Page 4 of The Tomorrows After You
I brushed my teeth and got ready for bed, eager to wash the day of travel offme. I could hear Jacob downstairs, blaring some war movie. He’d offered to watch something else if I wanted to join him but I declined.
Sitting down at the antique computer, I moved the mouse to wake it up. I opened the browser and went to History, hoping I could relaunch all the tabs I had had open.
My stomach lurched when I spotted it. My recentnoise.Clear as day, scattered across Uncle-fucking-Jacob’s search history. Not just once. Not twice. But at least seven different searches and visits over the last two weeks.
Noise.I scoffed. What a great euphemism for an illegally taken sex tape of me that had been unapologetically released.
Shame. Embarrassment. Disgust. All of it rolled offme in waves. He’d been looking at it. Watching it. For weeks.
Jacob’s cackle from downstairs made me jump and I felt like I might throw up. My heart hammered in my throat.
Fuck this.Fuck him. And fuck this house.
2
Riot
My five a.m. alarm felt like a cruel joke. I silenced it, wondering when had been the last time I’d slept in?
Probably before the weight of my life’s greatest mistake weighed me down every night.
I cursed the little prick of a police deputy, Jeremy Blackwell, for giving me the earliest community service assignments.
Thankfully, I didn’t mind today’s work. I liked groundskeeping. It offered immediate gratification, and I found the rhythm of mowing, edging, and trimming soothing. I’d picked up a few side jobs for a local landscaping business earlier this spring to make some extra money. That is, until one of the customers found outIwas the one pruning their roses and had me fired.Fucking Cherry Mitchell.
I pulled on my work clothes and emerged from my bedroom like a baby bird hatching into the world.
Only I was hatching into my large, luxurious double-wide park model.
As I brushed my teeth, I was once again confused by the stranger staring back at me in the mirror. My beard grew unrecognizably long. It was scraggly and unkempt, and made me appear crazier than everyone thought I was. But Katie told me not to shave, so I suppose I kept it overgrown as some show of disobedience.
Katie, my great redeemer.
I sighed, splashing water on my face. A few years back, I found myself on the wrong end of an inmate fight and I cracked my chin open. Medical wasn’t top of the line and the stitches had been a pretty gnarly chop job. I shaved when I got home, happy to have a real razor and shave gel for the firsttime in a decade. But Katie told me I needed to keep a beard to cover the scar.
“It would be one thing if it were somewhere you could cover up, but Ry, if you don’t hide it, the evidence of your past is literally all over your face. Anytime someone looks at you, they'll see the scar and think‘prison’.”
Katie made me her pet project since the day I got home, showing up on my doorstep with a basket of muffins. I appreciated it, even though it gave me a false sense of how the town would receive me. She secured me a job at her dad’s auto body shop that paid well, and the guys didn’t treat me like a convict, so I’d been grateful.
Part of me suspected it might be her way of living out some buried high school fantasy. She’d had a crush on me but, at the risk of sounding like an asshole, a lot of girls had. I only had one love back then, and that was football.
But now I had nothing and although I found her overbearing, I’m ashamed to admit I was happy for the attention. Katie was kind and pretty, but even after everything she’d done for me, she didn’t stir anything emotional or otherwise inside me except gratitude.
And that was saying something, considering I hadn’t been with a woman in almost twelve years now.
I considered throwing a pot of coffee on, but decided against it, grabbing a bottle of Gatorade instead. Downing the sugary drink, I gazed across the sprawling landscape of my backyard. It had been in my father’s family for generations.
And then I fucked it all up.
The church offered to buy it and lease it back to us so it wouldn’t go to the land bank.I still held hope of buying it back, but, quite literally, onlyGodknew how much they’d ask for.
The land extended beyond eyesight. My double-wide was supposed to have been temporary. My brother Brennan laid out plans for a nice sprawling farmhouse, but the money ran out before he finished the drawings.
I loved my brother, but I couldn’t live with him and his quirks. So, I made him a deal… if he laid out the plans for a small one-bedroom, I’d build it. It would be the same cost as another manufactured home, and I knew he’d like it better if it were up to his very high standards of specifications.
And God bless him, did he lay out those plans. It stood like an adult treehouse and pride bloomed within me. I had no experience as a carpenter, but I spent the last ten years working with my hands and all kinds of tools, so it wasn’t hard to pick up. Especially with the building plans Brennan drew.
I mean, down to the exact directions.
