Twisted Steel: An MC Anthology: Second Edition by Elizabeth Knox (top 5 ebook reader txt) 📕

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you in a few days.” She climbs in the car and pulls out.

My eyes follow the twin taillights until they disappear, then I stare at the sky. Only one star is visible this early, but I find it. My grandmother’s words echo in my childhood memory as she points up to the stars, holding my toddler body tight in her arms. Do you see that star, Timothy? Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight . . .

I clench my jaw as my eyes sting and dig in my hip pocket for my keys. I slide my thumb over them, fanning them out and find the old one, the one the color of a worn penny, the one I’ve carried with me since I was in middle school.

It’s a good night for a ride, so in a spur-of-the-moment decision, I climb back on my bike and head toward Santa Cruz. It’s a thirty-minute ride across the Santa Cruz Mountains to the big house on Chestnut Street.

2 Green

I pull in and park, climbing off the bike and stretching, the pings from the cooling big-twin engine are the only sound in the quiet neighborhood. I look up at my grandparents’ home. Granddad worked for the railroad and had a good pension and a bunch of valuable railroad stock. When they bought this big house, it was only a few hundred grand.

I’ve heard the story so many times in my youth, that I know it by heart. Grandma fell in love with the big, historic home that at the time was in bad shape. She loved the history of the place; she loved the fact that there were still trolley lines imbedded in the street out front, and that this neighborhood had once been where the city’s moneyed families had lived.

A railroad magnate built the house in the late 1800s. Through the years, as it passed from owner to owner, the place had fallen into disrepair. Grandpa loved the fact that it had a railroad history, so he gave in to his wife, and they bought it and fixed it up.

I stare up at the place. It’s got a lot of spindle work and fancy trim, a second-story, gabled porch over the front door, bay windows, and turrets. It was a grand dame for her time.

My eyes fall to the yard. It’s been let go, and a stab of guilt knifes through me. I should have come by to do the yard. After Mom and I moved out, Gram turned the place into a bed and breakfast, more to give her something to do and fight off loneliness, than any need for an income.

Five years ago, when she turned eighty, she closed the B&B, and her health began to go downhill. Seeing the state of the yard now, I know she’d hate the fact that her prized flowerbed and meticulously trimmed hedges are now overgrown with weeds.

I climb the steps and insert my key in the lock. The door creaks as I enter the large foyer. The place smells like it’s been shut up for months, which it has, but as I glance around, everything looks exactly the same as when I lived here with Ma.

The parquet floors, the antique brass light fixtures, the ornate, carved staircase with its double landings, ones I jumped down to on a regular basis, the boom echoing through the house and earning me a stern talking to on more than one occasion.

I smile and glance in the living room on the right with its huge carved fireplace and stained glass windows; it was a room they barely ever used.

I move to the left side of the foyer to the front parlor with its round bay turret, windows flooding the room with light, an equally impressive fireplace bookends this side of the house. This is the room I usually found Gram in, reading or doing needlework or knitting. My eyes drop from her floral upholstered chair to the knitting basket still there on the floor, needles jammed haphazardly as if she just stepped away to get a cup of tea.

I roll open the big wooden pocket doors that lead to the dining room. The table is still covered with the same lace tablecloth I remember as a child. The buffet against the wall holds her blue Dresden china.

I push open the swinging door, through the butler’s pantry and into the kitchen at the back of the house. It’s big with lots of windows and the original wood floors. No updates have been done in here since the nineties and it’s an odd mix of tile counters and white pre-fab cabinetry. There’s still a brick chimney on the far wall that once connected to a pot-bellied stove.

I open an upper cabinet, finding all the coffee mugs my gran collected. Front and center is still the one I gave her in first grade that says I love my Grandma with a big red heart.

But that’s not what I’m looking for. I know she always kept the wine stashed on the top shelf. I feel around and come up with a bottle. It’s a red from Sonoma Valley, a 2015 vintage. It’ll do.

I dig in a drawer for a corkscrew but skip the glass and take the bottle with me backtracking to the big staircase.

I trudge up the steps to the second floor. The bedroom my grandparents shared faces the front of the house and also has a turret with bay windows, an ornate fireplace, and a big carved four-poster bed.

I remember my grandpa kept little wrapped butterscotch candies in a jar on the mantel, and he’d sneak me one every day. I see the jar is still there, his pipe in a stand next to it, along with his gold pocket watch that the railroad gave him when he retired. I pick it up and pop it open, my