were like that, to a point. It was one of Claire's biggest complaints about her brothers. That they absorbed all the light in the room, demanding the spotlight for themselves. Gideon was just a nicer, less wildly famous version of that.
I nudged the box with my toe. Gid was in there. His words, his voice. "I should go over there, hand it to Foster, right Gingy-Girl?" I asked my kitten. "Since Gid is his brother?"
She sat up and bit my knuckle.
I laughed through my tears. "Is that a no or something?" I wondered, dangling my fingers over her face. The vet said not to use hands as toys, but Ginger wasn't interested in anything else but my limbs. And she was so cute I let her get away with it. "You think I should keep the box here, right?" I asked her as she rolled and batted and fell over herself. "Just in case I get the courage to listen?"
Ginger made an impressive leap, Velcro-ing herself to my bicep. I yelped again and peeled her away, before cuddling her to my chest. She struggled in vain to bite at my earlobe. "Stop, just be sweet for one second. I need this," I said, hugging her tight.
As I squeezed her struggling body, my mind leaped back to the day of the funeral. I wondered if I had felt like this in Jonah's arms as he hugged me tight. I'd wanted to scratch and bite him too, but it had also been strangely comforting, comforting enough that I'd done it again upon arriving at the wake.
He was Gid's favorite for some reason. Maybe that was the connection I had felt. He was a musician, just like his uncle, and stubborn like him too.
"Ow, okay!" I sighed, setting Ginger down and rubbing my scratched up hand. "Maybe I don't give the box away, huh?" My kitten blinked and made a mad dash for her food bowl. I nodded, "Yeah, you like that idea. But maybe I invite Jonah over and let him listen to it? Since he was Gid's favorite?"
Ginger blinked at me, all solemn, cat-like dignity. Then she attacked her own tail.
I looked back at the box, hulking silently there in the center of my living room. Filled with Gid's soul. He'd shared it with me and not his nephew for a reason. "You're right," I said to my cat. "That's a terrible idea.
Chapter Seven
Jonah
The decision to stay here in Crown Creek had felt like the right one for all of twenty-four hours. But one night in my old bed had me nearly wild with claustrophobic memory. Every creak of the house settling was one I had heard before. Every sigh or grunt from Duke was a direct link to the past. Every pass of my father's footsteps on the squeaky stairs as he got himself ready for the day was an echo of all my childhood mornings.
If I didn't get out of this house today, I was going to lose it. And I needed to flee before my father could corner me and rope me into doing the one chore that just might break my heart.
I rushed down to the garage and then stopped.
My father had beaten me down, and was there with his head under the hood of my rental car.
I stood there for a moment, jingling the keys in my hand. "Hey, uh, what are you doing?
But I knew exactly what he was doing. He'd won. He'd beat me. I remembered him pulling the same kind of stunt when I'd come home from tour seven years ago and wanted to sneak out to a party late at night. Rather than forbid me from leaving, my dad just disconnected my car battery saying he'd replace it 'once the good ones are back in stock at Chuck's shop.' I was stuck home for the remainder of that visit. It worked exactly as he'd planned.
But he never admitted that keeping me home was his goal, nor would he admit it now. So he muttered something about jokers and who they thought they were fooling, then pulled his head back out from under the hood. "Your lines are almost completely clogged."
"Ah, yeah. But it's a rentalm so that's really not my problem."
"I'm almost done with the flush."
"Dad, it's their job to deal with it. Not yours."
He turned and looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head. Then he swept his hand over to the neatly laid out parts and disconnected hoses and sort of shrugged like 'what can I do?' "Never leave a job unfinished," he intoned.
I pressed my lips together and sighed. Whenever I complained to Gid about my dad, he'd always say the same thing. "You're more like him than you realize."
Stubbornly refusing to let go of something until it worked the way you wanted it to?
I understood that all too well.
"Fine," I said, shoving my hands into my pockets.
"You're gonna be around later, right?" Dad asked me, wiping his hands on a rag.
I swallowed. If this were any other place in the world, I'd be able to say 'hell no' and leave it at that. But this was Crown Creek. This was my Dad's house, and so I had to say, "Probably."
I could see by the twitch at the corner of his eye that he didn't like that answer. "Got a lot of work ahead of us," he said, taking off his glasses and wiping them with a different rag. Of course he had rags assigned for specific purposes. "I could use the help."
I'd come down hoping I could slip out un-noticed. If I was gone, then there was no way my father could ask me to help clean out Gid's house with him. But he'd made certain I couldn't flee by disabling my car.
But maybe he hadn't won. I wasn't as dumb as I used to be. "Yeah, if I have the time, definitely," I said smoothly. "But I was going to run into town." I grinned and shrugged. "Looks like I"m going to have to walk, huh? I guess I could use the exercise but it's definitely going to take me longer."
My Dad put his glasses back on again and regarded me with a fierce stare. Gabe could almost match it in intensity but my father's had the advantage of profound disappointment in all your failings as a person. "Huh," he said. He paused, letting the silence stretch out, most likely hoping it'd start me squirming in shame. But when I didn't buckle, he blew air out of the side of his mouth and turned back to the car. "Then I guess I'll see you later," he said pointedly.
"Hope so!" I replied, clapping him on the back. Feeling flush with outsmarting him, I didn't even mind that I had a mile and there-quarters walk ahead of me along frozen country roads. If I was walking, that meant I wasn't down in Gid and Izzy's
place with a trash bag, throwing out the remnants of his life.
Izzy was moving off the property now, into a little trailer near where the cult-people lived. My dad had told her she could stay, but the idea of living with the memories of Gideon was too much for her fragile nature, and she'd declined. Which meant that now all of Gid's instruments and equipment were being packed up in boxes. Izzy had mentioned maybe donating them to the school in his memory and the thought was nice but my mind rebelled at the idea of Gideon's memory being let loose, formless into the world rather than staying tightly contained in the place where he'd lived.
I had no right. I knew that. I wasn't so much of an asshole that I couldn't see that it was Izzy's choice to do with this stuff what she wanted. She was the one who had spent half her life with the uncle I'd barely seen in two years. But a hurt kind of anger, a childish sense of unfairness, was nipping at the edge of my rational mind. I didn't want to see him do it. I didn't want to help him do it. And I knew if I hung around the house there would be no way to avoid it. So I left the house.
Walking into town was like playing peekaboo with the creek. I left it at my parents' house, heading out along our road only to find it again as it dove under Davy's Bridge, the first of the three spans over it. Then it left me as it hooked out in a wide loop before making another sharp turn out there by the cult people and heading straight into town. I found it again, narrowed within cement banks, as the first scrappy stores that clung to the outskirts of town came into view.
I huffed out a visible puff of breath. My coat was too thin for this kind of damp cold. It was made for style, not for weather and right now the smell of snow was in the air. I could see it up there, the sky was fuzzy with it, but nothing was falling yet. Tonight it would, for sure.
The town of Crown Creek was really little more than a glorified intersection - which the locals loftily called 'The Four Corners.' Here the creek narrowed some more before taking a steep dive over three small series of rapids, baby waterfalls, but falls all the same. These falls were why the town had sprung up out here in the first place. The shells of old flour mills clung to the banks of those little falls, their grinding wheels long since rotted away,. They were old and worn and now looked like part of the landscape.
In the summer the falls would be roaring, but ice was already starting to freeze the creek into silence. A car went by, the tires noisy on the wet pavement, but otherwise everything was quiet.
It had been a long time since I had heard this kind of quiet.
I passed a few shops. A sad little pet store with a sleeping cat in the window that looked like it had given up on the idea of adoption and made its home right there. A shuttered art gallery. A dollar store.
Nothing I needed.
At the corner of Mill Street, I looked in on an empty storefront, the only thing left inside was a fallen over chair in the very center of the space. There was music leaking out of the building next to it and I did a double take to see a bar in front of me.
I turned in a slow circle, uncertain if I had somehow lost my bearings. I didn't remember a bar being at this intersection. Not that the name was much to go my. Crown Tavern. Everything around here was Crown this, Royal that. Even my family name fit with the theme of the area.
Crown Tavern. Slowly, the name brought up a faint memory of kids in T-ball uniforms. The kids with normal childhoods, the ones who didn't always know exactly what they wanted from the moment they could speak. This bar must have always been here and I was just too young to go inside.
I was old enough now.
I pushed my way inside. It felt overwarm after my freezing walk and I immediately shed my jacket. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, although smoking indoors had been banned for ages now. It seemed to be seeping out of the walls.
I looked around, taking in the wood paneled walls, the cheap metal tables, the U-shaped bar with the video-trivia games bolted to the ends. There was a small, cleared out space in the corner by the window, with a raised, rickety looking stage sitting on small risers. It was smaller than even the ones I had played as a kid. I went over and took a seat next to one of the trivia machines and studied my frozen hands.
There was no nostalgia here. I had no memories sniffing around the back of my head like dogs trying to catch a scent.
I could relax. I did relax.
But only for a moment.
The man four seats down twisted on his stool. I could sense him studying me and wondering is he should say something. He wondered so long it was actually a relief when he finally spoke up.
"Sorry," he said. "But, you're Jonah King right?"
Instantly I was on the alert. After losing my manager and having my appearances cancelled, the last thing I could afford was a pissed of Tweet from some aggrieved civilian. Even though I was home, I still had to be extra sure to answer all autograph requests with a smile and a witty joke. "I am," I said, pasting my practiced smile into place. "How are you?"
But the man wasn't done talking. His face was familiar in the vague way every face was familiar in this town. "Yeah, you're definitely Foster King's boy. It's all in the eyes, that's for damn sure."
I blinked. It had been a long while since 'Foster King's boy' was how people knew me. "I've heard that before," I said carefully, still not quite sure where this was going.
He nodded and sipped his beer. "Sorry about your Uncle. Andrew was so excited about the spring musical."
I blinked, then remembered. Right. Gid was a music teacher. I looked at him again, inhaling sharply. "I remember you."
He grinned showing yellowed, nicotaine stained teether. "Yeah. Wondered if you were gonna. I'll save you the brain strain." He held out his hand. "Jack McLean. I was a year behind you and a year ahead of Gabe."
I nodded, feeling more at ease now. "Until we left, yeah."
"Now you're back for a little while, huh?"
I licked my lips. "I'm working on a new project," I lied smoothly. He raised his eyebrows, the impressed look on his face emboldening me. "Stripping it down, getting back down to my roots, you know?"
The lie must have sounded believable because Jack looked impressed. "Well if you're gonna be hanging around a while, you need to know what's what."
I took a drink and listened as Jack brought me up to speed with the town gossip. He was really gifted at summarizing. In no time flat I knew which of our classmates had ended up in jail, and which of those charges were 'complete bullshit.' I also learned who had ended up with six kids but never got married and who left town to become 'some big city hotshot.'
Through all of this, the bartender - who I was pretty sure was at Gid's wake but didn't say a word then and said more of that now - brought me an assortment of craft beers from the brewery down the road. I felt my shoulders unknot.
"Jonah fucking King."
"Jesus," I almost fell off my barstool when I saw Taylor Graham suddenly behind the bar. With a beard. "Tay. What are you doing here?"
He grinned. "I work here, what the hell are you doing here? Shouldn't you be off banging groupies somewhere?"
Taylor hadn't changed. Except everything about him had. The eager face was still there, but ringed with a giant, bushy blond beard that looked like it should be groomed using hedge trimmers. The same hopeful smile was hidden under all that hair, as well as an extra one hundred pounds and several inches. But it was still Taylor, still looking at me with that hero worship. He'd played with us a few dates back when we were doing local festivals. And honorary King Brother, we'd called him, until our slimy manager Bennett put an end to that.
I had to smile. "Need to rest sometime, don't I?" But anxiety settled in a knot right between my eyes.
"Been following your solo stuff," Taylor went on. "You seem like you want to move in a different direction."
"He's getting back to his roots," Jack piped up.
Taylor's smug expression made me instantly regret the lie. "I mean, I'm stripping down a list, yeah. But new direction?" I waved my hand. It w
as one thing to have self-doubts. It was another thing to let Taylor know I had them. "Why fuck with what works though, you know? When you got a winning formula."
He nodded, wiping the same glass, spinning it around and around in his hand until it was streak free and spotless but still he didn't put it away. His smile was so wide it looked like it hurt. "Yeah, yeah well of course, man you're on top" He shook his head and seemed to suddenly notice the glass in his hand and set it down with a clang. "Shit, how long you in town? And sorry about your uncle but the way. But seriously, if you're around for a while we'd love to have you play a set."
I looked over at the small, rickety stage. "You mean, here?"
"No, Madison Square Garden," he deadpanned. "Of course here."
I grinned. "You want to put me on as opener or closer for the small town dreamers?"
"What, we're not good enough for you?" He was smiling, joking, but there was a hard glint in his eyes.
I laughed. "Sure man. I've been dying to play a half-empty bar. Just to switch it up, you know? I was getting tired of huge crowds of people screaming my name. It'd be nice to go back to being ignored in the corner of a bar."
A shadow passed across Taylor's face. I looked at him, and then Jack who was studiously looking away, draining his beer at a rapid clip. I swallowed and lowered my voice like I was letting them both in on a secret. "It's just... not many people know I'm in town, and we're kind of trying to keep things private, be there for my family."
"Nah sure, sure, I get it. Bad timing." He whistled between his teeth as he swiped the bar with his rag, but the friendliness had dissolved from his demeanor. "What can I get you?"
"Another one?"
"That's five dollars."
"Guess your drinks aren't on the house any more," Jack chuckled, having watched this whole exchange.
"He can afford it," Taylor said, smiling through a snarl.
I had fucked something up and I didn't know what it was. That was the fucking problem with coming home. These people all thought they knew me, but they had no idea.