Disgrace

  I kept trying to turn the engine and then paused for a moment.

  Dear God, it’s me, Gracelyn Mae…

  When Rosie finally started after about five more attempts, I closed my eyes and took a breath before I drove away. “Thank you,” I said softly.

  It was nice to know that even when I felt alone, there was something bigger than me to believe in.

  * * *

  “I hope this is the right choice,” I muttered to myself as I began my drive to Chester. Back where we came from, everyone believed Finn and I were still in love, living our happily ever after.

  He hadn’t told a soul, and I hadn’t either. Maybe because we knew the type of people who lived in the town where we grew up. Maybe we hadn’t told anyone because we both weren’t ready for their judgments, their thoughts, their opinions.

  Their advice.

  Chester was a small town in Georgia about five hours from Atlanta, and when I said small, I mean everybody knew everybody’s middle name and when they had their first kiss—at least the fairy-tale romance story of it, not the actual truth.

  In a place like Chester, everyone lived on semi-truths—you know, where one only told the side of the story that made them look like a proper lady or gent.

  Everyone knew I was coming back to town because they knew Finn had landed the position at the hospital, but what they didn’t know was that when I came back, I wouldn’t be laying my head right beside his.

  I hadn’t made plans for where I’d stay; a silly part of me thought Finn would come back and we’d somehow end up back in love. Even though that wasn’t how it went, I wasn’t too worried about finding a place to lay my head that night. My family would be there for me, always and always.

  In Chester, the centerpiece of the whole town was Zion Church, which sat right in the middle of downtown. The church was the heart of the town, and my father, Samuel Harris, was the man who ran it, just as Grandpa James had before him, and Great-Grandpa Joseph had before him. Daddy never said it, but I was certain he was disappointed when he didn’t have a son to take over the church someday after he stepped down.

  He had asked me, and I’d respectfully declined. Finn had gotten into medical school in Tennessee, and like the good wife I was, where he led was where I followed. I followed him many different ways throughout his schooling, and I thought Atlanta was the final stop. When he told me he applied for a position in Chester, I had to admit I was surprised.

  He used to say he never wanted to return to small-town life, always said it suffocated him.

  Dad respected my choice of not wanting to take over the church and said he was proud of me, and Mama respected that I stood by my husband’s side. There was a reason her favorite song was “Stand by Your Man” by Tammy Wynette.

  The church was an integral part of my family’s history, and the whole town of Chester gathered in the building more than once a week for sermons, prayer circles, Bible studies, and pretty much any bake sale that took place. Church on Sunday morning was just as common as football on Fridays and whiskey on Saturdays.

  In a way, my family was royalty in small-town USA. If you knew the church, you knew our family, and if you knew our family, you knew our wealth.

  Daddy claimed the money didn’t matter and that his main purpose was to give back to the community and serve God, but Mama’s red-bottomed shoes and flashy jewelry told a somewhat different story.

  She reveled in being small-town royalty. She was Queen Loretta Harris, the pastor’s wife, and boy, did she take that role seriously.

  The closer I got to Chester, the tighter my stomach knotted.

  It’d been years since I’d packed up my life and relocated with Finn, and the idea of returning home without him terrified me. I hated how loud my insecurities were lately, hated that I cared so much about how the town would judge me.

  What would people think?

  What would they say?

  Worst of all, how would Mama react?

  3

  Jackson

  “Five hundred today, five hundred next week,” I dryly told the woman who kept beating her fake eyelashes toward me. She tried her best to push out her chest in my direction, but it was pointless. I’d already seen what was under that blouse, and there wasn’t much for her to push out.

  “But…” She started talking, but I tuned her out. Nothing she could say would interest me. Nothing about small-town USA interested me in the least.

  Everything about Chester, Georgia, was a pain in my ass, and I hated that I somehow got trapped there.

  It was all so damn annoying, from the small-town gossip to the small-minded folks. The people acted as if they were straight out of a cliché movie with every corny, fictional small-town stereotype, though I supposed the stereotypes had to come from some truth. Maybe Chester was the case study for those shitty films. Either way, I hated the place.

  One couldn’t quite call the people of Chester ignorant to the realities of the real world outside of their small quarters because they weren’t unaware of life in the real world. They knew what was happening outside the town.

  They knew the current state of the union was a disaster. They understood the poverty sweeping our nation, the drug trafficking stories. They damn well knew about the wildfires, school shootings, marches at the nation’s capital, and rallies for clean drinking water. They knew about our president, both past and present. Yes, the people in Chester, Georgia, knew all about the workings of the real world, they simply much preferred to speak about why Louise Honey wasn’t at Bible study on Thursday night, and why Justine Homemaker was too tired to make homemade cupcakes for the church bake sale on Friday.

  They loved to gossip about shit that didn’t matter, which was one of the many reasons I hated living there.

  For all the hate I had for the town, it was nice to know the distaste was mutual. Chester’s townspeople hated me just as much as I despised them—maybe even more.

  I’d heard people’s whispers about me, but I didn’t give a damn. They called me Satan’s spawn and it had bothered me when I was younger, but the older I got, the more I liked the ring of it. People had harbored an unnecessary fear of my father and me for fifteen or so years. They called us monsters, and after some time, we stepped into on the role.

  We were the black sheep of Chester, and I didn’t mind one bit. I couldn’t have cared less if those people hated me or not. I wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

  I kept my head down and ran my dad’s auto shop with the help of my uncle. The worst part of the job was dealing with people from town. Sure, they could’ve left Chester to find another auto shop, but alas, to them, venturing into the outside world was even more terrifying than dealing with my father and me.

  That was why my current situation was so damn annoying: I had to deal with idiots.

  “I’m just sayin’ you owe me five hundred dollars by the end of the day. I take Visa, Mastercard, check, or cash,” I told Louise Honey as she stood in front of me in her pink dress and high heels, tapping her fake nails on my desk.

  “I thought we made an agreement last Thursday,” she asked me, confused by my coldness. “When I stopped by to talk…”

  By talk, she meant fuck, and we’d happened to do that all night long.

  That was why she had missed Bible study—because her small tits were bouncing in my face.

  The women of that town had no problem hating me when the sun shone while moaning my name when the shadows of night fell. I was the secret escape from their fake realities. A challenge for their well-behaved Southern souls.

  “Was our agreement made before or after you sucked my dick?” I asked dryly.

  “During,” she replied in a whisper, her cheeks turning red. She was acting shy, which must’ve been part of her act to get her bill lowered because she hadn’t been so bashful when she’d asked me to tie her up and slap her ass.

  “Any deals made with your lips around my cock are null and void,” I stated. “Just leave the payment on my des
k. Half today, half next week, all right? Or I’ll just give your boyfriend a call and see if he’ll pay it.”

  “You wouldn’t!” she cried. I stayed quiet, and she stood tall and quickly pulled out her checkbook. “You’re a monster, Jackson Emery!”

  If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that…

  “Thank you for your time. We at Mike’s Auto Shop appreciate your loyalty to our company. Have a blessed day, sweetheart. Now, if you could please let yourself the fuck out of my shop, Louise—”

  “My name’s Justine, you jerk!”

  Oh. Justine…

  Names weren’t something I cared about. They made things personal, and I didn’t do personal.

  “As long as your name is right on the check, we’re good,” I replied.

  “You’re an awful, awful man, and you’re going to die alone!” she barked, storming out of the shop.

  “Joke’s on you,” I mumbled to myself. “Most people die alone.”

  After she left, I returned to the car I had been working on as Tucker napped in his dog bed in the far-right corner of the shop. If my black lab was good at anything, it was napping in his dog bed.

  He was an old man, fifteen years old, but out of the two of us, it was clear that I was the grump. Tucker just went with the flow in the same way he always had. When I was down in the darkness, he was always the happy spark of light.

  My faithful companion.

  As I worked on the car, my father walked into the shop, and by walked, I meant he could hardly remain standing. I hadn’t seen him since the day before when I dropped off groceries. His house had been a mess, but that didn’t shock me. His place was always a mess because he didn’t care enough to clean it up.

  He looked identical to me in almost every way, except for his constantly bloodshot eyes and skinny body. He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard and grunted. “Where are my keys?”

  I had taken his car keys away from him four nights earlier—crazy how he was just noticing they were missing.

  “You can walk anywhere in town, Dad. You don’t need your car.”

  “Don’t tell me what I need,” he mumbled, stretching his arms out. He wore a dirty T-shirt and a pair of torn and ratty sweatpants. It was his normal wardrobe even though I bought him new things every now and then.

  “What do you need? I can get it for you,” I told him, knowing he had no business getting behind a steering wheel. Even though his license had been revoked long ago, he still tried to drive around.

  Ever since he pissed on the damn float at the Founder’s Day parade, the townsfolk were just looking for a reason to get him locked up again, and I didn’t want to deal with that.

  “Gotta get some food.”

  “I just restocked your fridge. You should be good.”

  “I don’t want that shit. I want a pizza.”

  I glanced at my watch and cleared my throat. “I was gonna go grab a pizza, too. I’ll get you one.”

  He grumbled some more before turning to walk back to his house. “And some beer.”

  I always casually forg0t the beer.

  “Tuck, you wanna go for a walk?” I asked my dog. He lifted his head to look at me, wagged his tail, but then plopped right back down and went back to sleep.

  That was a clear no.

  Going downtown was always a bit stressful. My father and I didn’t belong in a place like Chester, but still, there we were. Over the years, my dad had done a good job of getting everyone to despise us. He was the town drunk, the filth, and the OM—original monster. I was twenty-four years old, and I harbored more hate inside me than the average man. Everything I’d learned about hating people, I had learned from my father.

  Nobody took the time to get to know me because they knew my father’s reputation well enough. Therefore, I never introduced myself to them and their judgments.

  Plus, I was a monster all on my own, and it didn’t take anyone long to realize it.

  I took right after my pops.

  As I approached the pizza shop, I heard the whisperings of the people around me. I always noticed how they moved away whenever I approached. They called me a junkie because I used to use drugs. They called me a drunk because my father was one. They called me white trash because it was the only clever title they could come up with.

  None of that bothered me because I didn’t give a damn what they thought.

  Small-town people with small-town minds.

  When I was younger, I’d get into a lot of fights with people who would talk shit about my father and me, but eventually, I learned they weren’t worth my time or my fists.

  Every time I got into a fight, they savored it. Every time my fist met a jerk’s face, they used it as justification for their fabricated lies. “See? He’s wild. He ain’t nothing but a lowlife.”

  I didn’t want them to have that power over me; therefore, I became silent, which seemed to scare them even more.

  When they whispered, I kept quiet.

  When they spat at me, I walked on, though if I was feeling wild, sometimes I’d growl at them. It scared them shitless. I was certain some of them actually thought I was a werewolf or something.

  Idiots.

  “He’s just like his father—a no-good piece of trash,” someone muttered.

  “I wouldn’t be shocked if Mad Mike died in his own vomit,” a fellow customer remarked, his voice low but not low enough for me to miss his comment.

  I paused my footsteps and took a deep breath.

  Those words hit me the hardest because I wouldn’t have been shocked either.

  I listened to them talk about my father dying, and flashes of my past shot through my mind. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I wanted to use. I needed something to fix my current fucked-up mind. Just a little, nothing too major…just one small hit…

  My heart pounded against my chest, beating me up inside, crying for numbness, crying for me to bring it back to a level of comfort it missed.

  I looked down at my wrist and saw one of those stupid ass plastic bracelets that read Powerful moments. Dr. Thompson had given it to me a few years back when I entered rehab. I could almost see his aged head of hair and kind eyes staring into mine, reminding me that I was stronger than my worst moments.

  “Those times you feel lost and afraid and weak—those are your moments for a breakthrough. Hidden beneath those dark moments is your power. Take those weak moments and make them powerful. Make them matter, Jackson. Make them count.”

  Dr. Thompson had me snap the bracelet against my wrist whenever I felt weak had or got the urge to use.

  My wrist was currently red as hell.

  Even so, I kept snapping it. It was a reminder that my next move would be real, just like the pain. The next choice I made would control my other choices down the line.

  My choice couldn’t be drugs.

  I didn’t use those to curb my emotions anymore.

  I didn’t use those to make me feel empty inside.

  I’d been clean for years, and I didn’t want that to change. Especially due to the people of Chester.

  Doing my best to ignore the ignorant people around me, I glanced outside then paused when I saw a car flying through the one and only stoplight in town. By stoplight, I meant the flashing yellow light. The car moved recklessly, and a knot formed in my gut as I realized it had no plans of slowing down.

  I groaned. “You’re going to crash,” I muttered to myself before releasing a heavy sigh and breaking out into a run toward the unstable vehicle. “You’re gonna fucking crash!”

  4

  Grace

  I’m going to freaking crash!

  “No, no, no!” I muttered to myself as I tried to control my uncontrollable car. Seconds before I’d pulled into Chester, my car had begun to hiccup, but I’d figured it would make it safely to my sister’s house before it gave out on me completely. That wasn’t the case.

  I tried to hit the brakes, but the pedal went to the floor of the car and nothing happene
d.

  “No, no, no,” I begged, feeling the vehicle start to shake.

  I flew through the flashing yellow light at the intersection of Grate Street and Michigan, and I shouted as people scurried out of the way so I wouldn’t hit them. I hit the curb a few times, trying to maneuver the car a bit, but nothing was working. Taking a deep breath, I said a small prayer, but it seemed my link to God was a bit delayed at the moment.

  Panic filled my heartbeats as I headed straight toward the auto shop at the end of downtown.

  How ironic would that be? Crashing into an auto shop.

  I reached for my phone that sat on the charger, only to realize the car hadn’t been charging at all and was completely dead. Just my luck.

  “Take your foot off the brake. It’s already flooded,” a deep voice said, making me turn around to look out the driver’s window.

  “It won’t stop!” I said, my voice shaky.

  He was running right beside me, keeping up with the wild runaway vehicle. “No shit, Sherlock. Unlock your door and slide over to the passenger seat,” he ordered.

  “But I can’t take my foot off the brake, I—”

  “Move!” he ordered, sending chills down my spine.

  I did as he said. The man quickly hopped into the moving vehicle, did some magic trick moves with the keys, and brought the car to a halt.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said, my breaths heavy. “What did you do?”

  “Put the damn car in park and turned off the ignition. It’s not brain surgery,” he said with such distaste on his tongue. He opened the driver’s side door and stepped out. “I’ll push you to the curb.”

  “But…” I started, uncertain of what to do. “Do you need help?”

  “If I did, I would’ve mentioned it,” he grumbled, obviously annoyed.

  Well then.