Defiant Heart Read Free

siding. The door to the shed was secured by a simple latch that lifted easily when Jon tried it. The door opened with a squeaking protest from the hinges, and he was greeted with a dry blast of stale air.
    Jon stepped up into the shed. To his left was a broad workbench, to his right a pegboard wall on which hung a series of tools. At the rear were dozens of small drawers laid out in neat rows and columns. Selecting one at random, he opened it and found that it contained a collection of nuts, all the same size. He opened the drawer next to it and found it also contained nuts, these slightly larger than the first. The drawers immediately above each contained bolts with diameters corresponding to the nuts in the drawer below. The lengths of the bolts increased as he moved up the column of drawers.
    The person who worked here‌—‌his Grandpa Wilson, obviously‌—‌had been extremely neat and organized. To Jon, there was an undeniable elegance in the way his grandfather had organized his workplace.
    A noise outside caused him to start. Moving quickly to the front of the shed, he stepped out and closed the door behind him. He saw no one in the rear yard, and there did not seem to be any sound coming from the house.
    He would talk to his grandmother about the workshop when she returned.
    #
    Vernon King grabbed the keys hanging on the nail embedded in the wall, pushed open the screen door and stepped outside. The truck, he saw, was parked next to the barn. He was relieved to note that the bed of the vehicle was empty.
    Absently tossing the keys in the air with the open palm of one hand and catching them with a downward snap of the same hand, he strolled across the dusty yard. He was reaching for the handle to the driver’s side door when he heard his father.
    “Where do you think you’re going?”
    Vernon turned and saw the man standing by the corner of the barn. He had been pushing a wheelbarrow full of manure and now set it down.
    “Out,” said Vernon.
    “Don’t you have chores?”
    He did, at least by his father’s reckoning. But he also had something else he wanted to do, and the two conflicted. He’d made the decision that the one outweighed the other. And, if he’d had more time, he might have been willing to engage in a more lengthy discussion about it. But he needed to get going and therefore opted for a much shorter response.
    “Nope.”
    His father came around the wheelbarrow and took a couple steps in Vernon’s direction. He had a look on his face Vernon knew all too well. It was one that had terrorized Vernon from the time he was old enough to remember until about three years earlier, when, at the age of fourteen, Vernon had, almost overnight it seemed, grown four inches and added about thirty pounds, all of it muscle.
    As a youngster, Vernon had been a tall, gangly boy. He’d gotten his size from his father, who stood almost six foot three inches and was built like a locomotive. All of Vernon’s other physical attributes he’d inherited from his mother, a pretty petite blond who’d been forced to marry his father when she’d become pregnant with Vernon at the age of fifteen. Several years younger than Vernon’s father, she had, for almost ten years, put up with the man’s abuse, both verbal and physical, until one day, without warning, she’d simply left. Her parting words had been scribbled on a piece of paper she’d impaled on the nail from which Vernon had just retrieved the keys. They read, “I can’t take it no more. I’m going where you won’t never find me. Good bye. PS. Go to Hell.”
    With his mother gone, Vernon had borne the brunt of his father’s cruelty. Even after he’d grown to be the same height as his father, he’d been thoroughly cowed by the man. Then came the miraculous growth spurt. It roughly corresponded to the time Vernon had begun playing basketball.
    Everything came to a head one winter evening. The Jackson High School basketball team had played an away game,