you're too young & eager to love

Just a little warm-up piece! Focusing on family dynamics and the morning after.

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Their cinder block house has shifted. Like snow melting in the gutter - all that pristine pureness disappearing to reveal dead leaves and decay - something rotten is being exposed. Sam Elders isn't much of a philosophical man, and he certainly isn't well read enough to recognize a climax when it's happening in real life, but he knows moods. And when there's a bad one, thickening up the air with invisible rot, Sam almost always thinks there's a woman to blame.

The only woman he has to point a finger at is his daughter, and she looks as fresh as summer rain. Fresh, reinvigorated, flush with youth. Still, the mood lingers. The mood reminds him, persistent and nagging, as offensive to him as the sour smell of garbage.

Sam leans with his bad hip pressing against the edge of the kitchen counter, drinking his coffee black and watching his daughter. He scratches his jawline, calloused fingers rubbing against three days’ worth of stubble. He isn't sure what exactly is different about her - she has the same patch of freckles spanning her left knee, the same unabashed frankness, the same blonde hair streaked with tones of honey and gold - but he knows in his gut that something has changed.

Haven's wearing cut-off shorts and a velour sweatshirt in camo print, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows as she sits at the rickety lawn table (it's been posing as a kitchen table for four years now, oddly at home against the chipped mugs and hard plastic plates), spooning off-brand cereal into her mouth. She slurps as she eats, drinks the sugar-milk at the bottom of the bowl once she's devoured the last of the floating marshmallows and toasted oat pieces. Sam hides his frown, but he thinks even the way she licks milk from her mouth seems off, like the cat who finally caught the canary.

"Is this your way of telling me you're off to join the military or something?" he finally asks, clearing his throat with a lift of his greying eyebrows and a pointed glance to her sweatshirt.

"Well, there was a recruiter at the job fair last week at school." Haven taps her spoon against the rim of her bowl and runs her mouth across the back of her hand. She flashes him a playful smile - and there it is again, that something that's different, a smile that's more fox than lamb.

He snorts. "Job fair. What a bunch of bullshit."

She nods along, her easy agreement often punctuating her father's sentences. "I think Luke got polled as a potential police offer, do ya believe it?" Sam scoffs his answer as Haven watches her brother emerge into the hall as she speaks - he's stumbling out of her bedroom, thick with half-sleep and one hell of a hangover, struggling with pulling a pair of ripped jeans up over his naked hips. Haven thinks there’s a reluctant, dejected air about him. He’s slow to make his way into the kitchen, and when he does it’s with a yawn that hides the wince of his eyes.

Luke’s hair is sticking up in the back. Haven reaches out to smooth the unruly strands, her fingers coaxing them into submission slowly. Luke groans under his breath, folding his body into an out-of-place wicker chair at the table. He drops his forehead to the counter, his arms folding around his face as a makeshift pillow; his sister’s fingers keep digging through his hair, working their way down his neck. She can smell him: stale sweat and beer, cigarette smoke and ripped denim.

"Long night?" Sam asks.

Luke grumbles something the rest of his family can't hear.

"Jaime Holster had a party last night," Haven says by way of explanation.

"Yeah, well, your sister has been up for an hour." Sam has a way of speaking to his son that’s purely admonishment.

When Haven starts to rub the outside of his ear, Luke shrugs away from her irritably. His body jerks as though burnt. She grins and pats his shoulder as if to say no hard feelings here before getting up to put her bowl in the sink.

“I’m going to the mall. There’s a pair of boots for sale at Macy’s that I’ve been eying for a week now. Figured I’d treat myself.” She snatches the keys to the truck from the counter and kisses Sam on his grizzled cheek, heading out the door with a pep in her step and an off-key whistle on her lips.

Sam eyes his eldest, still dejectedly curled at the table. He pours him a cup of coffee – black, like his own – and places it down by Luke’s nearest elbow.

“Maybe take it easy on the Budweiser next time, son.”

Sam means it jokingly but Luke snarls something into his arm, head still buried in his self-made crevice of skin and table. Sam remembers being seventeen himself, full of spit fire and testosterone, his throat desperate enough for cheap Bud and watered-down vodka and his dick willing to rise for just about any free hand, mouth, or snatch, so he resists the urge to smack his son across the top of his head. The truth is, as much as it bothers him to admit it, Sam Knows Luke doesn’t have the same attitude, although Sam sometimes wishes he did. Luke is his mother’s son, through and through, bursting with too much self-control in his bones and willful ignorance in his brain.

But as Sam likes to say, there’s always a woman to blame.