Chapter 1
I'd spent my entire life thinking my father had up and left after I was born, not wanting to raise a child at such a young age. I was wrong, or at least my mother was. Ever since I was a little boy my mother had answered any and all questions about my father with a usual string of curses and insults, drilling into me that he was a bastard that left his family. I'd believed her without question, right up until the day she died.
My mother had been battling and suffering through lung ca