Page 73 of Whiskey Chase
“I’d like to point out that I haven’t turned you down, and we have pie.”
“You didn’t say yes,” she said, pouting at her hands in her lap.
“Scarlett, when’s the last time anyone said no to you?”
“It happens on occasion.”
“Not this occasion,” I told her.
She raised her gaze to mine, and I felt my heart glow a little brighter.
“I’ll be your boyfriend on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You promise to never cook again.”
28
Scarlett
Igave the front door a good kick. Warmer weather always made the front door of my father’s house stick. I hadn’t been back here since that morning I’d found him. Even in death, Jonah Bodine Sr. hadn’t looked peaceful.
I took a deep breath and stepped inside. My childhood home was a bungalow. The yellow siding had always struck me as too cheerful for the family that lived within its walls. Especially after Mama died.
I dropped the keys on the skinny table Gibson had made in his high school shop class. Dad’s keys were there too. Dropped there the afternoon before he died. I’d muscled him into the house. He’d snuck a flask along to a job site, and I’d had to bring him home early before the clients saw him shit-faced on the job. I remembered tossing his keys on the table one last time.
It was stuffy and dark inside, reminding me that this was now an empty house. There was no more life in the Bodine bungalow. The blinds had been drawn the night Daddy died and remained closed since then. I’d been avoiding this place and the memories just like my brothers. But I was the only one of us who had the memory of him dead in his bed.
I turned into the long skinny living room on the left. Everything here was exactly the same as it always had been. A saggy plaid couch. The recliner that didn’t recline quite right. The flat screen TV I’d bought dad two years ago when his rabbit-eared dinosaur had finally called it quits. I’d mounted it above the fireplace for him with the sad hope that having something nice would make him want to make an effort in other areas of his life.
My father had taught me a lot of things. He’d shown me how to use every tool known to man to fix just about every problem created by man. But he’d also taught me that no matter how much I hoped or prayed or tried, I couldn’t control other people. I couldn’t make them make the choices I wanted them to. I couldn’t drag them into health and happiness.
It was a painful, essential lesson.
With a sigh, I set about opening the blinds and windows in the long room. Maybe some fresh June air would sweep out some of those memories that haunted us all.
One by one, I worked my way around the room, opening them before moving on to the eat-in kitchen on the opposite side of the house and doing the same. The first floor was divided in half by the stairs to the second floor. I tried to look at the house objectively, like a new project for which history didn’t matter.
I’d always wanted to expand the kitchen into the useless breakfast nook. Now I could.
I skipped Daddy’s bedroom in the back of the house. I wasn’t ready to revisit that room. Not with its most recent memories.
Growing up, it had been mine. The only one on the first floor. There were three small rooms upstairs. When I’d moved out at nineteen, I’d moved Daddy to the first floor since his drinking made him unsteady on his feet.
I looked around trying to decide where to begin.
Overwhelmed, I sat down on the first step of the staircase. It still squeaked as it had for fifteen years. We’d all learned to skip that step when it would have been faster and smarter to just fix the damn thing.
I sighed out a long breath. Jonah, bless his big heart, had offered to come help me today. But it wasn’t exactly fair to him, asking him to clean out the home of the father who’d abandoned him.
So, it fell to me. I put my face in my hands and allowed myself a moment of pathetic self-pity. What did I really have to be upset about? I, Scarlett Bodine, age 26, had my very first official boyfriend. We’d sealed the deal last night with baked potato and pie and some vigorous, acrobatic sex on my porch swing. At least until the chain had snapped and we’d fallen in a heap to the floor.
Totally worth the bruises.
In the grand scheme of things, having to tackle my father’s house alone was an emotional inconvenience, but my good stuff outweighed the bad. Now, if I could just get up the gumption to start…
The crunch of tires on gravel out front had me lifting my head.
