I drew in a deep breath as the boys closed the front door on their way out. Of course Brooks was leaving again. I was nothing but an afterthought to my own brother, and it had been that way my entire fucking life. Tears brewed behind my eyes, but I blinked them back as quickly as they formed. He didn’t deserve my tears. He hadn’t deserved them before, and he certainly didn’t deserve them now.
Guess whoever he fucks takes priority over blood.
As I looked around the bedroom, I sighed. This has been my parent’s bedroom. While I was excited to have the space all the myself, the memories of crawling into bed with them when I was a young child bombarded my mind. I gazed over at the bedframe with the musty mattress still on top of it and swallowed hard. I had spent so many fearful, stormy nights curled up in between them when I was a child.
Back when things weren’t so fucked all the time.
“I really am trying, Mom,” I whispered.
When she passed on, I made her a promise. I promised her that Brooks and I would stay close, no matter what. And most days, it felt like I was the only one working to keep that promise fulfilled. I stood in my childhood home only weeks after my only brother got out of prison, and I was somehow standing alone.
I hate my life sometimes.
But what did I really have back here? I came back for Brooks, and if this was how I was going to be treated, then it did me no good to stay here. I had terrible memories of this place. Horrible nights of crying myself to sleep and staying up, perched at the windowsill to see if Dad would ever come back. Memories of birthdays without cards or friends. Memories of watching Brooks leave time and time again, only to come back days later without a care in the world.
While I held Mom’s hair back at two in the morning when I was only fourteen years old because she couldn’t stop vomiting up her guts.
“I have nothing here,” I murmured.
Might as well clean it up and sell it, then.
It wasn’t as if Brooks didn’t want to sell the place. I’d had to convince the overgrown man-child not to sell this place off at least twice while he was in prison. And maybe this was his plan. Maybe his plan was to treat me like absolute and utter shit until I didn’t do anything but give into his plan of selling this place.
If that was his plan, it worked.
“All right, let’s do this,” I sighed.
I started with my parent’s old bedroom and went room by room, dusting and vacuuming and sweeping. I swatted at the cobwebs and sucked up the spiders that crawled out of the corners. I wrinkled my nose at the carpet and made a mental note to get someone in here to give me a quote on what it might take to replace it. If I sank enough money into this place, I could update it and really turn a profit. A home like this in the kind of quiet neighborhood it was in would sell for at least three times what Mom and Dad originally paid for it.
It just needed a little bit of love and tender care.
Like me.
After getting the master bedroom and bathroom up to par, I finally moved to my old bedroom. And when I opened the door, I found that it wasn’t as dirty as I figured it might have been. Things didn’t seem as dusty, and the musted old odor I smelled around the house didn’t creep up from the carpet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the boys cleaned up this room before they ever tackled getting my shit out of the car.
“Huh,” I said softly.
I put down the broom and the duster and walked into the middle of my room. Hell, even my damn posters and pictures were still on the wall! It felt like I had walked right into my high school dreams. I ran my fingers along the band posters of musical men I had huge crushes on as a fifteen-year-old girl, smiling as the memories wafted through my mind. Memories of the few days Mom sobered up enough to come to my soccer games. Memories of when I was younger, back when Dad was still around. I turned toward the bed and watched the memories unfold before my very eyes.
As if I were watching a reel of my life.
“But Daaaaad.”
He placed his finger against my lips. “No ‘buts’. It’s time for bed.”
I wiped at my eyes. “But I’m scared, Daddy. The thunder is loud.”
He cupped my cheek. “I know it is, Princess. But no one ever conquered their fears by cowering away.”
“I wanna sleep with you and Mom, pleeeeease?”
He kissed my forehead. “How about I lay down with you until you fall asleep? How does that sound?”
I sniffled. “Promise?”
He booped my nose with his finger. “Promise, promise.”
The memory faded away as quickly as it had popped up and something wet streamed down my cheeks. I cursed to myself softly as I wiped it away, determined to stomach my emotions. None of them deserved anymore of my tears. I had cried half of my life away when I first moved to L.A., and I wouldn’t give them another second of my time. Mom and Dad—and Brooks, for that matter—made their choices. Dad chose to leave, and Mom chose to turn to alcohol to remedy her broken heart. My brother chose to seek out family elsewhere instead of culling together what was left of his family here.
It wasn’t my fault they all forgot about me in the process.
Still, the guilt hung hard in my heart. The fact that I couldn’t pull my mother out of her drunken stupors never sat right with me. I mean if I was a daughter to be proud of, she would have sobered up. Right? I was her damn child, for crying out loud! Surely I was worth sobering up for if I had been worth something or if she hadn’t been so ashamed of me, right?
I should’ve seen how much she was struggling earlier.
Then, a picture on my old bedside table caught my eye. It was the only picture I had of Brooks, and it was from years ago. He didn’t even have his official leather cut back then. Just a plain leather jacket and a dorky smile on his face. I giggled softly as I walked over to the picture. I picked it up and smoothed the small specks of dust away from the glass just so I could take in those kind and happy eyes of his.
Before my eyes gravitated toward Porter.
My brother had his arm tossed around Porter’s neck and my heart stopped in my chest. But that didn’t stop the guilt from blossoming stronger than ever. Porter once struggled just like my mother had. At one point in time when I’d known him, he did nothing but drink his sorrows away. And instead of staying to help him out, I ran.
I ran to L.A. and never looked back.
I’m so sorry, Porter. You deserved better than me.
I put the picture down before placing the glass against the bedside table. I couldn’t stomach the idea of looking at it. They both looked so happy, and it only reminded me of how things were whenever I wasn’t around. It only reminded me of the mistakes I’d made and how it altered the rest of my life forever.
Maybe if I hadn’t run away from home, Brooks and I would be closer.
Maybe if I hadn’t run all the way to L.A. to escape things, Porter and I would be together.
“Maybe if I wasn’t such a damn nutjob, I’d have a normal life,” I murmured to myself.
A scurrying sound behind the wall caught my ear and it pulled me from my trance. I furrowed my brow as I walked over toward the sound, dreading what I was about to do. The scurrying noise stopped, and I placed my hand against the wall, waiting for the opportune moment.
Then, I knocked against the wall with my knuckles.
Before the scurrying started up quicker than ever.
“Damn it, there’s rodents in the walls,” I hissed.
I added a call to an exterminator on my long list of things to do to get this house in shape enough to sell.
There was no use in dwelling on old memories, especially with the paths we had taken in life. So, I lost myself in more cleaning as I went room to room upstairs. I tied a shirt around my mouth and nose to keep the bulk of the dust out and I vacuumed the carpet over four times before that nasty smell even thought about dissipating. I threw open every single window as I bounced from room to room, doing everything from stripping the beds of their sheets and throwing them away to cleaning the windows and washing the fucking popcorn ceilings.
“Those are gonna be a bitch to fix,” I grunted.
By the time I made my way back downstairs, I’d been upstairs for at least four hours. And I heard a dreaded sound that I knew would keep me occupied for a while. I rolled my eyes as I set everything down, including the vacuum cleaner, and I backtracked the sound of dripping water all the way into the kitchen.
And when I looked in the sink, I found the smell of the stale carpet that I thought was from the floors.
I gagged. “Holy shit.”
The water sitting in the sink was brown, and the drain smelled as if it were clogged with old hair and diapers. I tightened the shirt around my face and threw open the cabinet doors beneath the sink and rolled my eyes when I saw the rotting wood. I had no idea how long this sink had been dripping for or why Brooks hadn’t popped by to check on things after turning on the damn utilities for me, but I knew this job would take up the rest of my night.
So, I went digging around for Dad’s old toolbox so I could find a way to fix the leaky pipes.
And get rid of the damn clog in the kitchen drain pipe.
