by Liz Crowe
House Rules: The Jack Gordon Story
By
Liz Crowe
House Rules: The Jack Gordon Story
(A Stewart Realty Novella)
A Sizzlin’ Book published by permission of the author
Copyright © 2013 by Liz Crowe
Cover Art and Design by Mina Carter
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Series Reading List
About Liz Crowe
Prologue
The young boy was on the cusp of manhood that day.
The day he wandered into his kitchen, hung over, hungry, mad at the girl who’d teased him all night yet wouldn’t let him past second base no matter how hard he begged. Plus as a bonus, he was already late for basketball practice.
It was also the day his mother died. When he stepped into the room lit only by weak sunlight, rubbing his face and wondering if he could squeeze in a shower, or if he should just go straight to the high school gym and beg his coach’s forgiveness, his foot met something that was not a chair leg or anything else that made logical sense. He stopped, looked down, and saw her. His brain quickly flipped through events even as it attempted to process what his eyes registered.
He dropped to his knees and rolled her over, his lovely, quiet, smart, and creative mother—the first woman he’d ever loved and would always love, as is the way of boys, despite his frustration at her willingness to put up with his father. Her eyes were open, face drained of all color but for the dried vomit on her cheek.
The boy’s hands shook. Anger swelled in his chest. He brushed at the crustiness on her face. Raw fury made his vision dim. How dare she? What the hell was she thinking? How could she give up on herself, on him, on their family?
Eyes burning, his entire body shivering, he picked up the phone and called the ambulance. When they arrived he backed up, fast, then sat on the floor, tears streaming as he watched the paramedics try to revive her.
They kept asking him how long she’d been like this, as if he knew. As if he could have known, sunk so deep into his own selfish bullshit the night before. No one knew how long she’d lain face down in her own puke.
He swiped at the embarrassing tears, unable to stop crying. His mother was dead. On her own scrupulously clean kitchen floor she’d lain while he fucked around, got drunk, tried to get in some girl’s panties. He had failed her when she needed him. Not that she would ever ask for help. No, that was not her way. Silence, stoicism, extreme organization, and tidiness—that was her method against the madness that had become her marriage.
His chest hurt so badly it frightened him. He heard a sob, and when one of the paramedics glanced over at him, he realized it had burst from his own lips.
He looked up when he heard the front door open. The sight of his father forced fresh fury down the boy’s spine, coalescing in his freezing cold fingertips. His father’s face, when it appeared at the kitchen door, was full of shock. The asshole had the nerve to actually be surprised by his wife’s condition.
“You did this,” he growled, not even recognizing his own voice. His hands formed fists of their own accord, and he leapt across the kitchen, his finely tuned athlete’s body giving him strength and his rage motivation. He could hear his father’s sharp voice, angry and demanding. Saw the fear in the man’s eyes as he looked down at his dead wife. He barely registered the sight of his sister, standing slightly behind the man in the doorway.
Then the father looked over and met his son’s gaze. The sickeningly familiar sneer was all it took to turn what could have been a simple punch thrown by an unhappy teenaged boy into a beating that it would take John Gordon Senior weeks to fully recover from.
“Jack! Stop it! Daddy!” The young girl jumped onto her brother’s back at one point, yanked at his hair, scratched at his face. “Stop it! Please!”
There was no stopping Jack. The grown man now no longer fought back, but cowered and tried to cover his face with his arms. He made no sounds, didn’t beg for his son to stop, but his hard blue gaze said it all. Reminding the young man of all he hated about his father from the time he could remember having feelings about him.
He kept hitting. Finally, one of the paramedics yanked the boy off and threw him halfway across the room to get him to stop.
He sat, chest heaving, staring at the utter fucked-up mess that was his family—dead, puke-covered mother; bloody-faced father groaning in pain in the opposite corner of the room. A small sob caught his ear, making his inner caretaker rise to the surface. Tamping down anger, he stood and went to his sister who stood gripping the doorframe.
He glared at them all, took her hand, and walked out of the room, soothing her while swearing on all he held holy that he would never speak to his father again.
Chapter One
“John Patrick…John Patrick Gordon.” Someone smacked his face, tugged his hair. He grunted and rolled over but woke when his nose met the hard back of his grandmother’s couch.
He sat, put his feet on her cold hardwood floor and stared down, trying to get his bearings. The pounding in his head matched the sensation of his heart, beating somewhere up in the area of his throat, which felt like a stretch of desert. He groaned when his grandmother, the petite, perky and brutally controlling woman whose son Jack had pounded to a pulp not two weeks ago, smacked his ear so hard he would hear ringing for hours.
“Ow, shit! Maimeo… Jesus.” He rubbed his head but wouldn’t meet her gaze. His knuckles burned even now, and he could still feel the sickening crunch of his father’s cartilage underneath them.
“Don’t you try and charm me with your smart mouth, ya great heaving lump….” She stood over him, arms crossed; her lingering Irish lilt ramped up by her anger at finding him in his current condition.
Her deep blue eyes bored into him, hard, so hard he had to look away and rub the back of his neck, trying not to look so completely hung-over. “You reek of whiskey, boy. You think acting like this is doing yer dear departed ma any sort of service? Hmm? And yer da? What about him? When are you gonna get up off your arse and make up with him? I can’t have ya here on my couch forever.”
Her eyes softened when she sat in a chair across from him, ankles primly crossed, fingers threaded t
ogether on her knees. Her voice softened, as did the brogue. “John Patrick. You are such a good boy. Don’t be turning to drink now, so young. It’s….” She bit her lip and looked away then back at him, the brief emotional moment passed. “It’s a weak copout. One I let your father get away with but one I refuse to allow you to use. No excuses.” She jumped up, grabbed his ear, and yanked him to his feet, shoving him ahead of her as he yelped and tried not to puke on her carpet.
“Get in the shower. I’m making your sister a big breakfast and you, me fine young boyo, are gonna be joining us. Go on, hurry up.” She shoved him into the small bathroom and slammed the door.
Jack sat on the closed toilet lid with its fussy, fuzzy cover matching the rug under his feet, their nearly neon, sea-foam green the same as the shower curtain and the tiny guest towels alongside the sink. Pressing his fingertips into the bridge of his nose he counted to ten, then twenty. Then, figuring he was past the vomit urge, he stood and cranked on the shower.
He knew his grandma was not kidding. A giant greasy breakfast awaited him, and he would be forced to eat every bite. He also knew he would have to stop hiding out here soon. He had to get home to his own bed, his own house, and get his sister, Maureen, back to her routine. They had made it through the funeral mass and small wake. Jack had used all of his energy to ignore his father the entire time while Mo tried to pull them together.
His father was nothing if not resourceful. He had rallied, accepted the condolences of many and ignored his son entirely. Even the bruising had faded, as if already mocking Jack by reminding him he obviously had not hit the bastard hard enough.
The only person who paid Jack much attention at all was his father’s secretary, who stuck fast to the man’s side, bringing him coffee and water and eyeing Jack when she wasn’t attending to his father.
That same secretary was the one Jack had caught straddling Gordon Senior’s lap in the office, her skirt hiked up to her waist, one Sunday afternoon when he’d wandered in to work on a school report on the construction company’s computer and printer. He’d been simultaneously horrified and turned on by the sight of the woman’s bare ass and the sounds she made.
It only really just occurred to him at that moment that his own father was a pig. Mean, emotionally abusive asshole defined John Gordon Senior. And Jack truly hated his usually drunk guts.
He let the water sluice across his back, then tilted his head up and opened his mouth to drink some, not even caring that it was hot but needing the hydration so badly it tasted like fresh, cool spring water. The flash-point images from the funeral and wake kept coming at him. The sight of his mother’s calm, beautiful face, finally at peace with herself after nearly twenty-five years under the condescending boot heel of her husband, was something that he would never forget.
He sucked in a breath. No tears had been shed from him over the whole thing after his breakdown in the kitchen, nor would any be. He was determined to stay in complete control of his emotions now after that initial violent outburst.
“John Patrick!” His grandma’s voice sliced through his reminiscing, a relief actually. “Don’t be using up all an old woman’s hot water. I’m not a money tree, ya know!”
He rinsed off and climbed out, tiptoeing into the guest room where he’d been living since his mother’s death. His grandma was a fastidious housekeeper and would practically snatch his clothes off his body in her haste to get them through the wash. He had a pile of fresh laundered and ironed blue jeans, T-shirts, his basketball uniform, socks, and underwear all in a nice neat pile on the military-crisp bedspread.
Cursing his weak-willed self for drinking so goddamned much whiskey at that lame party, he mentally blamed the girl, whose name escaped him, for pretending to put out then yelling “stop” at the last minute—which he honored. He would never lose his virginity at this rate, and he was ready, more than ready, but could never seem to find the right girl combined with the right moment. A fact that would come as a real shock to his teammates and friends, all of whom assumed he was a master cocksman at eighteen, on the edge of graduating from high school.
He was not about to dissuade them of that—no way. He was certainly a class-A flirt who could talk to any girl any time, anywhere and loved doing it. But that one last thing—the real deal, the home base act—it escaped him still.
After tugging on jeans and a shirt, willing the pounding in his temples to stop, he headed for the kitchen. His sister Maureen looked up at him when he appeared in the doorway trying not to hold his nose too obviously at the smell of eggs, sausage, and coffee. His queasy stomach made a slow roll. He gulped and sat, keeping his eyes down.
The young girl held onto her sullen silence as his grandma kept up her end of the conversation with herself. His fork clattered against the plate but he shoveled a few bites into his mouth, feeling the woman’s gaze boring into him.
“Maimeo says we are going home tomorrow.”
He looked up, startled, to see his little sister’s bright blue eyes brimming with tears. After swallowing the huge wad of eggs past his gorge, he sighed and sipped some orange juice. He couldn’t fathom how he could possibly go back there, to his mother’s house, where she would just…not be…anymore. He bit the inside of his cheek and tried not to curse the old woman who sat taking tiny bites of her breakfast and glaring at him.
“Um, well,” he said, patting Mo’s hand and focusing on the little girl he’d been more or less taking care of since she was a toddler when his mother dropped into a booze bottle.
Mo was no trouble really. He loved her, and never minded taking care of her. But sometimes he wished he could just be a normal kid. A young man whose only responsibility was to get up, eat food, go to school, play sports and go home, lather, rinse, repeat. One whose parents did not get into scary screaming fights which many times devolved into actual physical contact rarely ending in his mother’s favor.
Jack’s father was a perpetually angry man who took out his frustration as the founder and sole owner of a growing construction company on his family. Between snide remarks, flat-out insults, and dark silences that took on lives of their own, no one ever felt at ease in the Gordon house, and hadn’t since the moment Bridget Gordon had announced she was pregnant with Jack’s little sister.
That news flash had flipped some sort of Mr. Hyde switch in his father, sending him into a frenzy of work combined with more work, as if he were terrified of failing, or since he had fathered a second child he had a hundred times the responsibility.
Jack had a different theory. As he stared into his little sister’s trusting gaze, he revisited it, his head still pounding, now with stress on top of the hangover. He honestly believed that his mother may have had an affair with a man who had lived next door to them for a while. The man had a wife, supposedly ill, whom Jack never saw leaving her house. He remembered the guy vaguely. He’d been tall, with light blond hair, Jack remembered. Soft-spoken and helpful when Jack’s own father was absent in the evenings, which was pretty much seven days a week. The guy fixed things, carried grocery bags, even mowed the grass a few times—was in general sort of a substitute male adult in the house.
Something about the way Jack’s mother and the man would stand, close but not quite touching, in the kitchen while the elementary school age Jack ate his after-school snack made him feel…funny. And then, the man was gone. One day a for sale sign appeared in the yard next door, and his mother had locked herself in her bedroom and would not emerge, not even when his father threatened to kick the door down.
A few weeks later, the blessed news was announced. Or not, depending on one’s perspective. Jack’s life, already a little odd although he didn’t realize it, got even stranger. Of course until he visited his friends’ houses, where the parents loved each other and actually proved it by not fighting constantly, he didn’t realize how “not normal” his own world was.
He stared into his little sister’s eyes, forced the memory of his mother’s body, face down on her own vomi
t, out of his head. “Yeah, Mo. Sweetie, we need to get back to our own rooms, don’t you think?”
“No.” She stuck out her lower lip and pulled her hand away. “I want to stay here.” Mo looked down at her plate, tears plopping onto her uneaten eggs.
“Oh, my darlings.”His grandmother sighed. “You have to. Your father and I talked and we…he said he wants you home. So home you must go.”
“I hate Daddy,” Mo declared, but in a whisper, as if afraid he might hear her.
Jack stared at her, then dragged his gaze to his grandmother, the woman who had raised the man in question and had declared her grandchildren “perfect” and her daughter-in-law a “wee bit fragile but lovely.” She kept eating, sipping her coffee, and not meeting his eyes.
“We are going home,” he declared, pushing away from the table. “Today.” If the mean old bitch didn’t want to help them, then he would be damned if they stayed here another minute. “Finish your breakfast, Mo. Then pack.”
As Jack sat on the guest bed, head in his hands, the mattress dipped as someone joined him. His grandma put her arm around his shoulders. “It’s best this way, John Patrick. Do you understand? You have to be the grownup in that house. I can’t do it for you.” She pulled away, took his chin in her hand. “And stay off the sauce. Addiction is in your blood, boy. Don’t fall to it. Be stronger than that. I know you are. I sense it about you.”
Jack nodded. And grew up a little at that moment, more than he wanted to, but accepted it for what it was.
Chapter Two
“Here.” His father tossed Jack a set of keys, startling him from half-hearted perusal of his homework on the living room couch. The truce they’d struck a few weeks ago when Jack had shown up at home, weepy little sister in tow was uneasy at best. Jack had set his jaw and faced his father whose nose was still off-kilter and his cold blue stare, which held nothing but neutrality when he’d opened the door for his children.
