“Yeah, okay. We’ll go to the house.” Carson's tone didn't exactly match his spoken agreement.
For that, Trevor couldn't exactly blame him. He would have preferred to be just about anywhere but the house they had grown up in. He'd sworn to himself that he'd never set foot there again, and the fact that their parents were both gone now didn't make him feel any better about going back on his word.
He turned his face up to the sky, where large, fat clouds were gathering, ready to dump their bounty onto the two McCall brothers. Not that Trevor would have minded. He'd always liked standing out in a storm, and it would beat listening to the reading of his parents' will, any day of the week. He didn't need to ask to know that Carson felt the same way. Only a sense of duty sent them back to their trucks, climbing in and slamming the doors, starting engines that somehow managed to sound as resigned as Trevor felt. In Trevor's case, duty was joined by a strong desire to get things over with so he could go back to his real life.
"Not long now," he promised himself and the empty cab of his truck as he eased it back onto the road that led to his parents' house. "Not too long now, and all this will be behind you for good."
He nodded, trying to ignore the feeling of doubt settling like a stone in the pit of his stomach. That dread didn’t mean anything, or at least, it didn’t have to. All he had to do was get through the reading of the will, have some dinner and a few beers with his brothers, and as soon as tomorrow morning, he could be on the road. In a couple weeks, it would be like none of this had ever happened. Just another unhappy memory, another bad dream to file away in the part of himself he made sure never to visit.
2
Trevor and Carson pulled up in front of the house at the same time, Carson maneuvering his truck so close to Trevor’s, the older brother grimaced. For a moment, Trevor let himself rest in the old, battered driver’s seat, feeling the faulty heater blowing in his face. Despite the March air’s chill, he was sweating bullets.
Even after Carson dropped out of the cab of his own monster vehicle, Trevor remained in place. “The gang’s all here,” he muttered to himself. “Back together again at last.”
Randy's car was already parked alongside the house, and for some reason, that made everything feel more real to Trevor.
Too real, making the instinct to turn and run with his tail between his legs so strong, he could hardly swallow it back down. Only Carson's earnest, questioning face in his window got him to open his door at all.
“What’s the deal, bro? You planning on hearing the reading of the will from here? Because I’ve gotta tell ya, that doesn’t seem like the best plan to me.”
“Very funny,” Trevor muttered, shoving one hand deep into the pocket of his sheepskin coat and shooting his brother the bird with the other. “You’re just a riot today, aren’t ya?”
“You know, I try. Got to lighten the mood somehow, right? I mean, with everything that’s going on? It’s either laugh or cry.”
“So help me, if you start crying—”
“You’ll what?” Randy interrupted from the open doorway. “You two planning on getting into it out here without me?”
"Randy, look what the cat drug in," Carson chuckled, turning away from Trevor and striding quickly toward the house. As Trevor watched, he skipped up the steps to the porch and pulled Randy in for a hug. The two brothers embraced the way men in their twenties were wont to do, clapping each other on the back and then pulling apart quickly, clearing their throats and kicking up snow with the toes of their boots. Trevor watched and wondered how long it would take them to notice if he decided to go ahead and get gone.
“Come on, big brother,” Randy called as if reading Trevor’s mind. “It’s time. We’ve got to put things to rest, once and for all. This whole mess has been bad enough already. No sense drawing it out any longer than we have to.”
“Mr. Barnes been on your back about us not being here yet, has he?” Carson laughed.
“Maybe a little bit,” Randy admitted, two bright spots of color finding their way to his cheeks. “And, if we’re being honest, I’ve got some other things I need to attend to after this. I know it sounds awful, but—”
“No,” Trevor interrupted, his voice a good deal harder than he’d intended it to be. “It doesn’t. Our lives didn’t stop when Mom and Dad died. Maybe they should have, and maybe not, but that’s not how death works.”
A new voice broke in. “Too right. Now, would the three of you mind very much joining me in your father’s office? It would be best if we could iron out the details sooner rather than later. There are some elements of this particular will that are a little...unorthodox.” Mr. Barnes, who had appeared in the doorway without making a sound, turned promptly on his heel and walked back into the house.
Trevor raised an eyebrow at Carson, who mouthed the word “unorthodox” with questions written across his face. Trevor and Randy shrugged in perfect unison and, smiling tiredly to each other, followed Mr. Barnes inside, the new arrivals shrugging off their coats and hanging them on their accustomed hooks by the door as they entered.
The second he was in the house, Trevor wanted to walk right back out again. He'd expected it to be hard to come back to the ranch, but he'd under-anticipated how bad just stepping inside the house was going to be, like walking into a time capsule—or a building full of ghosts. Not just the ghosts of his parents, either. Ghosts of himself and his brothers, younger versions of themselves roaming through those now quiet halls and already dusty rooms.
Large, studio-produced family portraits hung on the walls, and more photographs lined the fireplace mantel and the free space on the shelves of the bookcases. Never mind that Trevor had stopped smiling in them around the time he turned eight, although it had taken several more years for him to figure out why he felt so different from the rest of his family, his set frown and crossed arms upsetting the otherwise picture-perfect image of what a family was supposed to look like. His parents had gone on displaying the photographs all the same, up until Trevor had moved away and stopped coming home.
They were resilient, he had to give them that. They always had been.
Trevor trailed after Carson and Randy reluctantly, running his fingertips along the plaster of the walls beneath where the pictures hung and trying not to look at much of anything else. He didn't want to see any more reminders. Sitting down in his father's study was going to be bad enough.
He was even surer about that as soon as they stepped over the threshold.
“Jeez,” Carson said, letting out a shaky breath. “This is a blast from the past.”
“Right?” Randy said, glancing around the room as if he expected their father to pop out of one of the shadowy recesses of the room at any moment, to scold them for being in his study when they knew they weren’t supposed to be.
If Mr. Barnes was rattled by the supersized dose of James McCall, however, he didn’t let it show. He walked purposefully around the boat-sized mahogany desk, where Trevor imagined he could still see his father’s stern face, and sat right down. The lawyer rolled the overstuffed desk chair closer and removed a stack of papers from the briefcase placed there for just this occasion. Looking at Trevor and his brothers again, he was all business.