Stef Ann Holm, Lucy Back [paper ebook reader .TXT] 📗

telling him her hard luck story—something unlike her. But it had been a long day of disappointment, and he mentioned having a vacant house he used to rent out before the foundation resettled and knocked off the right side of the porch.

She’d begged him to show it to her, and she’d made a deal on the spot for $1,500 a month. Dirt cheap. Rent in Red Duck was obscene. She couldn’t even think about buying, not even with the proceeds from the sale of her Boise house. And Timberline? You couldn’t touch a home for less than two million.

“We have to live in a piece of junk?” Jason’s question broke through Lucy’s thoughts.

“No. It’s not bad at all. I really liked it and there’s a view of the ski mountain.”

Well, sort of. The trees blocked it off. But they could fix up the house and make it a home. It was the best she could do and still live in Red Duck.

“I never wanted to move here,” Jason grumbled, flipping the key of her Passat open and closed like a switchblade. “Why can’t we go back to Boise? All my friends are there.”

She kept an assurance in her voice she hoped would convince him. “You’ll make friends here.”

Matt rubbed his belly. “I’m hungry.”

“We’ll get something to eat soon.”

The deputy returned with a map. She followed his finger as he traced a road, showed her how to get to the house.

“Just what is your business in town?” the sheriff asked, puffing out his chest like a rooster.

Lucy stared at him a long moment. “My business.” Then she thanked the two for their time, put the boys back in their respective vehicles and began traveling on Honeysuckle Road.

Her hands gripped the wheel of the moving van, her stomach pitching. Not from hunger this time, but from trepidation. She hoped she wasn’t making a mistake.

She’d spent hours, days…several weeks planning for this move and contemplating every angle of what could or would go wrong. The positives outweighed the negatives. She could work up here, make a nice living as a personal chef. She’d gotten that part covered and knew the business could be stable. But a piece of her was riddled with guilt. She’d taken the boys away from the only home they’d ever known. She’d sold the house she’d won in the divorce—a modest four-bedroom with a big yard, basketball hoop, skateboard ramp in front where all the neighborhood boys congregated.

Things would be different for them up here. But it would be a good different. She had to remind herself that this was for the best.

But as the house came into view, with its gray-weathered sides, a magpie squawking on the roof, the porch sloping and in need of repair, and a discarded truck tailgate in the front yard, she bit the inside of her lip.

Matt rolled down the window and stuck his head out as she let the truck engine idle. “Cool! This place looks like a junky fort.”

Jason had gotten out of the Passat, stood next to his brother at the open window. He gave Lucy a pathetic glare, then muttered, “I wish you and Dad never got a divorce.”

Lucy wished the same thing, but her marriage bed could sleep only two people comfortably, and Gary had decided he liked his office secretary taking dictation in between the sheets. Her ex suffered from classic male menopause and had bailed to Mexico on an extended holiday.

“Well, we did get a divorce,” Lucy all but snapped. “So now it’s the three of us and we’re going to make the best of it.”

She spoke more to reassure herself than the two boys, whose gazes had slid back to the house just as the magpie dropped a present on the front steps before flying away.

Before the day was over, Jason knew he could find someone in Red Duck to hit him up with a bag of pot. His mom was dumb to think that this potato-land town didn’t have drugs for sale. If a dude had some money, anything was for sale.

Buying weed and keeping a joint in his hall locker had been effing stupid. The Special Resource Officer at his old high school was like a canine. He had a nose that could sniff out a stale P & J sandwich locked tight in a binder. Getting busted had reeked. Jason had really screwed up. That had been the first time he’d smoked weed, and he’d paid a penalty for it, but he’d done alcohol and never got caught.

When Gary left them, Jason got drunk on purpose to make the hurt go away—a pain he didn’t talk about, not even with Matt. His mom never found out about the drinking. He told her he was going to the skateboard park with his friends, but they ended up at Brian’s house instead. Brian’s parents had a wet bar stocked with any liquor you could think of. Brian put water in the vodka bottle to make up for what he and his friends drank. They took some Smirnoff Ice, too, since there were a couple cases of it in the garage refrigerator. Five or six missing bottles—it was nothing noticeable.

Thinking back, Jason remembered how he’d puked his guts up and had a headache all the next day. He’d lied, told his mom he had the flu. After that, he swore, no more alcohol. Just grass. But not regularly. Only when he needed to forget his troubles.

He didn’t hate his mom. She was trying. And he knew that he was a shit to her sometimes. But he couldn’t help himself. He had a lot of anger in him. Sometimes he just wanted to hit something. Like maybe Gary for running off to Mexico.

Gary was an effing bastard.

He only called on Sunday nights, and stayed on the phone for ten minutes before he said he had to go. And he always called at exactly 8:00 p.m. because that’s when the rates went down calling from Meh-he-co.

Jason