Page 7 of Adam's Rising

Adam blew out a breath. “Thinking.” He couldn’t tell Peter what he was contemplating. His kid brother would be all over going to Daytona Beach. But Peter was only fourteen. He needed to finish high school.

Instead of overthinking his decision, Adam turned left.

“Adam!” Peter craned his neck, looking behind the truck. “Anchorage is that way. Thomas told us to head to Anchorage.”

“Change of plan,” Adam said simply. “There’s a ranch in Wasilla. I can work. Make some money. Then maybe we can —”

Peter jerked the backpack off the floor. “We have plenty of money.” He pulled out two wads of bills. “They’re not ones with a hundred wrapped around them, either. They’re all hundreds. If Thomas had this much, why didn’t we ever have more food?”

Adam slammed on the brakes and stared at the rolled-up bills. He didn’t answer right away. He couldn’t. Thomas hadn’t been spending his own money. That much was clear now. The food had been scarce because the money hadn’t belonged to him. Not really.

Eyes on the road, Adam exhaled softly. “Because that cash wasn’t ours to spend, obviously. Now, put it away until I figure out what to do with it,” Adam growled. “If anyone sees —”

“See us?” Peter shoved the wads of money back into the sack. “Who’s going to see us?” He motioned around them at the two-lane road, the darkened businesses. Wasilla was larger than Falcon Run, by a longshot, but it was still the middle of the night. Peter shook his head. “We’re in the middle of Bumfuc —”

“Peter! Don’t talk like that.”

Peter scoffed. “Who’s gonna hear me?”

“Ihear you. It’s… it’s…disrespectful, and… probably offensive to… Egyptians.” Whenever their father would slip and swear in front of their mother — which was unusual — their mother would say that cursing was disrespectful and, worse, it showed a person’s ignorance, revealing they weren’t creative enough to come up with a proper adjective or interjection.

“Whatever, man,” Peter grumbled. “Dad cussed. You and Thomas cuss —”

“Only when I’m at the end of my rope… and there’s still a fifty-foot drop below me.” Exactly how he’d felt two hours ago. He used the climbing metaphor, knowing Peter — who was a much better climber than he ever was — would understand the feeling of your life hanging on by a thread.

Peter glanced around at the empty intersection again. “What I was going to say… in the middle of nowhere… is that if we don’t go to Anchorage, how will Thomas find us? Didn’t he tell you where we’d meet?”

Adam whooshed out a breath.Oh, no… Dear God.How do I explain? He’d just assumed Peter had understood. But why would he? He wasn’t there. His body hadn’t been flattened into muddy snow by a trained gunman. Jeff had grown up in the same part of Alaska they had, but he’d acted as if he’d just come back from Vietnam.

Instead of answering Peter’s question, Adam focused on a car pulling into a parking lot a half-mile down the road. The headlights went out, then the door slowly opened. A couple of seconds later, an older woman, her coat drawn tight around her neck, shuffled to the side door of a squat wood building with only a red bowtie-looking sign touting BUDWEISER. He guessed patrons must be more interested in the fact that the restaurant served beer than food.

Adam pointed through the hazy windshield. “Isn’t that the diner Dad took us to before picking up a new horse he needed to train?” Adam had never put together that the ranch Jeff had directed him to might be the place he’d been as a child. Clara Mae ran the ranch, he remembered. She’d been tough on the hands but she’d treated Adam well.

“Yeah…” Peter nodded. “Remember their flapjacks? I cried when the waitress set the platter in front of me.”

Adam shifted his foot from the brake to the accelerator, heading toward the restaurant. “I remember that. I was so confused. Why did you cry? I thought you liked flapjacks.”

Peter turned on the bench seat, lifting his hands to indicate the size of something. “That one blueberry flapjack was bigger than the plate. You know how Dad always insisted we eat everything on our plates. Well, I remember staring down at that gigantic brown thing the size of flattened bear skat — with berries even — thinking, I’ll never be able to eat this, and then Dad will be mad at me.”

“Oh…” Adam covered his mouth, trying not to laugh. He certainly didn’t feel like laughing. Any minute, Peter would remember his question about meeting Thomas in Anchorage. Still, Peter was easy to sidetrack. Both Thomas and Adam had learned early on that if their baby brother was complaining about something, they could get him thinking about something else — sometimes just by staring off in the distance. Peter would be ranting one minute, and Adam would focus on a specific location in a tree or simply out the window, and Peter would forget his train of thought, anxious to join in with whatever his brother had discovered.

Peter’s expression turned down. “Dad didn’t yell at me, though. He simply picked up my fork and knife, folded the flapjack to look like a small stack of flapjacks, then winked at me and said, ‘I’d be happy to help finish it off if you can’t.Don’t forget Thomas has a larger appetite than all of us put together.’ Hm,” Peter finished, looking down at the geometrical pattern on the woven seat cover. “I totally hadn’t thought about that day in forever. I might never have again if we hadn’t come here. I miss them, Adam.”

“Mom and Dad?” Adam tested.

“Yeah… Thomas, too. He used to be so cool, so laid back. Now he’s all —”

“Stop right there,” Adam warned as he pulled into what he hoped was a parking space outside the café. Although there wasn’t three feet of snow on the ground, slush and mush covered any lines that might indicate where he should park. “Thomas worked his ass off to keep us in our home.”

Peter pulled in a shaky breath. “I know… I just get so — angry. It’s not fair what happened to us. If I were Thomas, I would have ditched us two leaches. I mean, really, why should he have to take care of two teenagers? I know it’s not fair. Still, I wish he could be a kid — I wish the three of us could.”

Adam thought about his father’s constant reminder when any of them had whined about not getting what they wanted thatlife isn’t fairbut held his tongue. Peter had already lost, in a way, two fathers. Adam didn’t need to be Peter’s father; he needed to be his older brother. Like Peter said, they were still kids.

The coffee shop probably wouldn’t open for another hour or so. The woman probably gets in early to make fresh biscuits or pastries. Adam seemed to remember that there had always been fresh baked goods.

Adam turned off the ignition — no sense in wasting gas — and nodded to the coffee shop. “We can get one of those flapjacks when they open, which probably won’t be for an hour or longer. We need to talk, anyway, and here’s just as good as anywhere else, I suspect.”

Peter pursed his lips, then looked up at the stained headliner. “We don’t need to talk, Adam. I think I know why you made the turn for Wasilla.”

---