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  So needless to say, it was a long and painful process. By the end of it, I was nearly in tears myself because how bad my head was hurting. All of her screaming and crying had worsened my migraine to the point I couldn’t think. I just signed any paperwork placed in front of me, letting my mother cling to my side and soak my sleeve with tears over my bastard of a father. I’m sure I came off cold to the funeral director, but I couldn’t have cared less. At that point, I just wanted to get out of there.

  Once all of the decisions were made and my mother wrote the deposit check, I helped her stand and tried to get her to the car as quickly as possible. “Stop pushing me! Stop pushing me! Don’t you think I’m in enough pain?!” she sobbed to me as I tried to get her in the car.

  “I’m not pushing you, mom. I’m just trying to help you in the car,” I sighed heavily.

  “You don’t even care your father is dead, do you?! He was nothing but good to me, and you hate him! Do you want me treated badly? Do you?! Why do you have to be so cruel?” she cried, hitting me repeatedly in the chest.

  I grabbed her by the wrists, forcing her to stop striking me. “Do you really expect me to care about him dying? I know you’re not all there, but are you ignorant, too? Did you not see all the times he beat the crap out of Lyle and me? Do you really think just because he stopped putting his hands on you, that he’s some saint? He was a piece of shit who only cared about himself. Dad was nice to you because he was terrified of being alone, and he liked you depending on him. None of what he did was for you, it was always about him. Stop being so delusional and stop causing a scene. I’m here to help you guys, not fight with you.”

  Her jaw dropped and then it snapped shut. Her brow furrowed and then she spat in my face. I saw red for a moment. I am far too tired for this shit, I thought bitterly to myself. Placing my hand on the top of her head, I forced her head down to get her head past the roof of the car and got her in. Slamming the door behind her, I walked over to my side and sped off. The whole way to the house, she was cussing me out. She had to have used every name and curse word in her vocabulary, wanting to let me know just how angry she was with me for what I said about my father. How could she blame her child for wanting to get away from an abusive parent? Her realizations were beyond me.

  I was itching to get out of that car by the time we pulled back up to the house. She was in hysterics, and it was driving me utterly insane. Throwing the car in park, I practically leaped from the car. My mother pushed her door open and let herself fall to the ground, her entire body heaving with each explosive sob. Her hands clutched at the summer grass, “My Deacon, my Deacon, my poor, poor Deacon…” she wept.

  Rubbing my forehead, I moved over to her and picked my mother up from her underarms, “Mom, he chose drugs over you. You need to understand that so you can move on with your life.”

  “No he didn’t, no he didn’t!” my mother sobbed, tears pouring from her eyes. “You just didn’t understand him. He was in pain, Jason!”

  “No he wasn’t,” I snapped at her, managing to get her in the front door, slamming the door behind me. “He was a selfish man who would rather feed his heroin addiction and alcoholism than his family. Mom, he literally chose heroin over his own life. Nothing was important to him. You’ve always deserved better than that. You need to heal from his death and your marriage to him,” I expressed to her firmly, but with genuine concern. My mother frustrated the hell out of me. She witnessed my father beat the shit out of my brother and me, and was cheated on and abused for the majority of my childhood. Deacon Gilmore had been an asshole to all of us. She didn’t deserve the treatment she had received, even if it seemed to her like he treated her well. If my dad had cared about my mom, he would have had a real job and would have been clean. My mother didn’t know what real love was like, none of us really did.

  She coward away from my touch, acting as though I had left her with a chemical burn. “Why don’t you go back to where ever you were hiding, Jason? You clearly don’t love me, and you didn’t love him. So, just go! Leave! I don’t want to see you!” my mom screamed at me, running upstairs. I plopped down on the couch and placed my face in my hands. If she kept on, it was going to be hard not to just listen to her and get the hell out of town.

  “No place like home, huh?” Lyle called to me. I lifted my eyes to see him standing across the room with a mug of coffee in his grasp.

  I let out a dry chuckle, “Yeah, no kidding.”

  “How bad was she?” he asked, moving over to sit next to me.

  “Considering she only screamed about ninety-nine percent of the time, not as bad as it could have been,” I told him sarcastically.

  Lyle chuckled, heading over and sitting next to me on the couch. I liked the fact that even though it had been eight years, nothing really changed between us. It relieving to know that Lyle didn’t hate me—at least to my knowledge. “So what now?” he asked.

  “Well, the funeral home wants some pictures of dad and some of his personal belongings. So I’m going to go through some of his stuff, maybe clean some of it out for mom to help her start moving on,” I told him.

  Lyle sighed, “Well, I guess I’ll help you with that. Though I don’t know what all we will find. I mean, it isn’t like we can give them heroin to display.”

  I chuckled at his morbid joke, “I know. I’m sure we can find something, though. Later tonight, will you help me call everyone?” I asked him, wanting his help in informing the family of Deacon’s ‘untimely’ death.

  “Let me guess, you want me to call our cousins?” Lyle questioned, raising a brow at me. I gave him a pleading look. I couldn’t stomach our cousins and would rather die than talk to any of them on the phone, “Fine, but you owe me,” he grumbled.

  “I don’t have a ton of cash on me, but we can go grocery shopping this evening, and you can pick out some snacks you want,” I offered.

  “Deal,” Lyle agreed.

  We both stood from the couch then. No words needed to be exchanged between us, we both understood we had to deal with our mother right away. My parents had shared a room, of course, and she wouldn’t take kindly to us poking around while she was grieving. Going to her bedroom door, I knocked on it softly. “Mom, it’s Lyle and me. Can we come in please?” I called to her.

  “Go away!” she cried.

  “Mama, please,” Lyle called in. “I’ll sing your favorite song to you,” he offered.

  There was a bit of silence before she responded, “Okay, fine. But Jason better not be mean to me.”

  Pushing open the door, we stepped into the room. My mother was in the fetal position on the bed, sobbing into her knees. I watched as Lyle walked over to our mom. He sat next to her, and she placed her head on his lap. His hand stroked her hair as he softly started to sing Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi; I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at that song being her favorite. Her loud sobs soon softened as she listened to Lyle’s voice.

  While she was distracted by Lyle, I started to search for things to bring to the funeral home. I moved over to their closet and opened the sliding door. One-half was my father’s, one-half my mother’s. His side was filled with raggedy blue jeans, stained plaid shirts, and worn boots. I shifted through the clothes before kneeling down to go through the bottom of the closet. As I sifted through a box of sundry items, I found an oblong fishing bobber. A vivid flashback took over my senses.

  I couldn’t have been more than four years old. Dad had dressed me in a pair of overalls that were several sizes too big for me, but I didn’t care. I liked the fact that I was matching him, feeling like a big kid. We waded through a sea of tall grass until we got to this little pond in a clearing in the woods. My dad plopped down on a big rock with a cooler next to him. He patted the rock in front of him, and I hurried over to sit between his legs. Taking an oblong fishing bobber from his pocket, he showed me how to get it onto the fishing wire. He then flicked the line behind him, then hurled it into the water. I could see the c
yan and peach colored bobber floating on top of the water. From my childish perspective, it looked like he had managed to launch it all the way across the pond. I looked back to him with twinkling eyes. My dad gave a lopsided smirk and cracked open a beer, chugging the contents of the can.

  I blinked as I came back to reality, eyes fixated on the bobber. That had to be one of a handful of decent memories I had of my father. Of course, I had been too young to realize he was high and had been working on getting drunk—too young to understand the danger I had been in or to foresee the bruises he would leave on my backside later that night. There was a roar of whispering in my ears when my fingertips grazed the bobber. It was so loud, I hadn’t heard Lyle calling my name repeatedly. I nearly jumped out of my skin when he touched my shoulder. I looked up at him with shocked eyes. “Are you alright? You weren’t responding to me…” Lyle asked me.

  I shook my head, “Sorry… I have a ringing in my ears,” I muttered. Once again, I raised a hand to my ear and tapped it to try and get the noise to go away. It wasn’t until I put down the bobber that it vanished. I must have been delirious from sleep deprivation… I couldn’t stroll down memory lane anymore, not if my mind was going to play tricks on me. Standing straight, I looked at Lyle, “You know what, we can do this later tonight. Let’s go ahead to the store.” I had promised him we could go, and I might as well get it over with so I could relax when we got home.

  He nodded excitedly, “Yeah, sure.” I looked over to see my mother was already passed out on her bed, giving my brother a questioning glance. Lyle gave a shrug, “She was tuckered out. Being crazy can do that to you.”

  I chuckled. It was enlightening to see that Lyle wasn’t completely soured by how his childhood and adolescence had turned out. I wish I could have said the same thing at his age. Walking out of my mother’s room, we headed downstairs and for the door. It would be nice to get away from all the stress for a little bit, even if it was just a trip to the grocery store.

  CHAPTER FOUR: CONDOLENCES

  The Following Afternoon

  Not many showed up to the service, but it wasn’t like I had anticipated anything different. Deacon Gilmore hadn’t been the most popular of guys. As far as I knew, he had been addicted to heroin since his early twenties and had lied, cheated, and stolen to feed his addiction. He hadn’t cared a bit who he had to step on to do so. But, of course, the few family members who I didn’t want to see had shown up, and I wasn’t looking forward to the forced conversation I was bound to have with them. My father’s family wasn’t any better than he was. While they weren’t necessarily on hardcore drugs, they were nasty and mean drunks. I’m sure they would cause problems in the months following the funeral, thinking that my father somehow had money and would fight me when I tried to explain he had nothing.

  They shot my mother, brother, and I dirty looks during the entire service. It was probably because my mom wouldn’t stop wailing the whole time, making it hard for anyone to hear the pastor. I contemplated just leaving, not wanting her to ruin the service for everyone. But luckily the service was brief, no one having any stories or words to share with the small crowd of family and friends. The pastor then called upon six men to carry the casket, one of them being me. Peeling my mother away from my side, I left her with Lyle to join my cousins and uncles to carry my father’s casket. I didn’t want to be a pall-barrier, but I didn’t want to cause a scene by refusing.

  My hand grasped the metal handle at the front right of the casket. For a moment, it sounded like someone was tuning a radio as the sound of static filled my head. The static noise turned into a loud roar of muffled whispers. It couldn’t be whispers. I couldn’t be tired enough to be hallucinating, could I? I was under a lot of stress, and it was getting to me. Dear god, my head felt like it was going to split open at any given moment, actual tears stinging my eyes from the pain. Well, at least it was making me actually look the part. It wasn’t like I wanted to hate my father, he had just made it impossible not to.

  The funeral home pianist played Amazing Grace as we carried the casket down the aisle and to the door. My mother screamed in the background, crying uncontrollably in my brother’s arms. The noise in my ears grew louder with her screams. It felt like my brain was going to boil in my skull. This migraine was unreal with how much it hurt. When we stepped outside, the sun burned my eyes, even with it being hidden behind an overcast horizon. The murmuring noise was so loud in my ears, I couldn’t even hear my mother anymore. It had to be the exhaustion. Lyle was going to have to drive us back to my parents’ house, it wouldn’t be safe for me to drive at this point.

  I was so focused on the noise and pain in my head that I hadn’t realized we had reached the grave site until all the other guys came to a stop. We carefully placed the casket down onto the bars over the freshly dug grave. My eyes fixated on the wooden box as I went to step away. It terrified me how little I had felt while carrying my father’s dead body. He really had meant that little to me. Stepping away, the white noise in my ears eased. I joined my brother and mother in the seats next to the grave. The service continued there for a short while, the pastor reciting scripture about judgment day, and how even a ‘restless’ spirit like Deacon could find their way into the pearly gates of heaven if he accepted Jesus into his heart. It took everything in me not to laugh. The man clearly had never personally known my father. I don’t think even the noblest Christians would have felt comfortable saying he would get into heaven if they knew the man. But the sweet old man didn’t know any better, did he? What he saw was a wayward spirit who did not have many people involved enough in his life to even bother to come to his funeral. The pastor had done his best, that was for sure.

  I couldn’t have guessed how long the service lasted out there. Could have been minutes, could have been an hour. The pain consuming my head made it feel like it took all day. I was relieved when the other patrons stood from their seats, signaling that the service was coming to a close. Within the hour, we would be home, and I could get my mother and brother some dinner and finally lay down. I helped my mother to her feet, her hands clutching to both Lyle and me. Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy from her endless sobbing. Her hair that she had managed to tame into a bun was frizzed out in every direction. She was a complete mess. I rubbed her upper back as people came up one-by-one to give their condolences. None of them were members of my mother’s family, she didn’t have any other family but my brother and me. So she shied away from all of their faces, not able to make eye contact with a single one. My father’s nephews approached, and I had to force a polite expression. They were hellions, to say the least. In my younger years, my uncles and my father had been close, and my older cousins would torment myself and Lyle. They were as cruel as children could be. They wore smug smirks as they approached, looking more like young teenagers than thirty-something-year-olds. “Hey Jason, long time no see. Finally back to reality after playing Dr. Hollywood?” my cousin, Tyler, chuckled as he punched my arm.

  Ah yes, because it was glamorous to go to college. “I’m just back to help the family out,” I said with a tight-lipped smile.

  “Too good for the small town life,” Mason, another cousin, snorted.

  “Precisely,” I mumbled under my breath. I patted my brother’s arm to let him know I was stepping away, needing to get away from my cousins before I completely blew a fuse mentally.

  Walking down the small hill, I headed toward the parking lot. I was just going to do a lap around the place, giving myself enough time alone to compose myself. As I got to the bottom of the hill, two men approached me from the side. Had they been at the funeral? A few of my dad’s friends had shown up, and I didn’t recognize all of their faces. “Jason Gilmore?” one asked. The man had blonde hair buzzed short on top of his head and had a severe red-tint to his complexion.

  “Yeah?” I responded hesitantly.

  “I’m Vinny, this here is my associate Roger. We’re friends of your father’s,” the blonde explain
ed.

  I nodded at him, “Hi guys. The service is over, but they are still gathered on the hill just over there,” I said, pointing behind me.

  “We know. We were just up there. I was hoping you could go for a walk with us,” Vinny said with a wide grin.

  Instantly, I had an off feeling about it. Why did they want to talk to me? They didn’t know me… But, they looked a little too rough around the edges for me to have the courage to tell them no. “Yeah, okay,” I muttered.

  “Good answer,” Roger chuckled.

  Vinny stepped to me and put an arm around my shoulders. His cologne was overpowering, having a strange musky scent to it. They pulled me around the side of the building. The unsettling feeling was growing stronger and stronger. This wasn’t going to end well for me, was it? “You see, Jason, we’ve been friends with your dad for a long, long time,” Vinny explained. “In fact, we went to school together. Your old man and I knew each other well enough even to go into business together.”

  Oh no. I didn’t need to know any more information to know where this was going to go—and it definitely wasn’t going to end in my favor. The larger man, Roger, threw me into the side of the funeral home, the back of my head smacking against the brick wall. I let out a loud groan, my hand going to the back of my head. Jesus Christ, my head hurts bad enough already. There was a hand around my throat then, getting my undivided attention. “Listen here, Doctor Gilmore,” Vinny spat; my eyes widened, how did he know what I did for a living? “Your father stole an eighth of a kilogram of heroin from us, which is worth fifteen grand—and he took ten grand in cash. Now that he’s dead, who do you think needs to pay up that debt?” he questioned. Roger’s hand tightened around my windpipe. “If you don’t find my shit by the end of the weekend, we are going to come after your family. Got it? I’ll be over to check in on Monday. Don’t think you can hide from us. I’ll find you, your batshit mother, and that spineless baby brother of yours, no matter where you guys try and hide. Find what your father stole from me, or else,” Vinny growled. He had the eyes of a crazy man, the pale blue hues wild and wide. “Do we have an understanding?”