333 Miles by Craig Birk Read Free Book Online

mom, and it
was just the two of them until he was in high school and his mom
remarried with a man who owned a medium-sized contracting business.
His stepdad, Howard, was also divorced, though Roger never heard
the story about why. He didn’t really care why, and was just glad
that his mom had found someone who made her happy and secure.
Howard was a good husband and a good father. There were rarely any
arguments and Roger was too old to have another babysitter to mess
things up, so everything seemed to work out.
    Roger didn’t often think about fate or the
meaning of life, but one day when he was twenty, enjoying a Kodiak
after a few whiskeys, he realized that while society deemed his
parents’ marriage a failure, from his perspective it worked out
perfectly. If his dad had not married his mom, he wouldn’t exist.
If his parents had got along well enough to stay together, they
would have been moderately unhappy all of these years and his mom
would not have Howard, who truly did make her happy.
     
     

Chapter Seven
    Work
    4:27 p.m.
     
    “ You see that building? I bought that
building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two
years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At
the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it's a
day's pay.”
     
    – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
     
    Twenty minutes after Roger passed out in the
back seat, the mood in the car was better, though still somewhat
subdued. Traffic had thinned and Alex noted with satisfaction that
the needle on the speedometer was slowly creeping past the orange
80.
    It turned out that during the disagreement,
traffic had cleared, and they had made decent progress. The group
was now just a few miles from Temecula, where Gary had almost
bought a house while he and Blair were engaged. Just five years
ago, they would have been able to afford a four-bedroom place in
Temecula with a pool in the back and a nice view of the hills.
Today, the same house would cost nearly $400,000 more. Blair
occasionally brought this up during arguments because she had been
the one who wanted to buy the house rather than waiting until they
could afford something closer to the city. Few things pissed Gary
off more, because he was the one who would have had to deal with
the ninety-minute commute every day. So while he occasionally
regretted missing out on some of the gains in the housing market
over the past few years, he knew that it was worth waiting because
he probably would have gone crazy and lost his marriage if they had
lived in Temecula. And financially they were still doing fine with
their current house.
    Entering the city, a large sign declared
Temecula to be a place of “Old Traditions, New Opportunities.” As
they passed through the suburb, Gary noticed that while it still
seemed like a fairly nice place, the negatives of sprawl from Los
Angeles and San Diego were starting to show. There were occasional
patches of graffiti on the brick walls lining the freeway and a few
patches of shitty-looking townhouses and condos had appeared. The
graffiti on this particular stretch consisted of one XIV in huge
black letters and, to the right, in red, a rhetorical question,
“Bush, WTF?” He also noticed a new Del Taco, which he considered a
welcome addition to any neighborhood.
    Alex broke the silence, or at least spoke
over Avril Lavine who was singing about stealing a skater boy from
a prissy chick. “Hey Mike,” he asked, making eye contact with him
in the rearview mirror, “how’s work going?”
    Mike: “Fine. How about you?”
    Alex: “Cool, man. They keep paying me anyway.
G-Balls?”
    Gary turned back from staring out the window
and thinking about how much Del Taco he would eat if he did live in
Temecula: “Oh, its good. We have a big case and if it goes well and
then I work four more years of seventy-plus-hour weeks I may have a
good chance for Junior Partner.”
    Neither Alex nor Mike had any idea if he was
being serious or