“Sometimes I feel bad cuz I forget things about Mommy.”

  I kissed the back of her head, surprised at just how much her comment had hurt. “It’s okay, Hazel. I promise. We’ll always have the pictures and videos to remind us. She’s out there somewhere, remembering you, and that’s enough… goodness to fill the whole universe. I wish you could understand just how much that lady loved you. Someday you might have kids of your own and understand how you can love someone so much it actually feels a little like pain.”

  “I already do understand.”

  She didn’t elaborate, and tears moistened my eyes enough that one dropped out, splatting right into her hair.

  “You’re wise beyond your years,” I said.

  “You always say that.”

  “That’s because it’s true. You’re smart enough to be President.”

  “Am I smart enough to be you?”

  “Okay, now you’re just trying to get something. You need to borrow money?”

  She giggled, and if my goal before bed was to get each of my kids to do so, then I was already halfway there.

  “What’re we gonna eat on our trip?” she asked.

  Kids could change the subject on a dime, a magical gift, especially when food was involved.

  “Hmm, I don’t know. I’m kind of in the mood for Combos. The pizza flavored ones.”

  “Those are gross. I was thinking more like Cool Ranch Doritos.”

  “Oh, you wanna kill us all with your breath? Okay, cool.”

  “At least I don’t get the toots like you and Mason.”

  If I had an additional goal to include flatulence in each kid’s conversation before bed, then I was two-for-two.

  “At least mine aren’t as stinky as Mason’s,” I said as solemnly as possible.

  She laughed again, and I figured I was about done, here. But I didn’t want to let go.

  “You tired, sweetie?”

  “Yeah.” She shifted out of my embrace and pulled her pillow close like a teddy bear. “I better get a proper sleep for our trip tomorrow.”

  Smiling from ear to ear, I gave her last one kiss on top of the head. “Oh yes, you should. I don’t want a mopey dopey all the way home.”

  She smiled, already half-dozed. I left her to it.

  5

  “It says it right here, Dad.”

  Mason pointed at a rule deeply imbedded within the minutiae of the Monopoly instructions. We were on the carpet, somewhere between Hazel and Logan, both of whom were breathing the deep sighs of sleep already. At least that’s what it looked like—I couldn’t hear much over the blowing fan.

  Mason eyed Andrea—reading an old and dusty National Geographic on the couch—then shifted to have his back to her. I looked over his shoulder to read the line he’d indicated.

  “Huh,” I grunted.

  “There’s nothing about putting 500 bucks in the middle. Or the taxes and fees. Landing on Free Parking has nothing to do with that money!”

  I was impressed with my son’s determination and research capabilities. Andrea had insisted on utilizing the old made-up rule despite Mason insisting it wasn’t actually in the official instructions. Looked like he was right.

  “Break it to her gently,” I said, throwing an amused glance back at Andrea. She knew all too well what was up. “Maybe wait for the drive back. That way she can’t escape when you rub it in her face.”

  “Good plan.”

  “Let’s get you to sleep, okay? Long day tomorrow.”

  “All riiiight.” He said it with that drawn out, whiney voice as he folded up the Monopoly instructions and tossed them aside. “I guess she can have one night thinking she won. But I can’t wait to bust her on it in the car. And we have to do a rematch!”

  I thought I might need medication when this rematch took place, but we’d cross that bridge when we came to it. “I’ll be rooting for ya. Now let’s get some sleep.”

  He mumbled something unintelligible, and I left him to his sweet dreams, filled with piles of money and monocled men in top hats.

  6

  Wesley had already dozed off when I sat on the armrest of Dad’s chair. I looked down at him, studying his features—his foppish hair, his teen-oily skin, his hardening jawline. You never noticed your kids’ changes from day to day, but every once in a while, in a moment like this, it hit you hard and heavy just how much they’d leaped forward in age. How had the little baby I’d once held in my arms and for whom I’d changed poopy diapers turn into this man-child lying before me? It now took considerable movement of my head for my eyes to travel from his head to the tips of his toes, when I used to see his whole body in one glance.

  My little boy was all grown up.

  I grabbed the blanket that was draped across the back of the chair and fluffed it over Wesley, then tucked it under his chin like the good ole days when he slept in the car-shaped toddler bed. He rolled over to his side, pulling the blanket along with him, turned away from me.

  “Goodnight, bud,” I said. The other fan stood next to his chair; I turned it on.

  Andrea walked up, grabbed my hand, then pulled me along behind her as she went to the kitchen. Mom was in there, emptying the dishwasher. When Andrea saw her, she seemed disappointed. Maybe the plan had been for us to make out while we munched on snacks—seemed as good a time as any to break the ice and return to our teenage glory years.

  “Hey kids,” Mom said, as if she’d read my thoughts and wanted to play along. “I think your father and I are finally packed up and ready to go. He just went out to check some of the irrigation lines, make sure the flooding hasn’t broken anything.”

  “What?” I asked. “Right now? It’s pitch black outside.”

  Mom waved it off as if to say, Whatcha gonna do?

  “Should I go help him?”

  “Nah. I think he wanted some time to think before we head out to your place.”

  “Are the cops out there with him? I better make sure they keep an eye out.”

  “David,” Mom said firmly. “Nothing’s going to happen to your dear old dad. He took his handgun with him.” She laughed at that, making me wonder if she’d slipped herself a gin and tonic or two after he’d left.

  “Well, why don’t you at least get some sleep. Come on. We’ll finish putting those away for you.”

  She thanked us and left, leaving us to it.

  “I can’t blame him,” Andrea said as she put away a casserole dish, seeming to choose a spot randomly. “This house is so small I can’t get you alone to save my life, and with all the rain I think everybody’s got a case of cabin fever.”

  I stacked some plates then put them in the proper cupboard. “You wanted to get me alone, huh? Ooh la la.”

  She shook her head endearingly. “You’re so adorable. Actually, I wanted to show you something I found on the Internet. Somebody must’ve fixed the connection now that the storm’s ending.”

  I stopped, everything else on my mind vanishing with a snap. “Really? What’d you find?”

  “This really old site that talks about… weird stuff. Really weird stuff. Most of it’s about things in the south, especially in South Carolina. Let’s just say the Lizard Man… ya know, what old Gramps used to go on about at the fall festival? There’s a whole page on him. It. Whatever.”

  My hopes for groundbreaking information collapsed like a sinkhole. “Oh,” was all I could get out.

  “But there’s something else.” She grabbed the utensil bucket—which filled me with joy; I hated putting away forks, spoons, and knives—and walked over to the correct drawer, opened it. I realized then that she was remembering all of this from our childhood, from the many times she’d been over here. My parents hadn’t changed a thing in all these years.

  “What is it?” I asked, leaning back against the counter. We were done with our chore.

  “Let’s go back to my room and I’ll show you.” She closed the utensil drawer with a soft thunk and put the bucket back into the dishwasher. “My iPad’s in there.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I can see what’s going on here.”

  “Oh please.” Another head shake—one which I fully deserved—but then she kissed me on the cheek as she walked past. I quickly followed her.

  7

  About 10 minutes after our dishwasher escapades in the kitchen, Andrea and I found ourselves lounging back on Patsy’s bed—poor Patsy, never there to defend her former domicile—snuggling, all four eyes in the room focused on the glowing face of Andrea’s iPad. She dexterously moved her fingers across the bright surface, as skilled as the techiest, nerdiest teenager around.

  “This is it,” she said.

  I stared at the screen. The website looked like something programmed back in the 90s, with almost no aesthetic upgrades since. Called Legends and Myths of the Deep South, the landing page had hundreds of lines of text, each one of them underlined to show it provided a link to what was described. The entire page was a jumbled mess, the font tiny, the kind of website where your eyes start hurting before you’ve clicked on a single thing.

  “There’s so much weird stuff on here,” Andrea said. “Sometime you just need to dive in and enjoy the ride. Your ancestors are basically insane.”

  “That’s what makes us special,” I murmured. “So what’re we looking for on here?”

  She scrolled the page a few inches, more and more underlined hot links appearing from the bottom like credits in a movie. “This one right… That one.” She pointed at a line squished amongst many.

  I had to lean closer and squint my eyes to see the stupid thing. It said:

  PURITAN HEXES RIVAL THEIR MOST DEMONIC COUNTERPARTS

  I gave her the most baffling expression I could conjure. “Uhhhh…”

  “Will you just read the article?” she asked, obviously annoyed. “Give me a little credit?”

  “Sorry.” I began reading, and paragraph by paragraph, two things became most prominent in my mind: First, that whoever wrote the article had either quit school or stopped trying to learn grammar around the second grade, and second, Andrea must’ve smoked something funny to think this crazy stuff had anything at all to do with our situation. I mean, this garbage was talking about Puritans and Quakers and curses and bloody sacrifices.

  “Just keep reading,” she said when I couldn’t stop myself from eying her questioningly again. “All the way to the end.”

  The background of the story went all the way back to pre-colonial times, when Native Americans still ruled the continent and the only people exploring this far north of what is now Mexico were mostly Europeans fleeing religious persecution. Schoolhouse tales of ships like the Mayflower and places like Jamestown, starvation and disease, brutal battles with those native to this land, futile attempts to plant crops and establish settlements. As glamorous as that one Peanuts cartoon might’ve made it seem, life back then was an absolute hell.

  But apparently, things weren’t bad enough for them, so they invented new problems, and this was what the article focused on—a completely bonkers rivalry between the Puritans and the Quakers. The hypocrisy, even in the poorly worded article, astounded me. Puritans came over here because they were being persecuted back home, and what was one of the first things they did once they had some resemblance of a new home in a new world? They started persecuting the living shit out of those claiming to be Quakers. I’m talking nasty, awful, horrible shit. Things like quartering bodies and sending the bloody parts back to their families, or old classics like burning people alive at the stake.

  And there were darker things, tales of curses and hexes placed on the Quakers, stuff that conjured images of Satanism or witchcraft more than it did of pilgrim Christians running around with their tiny wooden crosses. The one that struck me first was a curse placed by Puritan holy men on pregnant Quaker women—according to the madness I was reading, their babies were born with the skin inside out, no eyes, no tongue, no fingers, no toes. Egads, I thought. Another one was described as a hex put upon fathers, making them full of insatiable bloodlust, no matter how many of his own family members and townsfolk he murdered. It all intrigued me enough that I committed to research this craziness later for curiosity’s sake.

  Still, I had no idea what any of this had to do with my family or the serial killer running around Sumter County. As fascinating as it was, all I wanted to do was snuggle up with Andrea and go to sleep. Tomorrow, we’d escape all the nonsense of my hometown, anyway. My mind wandered and I started to skim a little, wondering just how many sadistic things these people could come up with.

  My eyes stopped on a single word. They stopped as suddenly as if some kind of magical, visual wall had erected itself in their path.

  That word was Gaskins.

  “What the…” I whispered.

  “Told you,” she replied.

  I had to backtrack, having spaced it so much that I had no idea in what context that plague of a name had just appeared. Jumping back to the last part for which I knew I’d been well focused—something about putting a hex on cow’s milk so that anyone who drank it got such an extreme case of diarrhea that eventually they’d die of dehydration—I began reading again, paying close attention to each and every word on the digital page.

  Several families from those harsh, cruel days decided that enough was enough and broke off from the main settlements of both the Puritans and the Quakers. Families from both sides, making a pact of peace, despite knowing that the secret pact would be viewed as heresy from their respective peoples. They broke off and fled south, as far as they could reasonably go, eventually settling in the swampy central lands of the Carolinas. The article then listed a few names of these families, and Gaskins was one of them. Player was not included—I read the short list twice to make sure.

  Andrea was obviously bursting at the seams to get my take on what I’d read—even though I couldn’t quite get past seeing the surname of Pee Wee and Dicky.

  “Well?” she asked. “Could any of those names be relatives of yours? On your dad’s mom’s side, somewhere up the line on any maternal side?”

  I had no answer—genealogy wasn’t my forte. Fincher and Player were about the only names I knew for sure. All I could get out to her was, “How on Planet Earth did you find this article?”

  “Google is your friend,” she replied. “I sifted through a bunch of junk but eventually landed on this gem.”

  I let out a weary sigh. “Not that it means a whole lot. I mean, what? Do you think the Gaskins family is cursed or something? Cursed to hunt down people and chop their heads off?”

  “Don’t be a smart ass,” she replied, yanking the iPad out of my hands as if I didn’t deserve it. “The key is that the Gaskins family goes way back, and we know that yours does, too. And yes, running around chopping people’s heads off is weird and creepy and unusual by anyone’s standards. So the fact that we have this weird-ass article about Puritans and Quakers putting hexes on each other and fleeing to where we now live… and that it involved the family of the guy doing it now and his dad who did it before him… and that both of these crackpots seem to have a thing for your family… I mean, come on. Maybe it means something.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” An enormous yawn bloomed from my chest and I was powerless to hold it back, mouth stretched wide. “Sorry. I’m just so freaking tired. And I don’t think any of this can help us tonight. Rain check?”

  She looked so disappointed. “It’s your family, not mine.”

  I pulled her into a hug. “Sorry, really. It means a lot that you’re doing all this research. Means even more just that you’re here. My kids worship you.”

  “They might like me even more than they like you,” she said.

  “I think that’s a good bet, actually.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out. Feeling her against my chest brought an amazing sense of peace. As much as sleep beckoned, I couldn’t wait to get on our way in the morning, especially with Andrea along for the ride.

  “Let’s go to bed, then,” she whispered.

  “Together?”

  “No way. That’ll confuse the hell out of your kids.”

  I doubted that. It seemed like something they said on TV or in the movies, but I didn’t wanna push it. Plus, we still had a very dark past to overcome before we took too many steps forward.

  “I’ll head for the couch,” I said, giving her one last squeeze. “You don’t have a fan in here, anyway, so it never would’ve worked.”

  She responded with a genuine laugh, and I was reminded of an old Seinfeld episode when George learned to leave immediately when a joke landed properly. I stood up, held my hands toward the ceiling.

  “That’s it! I’m out of here! Goodnight!”

  She looked at me like I’d sprouted a couple of horns.

  “Seinfeld?” I asked hopefully.

  “Ugh. I hated that show.”

  Exaggerating a heavy sigh, I said, “First Led Zeppelin, now Seinfeld? That’s okay. I forgive you.”

  “Goodnight, sweet David.” She smiled.

  “Nighty night.”

  Feeling like a kid again, I left her room and closed the door.

  8

  Darkness ruled the house.

  I lay on the couch, awash in its comfort and the soothing hum of the double fan action which blew air in conflicting currents throughout the room. I didn’t know if my dad had come back into the house yet or not, and I was too tired to check. I figured he was okay or my mom would’ve pitched a fit by now. We had two policemen outside our home. Others patrolling the streets of Lynchburg and all of Sumter. Dicky Gaskins couldn’t possibly be brave or stupid enough to come anywhere near my parents’ home.

  Tomorrow we’d awaken, bright of spirit. Mom and Dad together would make us a spectacular breakfast, the works, emptying out all the goodies from the fridge and cupboards for one last feast before our journey. Things would be packed into cars, seating arrangements made, movies downloaded onto a plethora of electronic devices, headphones tangled everywhere. Smiles and relief and dreams of new beginnings. The darkness of the past that had made Andrea and I go our separate ways… that darkness could end. We could be what I always wished us to be. Friends. Best friends. Family. And if the world spun on a perfect axis, tilting within all known laws of physics and love, then maybe something magical could happen. Perhaps the eternal pain of losing my wife could soften into something humble and sweet and full of good intentions. Maybe, just maybe, Andrea could be mine and I could be hers, despite our awful parting two decades ago.