Page 2 of The Embers That Remain

But as I listened to the fireplace crackle and pop in the dark down the hallway, I thought maybe love wasn’t supposed to burn. And I wondered, very quietly, if being a man really meant becoming someone like Dad, and if I really wanted to be like that at all.

One

Cali

Present Day

“Dang, Doc! Bruh, I wanna at least be able to live long enough to graduate high school!”

The car rattled as the tires drifted over the rumble strip, a low vibration that ran straight through the steering wheel and into my achy bones. My son’s voice bounced off the windshield as he fought with his navy activewear shirt, one arm flung across the center console, almost clotheslining me. His forearm blocked half my view as I jerked the wheel back into our lane, heart thudding harder than it should have.

“Jace,” I snapped, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. “I need to see to keep us alive!”

“That is not comforting!” he shot back, finally yanking his head through the neckhole. His hair exploded in every direction, as if he’d lost a fight with static electricity, and he glared at me like I’d personally wronged him. “Seriously. I’m not sure how they let you have a kid when you drive like this.”

“One,” I said, swerving just enough to make my point, “I am not a doctor. And two, I drive perfectly fine when your tarantula arms aren’t blocking my view, bruh.”

I bit back a smile, but he caught it anyway.

“Close enough, Doc.” He bent forward, tugging on one sock, then the other, football cleats clutched between his knees. “What’s your excuse the rest of the time? Think you can get me to tryouts in one piece?”

“I’ll consider it,” I said lightly. “If I don’t pass out from the odor,” I said, dramatically waving a hand in front of my nose.

He huffed, rolling his eyes so hard I wondered if they’d get stuck. “That’s called testosterone. You wouldn’t get it.”

“Oh, trust me,” I muttered. “I get it.” I blew out the side of my mouth to move a strand of hair out of my face. The highway narrowed as Kennedy came into view, the familiar bend in the road causing my chest to constrict before I even realized what was happening. Muscle memory. My hands adjusted on the wheel unconsciously. I’d driven this road hundreds of times as a teenager, always with the same knot in my stomach, always with the same quiet hope that today wouldn’t be worse than yesterday. The school secretary had told me tryouts ended at six o’clock sharp. Kennedy High had always been meticulous about its rules. Precision disguised as discipline. Discipline disguised as care.

“Practice is over at six,” I said. “Do you want me to stay? I was thinking of grabbing dinner from the diner and bringing something back to Grandpa’s.”

Jace paused, fingers tugging on his laces.

“Are you sure,” he asked, staring out the window, “that Grandpa’s gonna be cool with us living there?” His knee bounced once, twice, then stilled. His hand flexed against his leg, fingers curling and uncurling as if he was bracing for something unseen.

“He’s going to love it,” I said without hesitation. And I believed it in the same way I believed the sun would rise.

Jimmy Walton had never been a man of many words. He showed up instead. Fixed broken things. Sat beside you in silence that offered shelter. Even now, as his memory slipped in and out like a tide, that steadiness remained because things didn’t fade when the moments were buried too deep. Some people were built so strong that even memory loss couldn’t change the goodness at the center of who they were.

Jace nodded, processing. He always did that, taking things in quietly, carefully, like he was stacking pieces of information into place in his head, trying to figure out the pattern of what to expect. Our lives had been turned inside out with little warning, and I’d shoved my own reactions down so hard they barely had room to breathe.

There wasn’t time to process the last few weeks. There never seemed to be enough time to truly process anything. Never enough time to dig into the root of why things tugged just a little too hard, hurt just a little too much. One thing I knew was that Kennedy, Kansas, hated me, and I hated it right back. I hated that this was where I had to come, but for Grandpa, I’d go to the ends of the earth.

I took the last turn into the parking lot far too fast, tires squealing as I swung into a spot like I was racing an invisible clock. Two minutes to spare.

“Whew,” I breathed.

“Jesus, take the wheel,” Jace sang dramatically, clutching the dash, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever had a prouder moment as a mother that his taste in music came directly from me. “Cal, how are you gonna teach me to drive when you drive like this?”

“Har, har.” I shoved a bottle of blue Powerade into his chest. “Alright, dude. You have everything?”

He nodded, already opening the door. “Yep. I’ll see you at six.”

“Call if you need anything!” He gave me a quick nod and took off running, long legs eating up the distance between the parking lot and the field. I watched him merge into the cluster of boys gathering near the sideline, his shoulders squared, his head held high. He would be okay because I would make sure of it, as I had for the last four years. The buffer between him and the reality that was his life was me. I’d stepped in to protect him, just like my grandparents had stepped in to protect me.

I didn’t get out of the car because I didn’t have a reason to, but I let my eyes wander over everything around me. The school looked completely unchanged. Same limestone. Same windows. Same flagpole standing tall and unchanging. The cracked steps that once had resembled a finish line and a firing squad all at once.

The breath whooshed from my lungs as I shut off the memories this building ignited before it became like a dry grass fire in early spring that had dozens of volunteer firefighters responding because the wind was mercilessly pushing it across dozens of acres in the time span of seconds.

Memory pressed in like humidity—thick, uninvited, and heavy, as if you could taste the air you were breathing. Lockers slamming. Conversations that stopped abruptly when I entered the room. Eyes that tracked me through hallways, through classrooms, through years. Whispers they thought I couldn’t hear, and then the words they wanted to reach my ears. Slut. Whore. White trash. The sense of always being slightly out of place, no matter how carefully I tried to belong. Grandma and Grandpa had never had much, but they’d always had me in clean clothes, even if they were hand-me-downs from trends two or three years prior.