A sweet, sad story of hope

Sympathy

by Jordan Castillo Price

Standalone novelette available in multiple ebook formats through JCP Books.com, and through Amazon via the Kindle

It took Anthony Potosi years to recover from the accident that claimed his father's life, and doctors told him he'd never walk again. He proved them wrong. Now he's back at the landscaping business, Potosi and Sons, he shares with his two older brothers—but they seem more interested in getting Anthony to sell out his share than in celebrating his recovery.

The oil-and-water relationship between Anthony and his brothers is hardly new. Even when they were kids, Sal and Chip delighted in terrorizing their baby brother with stories like "The Hook," complete with visits to the abandoned Victorian a half mile down the two-lane.

Now Anthony towers over his brothers...but he's still the youngest. When the new owner of the Hook House calls in an order, they take a little too much satisfaction in sending him to face his old fears. And learning to open up again to trust, desire—and maybe even love—is far scarier than The Hook.

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Chapter One

There was a time when I would’ve been able to carry the biggest shrub in the yard without breaking a sweat. The yew I was currently loading up was big, no doubt, but I was only bearing half the weight. My brother Chip had the other end of the root ball. And even so, the strain of maneuvering that damn bush into the back of the van just about killed me.

“God damn it, Tony, pull.” Chip gave the root ball a shove that crushed my hand against the door hinge and I saw stars. I lost my grip for a second and lurched to recover, even though moving fast under all that weight was gonna come back to bite me in the ass later. I couldn’t just drop the yew on Chip—it’d squash him. And then I’d never hear the end of it.

I tried to brace my good leg and pull harder, get the lousy root ball up over the bumper, but it was no use. Leaves slicked the bottoms of my boots and I had no choice but to catch myself with my other leg—the useless leg—and the pain that shot up my spine was a cold, relentless kind of pain, nothing at all like the pain of my skinned knuckles. It was a pain that promised to linger. For days.

My good leg caught on the lip of the corrugated bed and finally I had leverage. I hauled one more time, and the burlap cleared the bumper.

I let go and wiped my forehead on my sleeve. I was drenched. Even my upper lip was wet.

“If you can’t cut it,” Chip said, “maybe you re-think selling your third of the business to Sal and me.”

Sal and me, Sal and me…. It never ended. “Maybe Sal and you should have been the ones out here loading the truck.”

Of the three of us, I was the youngest brother, and the biggest. And I figured I’d done a lifetime’s worth of hauling for Sal and Chip in the years before the accident. I’d never said as much out loud—but I’d done my damnedest to convey it with looks that were nasty enough to peel paint.

Not that Chip noticed. He liked his beer cold, his TV loud, and his dinner on the table when he came home from work. It took more than a pissy look to let the air out of Chip’s tires. “Alls I’m saying,” he rambled on, “is you take your cut, maybe you can go to school.”

“Oh God, not this again.”

“You don’t wanna go to Penn State? How ‘bout the community college? I heard you can bring in forty, forty-five grand a year with a two-year degree.”

“What the hell do I want a degree for?” Potosi and Sons. That was all I’d ever wanted to do, from the first time Dad let me work the backhoe.

“Don’t be stupid—you could figure out a way to get some kind of desk job.”

“I don’t want a desk job.”

“I’d think you’d jump at the chance…since your back didn’t heal right, and whatnot.”

My back. A daydream that featured a yew with a three-hundred-pound root ball falling on Chip—ideally from about ten feet off the ground—gave me something to almost smile about. It wasn’t my back that’d been broken. It was my pelvis. Apparently the two-syllable word was one syllable too many for my Neanderthal brother.

I wiped my hands on my jeans and headed back toward the office, and did my best not to limp. It cost me. But everything in life has a cost, doesn’t it?

The phone was ringing when I came through the door, and I heard a series of sounds that had grown so familiar to me I could picture them without even poking my head around the doorframe. The clatter of computer keys—my brother Sal finishing a thought. A sigh—he hates being interrupted, unless the customer happens to be both female and available. A squall of old metal as he leaned back in the ancient office chair—a piece of furniture that weighed as much as a yew, with horsehair stuffing hanging out the splits in the leatherette seat, a holdover from dad’s regime that Sal, the oldest, claimed as his birthright. The thunk of his boot heels on the desk as he prepared to do business. Then a moment of silence as the ringing stopped and he raised the receiver to his ear. “Potosi and Sons.”

They were just phone-words, as empty as “hello” and “how are you” and “have a nice day.” But after the buyout conversation in the back of the van, the greeting rubbed me the wrong way.

I hit the work sink to splash off some of the sweat, but even over the thunder of the water into the deep metal basin, I could still pick out Sal’s voice. “You want what? Really? But you’ll want to transplant hazel in the Spring. I got some hostas you can fill in with, half off…uh, yeah, sure, we got it. Uh-huh. Youse got a truck, or you want it delivered and installed? Okay, gimme the address.”

The cold water felt good on my hands, my face, but the whole core of my body throbbed where I’d caught that yew the wrong way—and yeah, even my back would be aching well into the night—but my knees too, and my hips, especially my hips.

I pulled some rough brown paper from the dispenser and blotted my face. I could take stock for the rest of the day—Sal and Chip hated dealing with numbers that didn’t have dollar signs in front of them, so when I pulled out the inventory sheet they gave me plenty of room. I’d go through our evergreens for the rest of the day, drive home with a hot pack against my lower back, and settle in with some Vicodin when I got back to my apartment. No problem.

“Tony, we got another one of them chump-changers.” Unless you were willing to drop a grand to have your yard graded or your perfectly good old growth replaced with new hybrids that looked just like your neighbors’ azaleas and forsythias, you were chump change to Sal. “You want to do the dropoff?”

Maybe—if they weren’t in the market for yew. I wouldn’t mind getting in my truck that much sooner and breaking open the heat pack. “What’re they…?”

“Hazel, three units. I think we got some leftover stock in Greenhouse Four.”

I did the inventory, not Sal. Corylus americana. Greenhouse Two. Maybe forty pounds each—a lot more back-friendly than the yew. I’d manage. I turned toward the door carefully, so as not to aggravate my aching hip.

“And get this,” Sal went on. “It’s at the Hook House.”

I almost stopped mid-turn, but as I paused, a pain shot down my thigh and up my spine that kept me going until I was facing the door. The Hook House—was he kidding? Some joke.

The Hook House wasn’t what most people would think—a piece of property owned by a family named Hook. The Hook House was a teetering old Victorian about half a mile away from our Grandpa Tito’s old apartment—God rest his soul. When Sal was twelve, Chip was ten and I was seven and not yet bigger than the two of them, we used to jimmy loose a rusted picket of the wrought iron fence and dare each other to get closer to the house, which was obviously cursed, haunted, or filled with axe murderers.

On the day the Hook House got its name, we were maybe a dozen yards or so away from the east side of the building, shivering in the shadow cast by the single turret, when Chip launched into the re-telling of a yarn he’d picked up at camp. Chip’s not what I’d call a gifted storyteller, so at ten he couldn’t have spooked even our wimpy cousin Carl. But right as he fumbled his way to the money shot—the bloody hook dangling from the car door—I caught a glimpse of something in the overgrown weeds, a patch of moss, emerald green, against milky gray stone. I inched forward, and it took me a minute to register the stone was man-made, that it had letters carved in it, and dates.

That we were standing there on top of graves.

They both thought it was Chip’s dumb story that’d sent me hurtling back toward the broken fencepost, back to Grandpa Tito’s kitchen that smelled like gravy and pipe tobacco. They had a good laugh at my expense, and ever since then, the old house was “Hook House” to them.

I’d gone back myself a few years later, after the growth spurt that’d left me towering over every other member of my family, when I was a badass fifteen-year-old who’d forgotten the meaning of fear. The Hook House looked more spindly than I’d remembered it, more decayed, but just as imposing. The picket was still loose, but I was too big to cram through the gap.

Maybe I was relieved.

Even so, I sat there on my idling dirt bike and smoked through half a pack of Marlboro Reds and just watched. The grass rustled once, and an albino squirrel darted up an old Sugar Maple. That was all.

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