Chapter 4: Neil
Texas always had a confused and mixed place in my heart, and I suspected it always would. It was the place of my father’s birth, the place he called home for the whole of his life, regardless of where he was actually living. I had grown up in Ashville, Alaska for my entire life. That whole time, my dad referred to Texas as his home anytime somebody asked. Hell, he would make sure to let people know he hailed from Texas whether they asked or not as if it gave him some kind of leg up on everyone around him.
There had been times when I was younger when I found myself actually jealous of the state, wishing my dad would talk about me with the same reverence he used for his home state. At the same time, the family ranch had always been one of my favorite places in the world to go to. I had many childhood memories of family vacations at that ranch, and they were things I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have traded for all of the world.
Because of those fond memories, being back at the ranch for the first time in almost a decade for a funeral made it feel even more like hell. I was here for my father’s funeral.
I stood beneath the endless Texas sky and listened to my father’s funeral service. The whole scene felt surreal. I was twenty-six years old, but until I had actually seen the jar of ashes my dad had been reduced to, a big part of me still believed he would live forever, just like a little kid would.
It was stupid, and I knew it, but stupid rarely stopped people. It sure as shit hadn’t stopped me. Even while spreading his ashes into the strong Texas wind, I’d hardly been able to believe that what I was doing was real. I had hardly been able to believe that my dad was actually dead.
“Jesus, Neil,” Brent said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m really sorry to hear about your dad.”
With a great deal of effort, I focused my eyes on Brent Faulkner, the man who had been my dad’s go-to person for as long as I could remember. He had always been my dad’s number two, essentially the next in line when it came to the business and the company.
For that reason, some people probably thought I had it out for him. That I considered him a rival or something. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. I liked Brent, and I’d always liked him. Even during the years when I thought everyone else around my dad and me was a complete asshole.
Brent had always been nice to me, and I hadn’t ever gotten the vibe that he was trying to do anything shady. I was glad to have him there with me at the funeral, especially because he was the only one there that I could stand at all. That was a pretty fucked up thing to think, considering that most of the other people standing around beside me were technically family. But it had been a long time since I’d considered them to be anything of the sort.
When I looked at them, I was reminded of that scene towards the beginning of the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Everyone milling around the casino lobby was a giant reptile dinosaur thing, and nobody could see it but the totally fucked up Johnny Depp character.
I hadn’t seen any of them in a hell of a long time, years probably, but I would have been happy never to see them again. I didn’t even have to talk to them to know they weren’t really at my dad’s funeral to pay their respects. They were there to grovel. They were there to offer fake condolences, and then see what kind of piece of the pie they could get their hands on. Even thinking about it made me want to kick somebody’s ass, which made focusing in on Brent all the more important.
“Hey, man, thank you for coming.”
“Of course, Neil! As I said, I’m very, very sorry. Last time I checked, everything was fine with your dad. This heart attack came as a surprise to everyone, I think. I know I always thought your dad was going to outlive us all, and my guess is that everyone else did, too.”
“I think you may be right about that,” I mumbled, looking around at the people who were family, according to blood. They felt a lot more like enemies.
“Don’t worry about them,” Brent said in a low, mistrustful voice. It made me feel better, just because it seemed to so closely mirror my feelings for the vultures circling my dad’s grave. “I already had nice chats with a couple of them.”
“Oh yeah?” I answered as nonchalantly as I could manage, feeling a wave of hatred run through me so strong it made me shiver. “Want to tell me a little bit about that?”
“Let’s just say there were a few people with a little more interest in your dad’s financial situation than they had any right to have. They had some questions for you, and I decided to step in and answer them instead. I hope that’s all right. Please tell me if I overstepped.”
“Jesus, no. Thank you, Brent. I’m going to wind up in jail if they try to milk me for money now. Do you know how long it’s been since any of them have seen my dad? I don’t think they’ve even spoken with him, for Christ’s sake.”
“No,” Brent said slowly, the tendons in his neck popping out a little as he spoke and simultaneously surveyed the little clumps of my family members standing around and eyeing us. “Unfortunately, that’s not true. I happen to know that first hand.”
“Tell me.”
My jaw clenched before he even started talking. By the time he was done, I was ready to set the whole worthless group of my dad’s remaining family on fire and take whatever consequences might come to me.
There was no doubt in my mind that if we were still living in the kind of society where justice was primal and in our own hands, I would be able to do whatever the hell I wanted to those assholes without having anything happen to me at all. Brent had several examples to give me of my dad’s charming family, but they all amounted to the same exact thing.
Over the years they had made as many attempts as they could get away with to take as much from my dad as they could get. Sometimes, Brent had been able to talk him out of it, and sometimes, he hadn’t been, but the requests had been there consistently. Those requests were the only times dad’s family had ever bothered to keep in touch with him, which solidified their spot as complete assholes in my book.
It did one other thing for me as well, something I had been kind of uneasy about in my own mind before coming to Texas to lay my father to rest. There was no question that I was going to have to go back to Alaska, at least for a little while, and that was a truth I was just going to have to find a way to live with. When it came to my dad’s company, though, my mind was well on the way to being made up. It would be my company, because that was what my dad wanted, and I knew it. But Brent would be the one to run it, and that was a good thing to have figured out.
It meant I could get the hell out of Ashville sooner, rather than later, and there was nothing I could think of that I would want more. The only thing that came close to competing was getting out of Texas and never coming back. That was something I was going to achieve the moment I left the ranch and drove my shitty rental car to the nearest airport. I was going to get on a plane, do my duties in Ashville, and then I was never going to fucking look back.