NOTE: I wasn't sure how to rate this, or categorize it. The rating may go up, and I may end up changing the categories. I'm not even sure it'll be continued. I basically just posted it before I could give myself a chance to second-guess myself, so please forgive (but point out) any mistakes. I'm absolutely, utterly terrible at editing, I'm afraid. By the way, the title’s tentative. I’m pretty happy with it, but I might still change it. I’m an artist, we’re moody and temperamental.

So this is a new one. Again. Yeah, I know, I’ve gotta start finishing stories before I post new ones. But this one kinda wriggled into my head a while back, and I haven’t been able to shake it loose. So here it is. : ) Just read it, 'kay? This one's kinda close to the heart for me, more so than they usually are.

-x-

Sins of the Father: ONE

And I remember, and I recall
And I can see that nothing's changed at all
Though we falter, we don't have to fall
And I can see that nothing's changed at all
— “Nothing's Changed”, The Calling

Her father would be remembered as an unkind man, a spiteful one with too much fondness for the drink and an unhealthy habit of nipping into worse substances. Even now as he lay in the casket there was redness in the otherwise pallid cheeks, and that face still sagged despite the mortician’s best efforts. The eyes she remembered as bird-bright and nearly half-mad were closed, the hands — big hands, she remembered — clasped peacefully at his waist.

But she knew him as her father, the man who’d done his best to raise her along with her two brothers. She’d been the eldest, and as such had been expected to be exemplary in all things: schoolwork, housework, cooking and cleaning. She was, after all, the only girl, and Luke Wells had always expected his only daughter to grow up, attend college or university, obtain a well-paying career — and to promptly give it all up at the first marriage proposal that came along.

Still working on that part, Charity mused as she sat, numb and unmoving in the pew. She hated churches, always had. Until her mother had remarried, the only time Charity had ever attended church was to mourn death. As soon as she’d reached college, she’d made sure she never set foot in another place of worship. She hadn’t seen the point. By age fourteen she’d seen her parents battle their way through an ugly divorce, had seen both her grandmothers die, and somewhere along the way, had lost all the faith she’d ever had.

She sat alone now in the pew, her two younger brothers and her half-brother and -sister behind her. Luke hadn’t wanted his ex-wife, who had happily remarried years before, at his funeral. Had written it specifically into his will, in fact. So Laurie Viger-Hoffmann stood outside, in her second husband’s arms, while three of her children attended their father’s funeral.

The service was brief, and heavy on the Catholic guilt. Charity squirmed on the bench, felt a hand land on her shoulder. She shifted, saw Brody watching her with those big, deep blue eyes they both shared. Brody, the youngest of Luke Wells’s three children, was only seventeen and had still been living with Luke when the heart attack hit.

It had fallen to him to call the ambulance, his mother, and his siblings while he tried to keep his father’s heart beating.

Now his mouth, a generous, full mouth the girls already loved, was pressed into a thin line. The only sign of emotion sparkled in those big, deep eyes. She raised a hand to his, pressed it there in comfort.

They both knew she wouldn’t grieve, not for her father, anyways. But there was to be a reading of the will, and that meant she had to be there. So Charity had taken personal time from the counselling office where she worked in Kingston, nearly two hours away, and had come back to the place where she’d been raised and had left without looking back.

Beside his younger brother, twenty-year-old Connor Wells refused to show emotion. His mouth was pursed, his brown eyes flat and hard, and his arms were crossed over himself in a defensive, nearly angry gesture. If he grieved, he didn’t show it.

It was ironic, and most people knew it, that Luke Wells would choose to have his final gathering in a church, a place he’d rarely set foot in since childhood. Brody had told her he’d turned back to faith recently, but Charity had still found it difficult to believe.

When the priest, an out-of-towner who didn’t know better, looked to the children of the deceased for a eulogy, the two young men shook their heads.

The priest’s eyes were kind, gentle on Charity’s face.

She wanted to scream at him.

“It was Lucas’s wish,” he said in a voice that was soft, yet loud enough to carry through the entire cathedral, “that his daughter, who was so long absent, speak for him now.”

It wasn’t her heart in her throat, but her stomach as Charity rose, brushed imaginary dust from her navy skirt as she walked to the front of the church, stood by the simply made maple coffin with its spray of irises and tulips. It wasn’t nerves that danced giddily in her stomach; it was bile, threatening to rise.

The townspeople of Freedom, Ontario may not have liked Luke Wells, but they were curious, and a few had brought themselves out to his funeral. He would have liked that, Charity thought. Would have liked to whine about the fact that people were nosy enough to come to a man’s funeral.

“My father wasn’t the best of men.” Her voice was quiet, not the boisterous, amused sound of the girl who’d left four years before. The already hushed cathedral went as silent as a tomb, and just as eerie. “He liked to boast and he liked to drink, and I suppose that’s why he didn’t last as long as he could have. Still, he did what he could, even when it wasn’t enough. I guess that’s all any father can do.”

While the priest gaped, Charity walked back to her seat, the simple linen of the skirt whispering against her legs.

She felt a small, hot hand tug on her arm and turned. Her five-year-old half-brother, Liam, was watching her with big hazel eyes he’d inherited from her mother. “Don’t cry, Charlie.”

“I’m not, buddy,” she assured him, and pulled him over the back of the pew to cuddle him in her lap.

And as the service droned on, Charity sat, dry-eyed and all but emotionless, while the man who’d fathered her laid in his casket and saw nothing at all.

-x-

Charity didn’t know what to say when she stepped out into the cold, blustery fall day and found her three best friends standing with her mother and stepfather. For the first time, she blinked back tears as she went towards them.

“You guys came,” she managed as she walked into their arms.

“‘Course we did. What do we care what that old fart thinks when you need us?” Dani James wrapped Charity in her arms, held tight while Lily Cafferty and Marie Bourke pressed close beside her.

Luke Wells hadn’t cared for his daughter’s friends, had done his best throughout her lasting friendship with them to drive the quartet apart. It was one of the things the stubborn, irascible man had never managed to do.

“Thanks, guys,” Charity managed.

“Hey, what are friends for?”

-x-

Later, after what felt like an eternity, when the will had been read and the casket buried, Luke Wells’s children gathered in the small, cluttered apartment he’d meant to move out of for a decade.

The kitchen table had been rickety when Charity left. When it didn’t wobble as she sat down, her eyebrows went up.

“Fixed it for him a few years back,” Connor grunted. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but he was broad-shouldered, and his current work as a heavy machinery mechanic, plus a sideline in carpentry, kept him in good shape. His thick brown hair was longer than it had been, starting to curl at the tips as it had tended to do in childhood and still faintly bleached at the ends from the summer sunlight that was now a fond memory, just as his work-toughened skin still carried a tan. “Was after you left.”

She hadn’t been back very often, Charity recalled as she nodded. But then, her father hadn’t given her many reasons — or opportunities — to come back.

The small town named Freedom had never given that to Charity Wells.

Across from his elder brother, taller and slimmer Brody cleared his throat. His dark blonde hair was shaggy, hanging almost to the collar of the white dress shirt he still wore. His hands were like Charity’s, long and fine-boned and elegant.

Dad would’ve been ragging on him about getting a haircut, Charity thought. He always said long hair was for girls.

It saddened her that both she and Connor had moved out, had left Brody to face their father alone. Brody had always been Luke’s favourite, had been pampered and babied as the youngest. How it must have hurt him to suddenly be saddled with the responsibilities of dealing with an alcoholic, drug-addicted father. Oh, Connor had stayed close, moving only to the larger town half an hour away. But Charity had let herself be driven out by the differences between herself and her father, by all the problems they’d had in the final years of her time at the local high school.

It was the first time she’d returned, and she knew there would be gossip. She expected it.

She didn’t have to like it.

But now, of course, even in death Luke was trapping his daughter under his thumb. Brody was still a minor, and as such was therefore forced to comply with the divorce agreement Luke and Laurie had signed more than a decade ago.

Every other week, he would have to come back to the little apartment that smelled faintly of beer and whiskey, only now it wouldn’t be his father waiting, but his sister. Connor, who travelled often for work and found himself in the western provinces of the country at least twice a month, had been deemed an unsuitable candidate for a legal guardian.

Charity, who had steady work and a tidy nest egg, was deemed absolutely perfect.

She wanted to resent it — wanted to resent him, her father, for doing this to her. But she looked at Brody, at the shattered eyes. Still young, she thought. By his age she’d been disillusioned, angry, and chomping at the bit, anxious to get the hell out of Dodge.

Ironically, she’d had to leave Freedom behind before she could find it.

“So I get his car.” Connor heaved a sigh, looked out the window of the small basement apartment at the little Ford Focus, still gleaming brightly despite being at least ten years old. Luke had bought it, secondhand, the summer Charity turned sixteen. “Lot of fucking good that’ll do me. My truck’s running fine, and if I drove out to a job in that pussy-assed thing I’d get laughed out of there in ten seconds flat.”

He fished out the keys the lawyer had left with him — God only knew what funds Luke had used to pay a lawyer — and tossed them to his younger brother. “You take it. The old man kept it running well, at least. He was a mean, drunk sonofabitch, but he knew cars.”

“Yeah.” Brody closed his hand around the keys, swallowed around the lump in his throat as he glanced at his sister, still sitting quiet and immobile. His father had never taken the time to know his only daughter, the boy thought. And he wished he’d seen it before, so he could have done something — what, he didn’t know, but something.

“And I get this place.” After, she reminded herself, I spend a year here with Brody as his legal guardian. Charity glanced up, sighed. Looked around the cluttered space with her brothers watching her. She'd sat at the head of the table, what had been her father's seat for as long as any of them could remember. It was a seat she'd taken deliberately, both for them and for herself. “It’ll sell, I guess.”

“I’m not moving to Kingston with you,” Brody said hurriedly. “I’ve got friends here, and school to finish, and—”

“A girlfriend to move on,” Connor finished, grinning slyly as he drank from one of the beers Luke had left in his fridge. “She cute?”

“Shut up,” Brody muttered as colour flared in his cheeks. But he was smiling, thinking of pretty, dark-haired Anna from his co-ed gym class. He hated being the youngest in the family, though. Connor, especially, was always razzing him for something or other.

Charity, well, she hadn’t been around in a while. He’d missed her, too.

“You’re not going to have to move anywhere, Brody,” Charity promised softly. “We did enough of that after Mom and Dad divorced. I’ll stick out the year with you.”

“But... what about your work in Kingston?” His sister loved her work, he knew that. He remembered her coming home to their mother’s place while she was in college, bubbling with enthusiasm about her behavioural science program, the challenges of it, the things she was learning. And now that she was into family counselling, the career she’d wanted, he couldn’t believe that she would drop it all and come back to the place where she’d been so utterly miserable.

“I’ll manage,” Charity said with a shrug. “I’ll go back there on the weeks you’re with Mom, or work from here. I’ve got my laptop, a phone, people I can hand some clients and their cases over to.”

In truth, she didn’t know how she would manage, but she’d find a way.

She always had.

-x-

“Get back here, young lady! You live under my roof, you’re damn well going to abide by my rules!”

“It’s not your roof, it’s the landlord’s!” Charity shot back. She was seventeen, and what with the dishes, the vacuuming, making supper, and her homework, she just hadn’t had the time or energy to clean her room. Now, as promised, Luke was putting her through hell.

Her head was screaming, the nasty headache behind her temples ramping up to full force. She could feel the tears rising, hot, angry tears that threatened to smother her. Dear God, no, she wouldn’t cry, it was only something for him to use against her.

“Enough of that lip! I won’t have it! Now go clean that Goddamned room, it’s a fucking mess!”

“Oh yeah, ‘cause the rest of this place is just a fucking showplace,” she spat as she spun on her heel and walked fast down the hall, tears making her voice crack.

“Oh, now she’s crying,” Luke said in a vicious, taunting singsong as he went after his daughter with a speed that belied more than fifty years of living. “Christ, Charity, I’m raising my voice, it’s nothing to cry about.”

“I’m crying because I’m mad!” She shouted it, not caring about the upstairs neighbour as she slammed her bedroom door shut in her father’s face, twisted the lock with a nasty flick of her wrist.

In the next room, Brody huddled on his bed, all of twelve years old, and listened to his father spewing insults while his sister’s choked sobs came faintly from the other room.

-x-

A/N: Soooooo.... this is a new one I’m playing around with, not sure if it’ll be continued. I’d say it’s one of my darker pieces, but I’m not really sure where I’m going with it yet. So I’m just gonna ask you guys to please review, let me know if you think it’s depressing, inspirational, hard truth, whatever... even if you hate it, let me know, okay? Oh, and if you didn’t figure it out, that bit in italics was a flashback. There could be a few of those, but at this point, it’s anyone’s guess. So, love it, hate it? Tell me.
— Murphy