Bittersweet (True North #1)

by Sarina Bowen

  Most every night we went to bed early, and not because we were sleepy.

  A loud horn blast startled us apart. I looked out the window to see Jude leaning into his car, a hand on the horn, grinning up at us.

  Griff opened his door. “All right. Jeez.”

  “Well I’m waiting for you here, boss. And it’s rude to go at it in front of the guy who’s gone three years without any.”

  Beside him, Zachariah blushed, as he often did when sex came up in conversation.

  I hopped down from the truck and handed Jude the cookies. “I didn’t let Griff eat even one,” I promised. “The whole batch is for you.”

  “I’m still bitter about that,” Griff muttered.

  “You’re the bomb, Audrey.” Jude pecked me on the cheek, and I hugged him.

  “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  “I will.”

  “You’d better,” Ruth said, coming across the lawn, her arms around a box. “Here’s something for breakfast tomorrow. And some wool socks, because it’s getting cold.”

  Jude put a hand up to the back of his neck and stared at his shoes. “Thanks, Mrs. S. I really appreciate it.”

  “I know you do, dear.” She patted his chest. “Keep eating. You look healthier than you did back in July.”

  He really did. She wasn’t wrong.

  “Don’t forget Thursday Dinner,” Ruth said as Jude tucked her offerings onto the backseat of his awful car. “We expect to see you.”

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. But it wasn’t the same as saying, I’ll be there. “Really, thanks for everything.” He offered his hand to Griff. “I don’t know what I would have done without this job to get me on my feet.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done without the extra set of hands,” Griff returned.

  Jude shook hands with Zach and accepted a hug from Ruth. The other Shipley siblings were at school today. Kyle had gone back to his parents’ place a week ago.

  Jude got behind the wheel, wincing when the engine roared to life.

  “Needs a muffler,” Zach said to no one in particular.

  “Needs a lot of things,” Jude said out the open window. He smiled, but there was no joy in it.

  “Bye honey!” Ruth said, waving. “See you Thursday!”

  Jude waved, but made no promises. Then he drove down the drive and disappeared.

  We all stood there for a moment, feeling sad. “Zach will be all alone in the bunkhouse,” I pointed out.

  “S’okay,” Zach said. “Are we going to barrel tank number three this afternoon?”

  “Yep,” Griff said. “Give me two minutes.”

  Ruth went into the farmhouse and Zach walked away to the cider house. That left Griff and I beside his truck. “You can drive ’er back. We’ll have dinner here tonight, okay? Mom made a pot roast.”

  I could smell it. “Sounds great.” Sometimes I cooked for Griff, and sometimes I cooked or merely ate at the farmhouse with the whole family. I couldn’t decide which arrangement I liked more. On the one hand, a private meal with Griff occasionally led to kitchen-counter sex. But meals with his big, crazy family were awesome, too. “Do you think we’ll see Jude again?” I asked suddenly.

  Griff winced. “Hard to say. I think he wants to try to go it alone, you know? He needs to know if he can do it.”

  My eyes cut over to the driveway, as if Jude were still visible there. “I hope he’s going to be all right.”

  “We all do.” Griffin pushed me up against the truck and kissed my neck. “See you in a few hours? I might need you to taste a couple of blends with me tonight.”

  “Twist my arm,” I said, loving the feel of his beard against my cheek.

  He skimmed his lips down my neck. “Gotta see if I can balance my bittersweets with the right amount of acid.”

  “I love it when you want a tasting, baby.”

  Griff snorted. Then he stepped back. “Get in the truck before I jump you right here in the driveway.”

  “Fine.” I pulled open the door. “But only because it would traumatize your mother and Zach.”

  He waved as I drove away. And I drove the half mile home to make another batch of gingersnaps for my man.

  The

  End

  Steadfast (True North #2) is Jude’s story! You can read the first chapter on the next page.

  Excerpt: Steadfast (True North #2)

  Jude

  The last time I drove through Colebury, Vermont, I did so in a 1972 Porsche 911 restored to mint condition with a sweet new paint job in Aubergine.

  Compare and contrast—three years later, I rattled down Main Street in a tattered 1996 Dodge Avenger I’d just bought for nine hundred bucks. The front fender was held together with duct tape.

  None of that would have bothered me if the Avenger and I didn’t have so fucking much in common. We’d both ended up in the gutter, broken in body and spirit. The car’s muffler was shot. Exposed wires hanging out from under the dashboard were a perfect proxy for my jangled nerves. I was five months out of rehab and I still couldn’t sleep more than three hours in a row.

  My arrogant teenage self would never have driven this heap, but that punk’s opinion didn’t matter. I hated that guy. And while we’re marking all the contradictions, I should also add that the last time I drove through Colebury, Vermont, I was high as a kite on opiates.

  Today I was stone-cold sober. So at least I had that going for me.

  In the minus column, I was now a convicted felon. I’d served thirty-six months for possession and vehicular manslaughter. I had very little money and even fewer friends. The one lucky thing in my life—a live-saving job at an orchard in the next county—had just ended. It was November, and there were no more apples to pick or sell. So heading home was my only option.

  There was, as usual, no traffic in Colebury. The little town where I grew up didn’t have a rush hour. It was more like a rush minute, and that hadn’t started yet. I made one last turn and the houses got smaller. The sidewalks were uneven. Three years since I’d been here, and the place was still as familiar as the back of my hand.

  I would have never come home if I could have avoided it.

  Pulling onto my father’s property, I shut off that loud-ass engine. Nickel & Sons Auto Body had the corner lot. On the left was our little old house with the sagging porch. And on the right was a two-bay mechanic’s garage.

  The “& Sons” part of the sign over the door had never made sense to me. For starters, I was an only child. And that sign had been hung well before I was old enough to hold a wrench. I’d never asked my father about it, though, because that would require conversation. My father did not converse. He also did not praise or scold.

  Instead he drank.

  I’d pulled the jalopy into the driveway between the house and the garage. My arrival brought my father out of the garage’s shadows. I saw him mosey out the door, eyeing the unfamiliar car. He was probably hoping that I wasn’t a bill collector.

  I climbed out, watching for some reaction on my father’s face.

  He blinked twice. That was all I got.

  “Hey,” I said, reaching into the backseat for the duffel bag that held everything I currently owned.

  “You’re out,” he said.

  Thank you, Captain Obvious. “Been out for six months,” I said. “I’ve been picking apples in Orange County.”

  “Oh.” My whole life, he’d spoken in one- and two-word sentences. I used to think that he was just a man of few words. But now that I’ve spent a lot of time in addiction meetings, I’d decided that his silence was a way to avoid slurring his words. It was almost two o’clock, which meant that he’d probably drunk half his flask already.

  “So…” I cleared my throat, wondering what would happen next. “There’s no more farm work until the spring. I was hoping to stay in my old room, if it’s available.” Tipping my chin back, I looked up at the narrow windows above the garage. The same faded yellow curtains still hung up there.
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  I saw him squint then, looking me up and down. “Yeah,” he said after a pause. “Okay.”

  “I’m clean,” I added, in case he was trying to figure that out. Unlike so many other parents of the addicts I’d met, I’d never had a fight with my father about my drug habit. He’d ignored it. He’d ignored me. The last time I’d seen my father was during the first month of my sentence. He’d come to visit me in prison exactly once. It had been a long, stilted twenty minutes while we looked at each other from opposite sides of a beat-up table, trying to think of things to say. For three years, I never had another visitor.

  To be fair, one other person had tried to visit me. But I wouldn’t see her.

  “Actually…” I dug in my pocket for my keys. There were only three of them: the Dodge, the garage, and a third one, which I extracted from the metal ring by digging my fingernail between the coils. When the key was free, I offered it to my father.

  Slowly, he removed it from my hand. “Why?” he asked simply.

  I glanced toward our house. “You probably keep some liquor in the house. I don’t drink anymore. It’s easier for me if I stay out of there.”

  He gave me the squint again. But if I was honest with myself, this conversation wasn’t going so badly. “I can work, too,” I offered. I needed to work, of course. After buying the Dodge and factoring in the parts I needed to keep it running, that left me precious little to feed myself. I’d saved most of the money I made at the orchard, since room and board was included. But the pay had been low.

  I would have stayed on that farm forever, regardless. Living here above the garage, with ghosts all around me, in a town where I knew exactly where to score drugs? It was going to be the hardest thing I’d ever done.

  “Not much work these days,” my father said. “Got nothin’ but a scratch repair today.”

  That wasn’t surprising. In the bad old days, even at the height of my drug addiction I’d gotten a lot of car repair done while my father “managed” the place. He must have lost customers when I’d gone to prison. There was no way he’d stepped up to keep pace with the work after my arrest.

  I kept my voice neutral, because I didn’t want to piss him off. “I was thinking I could put out a sign saying I’d put on snow tires for forty bucks.”

  “Might work,” he muttered.

  “I’ll try it,” I said quickly.

  We stared at each other for a second. I think I’d expected him to look a whole lot older. I don’t know why. Maybe because I felt about a hundred years old myself.

  Finished with the conversation, my dad pointed toward the garage. “Gotta get back,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Walking away, he pointed at the Dodge. “That’s a piece of shit.”

  “I noticed.”

  And that was that. The weirdest father-son reunion in the world was over. I watched his coveralls disappear into the garage. They probably hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine since I got sent to prison.

  With my duffel on my shoulder, I walked down the driveway between the house and the repair garage. Nothing here had changed, either. The paint was still peeling, and there was dead grass poking out from cracks in the asphalt.

  In Vermont, we call November “stick season.” It’s a dark month after all the fall color has faded from the trees. The sun goes down every day at four, and we don’t yet have the clean white snow to hide all our sins.

  The driveway dead-ended into an alley, where the weathered exterior stairs up to my room were found. But I didn’t quite make it that far. When I turned the corner, I nearly stumbled into a small, low-slung car parked tightly against the garage’s rear wall. It was covered from bumper to bumper by a heavy black tarp.

  At the sight of it, my heart climbed into my throat. My physical reaction was the same as if I’d just spotted a dead body.

  In so many ways, I had.

  Bending forward, I grabbed a corner of the black tarp, lifting it just a few inches. Underneath, I saw exactly what I feared—a splash of Aubergine paint. It was a factory color at Porsche in 1972.

  Dropping the tarp, I took a step back as if I’d been caught doing something illegal. I didn’t know why this monument to my stupidity was sitting here. In my mind it had vanished along with the life it took three years ago. If I’d stopped to actually consider its whereabouts, I would have assumed that my father sold it whole for junk. Because he always took the lazy way out.

  But here it was, right in the spot where I’d have to walk past it several times a day, trying not to notice how the front passenger side was crushed from striking the tree.

  At least the tarp hid the missing windshield, through which a two-hundred-pound college football player had flown to his death, his neck snapping on impact.

  Just standing there looking at the broken shell of my former life, I began to feel itchy. And I don’t mean literally itchy. Itchy was the closest word I had for a drug craving. I felt a sort of restless tremble in my limbs and a hollowness in my chest. Some people describe it as a hunger or thirst. But that’s not quite right, either.

  Whatever you call it, there was an ache inside me that I longed to soothe. And I moved through each day a little lost, trying to fill an empty spot in my soul. But it never went away. Five months out of rehab, I still felt it all the time. It showed up when I was stressed or bored. It showed up when I was tired or underfed. Sometimes it showed up even when everything was going well.

  It was never, ever going to stop. There was no cure. You just lived with it. The end.

  The edges of the tarp shifted in the breeze, as if taunting me.

  At rehab they said: “Move a muscle, change a thought.” So that’s what I did now. I hiked the strap of my duffel bag a little higher on my shoulder. Then I skirted the Porsche without touching it again, and took the shaky wooden stairs two at a time up to my room.

  I hadn’t been here for more than three years. But it felt weirdly familiar to slide my key into the lock and push the door open.

  Musty. That was my first reaction. And then, messy. I didn’t own much, but all my possessions were strewn around the room, as if an earthquake had struck in only this spot.

  My room had obviously been searched, and not by careful hands. Dresser drawers were open, their contents thrown about. The mattress was askew, clearly the result of someone searching underneath. The items on my bookshelves were topsy-turvy.

  I dropped my duffel on the disorderly bed and walked straight through to the bathroom. My eye snagged on a pink bottle of salon shampoo that had waited these three years in my shower.

  It was hers. Sophie’s.

  Reaching out, I plucked the bottle off the shower shelf and flipped open the cap. And the scent overtook me right away — green apples. Standing there, remembering how Sophie smelled, it was like a sock to the gut. Of all the things I’d lost — my good name, a chance to get a decent job, my fancy car — none of them mattered like Sophie. She was gone from my life, and it was a permanent condition. No way to fix it.

  I realized a minute later that I was still standing there in my wreck of a room, holding my nose over a plastic shampoo bottle like a moron. But there’s no shame in missing someone. Trust me — I am well versed in shame. The pile of things I was ashamed of doing was as tall as Mount Mansfield. Missing her wasn’t a crime, though. Anybody would.

  Capping the bottle, I set it down again. Then I turned my attention to the toilet, which was the real challenge here. First I flushed it just to make sure it still worked, because I might have something I needed to flush down in a moment.

  Now came the hard part.

  I eyed the tank cover, wondering what I’d find inside. Probably nothing. It wasn’t an original hiding place by any stretch. But when I’d squirreled away my pills, I hadn’t been trying to conceal them from the cops, who would know exactly where to look. I’d only been hiding them from Sophie.

  I used to be so proud of the way I kept my two loves separate from one another—the drug
s and the girlfriend. Even when I’d been snorting an unsustainable quantity of oxy, I was still functional in the garage and still a good lover. What an achiever!

  Until the night it all went wrong.

  I’d played the what if game many, many times. What if she’d known? What if I’d been forced to admit my problem sooner? What if I’d slipped up in a small way, which prevented the ultimate disaster?

  What if was a pointless exercise. Ask any addict.

  Slowly, I lifted the dusty tank cover, peering over the edge as if there might be a serpent inside to bite me. And really, the pills I’d kept out of my life these past months were worse than any snake.

  But there was nothing there. My old hiding place had been discovered, and whatever stash had been here on the worst night of my life were long gone—discovered by the police, and sitting in some evidence locker somewhere, with contraband impounded from all the other losers like me.

  Thank God. Today I would not be truly tested.

  Sure, I’d probably have managed to flush the pills down. But you don’t know until you’ve got them in your hand. There was a chance that I would have pocketed one, just in case of emergency. But to an addict like me, that emergency would inevitably have come within the hour.

  The relapse rate for opiate addicts was over fifty percent. That depressing little statistic rattled through my mind all day long. “But that means almost half of us don’t relapse,” some cheerful soul had pointed out at rehab. “You can choose to be in that half.”

  Easier said than done.

  Feeling the first hit of relief since I’d rolled into town, I set the tank cover back in place. Then I got to work straightening up. When I stripped the bed, a cloud of dust rose up, making me cough. So I opened the window in spite of the November chill. I needed to air out my room. Air out my lungs. Air out my whole goddamned life.

  It took me several hours to get the place halfway to inhabitable. I dragged the Shop-Vac up the stairs to attack the bulk of the dust. I made a trip to the laundromat, went to a drive-through at a fast-food place while my clothes dried, and then ate in my awful car. It wasn’t the home cooking I’d been eating on the Shipley farm, but it got the job done.