Southern Heart (Southern 5)

I close my eyes and can see her in front of me as if it was yesterday, sitting in the middle of the bed. Her body almost a skeleton as she tried to fight "They didn’t catch it fast enough, and in three weeks, it had taken over her whole body." The lump in my throat is as big as a boulder. "It took three weeks for her to get diagnosed and to pass away."

I look at the men now as they stand there. Quinn shows on his face the anguish that I felt all those years ago. "My father didn’t even claim her body."

"Motherfucker,” Jacob says, shaking his head and looking down at his feet. Beau hisses out now. Casey and Ethan stand there with nothing on their faces. Both of them are trained not to show emotion.

"So they buried her in an unmarked grave," I tell them. "Now with my mother gone, there was nowhere he could get rid of 'his stress.'" I use air quotes. "It started slowly at first." I see his face in my head. "A punch in the ribs. A kick in the back when I was walking away. A backhand slap when I didn’t look up at him. A punch in the head when I looked up at him too long."

I see that Quinn is crouched down with his back against the wall and his hands in front of his mouth.

"When I was sixteen, I ended up in the hospital with a broken arm in two places." I look down at the scar that is now covered with my ink. "They knew I didn’t trip on anything, but at that point, what were they going to do? Get CPS involved when I was close to being an adult."

"They could have helped you," Beau says, and Ethan laughs.

"You think they are going to help a sixteen-year-old boy?" Ethan shakes his head and looks over to me. "Nothing they could have done would have helped."

"So I kept my head down. I made friends with the janitor at the school, and he would allow me to stay with him while he cleaned the school. I would hit the gym while he cleaned. I stayed there until it was dark out, then snuck in when I knew he would be passed out in the single recliner."

"How big did you get?" Casey asks me.

"I went from a scrawny one-hundred-and-ten-pound, five-foot-six boy to a six-foot-two, one-hundred-and-sixty-pound man," I tell him. "It happened so fast that I don’t think he was expecting it. Doesn’t mean he didn’t try to push me around. He did."

"It must have been harder for him," Jacob says with a smile on his face.

"It was, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t try," I say, swallowing. "He broke my leg with a metal pipe when I was sleeping." I look at Quinn, who hasn’t moved since I started my story. "I should have known it was coming. It took over six months to heal because"—I look down—"I couldn't go to the hospital."

"What?" Quinn asks me.

"I was almost eighteen. It was going to make another case, and I didn’t want it. I had made a plan by that point, and I just needed to be on alert every single day." I swallow. "So every single day, I got just a touch stronger. Every single day, I waited. Every single day, I also wondered if it would be my last." I look down at my hand. "He was becoming more unhinged as the days went on. He lost his job, and the money was not coming in. I don’t know what he was doing at the end, and I can only imagine how low he must have gotten. But I didn’t care because it would be only a matter of time until I would be gone."

"What happened next?" Beau asks me, his jaw tight as he bounces on his heels.

"He came home loaded and drunk," I say as the last day comes back like a movie playing over and over again. "Walked in or actually stumbled in." If I close my eyes, I can still smell him faintly. "Tried to turn on the lights, and they had been cut. I was sitting down in the dark trailer with just a little candle lit." I swallow now. "The rain had just started very much like two weeks ago. I sat watching him toss things around in frustration that he couldn’t control the situation. I remember the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof, the pitter-patter of it, and the light from the lightning coming into the trailer. I knew the minute he looked at me that it was going to be that night. I knew that it was no turning back. He came toward me, calling me every single name in the book. He couldn’t even speak. All his words were slurred. I was no good for nothing. The biggest mistake of his life. It wasn’t the first time he’d told me that, and unlike when I was thirteen, I didn’t shut my mouth on this day." I smile as the tears roll down my face. "I gave it right back to him. He was a spineless piece of shit." Casey smiles with me. "He was not a man. A man takes care of his family." I look at the men who actually do everything that I’ve just said. "He did not like that!"