Return (Coming Home #1) Read Free

back into the safety zone. I peel out. The engine roars and the glowing road lines are easy to see as the moon witnesses everything, now out from behind the clouds. E ven through my pooling tears I see it all and I’m driving, moving further and further away from the man I once loved.
    W ho said he loved me back.
    Yet every tire’s turn br ings me closer to a past where nothing made sense.

Chapter T hree
    “Carrie!” Elaine Boynton is a warm, loving woman who wears cats. Not just sweatshirts with pictures of cats. I mean, she’s always car r ying a cat in her arms or on her shoulder . And that hasn’t changed.
    Sometimes good things don’t change.
    “Come in, come in. Brian told me to expect you tonight. Oh, dear, you look so wet! What happened?”
    Brian, her husband and my dad’s old partnerat the bar, yell s out, “Carrie! Let me guess. That piece of shit car your dad gave you in high school finally crapped the bed.” Brian i s a man with a ready opinion and a sailor’s mouth.
    “Brian! Language!”
    That i s probably the nine-thousandth time I’ ve heard her say that to him. He never listen s . I haven’t seen them in three years and they are still the same. I just sh ake my head and stuff myhands in my pockets, trying not to shiver.
    Brian and my dad were co-owners of one of the local bars, The Shanty. I took my first steps in there. L earned to ride my bike in the parking lot. Did my homework on the shiny bar a million times after school . Most important, though: Brian t a ught me how to pour a beer there.
    N ow I am finally legal and c an work the bar.
    But there i s no bar.
    Dad andBrian lost i t three years ago. Mark’s words ripple through me. I hope I didn’t...  
    Elaine pul ls me in the house and hug s me. The calico cat on her shoulder leaps away. It pauses before walking up the stairs and glares at me. Great. The cat already hates me. I have yet another enemy in my hometown.  
    “I don’t care if you’re wet, you need a big old squeeze.” She i s warm and soft, a big woman witha bigger heart. Blonde hair that come from a box at the drugstore frame s her cherubic face. She w ears just enough makeup to look put together, but not too much. She i s about my mom’s age. Early fifties.
    I wonder what Mom would look like if she’d lived this long.
    Brian turns the corner from the kitchen, takes one look at me, and turns back, shouting, “Drowned rat!” He reappears with a giant towel,the kind you use at the beach. His arms wrap around me and soon I’m in a bear hug, lifted off my feet, the air crushed out of me.
    That’s the second time a man has wrapped his arms around me in the same hour.
    Brian and my dad always looked like they could be brothers. “Battlefield brothers,” he always said. They met in the army, doing work in Central America in the 1980s before I was born. Neitherman would talk about it. They both had nightmares, though, and turned off the TV when anything about El Salvador came on.
    “Scary Carrie!” he rumbles in my ear, using their old nickname for me. I can feel a piece of my dad here, in Brian and Elaine, and normally it would make me smile.
    Not after seeing Mark, though . Just the thought of his hands on me makes me flush. I feel guilty for wantingthat after what he did to my dad.  
    And me.
    “The poor girl needs a shower and to get in some dry clothes!” Elaine insists, smacking Brian’s beefy arm. He’s got the same blonde hair my dad had, a tight wave that needed to be cut all the time to keep it under control, and chocolate brown eyes hidden under a thick, muscled face. When Brian and Dad weren’t working at the bar they worked outsidea lot .
    Elaine shoos me upstairs and shows me the bathroom. It’s neat and old, with pink ti l e in patterns on the floor and up the wall, about halfway. The grout is nicked and chipped, faded to a dull, yellowish-grey, but it smells clean. Like bleach.
    “Here’s a towel and a spare robe. I’ll have Brian put your