Page 5 of Hero for the Holidays

“Meat is murder,” Lila said.

“I watched you eat a bacon cheeseburger yesterday.”

She shrugged. “It’s tasty murder.”

He was maybe in over his head.

“Right. Okay. So my brothers and sister live here on this chunk of land. I already told you about all of them. We’re renovating this barn up here, turning it into an event space. We have a lot of buildings on the property. My great-great-great-grandfather used to run a saloon on the property. Lot of gambling and...” He realized he couldn’t finish that sentence.

If one thing was true about his family, it was that lawlessness ran in their blood.

He was trying to be the change he wanted to see. Or something.

“All right, kid. You have two choices. Our place, which is just up the dirt road apiece, or we go straight in to meet the whole clan. How do you want to do this?”

“You’re leaving it up to me?” she asked.

“Yeah. If you’re not ready to meet everyone, then we won’t.”

“Where do they think you’ve been the last few days?”

“Just taking care of some business. We don’t really police each other.”

“But you all live on the same ranch.”

“It’s complicated. Listen. I never said that I was getting you aperfectfamily. Just a family.”

She looked at him. “I don’t really look like you.”

His stomach tightened. “No, you don’t.”

“Do I look like any of them?”

“Not especially.”

“Oh. You know I never really cared about being adopted. So I never dreamed about meeting my biological family. But you’d think there’d be something cool about it, like that we’d look alike.”

Damn. That was complicated. He looked in her eyes and he could see that it was for her too. That there were questions she didn’t want to ask, and ones he didn’t know how to answer. His throat worked.

He gritted his teeth. “Sorry.”

“I want to meet everyone. Let’s just do it. This is heinous. But my life has been like a fever dream for the last year. I’m kind of over it. If it sucks, we can dip.”

“Do all kids your age talk like this?”

“I’m on the internet.”

“Okay,” he said. She said that like it explained something. He wasn’t entirely sure that he understood what.

He killed the engine on the truck, and they got out. He stood in front of the farmhouse, which he had called home for the last thirty years. And he looked at it with new eyes. Because this was the first time Lila was seeing it.

“This is...home base. For the King family. For whatever it’s worth.”

“It’s...something,” she said.

It was two stories, with a wide porch. A big enough house to accommodate everybody. If there was one thing their dad had been big on, it had been public appearance. That was all part and parcel to his narcissism. He’d also been an unscrupulous business partner to the other families on the ranch, and had taken advantage of many people in town. Their reputation was basically shit. They’d done their best to redeem it. But people’s memories were long. Especially in small towns.

Also, he and his brothers were still half-feral. They might mean well, but they just hadn’t had a great example of how to manage...anything.

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