Chapter 7

For generations his kin had been bootleggers and now meth dealers that were too poor and ignorant to do more than try to make themselves feel better at the expense of others.

The Prangers gave a bad reputation to the people on Cobb Hill who were far from rich, but who--for the most part--lived decently and treated people fairly. Riley had always known this about his family, which is why he had never taken to looking down his nose at anybody else. Hell, his family was even too po‘ dunk to be accepted into the Ku Klux Klan.

He‘d turned to football, not thinking that it would be his way out. It had just been a way for him to play with his siblings and cousins—people who couldn‘t judge him because they were just like him. But then he‘d gotten so good that folks wanted him to play high school ball. It was something that he‘d excelled at and it made him feel good when he could smash those hoity-toity assholes from Irving and Ravenna that thought they were so much better than him.

He was even more proud when he‘d gotten a full ride to Eastern. But he hadn‘t just relied on the football program. He‘d studied so that he could get that college degree that no one in his family had ever attained. College had made a change in Riley Pranger. No one at the university knew what the Pranger name meant and he was judged on his abilities and not on the people that had come before him. The world opened for him and for the first time in his life he realized that he had unlimited possibilities.

A proximal tibia fracture is not words that a twenty-year old man should learn while laid up in a hospital in excruciating pain as a surgeon explains that the bone at the tip of your knee has been broken and that you will never play football again; and not just college or professional ball, but not even for your own pleasure.

Riley had come home knowing that he was here to stay, and all the possibilities that he‘d once dreamed of disappeared.

He sat in the truck staring at the big house and the small little house that sat beside it like a fancy, displaced garage. The gingerbread house. Grandpa and daddy had built the little cottage for granny and grandpa right next to the main house so that Daddy could give mama more space without the extended family. Mama hadn‘t been raised on the Hill but down in Ravenna and wasn‘t used to living with family all crowded together in one house.

Granny hadn‘t been too fond of his mother‘s desire to displace her and grandpa and had complained that she‘d raised five kids while living in the house. But she couldn‘t deny that the cottage was perfect and never complained about it once her and grandpa had moved into it. People always stopped to look at it because grandpa had made it look almost exactly like a gingerbread house just to please granny. People on Cobb Hill took pride in the things they did. His daddy and grandpa had been artisans.

The cottage was what people now called open concept with one bedroom on the main floor and a loft that was often used as a second bedroom. The kitchen was spacious and even had a working 1940s Chambers stove and an actual Frigidaire. The appliances had given him his love of tinkering with old parts just to keep them both in working order.

During lean times mama and daddy had rented out the cottage, forcing Bobby to give up his bedroom and double up with Riley. Granny knew that it was necessary and never complained but he‘d once heard her say that it was a damn shame that she couldn‘t even count on the pillow beneath her head being hers and hers alone. It was the only time that he‘d ever heard her show discontent about being poor.

The cottage was mostly rented out to people coming up to Cobb Hill for the holidays. No one liked travelling up and down the mountain during bad weather, especially at night when back then there had been no streetlights. Cobb Hill was notorious for its winding roads and sharp drops.

Life hadn‘t turned out as planned. His grandparents had never really gotten to enjoy their old age in the cottage. His grandpa had died before that could happen and grandma‘s dementia had gotten too bad for her to live in the little house alone. Daddy had died and then mama, and a year ago he‘d had to place granny in an assisted living facility. Now the property was the responsibility of Riley and at the age of twenty-seven he was still astonished at how fast it had all come to this. He remembered just like it was yesterday their home filled with noise and crowded with people. Now it felt like an abandoned house even though he still lived there.

Bobby and Mae who both had families had scoffed at the idea of moving back on the Hill. And one of the few coherent words that granny had spoken was that she didn‘t want Sully, Mandy, Angel or any of her many other grand children moving in with their bastard children. That she‘d said it right in front of them had resulted in the reason that Riley was basically the only person that visited her in the old folks home.

With another sigh he finally went inside, tossing his keys on the mantle. He suddenly realized that he‘d left his lunch pail in Bodie‘s refrigerator, which only served to irk him once again at being fired over something that had absolutely nothing to do with him. It was like Sully said, the bastard was hot headed and just wanted to punish him because he represented an America that most liberals despised. Would it have made any difference to Bodie to know that he‘d voted for Obama? Why should it be anybody‘s business what his political affiliations were? He kept them to himself. He certainly wasn‘t going to share them with Sully who thought Obama was a monkey.