Authors: Nate Allen
His very apparent commitment to his son, honesty with respect to his past and his acceptance of his responsibility in the events leading to his divorce were attractive to her. Instead of promoting himself, he seemed more intent on acknowledging and professing his flaws and shortfalls, celebrating his failures and that was appealing to her. She felt some adjacency to his situation, the details of which were enormously different than hers, but his ownership and understanding of them and the way he presented them to her front and center, were shamelessly attractive. She took comfort in the fact that he had something to lose, someone to protect, and whose interests he would put before his own. It made the possibility that he would disrupt her domestic applecart less likely, and that common ground of emotional “mutually assured destruction,” among other things she would discover that existed between them, would lend itself to an unpretentious, uninhibited, and gratifying relationship …at first.
His father had died when he was nineteen, a heart attack in the backyard while pruning an apple tree. It was just a couple of months after his second cancer surgery, and his mother had rushed in the house in a panic shouting that something was wrong, without thinking he asked his girlfriend to call for help, but being just a mile and a half from the hospital, they would be twenty-three minutes in arriving, and in all likelihood twenty-two minutes late. He had seen CPR performed on television, but his attempt would be unfruitful, and the man he thought indestructible would die in his arms.
Life had caught him off balance in that moment, pulled the rug out from beneath him. They had not had that opportunity to get acquainted as men, beyond the relationship of father and son, and there had been disappointment and tension between them in the past months, his dismissal from school, other singularly unimportant but cumulative nonsense that had created some distance between them, unresolved father/son issues. And as only time would tell, his absence in Jake’s life at that critical age would create a black hole filled with aimlessness, impetuous and self-destructive behavior, and a load of young man’s foolish trouble would follow that despite the advice and efforts of friends and loved ones, he would never climb out of, only survive to emerge on the other side of so to speak.
His dad had left him with clues, basic tenets about manhood, clichés mostly, probably as his own father had done. Jacob had memorized them, and in his youth misunderstood them in some measure just as someone who is simply left with an instruction manual is sometimes apt to assemble things incorrectly first before putting it together right. In time he would put content with context, and take what he perceived the meaning to be to heart, and aspire to make the memory of the old man proud. The most basic rule he had been taught was that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing right. It naturally fed into his innate predisposition for perfection, and he took it to the extreme in his signature fashion, if he couldn’t do it right, he wouldn’t do it at all, and on those occasions where his efforts to do it right failed, well he failed “very well.”
Like Newton’s laws of motion, a body at rest will remain at rest …a body in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by outside forces, his adult life was largely characterized by peaks and valleys, and great plateaus and piedmonts in between. Periods of great productivity and great periods of inactivity, periods where he seemed unstoppable, and conversely periods where he seemed immovable, and he was quite aware of it all, but felt like he was sitting behind the wheel of a car without the key, always in need of external circumstance or person to provide the impetus.
Impatience comes hand in hand with such an affliction, but like a mule that will sit in the field and take a beating rather than plod another step without getting the rest, the apple or water it desires, he had evolved into the sort of man that was resolved to do without when he couldn’t have what he really wanted, and it made of him a strangely patient impatient man. At this juncture however he wasn’t content to sit around waiting for Rae Anne Johnston’s schedule to ease up, so he had to hit the pause button on what might be, and leave the frame frozen on the fact that he had met someone of great interest to him, but it was nothing more than that at the moment. And so he proceeded business as usual. All of the yards seeded for the season, and leaves largely under control he was about to hit the lull, it had been a reasonably profitable year despite the drought and he had prepared like a squirrel putting away nuts for a harsh winter, saving money for the off-season, and shifting gears toward a part-time gig he had as a paralegal/investigator for a Raleigh attorney.
Rhonda Gibson had been Jacob’s paralegal studies instructor eleven years earlier. Young and just two years out of law school, she had opted to hang her own shingle as a full-service practitioner, but in the capital city attorneys outnumber pigeons, and as cutthroat as Jacob thought his line of work to be where everyone with a pickup truck and a lawnmower was trying to cut into his customer base, it was at least a straightforward trade. If you did good, dependable work it served as its own indisputable testament and reference, in fact, customer willing, you could even put a sign in their yard to that effect. The legal community however, despite the implication of fairness, could be deceptively unjust and mean, the kind of community that eats its young or starves them into submission.
Coming from rural eastern North Carolina, home to vinegar-based pork barbeque, tobacco, and perennial High School football powerhouses, she had pursued the career for all the right reasons, to help people, and fight the good fight. But it is a profession dependent upon relationships, relationships with other attorneys, DA’s, law enforcement, judges, clerks, the list goes on and on, the necessary network as such resembling a spider web, and she would find herself initially an outcast of sorts, relegated to the quarters of ambulance chasers and courthouse-steps JD’s hoping to be retained on the spot by some poor soul who had shown up without representation and in desperate need of it …not unlike the day laborers Jake would sometimes employ, only better dressed.
It was not an uncommon situation it seems, but she had found herself there in part by her own doing, having declined some professional offers, spurned some romantic advances, and winning a couple of low profile cases against more established lawyers and firms with big reputations and long memories, and yet she remained inherently opposed to being part of that culture and struggled as a result.
It had not been easy, she had the crows’ feet and invisible scars to prove it, but prideful and relentless, like the area she came from, she had eventually found a niche without compromising or conceding. They had met at the beginning of that journey when Rhonda was finding the going hard, and had taken the teaching job in the evenings to help make ends meet and pay off three years worth of debilitating law school loans. It was a time when Jake was feeling some self-imposed duress to transition from blue collar to white collar, but it was a “color” so to speak that didn’t really look good on him. While he was bright, he was also restless and easily bored. Physical pursuits and the immediate gratification they brought suited him best, and he would convince himself that he could make the sort of living he wanted for himself using his back instead of his brain.
In the process however, the two would become friends, and Rhonda would handle Jake’s divorce and custody cases. He would eventually come to work for her part-time in the capacity for which she had helped prepare him on an as-needed basis, and more regularly as he became available in the fall and winter months. While he wasn’t a licensed Private Investigator, he could work under the purview of an attorney’s guidance, and the similarities between the two, and their fondness for each other, strengthened both their relationships. He had found that as he had gotten older, the respective road of his life had narrowed to the point that he could only maintain a few close friendships, and Rhonda represented fifty percent of the population whose opinion he genuinely respected and whom he trusted. The other half of that equation was his longtime friend Harvey, or “Chunk” as he called him.
Harvey Childers was a chunk of a man, at 5ft 8” and 240 lbs he was almost unshaped, like a “chunk” and they had known each other for more than two decades. He had about ten different nicknames for Jake, randomly evoked irrespective of the situation as if he couldn’t remember his best friend’s name at times, and he could have hollered any one of them out at any place, at any time, and Jake, with the keenness of a Plott Hound would have recognized the origin and author often with accompanying chagrin. Chunk had been there to pick Jake’s ass up off the ground, literally and figuratively, on numerous occasions, and Jake had regrettably once knocked Chunk on his. They had not always been best friends, but through a process of elimination called life, seemed to have merely outlasted the other contestants in that regard and as time went on they would come to have each other’s back and keep each other’s secrets.
It was called the Corner Bar, but ironically resided nowhere near a corner on an isolated patch of two-lane country road. The owner thought it gave it a neighborhood establishment type of feel, but truth was, she could have named it
Hades
and it would have had the same degree of success and clientele. He didn’t frequent it often, it had an atmosphere of sadness, and was also unfairly popular with the Sheriff and State Troopers. Not as patrons of course, but as a source of revenue since there was only the one road, and it only ran two ways, it offered easy pickings. And with depressing regularity someone leaving the establishment was routinely found in the local biweekly newspaper police blotter. But Chunk and he were looking for a place to have a few cold ones, and the Corner was close, or close by “country” standards that is, which roughly translated to only 7-8 miles away.
There were all of about fifteen customers in the place, which meant it was about half full, but lo’ and behold, one of them was Iris Vaughn, or Ivey as he knew her. She was the daughter of a county High School principal, and had babysat his son before, during, and after the divorce. He knew her family casually, had done some work for them planting some perennials and cut-leaf Japanese maples some time ago, and they were good people. He hadn’t seen her in five or six years, she had to be at least mid-twenties now he thought, and she recognized him as soon as he came through the door, rushed over and gave him a hug and a peck like an old friend. She was cute, had been a High School cheerleader, but he had always known there was more to her than the “goody two shoes” outward appearance her parents demanded. He had found the occasional empty wine cooler and Salem Light menthols buried in his trash after her stints, but he also remembered babysitting with his sixteen year-old girlfriend once-upon-a-time, and there was never more than one or two on any occasion, so he hadn’t made an issue of it, and she knew it.
Ivey had graduated High School and attended an all women’s college in Raleigh, with the intention of becoming a teacher. Warm and nurturing, she seemed well suited for it, but after two years she quit school and changed course and began a pseudo-bohemian lifestyle by Raleigh standards for a couple of years, and even, unknown to her parents, had worked as an “exotic dancer” at an upscale club in Cary, N.C., for a time, which too, she seemed well suited for. He had always liked her, she wasn’t the typical teenage cheerleader prototype robot, perpetually effervescent and all “OMG’s, BFF’s, LOL’s,” …and drama. She was quiet and out of synch with it all, as if playing a necessary role or fulfilling a graduation requirement until she could walk across that stage, accept her diploma and close the curtain on that part of her life.
He couldn’t help but appreciate that in the process she had definitely matured into a PYT, “pretty young thang,” and while he didn’t particularly like the phrase “old soul” because it conjured up connotations of sadness and “the party’s over before it’s even begun,” she had a depth about her that was uncommon for a woman of twenty-five …or whatever she was, just as he contrastingly had a great deal of the boy left in him for a man his age, and consequently, over the next couple of hours, and three or four beers, the gap between their ages and the distance between where they were in their respective lives seemed to dissipate until she was asking him if he could drive her home, feeling a little “wrecked” as she put it. “
Are you sure?
” he asked coyly, “
I’ll confess I’m entertaining some impure thoughts,
” he added with a half smile and one eyebrow raised, buffering the statement as if joking in case it was not well received. She smiled and gently bumped him with her hip, “
I’d be disappointed if you weren’t.
”
She and her older sister, Rose, were named after her mother’s favorite flowers, ironically, of the varieties he had planted around their yard. Her mother June, and her sisters April and May …no joke, had been named after her grandmother’s favorite months… The irony of the fact that he might now be heading down the garden path to pluck one of those said flowers, and plant something of his own did not escape him, and the paradox unnerved him a bit.
Chunk would take the diesel home after having educated some young bucks on the foosball table, and Jake would drive her decade old Honda Civic. The plan intentionally lacked some clarity it seemed, and she promptly asked if she could crash on his couch to avoid the inevitable frown and dismay that would await both of them at her parents’ house, where she was visiting for the weekend. And he obliged, with increasingly cautious hopes, but no expectations. When they arrived, Chunk was out of sight, retired as he often did after such outings to the upstairs guestroom he frequented so much he called it his.
Jake fumbled halfheartedly with the sofa in an effort to give the appearance of being a gentleman despite hoping she would stop him, and then put on a CD he had burned of obscure alternative music he had compiled from TV show and movie soundtracks. She was again reminded of what she had always liked about him, while he had the weathered exterior of a career Marine or the Marlboro Man, he had somehow managed to grow older, but not old like so many men his age, and despite the gray in his dark hair, and the white in his goatee, the schoolgirl fascination had grown into a mutual lust for the evening. She kissed him, and it wasn’t a peck this time. She tasted of cigarettes and bubblegum and smelled like the summer after his High School graduation, which smelled wonderfully alive and full of promise as though something life-changing and unforgettable could happen any second.