play guitar until someone complained or he couldn’t see the hand before his face.
He never fought for the television. He never asked for anything. He was out of their business and he was out of theirs. The silent covenant had been working just fine. By zipping his lip, making sure everything was secure, and begrudgingly avoiding Tony under Lee’s repeated demands, he remained off his father’s radar – and so did Aly.
Over his shoulder, Noah watched his footing. On and off drizzling had made traveling across the sloping cement a dicey task in general – but the dark made it an easy fall. Backing down the driveway, he dragged the massive trashcans with him. Shakes of adrenaline were only beginning to fade. He was still trying to calm down after the fight.
Luke and Owen had snitched like a pair of rats. The second they walked in Hunt’s door, Rolland dragged everything out of them. How he spent his days with Alyson Glass, sharing the hush-hush legends from the sacred no-one-cares middle-of-nowhere and blowing his paycheck on gas so he could pick her up like a convict they'd made him. How he had admitted, yes, the researcher’s daughter was his girlfriend, and yes, he did take her into the woods and intentionally provoke the beast of the woods.
It was in the open, sprayed across the table. His actions, his desires, his recklessness– it was all warped around the girl in the boots, the something he’d desperately protected from the elder’s claws. His association was distorted into a perversion. Skeletons burst from the closet, femurs and phalanges thrown in his father’s face. Everything he had done was dropped into the worst possible light, using visceral words that stroked Lee’s ego while dramatizing Noah into a family-shaming liar.
Noah never understood how Owen’s father could make them belly-up so fast. Besides a taut face and nasty bark, the guy was weak. Skinny and long-haired with the constant odor of marijuana and liquor, he catered to his wife’s prescription consumption as though it wasn’t killing her – like she didn’t drag so-called-mutualfriend men home when he was working late on the roads or passed out somewhere, like she didn’t beat on Owen, who in following Rolland’s footsteps refused to run or defend himself against the woman in spite of being as big as a Viking-Gladiator-Pirate.
Rolland was just like Lee – an addict with self-gratifying tunnelvision. Their so-called accomplishments of disciplining their offspring, working in misery, and participating in morbid spouseenabling wiped their sins clean, revering them to all of Ashland – justification by association, never questioned.
It was sickening, the cycle. John, Andrew, Isaac, and maybe even Mark… they would all become Lees, just like Lee and had become Grandfather Yazzie. Noah knew he never would, just like he knew he could never let Sarah become Aunt Maria – or worse, MaryAgnes. At least Maria had fought to break free. He didn’t know if the poison was in the alcohol, the gene-pool, or just Ashland. Noah felt it when Lee spat in his face. It radiated from the man as he threw Noah into a booth, screaming and shaking with accusations. His father’s words shredded the walls he brought up around him. He almost lost it on the spot.
His father said Noah’s greatest disgrace is that he denied nothing, shameless. Lee was right. Noah refused to feel that it was wrong, refused to say so, refused to appease a man who he had no respect for. After landing a fist in his stomach, his father stumbled – gripping the sides of a table to catch himself. Afterwards, he pointed to the door, demanding Noah get out of sight until after everyone was sleeping. Punishment would follow in the morning.
When the bastard was sober enough to think.
Noah felt the anger rising again, flooding his lungs, welling in his chest. He stopped, wiping his hands on his jeans and lifting his shirt. It was as contused as Aly’s leg, swollen and dark. The sight was a reminder of the throbbing nausea that followed the fist, knocking the wind out of him.
He wondered why he had stifled the urge to grab the old man’s wrist and kick him to the ground. At first, he was sure it’d make it worse. His brothers would come after him or Lee would be too drunk to retreat. It was something else that stopped him, though.
Noah hated getting violent, feeling like he could see himself as Lee, dominating and brutal. Still, sometimes he