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“BLAKE, IT’S TIME TO go.”
It was my father yelling from downstairs.
I was sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, tying the laces on my boots. “I’m coming,” I yelled toward the bedroom’s closed door. “Just give me a minute.”
“You’ve already had thirty minutes, Blake. We’re going to be late.”
I looked at the clock on my nightstand. He was right. The appointment with my therapist was in less than ten minutes.
I stood from the bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and grabbed my favorite cap.
“I’ll be in the car.” Dad yelled up to me.
I heard the sound of the front door slamming shut. The impact rattled the old windowpanes on the wall.
I knew that Dad was pissed.
As I made my way down the creaky staircase, I heard something else. It was Wolf, my dad’s black Labrador. She was slapping her tail against the inside of her metal crate.
Standing at the bottom of the steps, I peeked into the den. Wolf looked at me from behind the crate’s door, tilted her head to the side, and made a pathetic whimper.
From outside, there was the sound of Dad’s horn.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m coming,” I mumbled under my breath.
When I opened the door, Dad’s truck was already running, and he had put it into reverse. The red brake lights illuminated the gravel driveway.
After shutting the front door to the house, I hustled down the driveway and opened the truck’s passenger side door. “I overslept,” I told him. “It’s not that big a deal.” By then I was sitting down. I buckled my seatbelt and slammed the truck door.
“It is a big deal, Blake. You’re my responsibility now whether you like it or not.”
The truck’s tires crunched over the gravel as Dad spun out of the driveway.
Up until the past few years, Dad had lived in Georgia. I visited his home in Edgefield often, and I had already been living there for two weeks, but I still studied the outside of the house like I was a visitor.
The 1800s-era farmhouse was covered in white clapboard. There was a tin roof that was rusted in several spots. A wide front porch stretched across the front. The roof on the right side of the porch was sagging and being supported by a thick balustrade that was pressed into the ground.
Not long after backing out into the road, the truck barely paused at the stop sign at the end of the road before Dad turned the wheel to the left and drove toward town.
It was only three miles to the town limit sign, but sometimes riding with him made it fell like an eternity.
“After I drop you off, I’m going to the store,” he said. “Destiny is supposed to be at the house around six. Supper is at six-thirty.”
Destiny was Dad’s fiancé. I had only been around her a few times. She seemed okay.
“I’m thinking spaghetti,” Dad continued. “How does that sound?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s fine with me.”
“Blake, Destiny has been looking forward to this all week. Please, just try to show a little bit of enthusiasm.”
I had always been shy, but recently it had gotten a lot worse. On the first visit with my psychiatrist, she told me that I was showing all of the signs of PTSD—Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and that the social anxiety was probably stemming from that.
I thought about the pamphlets that I had flipped through in the waiting room. According to what I had read, and what Mrs. Reynolds had told me about my “journey to recovery,” there are stages to combating anxiety.
People in stage two have admitted to themselves that they have a problem.
I was in stage two.
Just a week earlier, I had been folding towels in the laundry room when I knocked over a bottle of bleach. The plastic bottle hit the floor, the top popped off, and the harsh smelling liquid poured out onto the hardwood floor. It smelled like chlorine. Like the pool supply store. Dad found me an hour later crouched down, trembling, between the washing machine and dryer.
The passing landscape of fields and orchards eventually gave way to sidewalks and prestigious antebellum homes.
Even though the two towns were less than twenty miles apart, the town of Edgefield was a stark contrast to Ridge Spring, where I had lived before. Ridge Spring was a single strip of stores, businesses, grain silos, and a train track that ran perpendicular to all of them. The center of Edgefield was a quaint, grassy square that had a gazebo at its heart and a looming brick courthouse that overlooked everything else. Because of Edgefield’s violent past, legend had it that every inch of the square has been stained by blood.
“Here we are,” Dad said as he brought the truck to a grinding stop in a space on the far, back corner. “I’ll be back to pick you up in exactly one hour.”
I got out of the truck, shut the door, and watched Dad drive away.
Mrs. Reynolds, the therapist, worked from home. The house was an old Victorian that was just off the square next to a pottery studio and museum. I walked down the crushed brick walkway to the back of the house where her office was located.
Inside, several posters had been tacked to the walls. One of the posters read PTSD—POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER—HOW TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE IT. There was a window that looked out onto a neatly mowed yard and a bookcase that was so loaded down with books that the thin, wooden shelves sagged in the middle. A potted flower sat atop a metal filing cabinet in the corner. Other than the flower, the room seemed to be devoid of any kind of personal touches.
“How have you been since our last meeting?” Mrs. Reynolds was sitting behind her large, metal desk. A manila envelope was on the desk in front of her.
I sat across from her and told her about the incident with the bleach.
The therapist didn’t respond right away. Instead, she leaned back in her chair and looked me in the eyes. “Blake, I think that reading is something that you need to get back to doing. Is it a trigger? Is that the reason that you have pushed it to the side? It’s normal for people in your situation to lose interest in their hobbies, but...”
“It’s not a trigger. I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
It seemed like Mrs. Reynolds thought that everything had the potential to be a trigger that could bring back memories of that night.
“Just let me pass this along to you.” She opened the folder that was sitting on her desk. “I’ve compiled a list of people that you can friend on social media. This is a reading buddy program...”
“Really? A reading buddy? I’m not ten years old.”
Up until then, my only knowledge of reading buddies was from elementary school when the teacher had paired each student with a high school mentor. Mine had been a senior named Bethany Crane. Bethany wore the shortest shorts that I had ever seen and was always sucking on a breath mint. She was my first crush.
Mrs. Reynolds slid a pamphlet across the top of the desk.
“They will know nothing about you personally. This is just a way for you to baby-step into somewhat of a social relationship, and, at the same time, you’ll be picking back up an old hobby. It will be preparing you to take action.”
It felt weird to only be seventeen and have someone refer to something you used to do as being old.
And by “take action”, I knew what she meant—make a friend.
I picked up the pamphlet and slid it into my back pocket without looking at it.
Mrs. Reynolds continued talking. “You are at such a crucial time in your life. It is imperative that you overcome this. You mentioned at our last meeting that you wanted to know why your stepdad did those horrible things.”
“Well, wouldn’t you?”
She nodded her head. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong for looking for that sort of closure. I understand that need. I really do. But the truth of the matter is that you may never fully understand.” She reached to the open folder and picked up another sheet of paper. “Here. Let me give you this.”
I took the paper from her and turned it so that I could see the front. A single line ran diagonally from the bottom left to the top right where she had clipped a narrow strip of star-shaped stickers. Six circles were evenly spaced along the line and labeled with the steps to beating social anxiety—pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and termination.
“It’s a progress chart,” she said. “Take it with you and mark your achievements.”
While I was sitting in her office, I peeled two of the stickers from the paper and stuck one on each of the first two steps. The idea seemed silly, but it made me feel good. Like I was accomplishing something. Two steps down. Four to go.
––––––––
AFTER THE SESSION WAS up, I went outside to where Dad was in the truck waiting on me.
I opened the passenger side door and flopped myself onto the seat.
He was smiling. “Hey there big guy, how did it go?”
Dad was one of the most flippant people that I knew. On the way to town he had been on my case about being late and now, just an hour later, he was calling me big guy? And smiling?
I pulled the reading buddy program from my back pocket, handed it to him, then pulled the door closed.
He flipped the pamphlet open and looked it over. “It looks like it might be something good for you.”
He passed the pamphlet back to me and started the truck.
“I need to run by the brewery real quick,” he said. “Riley’s got the flyers ready.”
Dad owned a small brewery that was located on the opposite side of the square. After driving over, Dad got out of the truck and met Riley on the sidewalk. Riley worked at the brewery. He was a few years older than me. He had black hair that came down to his shoulders. Riley handed Dad a thick stack of flyers that advertised the upcoming event, a night on the square complete with bluegrass music and tours of the farm.
Later that night, the entire house was filled with the delicious smelling aroma of garlic, olive oil, and tomatoes as Dad prepared dinner.
Before I moved in, Dad never turned on the fancy chandelier that hung over the dining room table. The lighting fixture had been there since the house had been built. Dad had always said that the old wires were a fire hazard.
Rewiring the old electric was something that he had been meaning to do for months, but his work never seemed to allow him to have enough time to get it done.
Dad worked two jobs. In addition to the brewery, he also worked at the factory in town. His dream was that he would one day be able to quit the factory job and focus on what he really loved doing—making beer.
Just the previous week, I’d offered to do it for him. I went into the attic where I pulled the old wires through the ceiling and replaced them with new ones just how Morris had taught me.
Destiny arrived right on time, and the three of us sat at the dining room table together, underneath the lit chandelier, and ate dinner.
“Work was crazy from the minute I got there,” Destiny told us as she twirled spaghetti noodles around her fork and used her free hand to brush the long bangs out of her eyes. “I was already booked, but the walk-ins just kept coming. Everybody decided they needed to get their hair done at the same time.”
Dad and Destiny continued to talk about work, and I sat in awkward silence at the end of the table. I wouldn’t have had much to offer in the conversation even if I’d wanted to participate. Besides the pool store, I’d only had one other job. It was at a fast food place called Burger Heaven, and I hadn’t worked there since Davey was killed.
After dinner, while Dad cleaned the kitchen, I was upstairs pacing the floor of my room.