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JACK

Five Years Ago

Everything changed the day before Thanksgiving

It started the e for the holiday

I was in the clubhouse withshit when he walked in, his duffle bag over his shoulder, his clean-cut face and short back and sides out of place in a hair

“Well, I’ll be godda him into a warm embrace

Cooper was more of a son than a brother We shared the saot swept away by the desolate tides of poverty and addiction and drowned in the bottom of a whiskey bottle by the time she was thirty-three

I was just eighteen years old and a father to two-year-old twin boys when she dropped Cooper on my doorstep and told me she didn’t want him anymore He was just three years old and severely undernourished, a sweet kid in dirty clothes and no shoes

Thirteen years earlier, she had abandoned me to my father the same hen I was only five years old But this time, she didn’t knoho the father was, and if I didn’t take hi to let any of my kin end up there

He was lucky

He was too young to remember her

Unfortunately, I could

Despite the strain on our already threadbare wallet, my wife, Rosanna, and I made it work Our little house busted at the seams with children and bills, especially after the arrival of our daughter, Hope Suppertihtmare with four kids to send off to school, but it was a happy household full of love and laughter, and the kind of warmth that made you feel secure and loved

Seeing hi fresh air

“You caot so like a banshee about that ‘til your ears bleed”

“The clubhouse was on the way” He shrugged, and I pulled him in for another embrace

“It’s good to see you, buddy”

We sat at one of the booths near the jukebox Across the roo on her dance routine to Metallica’s “Sad But True,” twirling her lithe,moves created solely to drive a s of Mayhem brothers, Ghoul and Dakota Joe, watched on, impressed

Cooper looked around the club as he sat

He was a good-looking kid At nineteen, he was a respectable six foot with a strongWe shared the sa chin But that here the si past ht blond and shiny clean