by Erin Wright
No, she wasn’t her mother. Simply the human being who’d happened to give birth to her.
“You’ve never given me love,” she repeated softly. “I have been a thing to use to get what you want – more cash by selling me off to the highest bidder after you and Father blew through Grandpa’s estate. How long did it take you two to spend those millions?” Even as she challenged her mother, something she’d spent virtually her whole life trying to never, no never do, she continued to pack, grabbing everything she could get her hands on.
She could do this. She could walk away and never come back. She could.
“You have no idea how expensive children are,” Roberta said, her tone suddenly wheedling. “All of those shopping trips to the mall – do you think we got that money off trees?”
“No, I stupidly thought you grew it from the ground in the form of mustard seed and wheat and corn and potatoes. You know, Father’s job as a farmer.”
“Farmers only make so much,” her mother sniffed. “We couldn’t possibly live on just that.”
“Father is the largest farmer in Long Valley County,” Tenny pointed out. It was a fact that he liked to slip into a conversation whenever possible, so yeah, basically every time he talked to someone. “If you and Father cannot make it on his income alone, how the hell does anyone else pay their bills?”
“Language!” Roberta snapped.
“Roberta,” Tennessee said, admittedly enjoying using her biological mother’s first name a little too much and watching her eyes grow wide with shock and anger, “I am 26 years old. I can damn well say ‘hell’ anytime I want to.” She zipped the three suitcases up and began wheeling the first two down the stairs, thumping carelessly down. each. step. as. loud. as. possible.
“You’re going to mar the wood!” Roberta yelled down the stairs. “Stop that this instant.”
“I find it fascinating that wood on the staircase is what you’re worried about right now,” Tennessee said dryly, parking the suitcases next to the door out to the garage. “And oh-so-telling.” She ran back up the stairs to grab the last suitcase, wheeling it past her mother Roberta with a sarcastic smile. “I’ll bring the car by later. Perhaps you two can sell it and use the money to pay off some debtors.”
“The car? But…you can’t not have a car! How are you going to get around?”
Tennessee pulled her wallet out of her purse and began laying all of her credit cards down on the counter with a snap.
Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap.
Her mother had kept giving her new cards, telling her that they had better rewards, and Tenny had taken them every time with a shrug. It hadn’t mattered to her which card she used. But now, because of her frugal books from the library, she was beginning to realize that her mother was trying to move balances between credit cards to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors.
Just how in debt are they?
She pushed the thought away. Not her monkeys, not her zoo.
“I will drive my own car around when I earn the money to buy it. Until then, I walk.” She opened up the door to the garage and began wheeling the bags out one by one, pitching them into the backseat of the open top car.
“Walk?! I will not have my daughter walking around town like some…some hobo!” her mother spat from the doorway. Tenny slid into the driver’s seat as she tossed her purse into the passenger seat, and then looked over at the woman with a dry smile.
“Well then, I guess it’s good that I don’t consider you to be my mother any longer.” She hit the garage door opener on the visor of the car, waiting for the door to open and let her out, and give her freedom. Freedom from restrictions and lies and expectations.
Freedom from her parents.
She pulled out of the garage and swung around to head out down the road. She spotted Virginia at the front door, waving madly as Tennessee drove past, and Tenny waved back, her heart soaring.
She’d done it, she’d really done it.
Now she could only hope that her cousin didn’t mind her being a mooch for just a little while.
Chapter 19
Levi
Knock knock
Two swift knocks on the front door jerked Levi out of his Saturday afternoon nap. He’d been staying up late a lot lately, which meant that afternoon naps were becoming almost habitual. But it was worth it – hanging out every evening with Tennessee, Moose, and Georgia was an absolute blast because this time, they were paired off into the right couples, instead of everything feeling so forced all of the time.
Moose and Georgia still spent way too much time sucking face with each other but not surprisingly, Levi found that he didn’t mind it nearly as much now that he had someone of his own to make out with.
Funny that.
He opened up the front door to find a package lying there, the mail carrier already halfway down the block, ponytail swishing as she went. “Thanks!” he hollered at her retreating back, and then grabbed the package and walked back inside.
What the hell? He couldn’t remember ordering anything lately from an online retailer and it wasn’t like he had relatives who’d be sending him a care package. He flipped the small box over in his hands and looked at the From address.
YourAncestryRevealed.com?
“What the…” he muttered, pulling his knife out of his pocket and using it to slit the package open. Out came a welcoming letter, telling him congratulations on choosing to research his ancestry, and reassuring him that the process was painless and simple.
“What process?” he asked his empty house. As he pulled out the swabs and containers, everything neatly sealed in plastic to keep them from being contaminated, it slowly started coming back to him.
The night that his father had used him as burger-throwing target practice, he and Moose had played video games until the wee hours of the morning, and then Levi had collapsed onto the couch to fall asleep, drunk as a skunk. But he couldn’t sleep and instead, he’d spent hours channel surfing, until he stumbled across an informercial running about YourAncestryRevealed.com. The idea that he could have his DNA tested and figure out where the hell his mother had come from had been really appealing to him, probably even more so in his inebriated state than it normally would be.
He turned the cotton swabs over and over in his hands, sterile, ready to be used. Just a couple of swipes of the inside of his mouth, and he could finally have a few answers. More answers than he had right then, anyway.
He couldn’t believe he was going to do this, but as the welcoming letter made abundantly clear, he’d apparently already paid for the test. There wasn’t much point in throwing his money away, right?
He settled down at the kitchen table and began to read the instructions.
Chapter 20
Tennessee
Tenny flipped through the pages of the Boise State University catalog, hunting for something – anything – that looked like a career she could do. The fact that she was looking at attending a state university instead of a private college…the very thought made her smile. Her parents would have a conniption fit if their daughter was attending something as low-brow as a publicly funded college, but then again, what they thought didn’t really matter, right?
She technically had a Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts, which, as far as she could tell, qualified her to preside over state dinners, or work the drive-thru at Burger King. She certainly hadn’t learned anything of real value at the private college her parents had sent her to, unless learning how to fold cloth napkins into swans counted as being valuable.
She flipped the page in the catalog, her eyes skimming down it automatically without finding anything of interest.
She could be a teacher…except she knew nothing about children and really didn’t relish the idea of being a human Kleenex to a bunch of five year olds all day.
She could be an accountant, except numbers made her eyes cross.
She could be a policewoman, except she couldn’t exactly fathom yelling “POLICE!” at
the top of her lungs while breaking down doors. Hmmm…maybe she could break down doors and then offer the women inside a makeover. A new kind of police officer!
Yeah…no.
What she really wanted to do was to make the world a better place. Which sounded cheesy and hippie as hell and would have her mother diving for her smelling salts if she heard it, but it was true. Tennessee had spent her whole life doing nothing but worrying about her hair and nails and clothing and how to best highlight her cheekbones. She wanted to do something for other people.
She wanted to make them smile.
She wasn’t about to become a stand-up comic, so…
Tennessee Rowland, you are an idiot.
Duh.
Big, fat, whomping “What the hell was she thinking?!” duh.
She could make yard art for people.
Right?
That was a “thing,” right?
Plus, she wouldn’t have to take out student loans to make it happen. She was learning more every day with Levi as her tutor. Sure, some of their lessons ended in make-out sessions and so they didn’t exactly get a shit ton of learning done then, but for the most part, when they concentrated, she was learning fast.
As quickly as her excitement came, though, it began to disappear. The old adage, “You need money to make money” flashed through her mind. How would she buy metal to use? She couldn’t just keep “borrowing” Levi’s scrap metal. Borrowing implied that you gave the item back, and unless he wanted oversized bumblebees on stakes to stick throughout his yard…yeah, he wasn’t getting this metal back.
Not to mention that his scrap pile was quickly dwindling, and anyway, this needed to be her job, which meant she couldn’t be a charity case. She’d already moved into her cousin’s spare bedroom; she’d already borrowed countless pieces of metal from Levi, plus a welder and gloves and a helmet and a workshop space…
She needed to stand on her own two feet. She just didn’t know how. Had everyone else been sent to Adult School when she hadn’t been looking? Had everyone else learned how to make adult choices during a phase of their lives that she’d somehow skipped?
She groaned, burying her head in her hands, hot tears pricking the edges of her eyes. She needed to stop being so needy. She needed to be a grownup. Stop relying on everyone else to solve your problems for you, Tennessee. Levi and Georgia aren’t your mother, and the woman who did happen to give birth to you is a bitch.
You’re on your own; no one else is there for you.
Stop being a baby about it.
Such a baby.
Crybaby.
The pressure mounted, pounding on her, the panic swirling. Yeah, her mother was an awful human being – and her father too – but as the worry washed over her in drowning waves, smothering her, she began to think that maybe she shouldn’t have left home. Hell, maybe the guy in Washington wasn’t so bad. How would she know – she hadn’t even given him a chance. She didn’t even know his name. Maybe she could grow to love him. After a while. People had been suffering through arranged marriages for centuries.
What made her so special? She wasn’t special.
Just ask her mother.
Hot tears were dripping off her chin and plopping onto the catalog, the cheap ink smearing everywhere.
Even as her hands went searching for the cool metal, she knew she shouldn’t. She had to stop. She just…life was too much. It was just a thing she did to help. She could stop anytime she wanted.
She just didn’t want to right now.
Chapter 21
Levi
When he saw the email in his inbox, his stomach flipped with delight and not an insignificant amount of panic.
He’d done it. He was about to find something out about his family. His heritage. Everything his father had always refused to tell him.
He clicked on the email and began scanning through. When he got to the end, he paused, completely confused. He scrolled back up to the top and began scanning through again, more slowly this time.
What
The
Hell…
The percentages were all there. Apparently, he had some English in him, and then a mix of Italian and Spanish for the rest.
The one thing he was not? Scandinavian.
This doesn’t make any sense.
It couldn’t be right. Had they mixed his results up with someone else? Was that possible?
An email notification popped up in the corner of his screen – he’d received a second email from the company. Thank God! He clicked over to it, just sure that it’d be a “So sorry – don’t know what we were thinking; here’s your real ancestral information!” email.
Instead, it was entitled, “Levi Scranton, did you know there’s a relative in your area?”
Everything slowed down. He felt like he had when he was a kid and had jumped on a trampoline for too long – dizzy and off balance as his body tried to re-acclimate to the world around it.
No, this was not possible. Absolutely, positively not possible. Levi knew almost nothing about his family’s background, but he did know that Steve and she-who-shall-not-be-named mom had moved to Long Valley a couple of years before he was born. His father had gotten a construction job in Franklin, so they’d moved here from somewhere in Colorado.
Instead of a fresh start in a new area, though, his dad had fallen off a ladder after only a couple of weeks on the job, and hadn’t worked a day since. He used disability and Social Security payments to live on, along with a settlement from the construction company for providing “unsafe working conditions.”
Levi only knew that story because his father repeated it so many times, usually with a choice swear word (or seven) about how stingy the construction company had been in its settlement, and if they’d only been willing to give him more, he could’ve had a much better life from there forward…
Which, of course, meant an easier time being able to afford as much Pabst as he wanted.
The one and only other thing Levi knew for sure about his heritage was that his dad was Scandinavian. It’s why he claimed he shouldn’t go outside very often – he had fair skin that burned easily. Why, if only he wasn’t Scandinavian, he could’ve gotten another construction job but between his fair skin and his bad back, well, no one could expect him to work.
Levi had always had to bite his tongue at that (“Sunscreen – it’s a new invention! Try it, you’ll like it!”) but arguing with his father was like wrestling with a pig in mud: The pig would only enjoy it and in the end, they’d both end up filthy.
Yeah, arguing with his dad never worked out well.
But all of that meant that 1) He should absolutely not have any relatives in the area, and 2) He should be at least 50% Scandinavian.
He forced himself to click on the relative email to open it up. Just staring at it for hours on end wouldn’t give him the answers he wanted, as tempting as that seemed in that moment.
He began skimming down it. About halfway through, he found the info he was looking for: He was related to a Florence Garrett who’d registered in the system a little over two years ago.
Florence Garrett?
Florence Garrett?!
No.
No.
No.
He couldn’t be a Garrett. Moose was the Garrett. Levi was the Scranton. Didn’t YourAncestryRevealed.com know these things?
Florence Garrett…
Florence Garrett…
The name echoed in his mind as Levi tried frantically to match it up with something, anything, but he was coming up empty-handed. After all these years, Levi had never heard Moose mention a Florence. Maybe it wasn’t the same family. Maybe it was all a huge coincidence. Maybe they’d sent him the wrong test results.
With a trembling hand, Levi picked up his cell phone and called Moose. As soon as his best friend picked up with his customary greeting, “Yo! What’s up?” Levi blurted out, “Who’s Florence Garrett?”
Chapter 22
Tennessee
What the hell?
Not that she minded seeing Moose – in fact, she rather liked hanging out with him, now that she wasn’t going to have to marry him – but Levi and Tennessee had planned on spending the evening working on slicing metal into various shapes so Tenny could weld them together to create a piece of yard art. She was wanting to try that bumblebee idea today.
But none of this was something they’d usually do with Moose right there beside them.
Tenny hesitated. Maybe she should just walk back to Georgia’s house. Call Levi later and see if he wasn’t busy at that point. She shouldn’t bother him when he was spending time with his bestie, right?
Don’t be stupid. Moose probably just dropped by and surprised Levi. No doubt he’ll be on his way soon. You’re not bothering anybody.
But she couldn’t completely suppress the niggling, panicky feeling spreading through her gut. Something wrong, something wrong, something wrong…
The chant kept time with her footsteps and her heartbeat, until she finally made it to the front door of Levi’s house. She knocked and then stood back hesitantly when she heard a deep rumble of swear words that’d make her father proud.
The chant began to speed up. Somethingwrong, somethingwrong, somethingwrong—
Levi yanked the door open, his face flushed, his hair curling every which way in a mass of chaos that’d normally be an invitation for her to run her fingers through it, but not today. Not right now.