“So, you think this winter is going to be rough?” I asked, looking for a way to start a conversation that wasn’t awkward.
We were still very much getting to know each other. I had been in Ashford for two years now, but Brett had lived here his whole life. Granted, he’d grown up in what was quite literally the wrong side of the tracks—on the other side of the railroad tracks heading out of town. Still, his knowledge of Ashford was deep and could be useful as I settled here further.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everyone’s saying it could get pretty rough. I’m preparing for the worst, but then I do that all the time. You look like you’re pretty well set up here, though.”
“Yeah. I can handle the cold. Once I finish up with the firewood, I think I’m set. I have a cellar full of canned stuff with a little more to go and enough Sterno to survive the apocalypse down there. I can run one of my little cooktops with it and boil water and stuff if I need to.”
“So, what you’re saying is I should come over for spaghetti sometime in January,” he joked.
I laughed.
“Yeah, come on up,” I said.
“Reminds me of a couple years back. There was a blizzard that put me out of touch with everybody for six weeks.”
“Six weeks?” I asked. “How did you not go crazy?”
“Who said I didn’t?” He laughed and took a deep sip of his beer.
I laughed back, but it wasn’t all that funny. Being up on the mountain alone was still and calm enough, but it could also be rather damn lonely. Being stuck in the house for six weeks, without even the ability to go out in the yard and do much because of snow, sounded like a nightmare. Not that either one of us was about to address that. Brett was about my age, just a year younger, so being alone was second nature to both of us. By choice or by circumstance was unknown.
We continued to drink and share stories from our pasts, but we kept it surface level. Nothing too serious, nothing too real. By the time the pizza arrived, I was ravenous, and we flipped on the television to find a game to watch while we continued to chat and knock off a considerable portion of the case of beer.
2
Desiree
It’d been a few days. And no one had come to kill me, so I’d take that as a win.
Ashford was a sleepy town. It was stuffed away in the mountains of Tennessee and completely different than anything else I had ever experienced in my life. It was quiet and peaceful—and so empty. I was used to people everywhere—especially nights full of music, cars, and danger. That was my life growing up. I spent most of my time occupying a space that was in the absolute dead center of a city during the week, but I spent my weekends upstate, wondering when Dad would stop having guests.
There were always guests.
That was the life of a Mob boss. There were always “guests”. Every day, either he was gone, or he had people over. Every day there was one closed-door meeting after another. Every day was another reminder that my father was someone who the law wanted behind bars. And if they could ever pin something on him, they would take everything away from us.
I grew up not really knowing what my dad did until I was almost a teenager. Of course, I heard rumors, but I didn’t believe them until I started seeing things that I couldn’t forget. The gun cabinet my father had didn’t just have a couple of pistols and a rifle like other kids’ dads. He had a whole secret room that I saw once on accident. In this room, the walls were lined with guns of every type. I thought he was preparing for war.
Turned out he was, in a way. Rival families had decided that the feds were keeping him protected from prosecution because they would rather my father be running things than having them struggle to keep control on what was going on locally. From what I understood, which was preciously little, Dad was focused on keeping the peace between the families and keeping the police out of their business. Other heads wanted control so they could either infiltrate the feds or put out hits on anyone without questions ever being asked.
He tried hard to keep me out of the family business, which I appreciated. I didn’t want anything to do with it. The lifestyle—the money—none of it appealed to me. I wanted to help people, especially people who society alienated. In a way, Dad and I were the same in our goals, though we went about it in wildly different ways. He always said he just wanted to help. His way of helping meant bullets, and mine meant going to school so I could become a social worker.