Frank nodded, understanding. She wiped the tears from her face. The thought of her ex reminded her of the Proctors and she asked her father, “Dad, have the Proctors been bothering you?”
She knew that her father didn’t tell her most of the time when they did. She was running the family business and helping him with the side businesses and dealing with Greg’s death and James’s harassment. Her father thought her plate was too full. She didn’t want him feeling like he was alone though, especially where the Proctor family was concerned.
“They’ve been around,” he said.
“Dad,” she said, crossing her arms. “I know that you talked to Greg a lot about what you were both going through. Those people are vicious and I don’t want you being alone against them now that Greg is gone. I’m stronger than you think.”
He smiled and said, “Huh uh, I’ve always known that you were the strongest one of all of us. You just have so much to worry about. Besides, Lyle Kentworth has his own issues with them too, so I’m not alone here.”
Mia nodded. For years now, Randall Proctor had been pressuring both Mr. Fury and her father to sell him their assets. Years ago, Greg and Frank owned roughly fifty percent of the property in the town between them. Another third was owned by the Kentworth’s and the Proctor’s jointly. Over the years as Randall Proctor served as maintenance and transportation director for the Haddonfield Independent School District (HISD) he was amassing a small fortune. The Halloway’s and Fury’s hadn’t been able to prove it, but it was suspected that Randall had been misappropriating funds that were granted to the district over the past ten years. It was also suspected that bribes were being offered and taken when it came to positions for his sons within high-ranking positions.
Randall’s sons hadn’t grown up in Haddonfield. Randall and his wife had divorced when they were young and the three of them had moved back to Colfax County after their mother’s death. It wasn’t a year later when Vince, Randall’s oldest son was elected mayor. A year after that Michael, the middle son was elected President of the HISD Board of Trustees. Randall’s youngest son James was Mia’s biggest mistake and turned out to be the reason the Fury’s and the Halloway’s had come to know so much about the other family’s corrupt activities.
Mia and James had dated for three years. It had been the worst three years of her life. He presented as a smart, articulate, well-rounded man and he was really good looking. He had come into the Bar and Grille for lunch every day and at first he would just smile at Mia or say hello. Then he started sitting at the counter when she was behind it and he would make small talk. It was almost two months after he came to town before he asked her out. He took her for nice dinners out of town and dancing and concerts. They always had a great time. And then one night Mia picked up his phone while he was in the shower. The text message he had just received said something about picking up the money for the trustees. It was from a man she knew to be a contractor here in town. There had been rumours about trustees being demoted or even fired for voting against James’s father at the school district. She had tried to give them the benefit of the doubt before this. She couldn’t keep silent about it and that night when she confronted him about all of it, he had tried to deny it. When he realized Mia wasn’t a fool and not accept his pathetic excuses for why he had so much money and why the board always seemed to vote affirmatively for things his father would benefit from, he became threatening and told her he would hurt her family if she told anyone about her suspicions.
Mia was smart enough to be frightened of him. She didn’t put it past any of the Proctor’s to commit violence. But, she wasn’t frigthened enough to be intimidated by him. She had told Greg and her father in hopes of it helping their battle against them. What she didn’t tell the two men in her life that she knew would absolutely lay down their lives for her was that James had begun abusing her.
She still lived with her father, but she had been staying with James a lot. When he caught her packing the things she had left there, he had hurt her physically and forced himself on her sexually. She was became terrified of him very quickly. She left her things as soon as he went to work and returned to her father’s. She stopped taking James’s calls and she went to the Sheriff’s and filed a restraining order. James wouldn’t bother her at home because he didn’t want any witnesses to what he did to her but the restraining order hadn’t intimidated him at all when he saw her in town. That is what scared the shit of her the most. The fact he had so much control over so many people.
Meanwhile her father and Greg and Lyle had been trying to get evidence against all of the Proctor’s in the hopes of running them out of office and out of town. The town was on the brink of ruin as it were, thanks to their bullying. By the time Greg died, they still hadn’t had the evidence they needed. People in the town were scared to death of them and nobody wanted to talk. If they did, ‘accidents’ would happen to them and their families.
“You know, I think they’re responsible for Greg’s death.”
Mia furrowed her brow. “Didn’t they confirm he had a heart attack at the hospital?”
Frank nodded. “They drove him to it. They were terrorizing him. They wanted his ranches and he refused to sell them no matter what.”
Mia didn’t doubt that, she knew first-hand how capable they were of terror. She worried about her father though. Frank’s health hadn’t been good recently either and she feared they would stress him to his death as well. “Dad, you can’t let them stress you out that bad.”
He waved her worries off as Mia locked up the house and as she and Frank walked down the front steps, her father asked her, “What about you, honey? Has James been bothering you?”
“Not recently,” she said. She never told her father how bad it had gotten. She had finally bought a gun and carried it everywhere with her. “He knows I have the restraining order now and last time he came by, I also held my shotgun on him, trained on his face.”
Frank laughed. “I would have liked to see that.”
She rolled her eyes. “He just laughed. He thinks he’s invincible. They all do.”
With a heavy sigh Frank said, “That’s because they have the whole town terrified of them. I’ll talk to Lyle after things settle down with Greg’s service. Maybe he can think of a way for us to get these guys.”
Mia nodded. At the bottom of the steps she kissed her father’s cheek and hugged him. “I’m going to close the Bar and Grill down for the day tomorrow. Everyone wants to attend the funeral.”
“That’s good,” he said. The Halloway’s owned Halloway’s Bar and Grill. It had started out as a small bar and when Mia took it over not long after she got out of school, she began improving on it and making it more about the food and less about the bar. It had evolved into a family establishment that people from all over the county would come to eat at. The bar is still part of it and Mia brought in local bands every weekend to play. It gave the bands exposure they wouldn’t get otherwise and they give the Bar and Grill a discount price. It worked for everyone.
“I’ll pick you up before the funeral tomorrow, okay?”
“Okay baby. I love you.”
She smiled. “I love you too, Dad.”
Asher drove into Haddenfield just after three a.m. on Friday morning. As he remembered from when he was a kid, the tiny little town was sound asleep and looked the same. They rolled their sidewalks up at ten p.m. and unrolled them around seven the next morning. He drove down Main Street and saw that the General Store was still there. He had always liked the couple that owned it. Mr. and Mrs. Cooper had owned the store for close to forty years when Asher had been a teenager. They’d had two kids, but they had both been a lot older than Asher and had moved out of Haddenfield as soon as they had graduated high school.
He passed the Bar and Grill. He noticed that they had added on to it. From what he tell it looked like Mia’s family was doing well. The church he used to go to with his mother every Sunday was on the left and the park with the pond he and Travis and Dean learned to fish in was just behind that. He found himself feeling a lot more nostalgic than he had thought he would. As he drove by the high school he thought about Mia again. She had been such a huge part of his life then and now it had been an entire lifetime since he had seen her. He wondered again if she would be at the funeral. He knew he should stay away from her, but he would love to see her again, just one more time.
He finally came to the street his family lived on. He pulled up in front of the house and sat there for a long time with the car idling. He considered just driving on. He couldn’t make the time up to his father now. He looked across the manicured lawn. His father had always made sure it was mowed and edged to perfection. Asher wondered if he had did done his own lawn up until he died. He suspected he did. He couldn’t imagine his father letting anyone else touch it. His eyes moved up to the big colonial porch with the white pillars at the top of the stairs. The swing hanging between them was what caught his attention. He pictured his mother on that swing. She had loved it. When she got really sick Asher had hung one in back for her too, to make it easier for her to get to from her room. He sighed. He knew that he had to do this. He owed it to his father to be at his funeral and taking care of old family business had been too long in coming.
He backed up and pulled the car into the driveway in front of the garage. Grabbing his duffel bag out of the car, he walked over to the steps. He bent down and moved the rock at the edge of the lawn. His parents had kept a spare key there his entire life. His father was notorious for forgetting his keys. Asher bent down and picked it up. That memory of his father made him smile. Some things never changed. He turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door. The past assaulted him instantly. The first thing he saw as he stepped inside was the photos of him that his mother had lined the entryway with. It started with his birth photo. He had always thought he looked like an Ewok, but his mother disagreed. She used to say, “You were the most perfect baby ever born.” From there were his toddler photos and then one every year from Kindergarten through high school. He was always the star of Lily’s show. He was shaking before he even got through the hallway and into the living room. He flipped on the light and once again he was beat over the head with nostalgia. It made him sick to his stomach and he turned the light back off and headed up to his old room.
Asher’s blast from the past was completed here. His room hadn’t been touched except that it was a lot cleaner than he had ever left it when he lived here. He dropped his canvas bag down on the bed and started stripping. He was exhausted more mentally than physically. He sat on the edge of the bed and before he laid down his eyes landed on an envelope at the bedside. The front of it had the word
‘Asher,’
in
his father’s handwriting. With trembling hands he reached for it, flipping on the lamp next to the bed. He slid his fingers under the flap and pulled it open. The yellow lined paper made him smile again. His father used a yellow legal pad for everything. When Asher was a kid he often wondered if it was the same pad and it had a thousand sheets of paper in it. He slid the paper out, folded it open and began to read:
‘
To my son,
I’m writing this in hopes that someday you will come home. Maybe it will be after I am gone and that gives me one more regret. There is just so much that needs to be said. First of all, I love you. I have loved you since the day you were born. You were such a good kid and you made it so easy for us to love you. You brought your mother and I so much joy and someday I hope you will have the privilege of enjoying that feeling when you are raising children of your own. I don’t know where you went that day. I don’t know where you have been since but I want you to know that I never wanted you to leave. I looked up at the moon every night before I fell asleep and I wished that wherever you were, you were happy and safe. I hoped that the agony of our lives and the horrible way that I treated you didn’t get in the way of your happiness. I am pretty sure that it did and if I could build a time machine, I would absolutely do everything differently.
The day I met your mother was truly the beginning of my life. The day that I heard the doctor’s telling us she was dying felt like the end. I should have thought of someone besides myself. I had a son who needed me but I just couldn’t function, I wasn’t strong enough. You were the strong one, and I thank God that your mother had you. The alcohol started out as a crutch and it turned into my life source. I was so stupid. I was so blind. My life source was right in front of me and I just couldn’t see it.
Asher had to stop for a few seconds and wipe his eyes so he could keep reading. He hadn’t cried since his mother died. All of the death he had seen. All of the death he had caused. He hadn’t shed one tear. But tonight, his shoulders shook and tears rolled rapidly down his cheeks. He was consumed by emotion, the biggest one of all being regret. All of these years he had stayed away because he thought his father hated him. He had wasted all of this time. It was an incredibly devastating thought. If only he had come home sooner. Another round of sobs took hold and it took him another ten minutes to get himself under control enough to read on:
I am so sorry, son. God I wish I could change things. I wish we could go back. That’s not possible so all I have left is to tell you this: I’m so proud of you. You’re so strong and amazing. You are the best son that any father could have ever been blessed with. I failed you and I failed your mother miserably. When your mother asked me to let her go, instead of thinking about myself once again I should have considered the horrible suffering she had to endure. When you helped her instead of me I should have told you right then and there that you did the right thing. You did what she wanted and what she needed, because at seventeen-years-old, you were the man I couldn’t be. I am so sorry I put that on you. I am so sorry for it all.