Swish

.34

"Impossible.  Hey, I can bring a few people into the studio with me when I start to record, do you want to come?  They're going to show me the ropes on everything and you can get a head start on your own career if you know everything you need to know about a big label's studio."

"Are you serious?  I would kill to be in the studio with you!  I knew befriending you on your first day when you tripped and broke all those glasses was a good idea.  You're too shitty of a waitress to not be an amazing singer."

We dissolved into laughter at her reasoning, but then the door chimed through the small bar. 

"We're closed," we both called out simultaneously, laughing as we realized what we'd done. 

"Miss Bruins?"

My head whipped towards the newcomer, irritated that they don't know the meaning of the word 'closed'. 

"Yes?" My voice was exasperated and irritated, not wanting to be bothered anymore than I already had been. 

"My name is Mark Malone, from Malone and Son Law." 

He was a squat man with grey hair growing everywhere, tufts of it crawling out of his nostrils like they couldn't escape him fast enough, greying skin matching the coarse hair. 

"How can I help you?"

The uncomfortable look on the elderly man's face led me to realize that, considering he was from the same law firm that paid my grandmother her hush money, he was one of my father's lawyers.  

He angled closer to me and Sierra shot me a confused look but backed off towards the bar top and began absentmindedly wiping it down with a wet rag, pretending not to listen but she was always bad at being nosy, not like I minded.  She knew most of what had happened with my father, everyone did. 

"I am so sorry to have to give you this news and it not come from family, but all of your family I have spoken to refuse to contact you, and since you are the sole recipient of the will and trust,  I must be the one to inform you that as of May thirtieth, your father, Michael Brandon Bruins, has passed away due to complications from a lung infection.  I need you to sign a few papers and you will need to contact your lawyers as well in order to facilitate the transfer of funds to your accounts, but I don't see anything being tied up in probate unless you have remaining family that might try to contest the will.  I am truly sorry for your loss."

Sierra stopped wiping down the bar top.  The faulty fluorescent rectangular light above us stopped flickering, if only for a moment.  

Was this what shock felt like?  I should've been familiar with the feeling, considering my twelve year old self had endured wave after wave of it after the wreck, but this was a different type of shock. 

That shock had come from trauma so deep and soul marking that I would never be the same.  This shock?  This shock was born from something mundane and as normal as shutting the bar down like I did almost every night with Sierra, refilling the salt and pepper shakers, cleaning the tables, stacking the chairs, restocking the napkins and ketchup bottles, all disrupted by something completely out of the ordinary, completely unexpected. 

He was dead.  My father, the man who'd murdered my mother, kept me from my grandparents and the rest of my mother's family, had gaslit me for years, manipulated and controlled me like it was second nature to him, was dead, from complications from something that he had caused. 

He wouldn't have had that lung infection or been unable to fight it off if he wasn't forced to live the rest of his life in a wheelchair, all because of the accident that had killed my mother, that he had caused.