The Carpenter's Daughter Read Free Page A

it. She’d achieved exactly what she’d abandoned us for—fame and envy among the vain and superficial.
    Sarah didn’t know her mother’s adopted and very well-known last name, which was for the best. She didn’t need to know that her mother had taken three other husbands, squandered her wealth built from face-lifts, updos, and scandalous photos. And she especially didn’t need to know…
    All Sarah knew was that she had Cassie’s eyes. That was enough. She didn’t need anything else from the woman.
    I reached for the TV remote. I was too old for this. And too…blue collar. That was why Cassie left. She didn’t want the ordinary life I could give her. That, and she’d cracked. All of the crap her faith-freak dad had dumped on her finally split her right in two, and she lost it. Crazy didn’t just happen.
    Old reels of events I’d rather forget started ticking, flashing my most hated memories with cruel accuracy.
    We were eighteen and in love. I was in love, anyway, even if I couldn’t figure why Cassie wanted me. Maybe because of basketball. She thought she’d latched on to a star who could lift her out of the nightmare she’d lived in.
    Me. Imagine that. The son of a drunk and of a floozy who’d run off and killed herself. My future was sealed before I drew breath—I wasn’t going anywhere special, and I sure couldn’t fix her mess. Even if Kansas State thought I’d be a game changer on their basketball court.
    The scholarship offer was revoked, proving the unspoken prophecy. I’d failed the drug test, which was stupid. I never tried cocaine again. Especially after I found out Cassie was pregnant.
    That vivid and horrific moment still haunted me. I’d found her in her father’s basement. In the nine months we had been together, I’d learned that when she went missing, she was probably down there, raw knees pressed to the concrete floor, facedown, hands covering her hair. Repenting. That was what her father called it.
    I called it abuse.
    Sure enough, that was where I’d found her. Except she hadn’t been face-to-the-floor prostrate. In her white atonement dress, she was huddled in a corner of the dark, abandoned coal room, blood staining the sleeves of the snowy material.
    I remembered my stomach twisting hard, the taste of puke in my mouth as I bolted to her side. Her hands dripped red, and in between trembling fingers, she’d gripped a paring knife.
    With torture in her eyes, she looked up to me and moaned. “I don’t want to go to hell.”
    “God, Cassie, what are you doing?” I ripped my jacket off and knelt to wrap her wounds. Engraved in both of her forearms, cuts climbed like ladder rungs to her elbows. Sweat broke out over my forehead and neck as she fought against my help.
    “I don’t want to go to hell,” she cried.
    “Then why are you trying to kill yourself?”
    She pulled in a shuddered breath and set her agony-soaked expression on me. “Not.” She leaned heavily back against the cold wall. “This is atonement.”
    Something cold and hard snapped inside of me. Atonement. Her father’s word. The first time I’d ever heard it, Cassie had been missing for three days. We’d gone to a Friday night football game together, and I’d found the group with the goods. Cassie drank a little, but she didn’t get drunk. Didn’t matter—drinking was apparently a vile sin. Her father had her repenting for three days solid. I didn’t drink with her again.
    “Cass.” I tried to measure the rage in my voice. “This is crazy. Why are you—”
    “I’m pregnant.” Tears seeped from the corners of her eyes. She tried brushing them away, leaving a crimson streak across her face.
    What kind of a father did this to his daughter? What kind of a god would require it?
    My mind set right there in that nightmare of a moment. Cassie wouldn’t live like this, and neither would our child. And as for this god? Who needed that? Not me. Not Cassie. Not our kid.
    We got married a week after