The Decks and the Road
book 1- Freeborn
The Final Chapters- Chapter 36
Nathan- I'd never been on a plane. It was my love affair with cars that kept me
grounded. I hadn’t really thought of the
sky as a road, but it certainly was. I’d
taken many high roads, but none of them had asked me to take my feet off the
ground and I was glad. I’d enjoyed the
last twenty-four hours in Miami. It came
with lots of nerves, but it also brought with it joy, surprise, and both new
and old memories. It was good being able
to fill in the blanks. I didn’t let
Vance’s perception of things speak for my father, but it did answer the
question of why he’d left. To his credit,
he did seem to know things about him than I didn’t. I hadn’t realized how much my father had
withheld from me. It was the moment I
saw the service tags hanging on his office wall that I understood that we’d
both experienced him in a very different way.
It was also the moment I understood how he’d developed the cards he’d
given me. He was thirty-five when he
married my mother, and although he’d shared a lot of what he knew—he hadn’t
shared much about how he knew it. He
also never spoke much about his life before my mother and our family. I’d only in recent years realized the power
of the grip he had on me—on my thinking.
I was still just becoming my own man, but Vance had shook himself free
all those years ago. I’d tried not to
let the news bother me, and I’d done my best to respect his accomplishments but
it was hard to accept. The idea that my
father had only passed the shop on to me because he’d found out Vance had
secretly married some girl in Miami, and had started a family was a punch in
the gut. I wanted to believe he was just
sour, but he had the wife, the children, and the success to prove it all. The only thing I had now was The Shepherd’s
Deck, but it didn’t appear to be significant at all.
The flight back home seemed to find both me and Erilyn
trapped in our heads. We never exchanged
our concerns. When we landed, I got a
cab for her, and headed right for the shop.
I was already dressed, and I was the
first to arrive. I couldn’t help but see the shop in comparison to Shepherd
Engines. It wasn’t as bright or as big,
but I still got the sense my father would be proud. I’d been thinking about Natalie and her
friend, and I had it in mind to look for the name Dunbar. They were timeless and looked exactly as they
did the day I’d received them. I flipped
through about seven or eight cards before I found the name. There wasn’t a lot written beside it, but
what was, was significant. I held on to
the words, “club”, “leapers”, and “gatekeeper”.
I didn’t know what all it meant, but I could feel a great responsibility
attach itself to me almost instantly. I
also considered that I needed to study the cards—and understand more about the
frame around which they were created. I
thought to keep them closer to me. I returned
them to their box, and placed it under the seat of my car. When I returned to my office I decided to
clean the windows. Something had
shifted, and I had a great desire to see clearly—perhaps the way my father
always had.
Freeborn, a novel
Freeborn
© Grace Call Communications,
LLC
Copyright © 2017
by Natisha Renee Williams
All Rights Reserved
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