She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,209

operating with the certainty that my parents were dead. I visited their graves. I spoke to them. I prayed for them. Always gone, always something of the past. I knew their faces only from old photographs and dreams, and the sound of their voices eluded me like the waters of a fast-running creek. I made peace with my parent’s deaths long before I understood what that really meant. When you lose your parents at such an early age, it simply is. You know and understand nothing else. Auntie Jo always told me I should be grateful I had been so young. Both her parents died when she was an adult, and the vividness of those memories haunted her nightly.

I never told her about my dream, my personal haunting.

A dream I now knew to be not a dream at all, but the chaotic memories of a child.

If I had told her about the dream, would she have confessed my father was still alive?

Would she have broken down in tears and told me that was really why she hated him so much? My mother died, and he lived? She, this aunt who raised me as her own, part of a cover-up all these years?

Would she have called him a coward? Said he ran away? Might as well be dead?

How I wish I could have spoken to her about all of this. I hated her for keeping the truth from me, yet I loved her for protecting me, and both of those things seemed to be one and the same.

The gravel of the driveway crunched under our tires.

Stella held the pamphlet we found back at the welcome center in her hand, and she gripped it in such a way the paper crinkled.

A large, old house appeared on our left, peeking out from around the tall maples and alders, their branches swaying lazily in the early morning breeze. A hand-painted sign on a short post read Guest Parking, with an arrow pointing to the left. On our right stood a woodshed with enough cut logs stacked against the outer walls to last at least three cold winters. Beyond the shed was a garden, fenced high to keep out the deer and other wildlife. There were fruit trees, too. Apples and pears, mostly.

The gravel driveway opened up into a concrete parking pad on the left, then wound deeper into the property, toward another house, newer than the first, this one perched on a slight hill at the edge of the cliff overlooking the waters of Puget Sound and the shipping lanes a hundred feet below.

“This is breathtaking,” Stella said.

A white picket fence ran along the outer edge of the yard. There had to be four, maybe five acres. “How can he afford all this? This can’t be the right place.”

“Park over there.” Stella pointed toward the guest spaces.

I pulled up next to a brown Chevy pickup with a lawnmower in the back and switched off the engine.

I was out the car and around to Stella’s side to help her before I noticed the man watching us from the back corner of the woodshed, one hand holding a black trash bag and the other on the butt of a gun holstered to his right hip.

He was about my height, with brown hair peppered with gray that carried on into his beard. He wore jeans, a blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and black boots. There was a hard edge to his face, aged beyond his years. His eyes were sharp, though, fox-like, darting from me to Stella and back again from behind black framed glasses. His hands were dirty.

He didn’t move.

Not at first.

When he finally did approach us, he did so with trepidation, his grip tightening on the trash bag. As he grew closer, his right hand fell from the gun. He tugged the tail of his shirt down over it. He studied us both. His gaze lingered on Stella’s gloves. He ducked slightly to get a better look at Dewey Hobson, still in the back seat. Then he turned back to us, his expression flat.

“Dad?” the single word fell from my lips, so soft I wasn’t sure anyone else had heard it.

I’m not sure exactly what I expected. Maybe for this man to drop the bag, rush me, and embrace me in a hug? Tears, perhaps. A rushed explanation of the years gone, broken words covering two decades of deceit, secrets, and lies?

My God, son. You’re a man.

I’ve missed you, Dad. Every second,