Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 76934 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76934 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Lorenzo led me into the dining room and waved toward one of the chairs.
“Where’s the family?”
“Kids are at school. Gigi left with a tray of food, so I’m assuming she’s off with the other wives, stuffing someone’s freezer. She’ll be happy to see you, though. Been years, but she still asks about you. She’s gonna insist you come to dinner.”
“Got two extra chairs?” I asked.
Lorenzo’s head tipped to the side, his brows pinched.
I exhaled hard.
“Alright. There’s no easy way to lead into this.”
“I got as much time as you need,” he invited, resting an arm on the table.
“So, you know I went home when my old man died.”
“Of course. To take care of your ma.”
My mother had always been, to put it nicely, delicate. She’d been one of those women who was always a damsel in distress, always needing saving and pampering. My old man had been happy to do it while he was alive. And the loss sent her into a spiral. My sister had been dealing with it all. But with kids to take care of, she couldn’t handle it all.
“Yeah. She just had a never-ending list of new conditions to deal with.” Some of them were real. Some were made up for attention.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Over time, she got less and less mobile.” Mostly because she didn’t want to do the work to stay that way. Something not only I, but her doctors, and her physical therapists were on her case about. But she didn’t want to hear it. “Eventually, she got really frail and broke her hip. Went into long-term care.” Where, honestly, she was happy. She loved being taken care of. That was what she got there.
“But you didn’t come back?” he asked. He tried to cover it, but I could hear a bit of hurt in his voice. Like he thought I wanted to stay away.
I exhaled hard.
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah. So after my ma stabilized in long-term care, my sister… my sister got walked out on.”
It was more than that.
She’d been relentlessly cheated on for years, which she only learned about when her yearly visit with her gyno led to an STI panel lit up like a Christmas tree.
“Asshole.”
“Honestly, she was better off without him. But… but the whole situation took its toll. Her mental health went in the toilet. She ended up in and out of treatment for mental breakdowns and, later, suicide attempts.”
“Christ. Chris, why didn’t you call me?”
“I was just… dealing with family.”
“We’re family too.”
They were. But they had lives in the city. They couldn’t be out in the boonies upstate with me. On a good day, it was an eight-hour drive from the city to my hometown. Too far for anyone to make the trek.
“There really wasn’t much anyone could have done.”
“We could have lightened the load,” Lorenzo insisted. “I’m guessing when your sister was trying to recover, you were taking care of the kids?”
“Their old man took off and disappeared to avoid child support. I was all they had left. Then, about a year back, my ma passed.”
“Chris, fuck, man. You needed us.”
I did.
I’d never felt as overwhelmed and alone as I had when trying to keep my family afloat.
“Here’s the hardest part,” I said, rolling the tension out of my neck. “Six months ago, my sister’s last attempt was… successful.”
“Jesus. Fuck, Chris. I’m so sorry. Why… why didn’t you tell us?”
“Honestly, I couldn’t see straight at the time. I had my own grief, but then the kids’ too.”
“I can’t fucking imagine.”
I would never say it out loud, but some part of me knew that it was going to happen. My sister never seemed to find joy again after her first suicide attempt. No matter how much therapy or how many meds she tried, she was lost in the darkness of her mind. There was just some gut feeling that one day would be the day. So much so that I’d removed all the knives and box cutters from her house. I filled her garage so she couldn’t pull her car inside and turn it on. I emptied the medicine cabinets. Removed toxic chemicals.
In the end, though, she still had to get around in life. She still had her car. And she used it to drive to a liquor store, chugged a bottle of vodka, then drove her car off a bridge.
I’d been driving to her house when all the cop cars and emergency vehicles came flying past me. I had no idea until there was a knock on the door later. And two cops outside with serious faces.
They didn’t even need to tell me. I knew with one look.
And that had been hard.
But telling the kids?
That fucking shattered something in me.
And, of course, them.
I shook off the memories, grounding myself in the moment.
“Anyway. It took a while to get things all settled. Funeral, her house, the custody of the kids. Then I heard that job that I’d worked on all those years ago, the construction one?”