Over the Hills and Far Away (NOLA's Own #1) (5 page)

“I just can’t imagine my life without you,” I confessed to her, unable to hold back my tears anymore.

“You don’t have to today, especially not today. Go get the girls. We’ll make the birthday breakfast of champions, yeah?”

“Hell yeah.” I sniffled through my tears.

Grandma whipped up pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit salad. Dutifully, she nagged Mom when she snuck a piece of bacon because it was not on her salt-free diet, and then Grandma cleaned everything up, so the four of us could go sunbathing in the backyard.

I loved this backyard. It was like having a corner of trimmed but never tamed wilderness. Grandma always loved to let the wild things grow back here, giving the hedges a decent amount of space to flourish. She encouraged the native flora, only mowing the grass and trimming the bushes when they threatened to take over.

“It’s about balance,” she had told me when we had first moved in. “The wild allows us to carve a little place out for ourselves, but we should respect the natural beauty of the world.”

Grandma had lived in the same house in the neighborhood of Ormond, LaPlace Parish, Louisiana, since she and my grandfather married in the late forties. Back then, Ormond was a spread-out community, mostly small-time farmers raising enough produce and livestock to feed their families and barter or sell the rest. Grandma’s house was an older two-story home on a large plot located on a small cul-de-sac facing River Road and the Mississippi River beyond that. It was the only house on the small back street.

Before Grandma’s house had been built, it had been a huge plot of land. It used to be part of the ancient French revival plantation house that sat vacant on the adjoining lot. A large fence traveled along the whole length between the now separate properties, and the Plantation House—as I’d named it—and its plot had been slowly reclaimed by the wildlife creeping its way back in.

That property had been empty for about fifteen years or so. The same family who had once lived there owned it still, but they had decided to move into the city after a death in the family. It was a shame really. With some TLC, the property would be gorgeous.

Has it really been eight years since we moved here?

That was unbelievable in some respects. It seemed as though it wasn’t too long ago when we’d moved in here, innocent and naive.

Alys and I had had pretty unconventional childhoods. We were born and raised on a hippie commune, a compound located about half an hour east of Pensacola, Florida. It was really a huge farming property where the owner, Bobby Tucker, had wanted some like-minded people to grow and raise organic food with him. Folks had started moving to Tucker’s Farm Community in the late sixties and early seventies, and they’d started having families. It’d soon grown into a strange little neighborhood. They’d ended up building a tiny school, and several of the adults had taught the children. As far as I understood, it was legal. We had been homeschooled kids until we left.

Alys’s parents had gotten married on the commune by Bobby Tucker himself. They had a government-issued certificate and everything.

My parents, on the other hand, had not gotten married. In fact, their relationship was…special. They were in a relationship with Gloria Norris, the mother of my brother, Connor, who was two years younger than me. On Tucker’s Farm, we’d lived almost like polygamists with my parents living like man and wife and Gloria as a roommate of sorts. For me, for
us, that was normal. We hadn’t been frowned upon or anything like that. It was just…what it was.

When Alys and I were still kids, Bobby Tucker had died of natural causes. He’d left Tucker’s Farm to his son, Dale, and that guy was a born-again Christian—not that there was anything wrong with that. When Bobby had passed on though, Dale had started preaching, trying to get everyone to convert to his brand of Christianity. The ones who couldn’t bear to leave their beloved home had gone along with the conversion.

My parents held no religious beliefs, per se. My mom had been a yoga instructor with strong mental roots in Buddhist and Cherokee practices, and Da never gave a shit either way. When we’d lived at Tucker’s Farm, she’d held morning and evening classes and meditative sessions daily. However, since her heart had grown so weak, she’d no longer worked or even practiced really. Now, she would just spend hours a day in meditation.

However, my mom had decided it was time to move her family the hell out of there and back to her childhood home of LaPlace, Louisiana. Da had pretty much gone wherever Mom had, so our unique family unit had all decided that was what we’d do.

Alys’s parents had thought a born-again Christian cult was seriously not up their alley either, and they’d found a house for sale right in the same neighborhood of Ormond.

Our families were more like one big family, and we couldn’t bear the thought of not living close. However, the house they’d bought was in the newer part of the neighborhood.

Finding the perfect spot, Mom, Lili, Alys and I spread out our towels on the soft grass and got comfortable.

“Oh my god, I can’t move,” groaned Lili, rubbing a full belly that gently popped out above her bikini bottom. After a few minutes in the sun, her skin was already turning a sweet nutty brown.

Mom laughed. “You shouldn’t stuff yourself, Lili. It’s not good for your digestion.”

“But Grandma Betty makes the best damn pancakes.” said Lili. “She cooks them in the bacon grease.”

Alys was slathering her porcelain skin with SPF 40 before lying back on her beach towel. She burned fast in the tropical sun.

Reaching out, Mom rested her hand on mine, curling her fingers around me. I could feel her happiness bubbling just below the surface.

“So, Kenna tells me she met some dude last night,” she announced, grinning and waiting.

“Some dude?” squeaked Lili. “She finally met and bagged her longtime crush, Phil fucking Deveraux! It was freakin’ epic! After their set, he and X—that’s the bass player—went up to the bar for some beers, and Phil spotted her. He stared
at her for a whole five minutes
before he came over. I mean, he fell so fucking hard for her that I thought we’d have to get a forklift to hoist him back up. He’s, like, eight feet tall. It would’ve been a total mission…” Lili chattered on.

I allowed my mind to drift again, wondering if Alys ever took the time to remember our childhood. We hadn’t spoken of it in so long.

We had moved in the middle of the summer before the start of sixth grade. It had given Alys and I time to adjust to our new surroundings before we had started our first year in a public school. It wasn’t until the first day that we’d truly realized that we had been raised very, very differently from other kids. We hadn’t known how horribly cruel children could be, and we had been teased mercilessly for being unique.

We’d met another outcast halfway through that first year—a tiny Colombian girl who spoke some pretty rough English, having lived only a few months in California after her family had run across the Mexico-US border. Liliana’s father had crossed six months before she and her older sister to establish residency before sending for them. They’d made it over with an aunt and three cousins. Their mother was supposed to join them a few months after he had established their residency, but instead, he’d upped and moved them to Louisiana without so much as a backward glance.

That was when our duo had become a trio, and it had been that way ever since.

At the gentle squeeze of my hand, I looked over at Mom. She had her eyes closed against the sun and a smile that was even brighter.

She’s going to miss us, too. All she wants is for these happy memories to last, to take them with her. She loves all of us so much.

“…and then he kissed her, and it was one of
those
kisses, the kind you see in romantic movies and shit. It looked fabulous and sexy as all hell, probably because he’s so much taller than she is, which is something you don’t see every day. But the way he held her in his arms. He could not keep his hands off of her—not in a pervy kind of way, more like territorial. There was no denying that he was staking his claim on her in front of everybody…”

Lili was normally more observant than chatty, but when she was with us and we asked her to reveal her observances, she’d end up getting diarrhea of the mouth. Mom had administered the verbal laxative this morning, and now, we were all reaping the benefits.

“…so fucking furious! I wanted to punch that asshole in the nuts! He wouldn’t let Phil know we were being kicked out!”

“It was probably for the best,” my mom said with a smile.

“Bullshit!” grumped Lili.

“It’s all about timing,” Mom explained calmly. “One day, Philip will come back for his Baby Girl and continue what they’ve started.”

Lili sucked in a sharp breath. She had never mentioned Baby Girl in her ramblings, and her head swiveled to me, her eyes beseeching. My subtle shrug told her that I hadn’t told my mother, and her awe of Mom’s uncanny ability was renewed.

We lapsed into companionable warm silence once more, and I found myself again thinking about the last few years leading up to the events of last night.

High school had been an easier time for us. At the start of our freshman year, we had established ourselves as some badass rocker chicks who never took shit from anyone. We hadn’t been constantly picked on, but people had still made sure that we knew we were skirting the fringes of society.

Alys had taken Krav Maga classes. She had become so proficient that no one would dare fuck with her to her face. It was a proud moment when she had taken down a handsy basketball player who had thought he could push himself on her at a house party during our sophomore year. He had figured he was doing the weird chick a favor by showing her his undivided—and unwanted—attention. After she’d shattered his right testicle, people had left her the hell alone.

Lili was the artsy one. She had mastered English so well that she was the witty, smart mouth of our tight-knit clique. Lili’s true passion was photography. She was brilliant behind a camera. She’d spent our high school years snapping photos of us all around LaPlace and New Orleans.

Some of my favorite photos of hers were the ones she had taken at outdoor concerts and festivals. Lili had given me every photo she’d ever snapped of Phil and Our Boys back in the day, and I’d placed them in my NOLA’s Junk scrapbook, every one of them a secret treasure.

To be honest, I wasn’t too sure how our peers viewed me. I guessed people thought I was the quiet one—I was usually just stoned—who read books about New Age weirdo bullshit and always had a set of headphones jammed on her head. If it weren’t for the fact that I was a head taller than all the other girls and a large majority of the boys, too, I might’ve gone unnoticed.

Well, no, I had caught the eye of the tall, handsome loner, Jaime Angelo. He’d ended up being my boyfriend throughout nearly all four years of high school. We’d met at the tender age of fourteen, and I could look back on that relationship with fondness. He had been my first everything—first real kiss, first make-out session, first sexual partner…my
only
sexual partner. In the end, we hadn’t broken up because we no longer cared about each other. We had just grown apart. We had always been very different people, and it’d just become more pronounced the older we got.

The year I’d started dating Jaime was the year my mom’s health had really taken a turn for the worse. That was when Da started to stay more with Gloria in the city.

Mom though would smile and tell me not to hold it against him, that she felt better with him out of the way. Seeing him so devastated had started to take a toll on her mental health, and she needed to be strong to face what was coming.

“We all must go through that door, Kenna,” she’d tell me when I would complain about it. “It’s something we all must do alone. I’m only sad for the things I will miss, and I must come to terms with that within myself. I’m not scared.”

No, she wouldn’t be scared. She saw it as the next great adventure, a new world to explore and new souls to meet.

The weirdo.

She saw this as her future.

Suddenly, I found myself wondering about my own future.
Where will I be in the next few days, weeks, months?

For years, I had watched as my mom pumped herself full of prescription drugs that would have little to no effect. After she’d raised us on organic food, teaching us the importance of respecting our bodies by putting only clean nourishment into them, I couldn’t understand how she could take all these medications. Perhaps it was for Grandma, but I also thought Mom had just accepted that she was going to die, so it didn’t matter what she did.

But it mattered to me. There had to be a better way than taking an obscene amount of these drugs.

That was why I’d decided to earn my doctorate and practice therapeutic medicine.

The program I’d enrolled in would take nine months of intense training and education, not to mention top grades and taking the medical boards to become a therapist. After I passed, I would continue my education until I earned my doctorate.