Page 1 of Stand
Part I
Chapter 1
That wasit. Sam was getting the hell away from this house, its people, and all its memories.
“Come on, Cairo,” she said. Her German shepherd leaped up from his spot under the kitchen table to meet her in the front hall.
“Samantha!” her older sister yelled from behind her. “Get back here! You can’t walk away every—”
“Don’t call me Samantha!” she yelled back, clipping on Cairo’s leash. She should never have come back. Coming back only turned her back into an angry, childish seventeen-year-old who hated her name. Instead of an independent thirty-five-year-old with her own career and her own home and a state on the other side of the country that she missed like crazy.
“Sam!” her younger sister, Megan, called. “It’s raining!”
“I won’t melt!”
That wasit. Sam was getting the hell away from this house, its people, and all its memories.
“Come on, Cairo,” she said. Her German shepherd leaped up from his spot under the kitchen table to meet her in the front hall.
“Samantha!” her older sister yelled from behind her. “Get back here! You can’t walk away every—”
“Don’t call me Samantha!” she yelled back, clipping on Cairo’s leash. She should never have come back. Coming back only turned her back into an angry, childish seventeen-year-old who hated her name. Instead of an independent thirty-five-year-old with her own career and her own home and a state on the other side of the country that she missed like crazy.
“Sam!” her younger sister, Megan, called. “It’s raining!”
“I won’t melt!”
Sam slammed the ancient oak front door of her family home and took the steps down from the porch in one leap, Cairo happily jumping alongside her. The old house seemed to groan in protest. Yeah, yeah. She’d upset the status quo. Again. When Cat called her “Samantha,” she was really in trouble.
She took long strides away from the house, down the street she’d grown up on, the trees that had been venerable thirty years ago now creaking with old age and the weight of rain on their summer leaves. The town was late in cutting back the overhanging branches. She let them hit her in the face, punishing herself for her moment of weakness.
“I tell ya, Cai,” she grumbled aloud, “I shouldn’t have come back at all. Not even for Thea’s wedding. Not even to meet Kane’s babies.” They weren’t babies anymore; the oldest was four. She winced.
Cairo matched his long legs to her strides and looked up at her, his brown face grinning happily at the walk. Sam took another tree branch to the face as she looked down at him. She didn’t want him to cheer her up. She didn’t want to see how thrilled he was with the new smells and new people he’d met.
“I guess you wouldn’t have gotten your road trip though, huh, buddy?” she conceded, reaching down to scratch between his ears. He’d loved the three-day drive so much, sniffing the air through the crack in the window, visiting national parks, and sleeping on her bed at pet-friendly hotels. Had it been worth it just for that?
No. “Not fornothing.Shoulda packed up the car and gone back home right after the wedding.”
Her feet took her down a couple of side streets and through a short back alley to the public footpath in the woods. The slick mud oozing into her sandals soothed her. She knelt down and smeared some on her hands, too. There. That was more like the Sam she knew.
Had her love for exploration started here? The family home’s backyard was like many in this cookie-cutter suburb of Boston: small, dominated by the house, a detached garage and a long driveway for the many cars that had come and gone through the years. So she and her four siblings—Catriona, the oldest, the mother hen; Kane, the only boy, handsome and carefree until their father had died; Thea, studious and quiet, laughing at Sam’s jokes; and Megan, the baby, running to keep up—had often come to this trail, racing each other through the trees to the stream that ran through the middle of the woods and reflected the seasons.
Sam knew every curve, every eddy, every inch of that stream. She’d learned about erosion from watching it curl around a tree root until the root became exposed and the tree fell across the water. She’d crawled in and out of the old farmer’s cottage that had fallen to ruin in the middle of a thicket of brambles, not caring about the scratches when she found an old wooden bucket and rusty ladle. She’d learned about foundations and strata and decomposition alongside how to navigate her sisters’ moods and weaknesses. And which of her brother’s friends were worth getting to know.
Well, that had been years ago, when their lives were simple. Before they’d lost their father and then their mother and Sam had lost all faith in men being there when they were needed.
She sat down on one of the slick rocks near the tiny waterfall the town had aggrandized with its own name, and stuck her feet, sandals and all, into the rush of water. When she let Cairo’s leash out to its farthest extent, he hopped down to sip from the cool current.
Lifting her heavy hair from the nape of her neck, she raised her face to the rain coming through the trees and tried to blank out her mind.
But Cairo gave his warning bark, and then she heard the voices.
“It’s raining. Can we go back now?”
“No. We just got here.”
“Ugh. Dad, this is so lame.”