My Brothers Keeper - Prologue - Robert DeVore

My Brothers Keeper – Prologue

Staring out the bus window, his hands shaking underneath the faded black hoodie, Abel knows where he’s headed, and why. The last few years of his life have been mentally draining, and this trip was the escape he had been longing for.

Its been 15 years since his father died, and no matter how many times he tried, Wendy would never tell him anything about his dad. The news stories of the crazed biker outlaw who committed suicide by driving head first into a semi after murdering so many people in cold blood was the only real explanation Abel ever got about Jax.

That never did sit right with him. Nero knew it too, and regardless of how close he tried to get with Abel, he never could break through and connect with him like he wanted to. Nero may have been his dads best friend before he died, but to Abel he was just another person hiding the truth.

Who was his father? What happened to his grandparents? Why don’t they ever visit anyone from the Teller side of the family? The questions were endless, and tiring.

The bus was eerily quiet and as Abel moved restlessly in his seat, he looked around to see the company he was in. Being his first real time away from home, everything seemed so unique to him, yet very familiar.

There was a young Hispanic mother with her small daughter, who couldn’t have been more than four years old sitting towards the front of the bus. She never made eye contact with anyone, and Abel wasn’t sure if it was because she was just a private person who didn’t want to be bothered, or she was scared. Either way, he respected it and never spoke a word to her, or anyone else on the bus.

A little further back, an elderly man was sleeping in his seat, his salt and pepper hair pressed up against the window. The bus was warm, so the cool glass probably helped him sleep better. He only woke when his phone would go off, typing furiously and the lying back down.

The rest of the bus was filled with what could only be described as Skid Row’s distant relatives; a homeless lady wrapped in a wool blanket, slumped over two seats in front of Abel, and two drug addicts passed out from the heroin he watched them inject into each other only minutes before. It bothered him to see it, knowing the problems Wendy and Nero both went through separately with addiction, but he was too busy dealing with his own issues to really pay them too much attention.

Growing up, Nero and Wendy warned both Abel and Thomas about the dangers of drugs, highlighting some of their finer moments of history while they would all go horseback riding together. Just one of the stories would have been enough to convince most people that drugs were of no use, but they had dozens of them.

Abel was always quiet and reserved during these discussions, leaving Nero and Wendy unsure if they ever got through to him or not. But he did understand what they were trying to teach him, and never did stray into alcohol or drugs.

Thomas on the other hand was always an over the top energetic kid growing up and would get into everything he could get his hands on, including drugs and alcohol. By the time he was 13 he had already been expelled from 2 separate schools; one for beating a kid up so bad he put him in the hospital, and one for showing up to school drunk.

Growing up on the farm, Abel and Thomas were inseparable, with Luscious being the glue that held the whole dysfunctional family together. But when Luscious got sick and the farm had to be sold to pay for his new mountain of medical bills, it put a heavy strain on everyone.

Nero stayed in Norco, renting out a small apartment. It’s exactly what you would picture a dirty, hooker infested hotel room looking like, and he never really spent much time there, since he practically lived in the hospital room with Luscious.

Wendy moved her and the boys closer to her family on the east coast, ripping Abel and Thomas from their school, their friends and everything familiar. Abel was 13 when they moved, trying his best to start over and make friends, but it never worked.

He was a restless soul, always searching for meaning in every situation while his brother, Thomas, was full of rage, and cared about no one but himself. Maybe it was the way Wendy treated Abel different since they were blood related, but Thomas could feel the disconnect and reacted the only way he knew how, with anger and self medication.

As the sunlight started to peek in through the bus windows, Abel knew he was close. Reaching down into his ragged backpack, he pulled out his notebook and began to write.

“With each breath, the moment draws closer and I can feel my body tensing up. I am still unsure what I am looking for, and I cannot explain what I am doing on this bus, but I can feel it in my gut that this is the right thing to do.

My whole life has felt incomplete. The vague memories of my father, my other mother and the place I was born has haunted me. The only way to stop the nightmares is to face my fears head on. To find out the truth behind all the lies and bullshit I have been made to believe.”

Taking a slow, deep breath, he closes the notebook, stares at the ceiling blankly and quickly shuffles the pen and pad back into his backpack.

A couple moments pass, and Abel reaches into his pocket and pulls out the SON ring of his grandfather’s that his grandmother gave him when he was still just a small boy. Now, too small to wear on his finger, he tied the ring to his keys with a thin piece of brown leather, always keeping it with him wherever he went.

Besides the stories he was told, this was the only real piece of his grandfather he had left. He wrapped his hand around the ring tightly, knowing that this bus, and this trip in general was where he had to be.

A journey that he must take in order to fill the void in his life, and somehow figure out a way to save his brother in the process.

Continue to Chapter 1