Chapter 1
Jim
The red-and-white For Rent sign caught my eye through my helmet’s face shield. I slowed my Harley FX, parked it a
t the curb and lifted the visor.
Behind a rickety fence was a tiny house, probably no more than nine hundred square feet, squatting on a patch of dried grass. The cement path leading up to the door was cracked. A crooked step on the stoop. Peeling white paint on the siding.
Small, plain, and cheap.
Perfect.
I took off my helmet fished my cell phone out of my black leather jacket and called the faded number on the sign.
It’s just a damn phone call, I thought, inhaling deep. Keep your shit together.
A man answered. “Yeah.”
Inhale. Exhale.
“I’m calling about the house for rent in Boones Mill?”
No stutter. Not even on the m in Mill. A minor victory.
“Okay,” the guy said. “Six-fifty per month. Utilities included but not water. No pets. Wanna see it? I can be down there in five.”
“I have a job interview at the Blue Ridge Sanitarium,” I said. “If I get the job, I’ll be back in a few hours. I could see it then.”
The guy sighed. “So why call me now?”
“I don’t want anyone to take it.”
He chuckled over the distinct sound of an exhale of a cigarette—half cough, half laugh.
“Son, you’re the first to call in a month. I think you’re safe.” A drag off his smoke. “You going to work up at Blue Ridge? With all the head cases and whackos?”
I gripped the phone tighter. Asshole. “Just don’t rent the house, okay?”
“Sure, sure. I’ll put a courtesy hold on it, just for you.”
“Thanks,” I muttered. I hung up and my hand dropped to my jeans-clad thigh.
The guy was right—no one wanted his crappy little house but me. The phone call was a dry run for my job interview at the sanitarium. I’d been driving since six this morning from Richmond and didn’t want my interviewer to be the first person I talked to.
My ex-foster mother’s sneering tone filled my head.
Like it matters, you big dummy. You’re going to stutter your way through that job interview and you know it.
“Shut up, Doris,” I muttered.
Of all the foster homes I’d been bounced around since birth, I’d been in her care, if you could call it that, from the time I was ten until I turned eighteen. At twenty-four, her taunting voice still wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone. I didn’t stutter through every sentence anymore, but it still lurked under my tongue and came out to play when I was pissed off. Or nervous.
Like job-interview-nervous.
When I was twelve, doctors labeled my stutter a psychological disfluency: a reaction to a traumatic event, rather than physiological issues in my brain.
“A reaction?” Doris had said with a sneer in the doctor’s office. “You saying he can’t talk right, but it’s all in his head? Pfft. He’s a big dummy, is all. This just proves it.”