Hate You Not

Chapter 3BurkeThree Weeks Later

I look up from the gas pump, running my hand into my hair as a warm breeze tries to toss it around. As I do, a man across the way, filling a huge black truck, gives me a nod, as if he’s…saying hi?

I can’t bring myself to nod back, so I return my gaze to the pump. Gasoline is so damn cheap here. The pump clicks, signaling the tank of my rented Porsche is full, and I’m charged only $38.03.

Albany, Georgia—Where Everything Has Less Value. They should put it on the welcome sign at the city limits. It’s the nearest pseudo-metropolitan area to Heat Springs, my ultimate destination, and the place does not impress, I’m sorry to say.

I feel like I stepped back into 1994. The number of the strip malls, run-down fast food joints, pickup truck dealerships, and Walmarts is off-putting. When I first stepped out of the Porsche at the gas station just now, I swear I could smell cow shit in the humid breeze.

Yeah, it’s humid here. In February.

I don’t know what I’ll find when I get to Heat Springs—Molly only dug up one photo of June, my 26-year-old, GED-toting, food-assistance-getting, bank-loan-defaulting nemesis, and in that photo, she was twelve—but I know I can’t let Oliver and Margot grow up here with her.

It’s not about the sour grapes. Although…did Asher and Sutton really choose this over my place? Sure, I’m not the poster boy for guided meditation, karmic healing, and talk therapy like my brother was. I’m not taking apart my inner feelings and analyzing my true self and all that other intangible shit. I’m the type that puts everything into my job. But I’m an adult, and my home base is San Francisco.

This is about quality of life, and quality of education. Hell, even quality of food. I haven’t seen a Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or even a Natural Grocers since I stepped off the plane in Georgia.

There’s no private school in Heat Springs, so June Lawler either plans to send them to the Heat Springs public school or, more likely, I guess, drive or bus them here to Albany to go to one of these private schools. Molly checked them all out, and they’re shitty. There’s nothing this far from Atlanta that would ever prepare them for a quality college. Assuming she plans for them to go to college.

Asher had specific college funds for both of them, so surely she does. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ll be there by nightfall, and I’m not leaving unless they’re with me. I touch my wallet, resting in the passenger seat, and give myself a fake grin in the rear view.

Everybody can be bought for the right price, and thanks to Molly’s research, I know June’s. The girl is irrationally devoted to her family’s sad husk of a farm. It’s only eighty acres now—in the last ten years, they sold a lot of acreage to the neighbors—and if the paperwork is any indication, the land isn’t fertile. Every year for the last five, June has operated at a loss. Somehow Molly even found a PDF file showing crops June planted versus what she harvested. I don’t know anything about farming, but the numbers looked like shit.

Unless the paperwork is way off, it looks like she’s only got nine cows and one horse. She’s selling crop-planting and harvesting equipment for way less than it’s worth on two farm websites, and she’s taken out two new small business loans in the last year—both at near-predatory interest rates. The farm itself is financed through her brother’s trucking company, which is probably struggling like a lot of trucking companies are right now.

This is why she took my brother’s kids. She wants them for the life insurance money. Move them to the farm, then use the money intended to pay for private school, French tutors, and riding lessons to float her crappy family farm.

I went against my MO with my piece of shit father and contacted him to give him hell for letting Asher’s kids get taken. The motherfucker actually laughed. I shouldn’t have been surprised. He put on a good front for Ash over the years because he wanted an heir to his empire, but my father is poison. Just because I’m the only person alive who knows it doesn’t make it untrue.

I blow out a breath and turn onto a skinny, asphalt-cracked highway.

The trees around here are unnerving. They’re too tall, too thick. I feel like I’ve been sucked into some other dimension—one where maybe it’s fifty years in the past. Fields fan out around the narrow road, spreading in between dark swaths of Southern pine forest. I tap the steering wheel and check my cell phone. No service—not a surprise.

Finally I reach the city limits, marked with a small plastic sign that looks like someone made it in their basement. This is even worse than I feared; Heat Springs is barely a shit smudge on the map. I check the paper maps I printed off, but some of the roads I’m seeing through the windshield aren’t on paper. A minute later, I pull over at a diner sort of place. It’s got a brick façade, but there’s a front porch with wooden rocking chairs.