Love After Life by Daisy Gold

Author:Daisy Gold [Gold, Daisy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

4

Cyrus

The last time I trusted another human being enough to fall asleep in a car was when Papaw drove us out to the Grand Canyon. I wasn’t much more than six or seven at the time, and I remember Judah’s head tucked under my chin in the back of Nana’s old Caddy. I fell asleep somewhere in New Mexico and woke up looking out at the edge of the world.

I’m right back there, drifting through dreams of plateaus and crooked trees when Rachel’s door slams shut. I come awake with Judah’s boyhood smile and summer buzz cut in my eyes, and I have to blink him away before I register the absolute rathole we’re parked in front of.

We’re in a small neighborhood set back in a stand of pines, and I’ve never been here before. I believe I’d remember this.

The houses are better defined as shacks, and they likely should have been condemned shortly after they were built. Not one of them looks stout enough to handle a stiff breeze much less a tornado, and I don’t think there’s a window in the entire place that’s unbroken. All of the yards are covered in garbage—televisions with busted-out screens, bikes in pieces, shredded plastics, and piles of old toys. There are scraps I can’t even recognize, objects that are just pieces of things that once were.

This isn’t poverty. It’s meth.

And Rachel is beelining for the house in front of us.

It takes me thirty seconds to get my door open and crutches under my arms, and I resent every damn one of them. I’m halfway to the cracked concrete slab that acts as a porch when Rachel stumbles back out the door, followed by a tweaked-out fucker who might weigh a buck-fifty soaking wet but looks pissed and high enough to kill her regardless.

A younger version of Rachel rushes out behind him and grabs his arm, her hair bleached a white-blonde that clashes against dark roots. “Don’t hurt her!” the woman shrieks.

“I told you,” the man snarls at Rachel. “I told you, you ain’t welcome here. I told you what I’d do if you came back.”

“You lay hands on her, and I’ll fucking kill you,” I shout. It’s my business voice—one I haven’t had a call to use in a good long while, and it’s effective as far as such things go. All three of them freeze, and I get stuck on Rachel’s eyes a minute. They’re all full of tears again, and that leaves me feeling a mite murderous.

The man scoffs, eyeing my awkward approach with a gap-toothed grin as he reaches for my woman. “What are you gonna do?”

I pause a couple of feet away and pull the crutch out from under my right arm, holding it like a bat. “Just what I said,” I answer.

Rachel and the woman I presume to be her sister have a little more in the way of an instinct for self-preservation than this man because they both dart out of the way. The bulk of my weight is on my good leg, but my other leg is not complaining about carrying some of the load.

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