by Kate Morris
“Absolutely,” their mother answered.
The kids then all began discussing which restaurant to go to. Avery smiled, knowing she wouldn’t really get a say in her own celebratory dinner. There were too many little opinions that wanted a voice. Instead, she turned to her mother, who sat to her left at the head of the table.
“Hey, Mom,” she said to gain her attention, which was difficult at this table. Ophelia turned to her. “Who-who was that guy coming out of your office when I came home?”
“You know I can’t discuss my patients, Avery,” her mother reminded her.
“I know, but seriously, who would I tell? I work from home. I hardly go out. I don’t have much of a social life.”
“Well, darling, maybe it’s time to change that,” she said, evading her question like an expert.
Avery smiled. She loved her mother so much. They all did. Their worlds all revolved around the love and nurturing she provided.
“I know, Mom,” she said again.
“You know, Jonathan at church has asked about you quite a few times,” she prodded.
“Hm,” she answered noncommittally. Jonathan was working on his MBA. He was sweet and clean-cut and knew all the right things to say. She’d known him since they were kids. She looked at him more like an older brother. There was just no chemistry there, despite her mother’s encouragement. He was a good friend, though. “I’ve just been busy, cranking out the hours, burning the midnight oil. That’s why I got the contract and other people didn’t.”
“I know that. You’re very devoted to your work. And that’s a good thing. It will set you apart from the rest of the young people in your field, but you need a life, too, Avery. Constantly staring at a computer isn’t much of a life. You need to socialize with your girlfriends, too. Girls need their girl time just as boys need to hang out with other young men of their age. And I don’t just mean your little brothers and sisters.”
She nodded and glanced around the table at the children. Kaia, Abraham, Ephraim, Cyrus, Joy, Faith and finally young Finnegan- poking with distaste at his zucchini. She loved them all so much, but her mother was right. She did need to get out.
“Maybe I’ll go to the country bar Friday night with the girls,” she contemplated, thinking of her girlfriends, also girls who were homeschooled growing up. They’d all been a part of a big homeschool group who got together once a week so the children could socialize and play and do arts and crafts. She’d made lifelong friends there. Jonathan and his three siblings also belonged to that same group. Her family didn’t go quite as much during the school year anymore just because it was hard to take a full day off from their lessons to go to their homeschool co-op. “Renee mentioned something about it.”
“Just use good judgment,” Ophelia warned.
“I would. You know me,” she said. Everyone knew her. there were a lot of adjectives used to describe her. Reliable, responsible, caring, keen sense of right and wrong, honest, hard-working. Nobody ever declared her, Avery the troublemaker or Avery the risk taker. Or God forbid, Avery the girl who hooked up with a guy she met in a bar. The country bar was fun, though. They did a lot of line dancing, which she enjoyed. She and her friends had taken a few classes to better master it. They always had a good time and never got into trouble. It just wasn’t in their natures to do so.
A while later after dinner and after evening chores and after she and her mother and Kaia got the younger ones to bed, Avery went to her apartment above the barn.
When she turned eighteen last year, her father had surprised her with a suggestion to remodel the upstairs of their barn, which only housed her father’s collection of vintage cars. It was a forty-two by seventy-two pole barn, and she had the whole top floor to herself, her own flat. One small room served as storage for the family’s Christmas decorations, but other than that, she had her own two-thousand square foot loft all to herself. It was her sanctuary amid the craziness of her family. Keeping in the same mid-century design, of course, since her father was such a devotee of the style, the floors were hardwood. The ceilings, with the exception of her bedroom, were covered in wood and beams. The lighting was simple but efficient. Her father loved the simpler, cleaner lines of his home country’s architecture, which was why he came to love the styles of Frank Lloyd Wright. He found an architect to build him and her mother the home they lived in and used the same firm again to make sure the loft was a mirror of the main house. It took five months to complete. The front and back walls of the loft were glass like her parents’ house, and on the back end of the barn, there were also sliding doors that pocketed inside the wall to open up onto the second-floor deck. It was peaceful in the better weather when she could sit out there and work on her laptop with a mug of coffee.
She dropped her purse on the bench near the entry door and removed her ballet flats. The lighting automatically came on as she walked down the long hall, passing her office and design studio where her long, wide L-shaped desk stood in the middle of the room, and her drafting table was located near the glass wall overlooking the gardens. The mini recessed lights turned off again after she had passed down the hall.
The kitchen was just ahead, sleek and modern done in stainless steel and light maple cupboards with cream-colored stone counters and a matching backsplash. Her father, genius that he was, managed to work a curved design into the kitchen so that it didn’t just seem like a rectangle sitting off to the left. This way made it flow fluidly into the open space of the living room, which was a step down onto a slightly lower floor. That little element had been costly but drastically changed the design so that the flat didn’t seem so dull and predictable like a big box.
Avery set her laptop bag on the kitchen counter, delaying the work waiting for her once she opened it, and instead opened the fridge to retrieve a small bottle of orange juice. The stimulant content of orange juice was just as good as a coffee for her so that she could work well into the wee hours of the night. She turned and looked up. The loft overhead, mostly a rec-room for her younger siblings when they insisted on having a sleep-over at her place, was done in the same clean design. It overlooked the living room in front of it but did not distract from the design of the loft. The only thing out of place was the white canvas teepee in the one corner of the loft, which was not able to be seen from the first floor.
Avery took her bottle of juice and went to the living room. The front wall of glass looked over her parents’ home and the circular gravel driveway in front of it. Off to the left was the entrance to her mother’s office wing of the home. Beyond that, out of view, were two other offshoots where Finn and Cyrus shared a room and bathroom, and Faith and Joy shared another room and bath. Abraham and Ephraim slept in the basement in their own rooms while Kaia had a suite in the back of the house to herself. There was also a small guest suite near her mother’s office. Her parents’ suite took up the whole top floor, which was only about a third of the square space of the first floor. It was a modified ranch style with different angles and wings and the much smaller second floor occupied only by her parents. They’d had many colleagues out over the years, some snobs from the big cities or uppity professors. All of them had been envious or had offered a lot of money to buy the place. Avery overheard her parents discussing the value once. With the amount of land and the size of the custom home, her father surmised it was probably worth in the four to five-million-dollar range.
The second floor for the master suite was added about a decade after they moved in, and so were two more wings. Their house was about sixty-five hundred square feet, but it sometimes felt like ten thousand wouldn’t have been enough to gain the adequate amount of privacy she needed. Avery had to admit there were certain advantages to being the oldest. Living on her own, sort of, was the at the top of the list.
The house wouldn’t have worked in the city or in a suburban neighborhood where they had actual neighbors. So much of it was windows or floor-to-ceiling glass walls. It certainly wouldn’t offer any privacy. They o
wned sixty acres, most of it just woods. Her parents wanted out of the big city before they had children and spent a lot of time looking for just the right spot. They’d lived in other countries, in other states, in big cities in all but didn’t want to raise their children that way. Her father didn’t like the American public education system and knew he wanted the children to be homeschooled. Ophelia had wholeheartedly agreed. As a child, she’d attended a private school in New York City, but she had family in this region of Ohio and had spent a lot of her summers as a youth visiting with her grandparents here. It was how she and their father had chosen this particular region of Ohio to move their family to about a year after Avery was born. It was all she’d ever known. Avery had traveled with her family, with the homeschool group, as well, but this always felt like home to come back to. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She never wanted to leave and hoped her skills as a graphic designer would afford her the privilege of doing so. She also never wanted to be far from her family. They meant more to her than anything. Family was everything. Family was forever.
Chapter Three
He drove the perimeter of the power plant one more time and waved to the guard on duty, Jonah, a young man probably around twenty or so who Tristan had come to know the last few months since being stationed at Fort Romley, named after the general who’d single-handedly run the most successful war in American history. It had been named the fastest, most lethal military engagement the United States had ever led allied troops in and had occurred about ten years ago in Liberia, or what was commonly called the Three-Month War. He’d overwhelmed seven African nations in the span of three months flat. It was hugely successful and reasserted American might in the world.
Tristan had never fought in that sort of war. He’d been deployed basically since he got out of basic training because the U.S. Army recognized a killer when they had one. He had been to Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, Croatia, Turkey, and a few covert operations in Western China. He didn’t argue. He just went where they told him to go. He was good at one thing, and unfortunately, that skill set didn’t give him a whole lot of options outside the military for finding a job in the civilian world. Every time he came back with his team, they awarded him a pay raise and another ribbon. That stuff didn’t matter to him, though. The sense of camaraderie he got from his unit was more important. However, the last time he came home, his Colonel ordered him to the middle of nowhere for oil field, refinery, and energy plant babysitting duty. He knew what it was. They didn’t want to call it a mental health break to clear his head, but that’s what it was. Tristan didn’t agree with the assessment and definitely didn’t think he needed to talk to a shrink, but he didn’t exactly have a choice in the matter, either. Anything that got him back in the fight faster he’d be willing to do.
Protecting the nation’s interest in the oil and gas industry was something that came to be a national crisis in the year 2027 when anti-fracking groups and environmentalists started bombing pipelines. They attempted to blow up the new mega power plant in the same county and even the massive natural gas refinery just south of Carroll County, Ohio. Someone also decided to blow up the railway about twenty miles away from the refinery, which cost millions of dollars in repairs, cleanup, and spilled product. After a ten-year-long battle with the nutso extreme anarchist groups, the President decided enough was enough and actually had a small satellite military base built to keep a constant military presence in the county and more importantly to keep the nutjobs out. It was deemed a national security threat. There were a few minor skirmishes early on, but once the Hummers, two tanks, and an Apache helicopter moved in and soldiers started doing patrols, it quieted down the sissy boys with their protest signs, homemade bombs, and skinny jeans.
He parked the Army Jeep outside the barracks and went inside with his grocery bags. Tonight, he was making fajitas. First, he hit the gym and pumped iron for about an hour and a half. The base was small, more like a National Guard outpost, but at least they’d installed a pretty decent gym where they could lift and get in some cardio on the treadmills. He wasn’t a huge fan of cardio, but he did like lifting. Instead of hitting the treadmills, he jogged back to his house. It was about a whole half a mile, but at least it counted for something.
“Hey, douche hole,” his roommate stated the second he came through the door. “We’re goin’ out. Wanna’ go?”
Tristan usually abstained from hanging out in town with them. The whole reason he was on this bullshit base was because of his temper and the military wanting him to detox mentally and take a break. Freddie had a way of getting himself into some shit whenever they went out. Tristan didn’t need that. The sooner he could get back in the game, the better.
“Nah, gonna fix up some fajeetas,” he joked, purposely mispronouncing it.
“Screw that, man,” his friend said. “Let’s get some steaks and brews. C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
“Fun as in spending the night in the clink and having the L.T. find out?”
Freddie laughed and swigged from his bottle of water. “No way. We’ll be good. We won’t get you in trouble with the lieutenant. We promise.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Just some of the boys. Six of us or so,” Freddie answered. “Not Jackson. Dude’s got the pukes or some shit.”
“Alright, guess I’ll make the fajitas tomorrow,” he said and finished off his own bottle of water, tossing it into the trash after. He picked up a fast food burger wrapper from the floor where Freddie obviously shot and missed his target. Cleaning up after his slob of a roommate got old. Nobody on this small base had their own housing. The houses were more like small shacks, shotgun houses really with two even smaller bedrooms, a shared common room, and a tiny kitchen. The whole place was probably eight hundred square feet, but at least they each had their own bathroom. For Tristan, it didn’t matter much. He spent most of his time in the gym or out driving around the county, even when he wasn’t on duty. There wasn’t much to see because it was mostly farms, but it was peaceful, which he liked. “Where are we going?”
“To that honky-tonk bar, you know the one with the cuties in the short skirts and cowgirl boots?” he explained. Then Freddie yelled out and stomped around like an imbecile, “Hee-haw!”
“Oh, boy. This already sounds like a bad idea,” he joked and shook his head with a laugh.
“It will be for you, ya’ stinky bastard,” his friend said. “Get yourself cleaned up, man. We’re leaving in an hour.”
Tristan took a shower and dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt with a white cross on the back with the soldier’s creed scrolled over it. He wasn’t much into cowboy boots, didn’t own a pair, so he pulled on his work boots instead. He tucked his dog tags into his t-shirt and pulled on a worn-out trucker hat with the logo for a high-power rifle scope company on it. He wasn’t dressing to impress. He just wanted a good steak and a cold beer and to stay out of fights. The country western bar had the best steaks in town. There were other options, but this place was the best.
It was a small town that exploded when the oil boom hit. Lots of hotels, bars, and restaurants were built to accommodate the oil workers. Then once the building of the pipelines and infrastructure slowed down, most of the workers moved on to the next big fracking project in West Virginia and have been down there for the last twenty years. Some of them stayed in this area to continue working at the power plant that was also built around the same time and others took jobs for the oil refineries, the three that were built in this and the next two southern counties. It was a population explosion but not one that lasted more than the thirty years it took to get all the work done. Many of the smaller businesses went broke and closed their doors, which led to more franchised companies like Starbucks and chain restaurants and the like to move in. It reminded him of Vegas. He’d flown into that city one time when he was on leave with his buddies. It was black as pitch for hundreds of miles from the view he had in the sky on a redeye flight. Then it lit up like a tacky C
hristmas tree in the middle of all that darkness. His opinion of the city never improved. Then he and his friends had gotten into a bar fight with a bunch of frat boys. That hadn’t ended well for the college kids who played too many simulated fight video games. The real thing was a lot different.
Tristan grabbed a brown leather jacket and pulled it on over his t-shirt and followed his friend to his truck. He’d drive. He never drank as much as his friends. Too many calories to work off the next day. He went through the partying, drinking phase when he was sixteen until he quit cold turkey and signed up for the Army. His worthless biological dad had signed for him to join early at the age of seventeen. Tristan wasn’t stupid. There was something in his profile that the recruiter liked. They didn’t usually take underage kids, especially not with a record like his. He’d always done well in school and kept high marks and had even graduated a year and a half early, but that still wasn’t going to gain him admittance before eighteen without a good reason.
The drive to town usually took about twenty minutes, as their base was buried in the hills of the county. Lots of the guys complained about the locals being standoffish, good ole boy types, but so far Tristan hadn’t found that. Of course, he didn’t interact with any of them a whole lot.
The other guys were already gone, so Tristan didn’t have to wait up for them. It was dark along the winding, hilly, and twisty roads, some with hairpin curves. When they arrived, he parked near the back of the gravel parking lot near the road and locked it.
The country western bar was huge, three levels, and built to resemble something out of the Old West on the exterior with the long, rectangular design, all weathered wood construction, and a balcony that spanned the whole second floor. The first floor was where the restaurant and main bar were located and included a huge dance floor, mechanical bull ride, and a raised stage where the band played. The second floor was home of the karaoke bar and sometimes stand-up comedians. The third floor was an actual hotel. He assumed it was just like the Old West in the aspect that it was where people went to hookup and rented a room for an hour, which disgusted him. He wasn’t that bad about germs but, Jesus, no. Just no. And he knew that’s what the point of the rooms was. Nobody would actually be able to sleep in such a noisy environment, so they weren’t for that. Maybe him. Maybe other soldiers who were used to sneaking in an hour here or there when they could and when the nightmares had taken the night off.
