Aunt Denise stood in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed like she was guarding a border.
“I’ve done all I can,” she said for the third time. “You’re nineteen, Owen. You’re an adult. And Cody’s almost grown. I can’t carry both of you anymore.”
That wasn’t true. She could have. She just didn’t want to.
Since Mom passed from cancer the year before, Denise had reminded us every chance she got that we were expensive. Expensive to feed, expensive to clothe, expensive to insure, expensive to grieve. She said it like grief was a hobby we’d picked up to inconvenience her.
I looked past her into the kitchen. The roast chicken she’d made for herself sat on the stove, untouched. The table was set for one.
“Where are we supposed to go?” I asked.
She lifted one shoulder. “You’ve got that truck.”
The truck. An old green Ford F-150 with a cracked windshield and a gas gauge that worked only when it felt like it. Grandpa Walter had left it behind years ago, and somehow Denise had never managed to sell it. That truck had become our inheritance by neglect.
“It barely runs,” Cody said.
“Then make it run.”
She said it cold, but there was something nervous under it. Denise didn’t like being looked at too long. Maybe somewhere under all her selfishness she knew exactly what she was doing.
I picked up one of the trash bags. “Mom would hate you for this.”
That landed.
Her face tightened. “Your mother made a lifetime of bad choices, Owen. Don’t put that on me.”
Cody moved before I did. One second he was standing by the door, the next he’d taken two steps into the hallway, fists balled. I caught his arm.
“Don’t,” I said quietly.
He was shaking.
Denise took a step back. “Get out.”
There are moments when your life changes so cleanly you can almost hear the snap. That was one of them. Not Mom getting sick. Not the funeral. Not the slow months after, when our house got sold to cover medical debt and Denise took us in with the martyrdom of a woman auditioning for sainthood in her own head.
No, the real break was that rainy night when the front door slammed behind us and the porch light clicked off before we’d even reached the truck.
For a second, Cody just stood in the rain with his bag at his feet.
Then he said, “I’m gonna remember this for the rest of my life.”
“So am I,” I said.
We threw our stuff in the truck bed under an old tarp and climbed into the cab. The engine coughed three times before turning over. The heater blew air that smelled like dust and pennies, but it was better than nothing.
We sat there for a while in the dark.
“Where now?” Cody asked.
I gripped the wheel. My mind ran through every bad option in a fifty-mile radius. Friends’ couches. Shelters in Asheville. Sleeping in Walmart parking lots. I had sixty-eight dollars in my wallet. Cody had maybe twenty.
Then I remembered something Mom used to say when she was tired and thinking out loud.
If all else fails, there’s always your granddaddy’s mountain.
Back when she was a kid, Grandpa Walter had lived up in the Pisgah forest on a small patch of land near a place called Laurel Fork. He’d sold off part of it years ago, but he always claimed he still had “a few honest acres the banks forgot.”
Mom used to laugh at that. Denise used to roll her eyes and call him a wild old hermit.
He died when I was twelve. All I remembered clearly were his hands—scarred, strong, smelling like cedar and tobacco—and the way he’d wink like he knew a joke nobody else was smart enough to hear.
“You remember Grandpa’s place?” I asked.
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