Carmen Jenner - Welcome to Sugartown

“You’re not alone in this, I’ll be there. And if your parents won’t help you, we’ll move in together. Dad told me this morning that Jackson’s coming to stay with us for a while. He can’t stand being in that big old house in Tenterfield all alone after my aunt died, so he’s selling and going to be crashing on our couch. Maybe we can get him to move in with us someplace and it will cheapen the rent.”

“Oh joy, your hot cousin whom I’ve slept with exactly twice—the same amount of times, in fact, that he’s been to Sugartown—is coming to stay, and you want me to live with him while I’m pregnant with a fat arse? Geez, Ana, you couldn’t have told me all this before I got myself knocked up? Jackson Rowe moving to Sugartown is fucking monumental!” she yells, and everyone in the room turns to look at us. “Oh, go back to reading your magazines and pretending like you aren’t all here to kill your babies.”

I blink up at the madwoman formally known as my best friend, and she waves her hands at me to hurry up and get out of my seat. She starts to move toward the door, but before she turns completely, I see her hands briefly rest on her stomach.

She turns around to glare at me for taking too long. “Come on, woman. I want ice cream before you drive me home, and I need a whole damn pint of chocolate-chip cookie dough.”

The following day I sit at the kitchen table sulking over my cereal. I’m in one hell of a mood, thanks to sleeping on the lumpy couch all night. Holly’s occupying my bed at present, and is the reason for me not getting a whole lot of sleep last night—her pregnant arse snores.

After we got home yesterday, she came clean to her folks and the bastards gave her a pretty hefty ultimatum: destroy the life inside her that was going to “ruin her life”, or ship out and pretend she has no family left. I swear it took a freaking miracle to keep me from punching them both in their snobby, bitter faces.

I threw together a bag for her and dragged her out of that house before they could change her mind. This was her decision to make; how dare they not support her in this? That was their grandchild they were talking about offing.

Now, my dad runs around the kitchen, tearing the place apart in an attempt to find something he’s lost. Probably just the number for Gary’s Pizza Palace down the road.

“Dad, can I talk to you about something?” I hadn’t told him yet that Holly was pregnant and would be crashing with us until the two of us could find our own place. Not that he’d care; Holly is like the daughter he never knew he wanted to have. I’d just rather he hear it from me first, than the rumour mill in town.

“Can it wait, sweetheart? I’m running kinda late.”

“Yeah, okay,” I mutter then frown, because it dawns on me that it’s only 10 am on a Sunday and my dad never goes anywhere this early on a Sunday, unless it’s to the shop to buy more bacon. Assuming that this is what he’s looking for, I fish the keys to his Harley out from under the paper and hold them out to him. “Where are you going?”

He glances at me briefly and takes his keys from my outstretched hand, then averts his eyes like he’s guilty of stealing the last slice of pie from the fridge. “I’m visiting a friend.”

“Okay, cool,” I mutter and go to sit back down, but my dad’s staring at me with an odd expression that makes me rethink what he just said.

He’s not visiting a friend at all.

I narrow my eyes on him. “You’ve been going to the prison? For how long?”

“Since he went in,” he replies, and he at least has the good grace to look a tad bit sheepish.

Suddenly, I want to be sick. Knowing my dad has been visiting Elijah behind my back brings all the guilt rushing back to the surface. He’s just Dad’s employee, but he was everything to me. It hurts to know my father’s had that kind of interaction with him, even though I’m still not sure I’m ready to.

“He never mentioned seeing you.”

Dad’s brows shoot skyward. “You spoke to him? When?”

“He called me yesterday, while you were out.” I think back to hearing the surprise in Elijah’s voice when I answered the phone, and then I look at my dad and the realisation hits that he wasn’t calling me at all—he was calling my dad. “You’re his weekly phone call?”

“He has no one else, Ana.”

“That’s why you asked me to take Sammy to rugby on Saturdays, isn’t it? To get me out of the house?”

“I knew you weren’t ready to talk to him, but the kid’s all alone in the world, Ana. We’re all he has left. I gotta get going. I’ve got a two hour drive, and if I don’t haul arse I’m gonna miss visiting hours.” Dad sees me wince and his whole face softens. He steps toward me and takes my hand in his. “You could come, too. He’d love to see you.”

I remember more of my dad’s strange behaviour over the last few weeks and yank my hand away from his. “That’s why you took that picture of Sammy and I on your phone the other day, isn’t it?”

“It was a nice picture.”

“Are you giving it to him?” I accuse.

“I already have, baby girl.”

“Don’t call me that.” I dump my bowl in the sink. The spoon makes a loud clatter against the stainless steel and I wince.

“Ana, we owe him a lot.”

“We don’t owe him anything. He carved up a guy’s face, Dad!”

“Yeah, and if he hadn’t, I would have. He told me the truth about the night you hurt your arm. He saved you then, maybe it’s your turn to save him back?”

“I wouldn’t have needed to be saved if it weren’t for his ties to the Hell’s Angels.”

“Maybe not, but he loves you, kid. He’s a good man and he’d do anything to protect you. That’s good enough for me.”

“You can’t build a relationship on all the shit we have buried beneath us, Dad. One day, it’s all going to come floating back to the surface, and what then? All we ever did was hurt one another, and everything and everyone around us. Sometimes you’ve got to cut your losses before you gamble away everything you have left.”

“That’s not living kid, that’s barely surviving.”

“Yeah, but at least it’s not dying.”

“Look, I’m not saying you have to jump back into bed with him. I’m just saying, maybe think about what he’s going through on the inside. Alone.”

“It’s all I think about!” I yell through my tears. “Day and night, every minute for the last four months it’s all I’ve thought about. So don’t you dare accuse me of not giving this enough thought. I love him Dad, but he betrayed me, more than once. He behaved like an animal, no better than Scott—”

“Ana!”

“It’s the truth. I love him so much it’s crushing me, but I don’t know if I can forgive him all the same.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, kiddo, but you know where to find him if you decide you can.”

“Yeah, I do.”

The weight of my words hangs suspended in the silence between us and Dad turns to leave. Before he walks away though, he stops and looks back at me; his eyes are gentle and full of sympathy when he says, “I’ve never pushed you to do anything you didn’t want to, Ana, and whether or not you decide to forgive him is up to you, but he’s up for parole in two months time. Now, I don’t know if he’s going to stick around in this shithole town but he has a job with me for as long as he wants it.

“Despite what you think, that kid is the only reason I’m not serving time for murder. So I want you to think long and hard about this before you make any rash decisions. What he did may not have been civil, but I know him well enough to know he made a choice he could live with. Question is, can you live with yours?”

Could I? I didn’t know.

My annoying cousin drove an even more annoying Holden Ute in a very pretentious high-shine black. He’d been here for two weeks and I was ready to shove the beast’s muffler where the sun don’t shine and strangle him with the fanbelt. His precious and shiny new toy managed to wake the entire street almost every morning when he’d pull in before dawn and whistle his way up the drive. I didn’t know there were that many available women in Sugartown to sneak out on before dawn, but if anyone could find them it’d be Jackson Rowe.

Jackson is gorgeous in that typical Aussie kind of way: tanned skin, summer sky-blue eyes, blonde hair that curls into Simon Baker ringlets if he lets it get too long, a body like Chris Hemsworth and a face like Ryan Kwanten. Even I have trouble taking my eyes off of him and our mothers shared a womb—it’s sick and twisted, I know, but I’ve made my peace with it.

Right now, though, I wasn’t making peace with anything, I was on a warpath and my beloved cousin was about to feel the wrath of a sleep-deprived girl interrupted.

“God damn it,” Holly yells as she pulls back the covers and shoves two dry crackers in her mouth to stave off the morning sickness. It’s pretty rare for her not to have crackers or another form of baked goods in her mouth these days. “How is he still finding women to screw in this town?”

“I don’t know. Just be thankful you’re pregnant and unlikely to fall prey, too.”

“Yes, thankful,” Holly mutters caustically. “That’s exactly what I am. Ana, I don’t know how much longer I can pull off this I’m-not-pregnant-I’ve-just-eaten-one-too-many-tubs-of-ice-cream ruse. If Jackson keeps looking at me like he wants to get all up in this, I’m afraid I’m going to cave and let him bang my brains out.”

“You do, and I will personally shoot both of you. As much as I loathe the thought of having to see him dragging girls in by the hair at midnight and tossing them out before the sun comes up, we need him to move in with us. We won’t make the rent otherwise.”