Page 8

8. LIGHTS OUT

SAMMY

I drove past the RV and trailer park near the hospital as I headed back to Main Street, and it reminded me of all the duties I’d neglected while I sat in the hospital waiting for a complete stranger to wake up. My family owned a huge chunk of property in Violence, New Mexico. It was not too far across the state line from Arizona, but it felt like a million miles away from where I’d been for the past three days.

Despite knowing that I needed to get back to work, exhaustion beat down on me and I didn’t think it was in me to go deal with the campground mess, the camp store, or any repairs that needed to be done to any RVs that were waiting to be serviced. I wasn’t sure who my Uncle Brady got to run things in my place. If he was smart, he made my dad and stepmom do something to contribute to the family businesses. My stepmom thought she was above having to work, especially since she had given birth to my baby brother four years ago. My dad had his own business setting up state-of-the-art security for some of the richer landowners and businesses in the state. He often traveled to do so. My stepmother had been a souvenir he brought back from one of those trips.

Since he made really good money with his own business, Dad didn’t think he owed any time to what he called the family’s “white trash” ventures. He never spoke about us, our family businesses, or land like that before he met Colleen. In fact, if my grandfather was still alive to hear it, he would have made damn sure my dad never saw a penny from the businesses and wouldn’t have been allowed to live on the land, either.

My biggest problem with my stepmother was that she kept insisting that she should be the one to move into my grandparent’s old house. I’ve avoided my dad for months because he kept pushing for it to make her happy. They had a perfectly good, three bedroom house for them. It had been just fine for Dad, me, and my mom when she was still alive. It was where I grew up, so I knew it wasn’t a hardship for Colleen and her son to live there, especially since she had insisted on completely remodeling it when she moved in with my father. When I first came back from the Army, I no longer recognized it as the house I grew up in.

Then, my grandfather died, and Colleen started her shit about moving into his house because it was bigger. The only problem was that he had left it to me, so that I would have a home to come back to that I could be comfortable with, since Colleen had changed everything about my family’s house. The woman had even gone so far as to burn all the pictures left there with my mother in them. I hated her. I tried for my dad’s sake when I first came back, but I hated his wife. The only reason I still bothered to force a relationship with any of them was because of my little brother.

It pissed them off that I hadn’t moved into the house my grandfather left me and refused to allow them to do so. I wasn’t ready to take over my grandparents’ house just yet, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want it. While I worked out what I wanted to do with the house, because it needed some updates, I lived in a cottage near the campground. It made the commute to work a two-minute walk. It also meant that I could take my time, save some money, and really upgrade the house that was meant to be mine without having to live in a perpetual construction zone.

It was almost as though I knew what would be waiting for me when I got home. The way my thoughts drifted to my dad and his new family when I had so many other things to worry about, should have been a sign. When I pulled my car around the dirt road that led up to the campground, I could see Colleen’s black Lexus in my driveway. I wanted to laugh because it was coated in a layer of dust again, and I knew that pissed her off. My uncles would not allow for the road into the property or the ones on the property to be paved, as my father’s wife continually demanded. They all agreed the upkeep would be too costly and that it wasn’t worth it, since the paved portion of the road would be full of dust and dirt after the next windstorm anyway.

I groaned when I realized that the bitch had been lying in wait for me, but I was also in no mood to put up with her shit. I dialed my uncle’s phone.

“Brady Morton,” he answered. I rolled my eyes, because he was probably too caught up in whatever he was working on to look at his phone before he answered.

“Hey, I need someone at my cabin ASAP.”

“Why?”

“The step monster is there waiting for me, and I’m too damn tired to deal with her on my own. Either come be my witness or bring a shovel and be prepared to dig a deep hole.”

“Shit. Be right there, kiddo. Take your time. I’ll cut across on the side-by-side and meet you there.”

“Will do.” I hung up and slowed from the seven miles per hour I was doing down to a crawl that didn’t even register on my speedometer. I waited until I saw the dust trail Uncle Brady kicked up as he crossed the open expanse of land between the garage where he worked on motorcycles and older cars to the cabin I lived in. Once I knew he would arrive before I did, I picked up my speed.

When I managed to get my truck parked, I could already hear my uncle going off on my stepmother.

“What in the hell are you doing here?”

I got out of my truck and circled around the back where they stood in the drive closest to the cabin I’d been living in. My stepmother was dressed in what amounted to a power suit you might see an executive-level woman in the big city wearing, which was insane because we were in the middle of nowhere, and she was not employed.

“I was waiting for that brat to get home.”

“Why? I don’t have anything to say to you,” I called out to her as I moved closer.

“I had to step in and do your job for you while you were out partying for days on end!” The bitch screeched at me.

“I wasn’t out partying. I was at the hospital with a friend.”

Brady did a doubletake in my direction at my admission but turned back to Colleen and shook his head. “Sammy hasn’t taken a single day off since she came home from the Army. Even if she was out partying, which is none of your fucking business, she has more than earned her time off. I can’t say the same for you, though.”

“I don’t have to work,” Colleen retorted with that smug look on her face that always made me wish I could punch her without consequences.

“If you want to continue to live on family land, you do. We let Brian get away with not contributing for too long. There is a stipulation that we each have to work for the family business three days a week minimum as long as we live here, unless there is a medical reason why we can’t.”

Colleen laughed. “I know for a fact that Brian owns our house outright.”

“He might own the house, but he doesn’t own the land it sits on. That is part of our family trust that has legal stipulations attached to it. When Joy was alive, she did the work so Brian could focus on his security business. You are supposed to work three days a week in his place as your land rental.”

I almost laughed as Colleen sputtered and fumed. “Bullshit!” When she finally yelled, her whole face turned a bright red, nearly purple color.

“Tell your wife the truth,” Uncle Brady demanded. We all looked around for my dad. He wasn’t there but Brady held his phone up.

I could hear him huff down the line and felt his frustration in that sound. “He’s not wrong, Colleen. We are supposed to contribute and I haven’t done so for the five years we’ve been together.”

“I don’t understand,” she mumbled.

“I’ll explain it later. Sam?” he called out and I moved so that he could see me on his end of the video call.

“Yes?”

“Who were you at the hospital with?”

“That’s really not your business,” I shot back. My dad barely had anything to do with me since he hooked up with Colleen. He allowed her to influence him into distancing himself from me, and it wasn’t something I was willing to forgive. I had already lost my mom. Because of Colleen’s demands and my father bowing to her wishes, it felt like I’d lost my dad, as well. He was nothing more than a stranger to me.

“I knew she was lying!” Colleen shouted triumphantly. Her “gotcha” moment was shot all to shit in the next couple minutes, though.

“Sammy, I heard some things, baby girl. Need to know if they’re true. Who were you with?”

“I helped a man who was in an accident and stayed at the hospital in Springerville with him until he woke up,” I admitted.

“Bigfoot?” Uncle Brady asked. I nodded, shocked that he knew the man had been hospitalized, not that he knew him. They were around the same age. “Shit,” my uncle groaned. Dad remained quiet.

“Do you know what you’re doing getting mixed up with the Kings of Anarchy?” my dad asked.

“Getting mixed up with them?” I questioned. “I saved the guy’s life and made sure he was going to pull through. I wouldn’t exactly call that ‘getting mixed up’.” I shot back at him. “And even if I was, again, I don’t know what business it is of yours.”

“I’m your father,” he insisted.

“Funny, Brian, but the only man who has behaved like a father to me in the past five years is your little brother. You stopped loving me as your daughter and giving a shit the minute your little fling got knocked up and told you to.”

“Sammy, that’s about enough.”

“You’re right, it is. Tell your wife to get the hell off my part of the property because I don’t want her here.”

“You have to go to work, you ungrateful little bitch!” Colleen snapped at me.

“Ungrateful? Who the hell am I ungrateful to? You haven’t done a damn thing for me to be grateful for.”

“I worked your damn job the past two days.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo, Colleen. You’re supposed to put in your share. I’ve been working seven days a week for the past two years because you wouldn’t pull your weight around here. You can fuck all the way off!” I turned back to the phone and glared down at it because I wanted my dad to feel the weight of my words. “Get your wife off my property, and so help me God, if she gets in my business again, comes near any of my property, or so much as whispers in my direction, I will not be held responsible for how I respond to that threat! She has five minutes and I already started the timer.”

I turned my back and walked toward the cabin that I’d called my home for the past couple years. I didn’t bother to look back, to tune in and listen to what Brady or my dad had to say. I didn’t care what Colleen had to say, either. I opened my cabin up, stepped inside, and then shut and locked the door behind me. My family was complicated, my feelings toward them more so. I loved my dad - the man who was there for me while I was growing up, anyway. The man who he became after my mom died and he married Colleen was a different story.

I quietly moved through my cabin, grabbed a protein bar on my way through the kitchen, choked it down, snagged some fresh clothes out of my closet, and then went to take the mother of all showers. Once I was cleaned, I crashed on my bed and was out like a light before my head even hit the pillow.