That Reckless Night

Or else he was going to die of a heart attack before his first month was up. And that definitely wasn’t on his agenda.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MIRANDA PULLED UP to her parents’ place and took a moment to draw a deep breath before heading to the house. Her parents lived on a sprawling piece of property that backed up to the mountainside. It was gorgeous, although there was an air of melancholy that seemed to shiver with the spirits of those long gone. Miranda had always wondered if perhaps the property had once been tribal land, but when she’d done a short, informal property search, nothing had come up. Still, as beautiful as it was, there was no denying that the mountain breathed and the trees whispered.

From the outside, one would never know the chaos housed by the large log cabin that her father had built himself before Miranda had been born. The cabin had been her father’s gift to her mother when they’d been young, starry-eyed newlyweds. It was a little worse for wear as her father had all but given up on maintaining the place, choosing instead to stay in his shop a few hundred yards away, but at least from the outside, it still looked like home.

Miranda eyed the house, chewing her lip in trepidation. She never knew if it was going to be a fight, a tense altercation or just plain uncomfortable when she spent time with her parents, but she could always count on it being unpleasant. She didn’t have the kind of relationship most people shared with their parents; there were no joyous homecomings with laughter around the table or merry holidays filled with memories-in-the-making for the Sinclair family. At least not anymore. The Sinclairs had always been a little different, putting the fun in dysfunctional she’d always liked to say, but after Simone’s death the fabric of their family unit shredded under the pressure of their grief.

And as the months turned into years with no answer or closure into Simone’s case, a cancer had begun eating away at the Sinclair family that none had been equipped to battle.

Her mother became more emotionally closed off; her father had retreated into his own drugged world; her brothers had split.

But family was family and Miranda couldn’t ignore her parents as easily as her brothers did. Heaven help her, she wished she could.

The screen slamming on the back door as her mother went to pull clothes from the line made Miranda want to back up and drive away. Dealing with her mother was emotionally exhausting and Miranda wasn’t sure if she was up to sparring with the woman today. Invariably, her mother always managed to make Miranda feel as if she were the worst mother, a terrible provider for her son and an even worse sister because she couldn’t get Trace or Wade to come home more often, or at all. Miranda wasn’t sure how it happened that she became the scapegoat for their mother’s pent-up ire but she was a convenient target.

Her gaze strayed to the shop where her father was likely holed up and contemplated popping in to see her dad first. When she was younger, her father had supported the family with his wood carvings. He had unparalleled skill with a chisel and a piece of wood. Zed’s carvings could be found at the best shops all over town. But that wasn’t the case any longer.

Not quite ready to face her mother she detoured to the shop. She knocked on the door and then let herself in. “Dad?” She peered into the smoky haze that drifted on the cool air inside the shop and followed the source of the smoke. She found her father in his ratty recliner, a rolled marijuana cigarette between his fingertips. “Hey, Dad,” she said, taking a seat as far away from the smoke as possible. At one time, she’d thought her father was the most handsome man in Alaska with his long thick hair that had dusted his shoulders in soft waves. But now his hair had grown lank with long strings of gray threading through the tangled mess. Most times he kept it scraped back in an elastic tie at the base of his neck, like today. She tried not to let her disappointment in his lack of effort permeate her voice because she didn’t want to fight. Now and then, she simply missed the man her father had once been. “How’s it going?”

Her father, a man who used to be strong as an ox with thick, ropy muscles and a quick laugh, was a shadow of his former self. Sometimes Miranda had to stare really hard to see past the years of grief, anger and general apathy brought on by his marijuana abuse to see the man he used to be. God, it broke her heart. This was the reason her brothers stayed away. It was hard to reconcile the knowledge that their parents were irrevocably broken because then Miranda and her brothers might have to admit that perhaps they were broken, as well.