The Woman in the Trunk

I reached for the whiskey, twisting off the top, and drinking straight from the bottle. It was fine. I was planning on drinking every drop of it before I packed up and headed back to the city bright and early on Monday morning.

I drank a solid two fingers' worth standing right there in the center of the kitchen before making my way back out onto the front screened porch, tossing one of the musty cushions to the floor, and sitting down directly on the wicker. Propping my feet up on the coffee table,I watched the crowds of people making their way down the street toward the beach with their rainbow umbrellas and their folding beach chairs, their towels and swimmies and blow-up pools for babies who can't go in the ocean.

I was still there when they returned a half an hour shy of dinnertime, parents' shoulders drooping, faces flushed, children grumbling, babies whining, everyone probably itchy from the sand and starving and dehydrated.

I was working my way to dehydration thanks to the whiskey and the ungodly hot temperature outside.

I probably needed to eat too, I decided, screwing the cap back on the bottle, making my way inside, going for one of the cans of tomato soup, knowing that ordering in was out of the question. My budget was tight, and I wasn't looking forward to making it any tighter. So, I would make do with what was here as well as the couple things I had packed in my suitcase. Which meant a lot of protein bars and some instant oatmeal packets.

I had no business escaping the city, shirking my responsibilities, getting some time away.

Time away meant my father could sink the business even further into a hole.

But I had just hit my wall.

I couldn't take another minute of it.

I had to get away from the pressures of it all before I snapped and did or said something I would regret.

As a whole, I had my family's notorious temper, but I had always been better at controlling it. Maybe because I learned at a young age that when my father blew his top, things went sideways quickly because no one acted rationally when on an irrational tirade. But I had been controlling it for months. No, years. And from the looks of things, there seemed to be no end to the frustrations, so I would need to control myself for months or years to come.

At least, if I couldn't figure this out, if I couldn't get us out of the bottomless void my father had trapped our family in when I was a little girl.

So I needed a little distance, a little room for some calm and patience to burrow back in. Then I could go back, keep plugging away at my five-year plan to fix this situation. If I could just keep my freaking father from making it any worse in the process.

Lofty goals, with his track record, but I was going to do my best.

We had to fix it.

Or he was going to get himself killed.

And possibly me in the process.

My life might not have been worth much at this point, but it was mine. And I would be damned if I'd let my father's stupid business decisions take it away from me.

In my back pocket, my phone buzzed six times in a row. Texts. Likely frantic ones from Liane who was having a heart attack over something or another at work. I ignored it, trying to remember that I promised myself a weekend away. But on the eighth buzz, I set my soup down, reaching for it, scrolling through the texts.

Liane had been working at the family business since the beginning of time. I was pretty sure she was my grandfather's first hire when he'd opened shop. She was high-strung and prone to getting overwhelmed easily and overreacting to the most minor of problems. But she had become a sort of face of the business, always stationed at the register bright and early every morning, knowing more customers by name than I did.

Apparently, the shipment I'd ordered in earlier the week had come in. With a third of the items I had ordered missing. Liane, bless her sweet heart, was convinced there was simply some glitch, some misunderstanding as to why we were getting one-fifth the flour I knew we needed, half of the butter, nearly none of the fruit.

I, unfortunately, was just jaded enough to know the truth.

My father had gone behind me and edited the order, cutting corners that couldn't afford to be trimmed.

This was why I never left town, damnit.

On a sigh, I dialed my father, feeling my pulse pounding in my temples and throat. This man was going to give me a heart attack at the ripe old age of twenty-two.

"I'm busy right now, Gigi."