“Maybe you’re right, Uncle D, but I know a dying man wouldn’t write a heartfelt goodbye letter to his son if he didn’t love him,” Asher says, handing me an opened envelope.
I look at him blankly, still trying to make sense of what’s going on.
“I opened it and read it to be sure we could give it to you. There was no way we were sharing this with you if it would hurt you more than you already are,” Ryan says.
I pick up the letter with shaking hands. I look at it for a while before leaving it to rest on the table. I can’t read it now. I’m not sure I’ll ever be strong enough to do so.
“If you want us to be here when you read it, we’ll be here,” Ian says.
“Where is Emma?” I ask, looking to Asher for an answer.
“In Michigan, packing with her mother. Ellen didn’t want the money anyway, and she wanted to move closer to her daughter. Emma and I are fine, don’t worry about us. Between the trust fund you started and the one Grandfather opened for us, we’ll never need to work a day in our life.”
I send him a stern look. No way they won’t work. He smiles at me, showing me he was trying to get a reaction out of me.
“We’re leaving everything to Clay. How I see it, we win anyway. We have a family, and he doesn’t. He can sit alone on his pile of money like Scrooge with his evil witch of a mother and his sick heart for companions. They’ll be fine. The most important thing to us is you, Uncle D.”
“We love you, Dex,” Ian says.
“Even I love you, Dextyn,” Ryan jokes.
“You’re never going to let it go, am I right?” I sigh.
“Of course not. Would any brother let it go?” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
When I was hit with depression twenty years ago, my therapist said that the first step of healing from a depressive episode was focusing on positivity. To open the cage you’re trapped in, you need to think there’s still something worth fighting for. If I’m not ready to read my father’s letter and find peace within me, I know I can change the first lies I was telling myself in the darkness of my bedroom.
I am no burden to others.
I don’t deserve to be alone.
My family cares about me.
And I need to let them take care of me.
19
Luke
I’m in deep shit. I literally have shit up to my knees. There’s nothing like the smell of sheep manure to bring you back to reality. I love it and hate it at the same time.
I love it because it means I’m at my parents’ for the week and there’s nothing like Mom’s cooking, even for the forty-three-year-old man that I am. I hate it because, well, I’m shoveling sheep shit. Every time I’m in town, that’s what they have me do, as if they want to remind me where I come from. I hated it when I was fifteen and I still hate it thirty years later, but I do it. Why? Because shoveling shit means I have a family to go back to. They’re one of my most precious gifts. The other precious gifts I have are my artistic talent and, if you listen to my mother, my heart.
“Hey, are you shoveling or dreaming?” Aaron appears, hopping onto the tailgate of the truck beside the barn and sitting on it like when we were teens.
“I was shoveling until about thirty seconds ago. It seems you always catch me at the moment I start to think about something.”
“Maybe because I always want to know what’s in that head of yours.” Aaron shrugs.
That’s true. When we were young, he always wanted to know what I was thinking, where I was going, who I was hanging out with. Our parents thought he was overprotective until they realized he was just lonely. He clung to me as if I was the solution to his brooding and I was the only one who could tell him anything. Then I found him a girlfriend.
I walk away to wash my hands and try to get the smell off it. When I join my brother at the truck, he hands me a sandwich. It smells like shit. Everything smells like shit, but I don’t need to smell it to know it will be delicious. Mom’s cooking is always delicious. “Why aren’t you at the restaurant?”
Aaron owns one of the best restaurants in the state. Farm-to-table concept, of course. Gritt Your Plate prides itself on serving products from the Gritt farm and has received a great amount of praise. If he wanted to, Aaron could be a rock star in the chef world. Especially with his looks.
You can tell we’re brothers, but he’s more built than I am, his hair is grey, and his eyes are blue. All the girls were fawning over him in high school, but only one had his heart. Until he went to culinary school and met Jessica, an opinionated, family-oriented pro-athlete who had just injured herself. He fell hard and fast and came home with her as his fiancée. She wanted to visit the world after her injury, but he wanted to stay in upstate New York. She became a sports consultant for the local news and travels the country without him while he raises their kids, Hailey and Lawson. If Hailey is the sporty girl, Lawson is more the artist, like his dad and me. Because what Aaron does with those plates is fucking art.
“It’s Monday,” he says as if this should explain why he’s not cooking for clients, “and I needed to talk to you.”
His seriousness can’t be any indication of what he’s about to deliver. Aaron is always serious. I know he misses me being around. I don’t think he can open up as much with Jess.
“What’s up?” I say before taking a bite of my sandwich.
“Jess and I are calling it quits.”
I choke on a piece of turkey. “What? How?”
“It was a long time coming, but she met someone else while at a conference in Vegas and she decided to pursue it.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“To be honest, I’m pretty relieved. As beautiful, strong, and wonderful as she is, she never really understood my need to be close to the family. I’m not as free as you or her.”
“What about the kids?” I ask, grabbing for a bottle of water.
“She’s moving to Vegas. There’s no way I’m sending them there. They’re staying with me. She travels too much anyway.”
“Her job?”
“She already found a new one—a better one, it seems. I want to announce it to the parents and the kids while you’re here.”
I’m not sure which kids he’s referring to. We’re older than our two siblings by over a decade and always used to call them “the kids."
“Of course!”
“What’s up with you? Not that I’m complaining about seeing you outside of your annual Christmas visit, but I know you wouldn’t be here shoveling shit if you didn’t need some grounding.”
“Well, nothing life-altering. I just needed a break from LA. My shop was vandalized, so I’m renovating. I decided to leave Morgan and my new partner, Ryan, in charge and come for a visit.”
“That’s it?” Aaron looks at me as if he’s trying to read my soul. “Is this Ryan someone of interest?”
“Ryan as in Ryan Marley, heterosexual actor, restaurant owner, and now tattoo parlor investor.”
“Ah, that Ryan. I guess not then.”
“Nope. But there is someone. It’s just a little too complicated.”