St. Nacho's 4: The Book of Daniel

by Z. A. Maxfield

  Oh, fuck. The wedding. How could I have forgotten about that? I’d have to see Cam every time I fucking turned around until the end of June. “I wish everything was different. You don’t know how much. No one has ever gotten to me like you do.” I swallowed hard. “I really think I love you.”

  Way to bury the lede.

  Cam shot me a sad smile. “I almost believe you mean that.”

  Aw, shit. I did mean it. “Cam—”

  “Almost. I’m asking you to think about your brother. He needs what St. Nacho’s has to offer even if you don’t. A lot of people do. And none of us will allow you to come here and take that away. Do you understand?”

  “I’m really not the enemy.” I took out my wallet and dropped some money on the table. When Cam tried to shove it back, I gave him my fiercest not negotiable glare, and he pulled his hand back. “I don’t know how I came to represent all the evils of the outside world, and I don’t blame you for protecting what you have. I couldn’t prove myself to you even if I wanted to, but let me tell you in terms you’ll understand. St. Nacho’s doesn’t want me, she can’t wait to be rid of me, and I don’t want to be here.”

  Cam leaned forward to rise when I pushed my chair back to leave. I put my hand out to stop him. I didn’t want to hear anything else he might have to say.

  “Just stay there and enjoy your food and whatever else is on offer. I’ll be seeing you around.”

  * * *

  My phone rang as I made my way back home, and I took the call, flinching reflexively when my lawyer, Ted, barked out my name.

  “Livingston. You blew up my phone today. What’s so urgent?”

  “I’ve had an attack of conscience, and I need to change the terms of the divorce settlement. I need to admit I broke the prenup conditions first and take the consequences.”

  “What? No. That’s insane. Did you get religion or something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Is she blackmailing you?”

  “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Then what? Help me understand here.” The implied so I can talk you the fuck out of it, wasn’t lost on me.

  “I don’t want to be that guy, Ted. I don’t want to be the guy who does what’s expedient and only tells people whatever they want to hear. I want my new life to be built on something more substantial than convenient lies.”

  “Shit.” He didn’t bother to hide his annoyance. “If you do this, you’ll have to split everything down the middle, fifty-fifty. Are you prepared for that?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You’re the one that’s going broke. First of all, I’m going to bill you for the time it will take to go over the figures again, and when you get over that crippling blow, you’ll be more than fiscally naked because you’re giving Bree the clothes off your back.”

  “Too late.”

  “You need some time to think this through.”

  “I can’t live with myself if I don’t come clean. I have to do this. If it makes you feel any better, you can go after restitution for the things she destroyed.”

  “Hell no, it does not make me feel better. You should be distracting your conscience with what money can buy. There’s a lot to be said for that, Dan. Did I teach you nothing?”

  “Conscience is not a dirty word.”

  “It is if it makes you throw perfectly good money away.”

  “I’ve made up my mind.”

  He heaved a sigh that sounded like bagpipes. “You need to be locked up for your own good. You can do a month or two of rehab, and I’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”

  “Ted. I’m serious about this. So serious, in fact, that if you refuse to go along, you could find yourself out of the loop when it happens.”

  “You’d fire me over this?” He was hurt. I knew he looked out for my best interests; he had since the day we met. He was protective, a surrogate father. A business father. I liked him a lot. But not enough to let him talk me out of this.

  “Of course not, but I might leak the information and proof so Bree can control the outcome. Is that what you want? She’d be awfully smug if she thought she found something to use against me. If we go to her and come clean, we’re occupying the moral high ground and she has to suck it up and behave.”

  “What you say makes a certain, pleasurably vindictive sense. We give her money and make it a bitter pill she has to take with the knowledge we’re better than her.”

  “Now you’re seeing the big picture.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “But you will do it.” I wasn’t asking. I was telling, and he knew it.

  “Yeah.”

  “All right then. Make it so, number two.”

  “Ah, I hate when you say that.” Something thumped on his end. My guess is he threw one of his executive toys, maybe the little man whose eyes bug out when you squeeze him, or one of his many wooden puzzles. “Number two. It’s Number One, damn it.”

  “Keep your head. Just say to yourself, Bree will hate this, over and over while you’re doing it. That ought to get you through.”

  “You really don’t hate her, though, do you?” His voice held wonder. I got that. Bree might hate me, but I had cut her so much slack my lawyer had to be reeling from shock.

  “No, I don’t hate her.”

  “You should. The bitch totally fucked you over with Anderson.”

  “I know.”

  “Her lawyer for fuck’s sake.”

  That bothered Ted more than the cheating. That she’d cheated with the man who later became her lawyer really pissed him off. He was funny that way. He’d always been morally conservative and determined to be ethical where his business and his dick were concerned. He wasn’t a homophobe, but he wasn’t having the easiest time since I’d come out either. He’d been supportive as hell, though, and I was grateful. Mostly I used humor to break the tension between us.

  “By the way, the offer still stands. If you’ll let me fuck you to get even with Bree, I’m there.”

  “Fuck off.” He hung up the phone.

  Okay, humor broke some of the tension. If Ted didn’t find me funny, he hung up the phone. But he’d do what I asked. And that was one thing off my mind. But, jeez. Cam. My entire body vibrated with wanting him, and I couldn’t do a thing about it. I went to sleep with his image stamped on my heart. His taste on my tongue. I went to sleep wishing he was there beside me, wishing that I could pull him so close—open my heart so wide—he could crawl inside me.

  I said I loved him, and it was all too true.

  And just like that, the boy who cried wolf got gobbled up and became an object lesson for liars everywhere.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jake got home at one a.m., stumbling drunk. His clumsy footsteps woke me up. When I went to make sure he was okay, his fist came out of nowhere and connected so solidly, so painfully with my jaw, it whipped my head around.

  Jake didn’t wait. He marched out the door, still talking to himself. “Motherfucking, control freak, douchebag rich, stick up your ass…”

  “Wait, wait.” I hauled my ass off the floor and took off after him. “I know I deserved that.”

  “Damn right you did.”

  I tested my jaw by opening and closing my mouth. Still hinged. “Is that what passes for anger management these days?”

  “Shit,” he hissed, and slumped sloppily against our fence. “Do you even have any idea what you’ve done? How huge a deal this is to me?”

  “Obviously not, judging from your reaction. Why don’t you come inside the house, and we can talk about it.”

  He eyed me, and I knew he wanted to say no. But I eyed him right back, and fortunately I could still stare him down. He clumped after me and went ahead when I opened the door.

  “Joyce wanted to say good-bye. She left around seven. We came by here, but you weren’t home.”

  “Sorry. I was…”

  “With Cam, I know.”

  Sh
it. “How the hell…?”

  “It’s a small fucking town, what can I say? I heard you two were canoodling at Nacho’s.”

  Did I belong in St. Nacho’s? Hell no. A guy couldn’t get a drink without it making the news.

  “You could have called.”

  “She said you should call her. I think she was overwhelmed.”

  “No doubt.”

  I had to hit the head, and when I got back, I found him pouring ice-cold vodka into chilled glasses for both of us. He started the ball rolling. “So now what? Have you figured out how you’ll spin this? I have a brother and sister I’ve never met. I can’t believe—”

  “Just a damned minute.” I took my drink from him and sat in one of the chairs at our little table. “I’m not the one who let you down here.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  “Not the only one. Pop could have written to you if he’d wanted.”

  “How could he find me? Half the time I wasn’t even in the country.”

  “He could have found you through me. But he didn’t.” I wouldn’t have let Pop find Jake either, but it was true he didn’t try. I watched each word break Jake’s spirit a little more. Shit. Was I so fucked-up that I couldn’t keep that from him, at least? Better he should hate me than let our pop make him feel like less, yet again, after all these years.

  His eyes broadcast his pain. “Then why? I suppose you’ll fucking tell me.”

  “How should I know? I don’t know the way his mind works. And if you’ve read my letters to him, you’ve seen that more than once I brought it up.”

  Jake was silent for a long time. “What did he say?”

  Had Pop ever explained himself? For anything? I put my glass down and clasped my hands between my knees. “Have you forgotten what he was like?”

  “No.”

  “He ignored what didn’t suit him. He evaded and blamed and twisted the truth until you didn’t know what was real and what was made up. He broke Mom’s heart over and over.”

  “I know that,” Jake said miserably.

  We sat in gloomy silence for a while, one of hundreds—thousands—of silences spent contemplating just exactly what we’d done or what we hadn’t done to make our father act the way he had toward us.

  “Do you ever…?”

  When he trailed off, I lifted my gaze to his. “What?”

  He put his drink down and placed his head in the palms of his hands. I had rarely seen him this defeated as an adult, and it scared me.

  “Do you ever wish I’d never come along?”

  “What?” I stood so fast my chair slid back against the tile floor and battered the kitchen cabinet.

  “Do you ever wish it had just been you and Mom and Pop? Maybe if I’d never been born—”

  “You wait just a damn minute.” The intervening years melted away, and I got angry with our pop all over again, as if I’d caught him hovering over Jakey with his fucking belt out again, because that’s what it felt like. That’s what Jakey’s face told me—that our pop could reach out through time and space and fuck him up all over again.

  “You stop that this second. Pop was insane. It had nothing to do with you. He drank, and when he came home he took his disappointment and his anger out on us. It was his job to protect us, and instead he terrorized us.”

  “He didn’t want me, Dan. You know he didn’t.”

  I shook my head. “I know nothing of the sort.”

  “Everyone said he snapped after I was born. Zeyde and Mom talked about it when they didn’t think I could hear. Like…like I was the last straw, and Pop couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “That’s preposterous. How can anyone blame a baby for—”

  “I don’t know. I only know that he did. He blamed me for everything that was wrong, and if you think about it, you know it.”

  Thinking back, I realized what he said rang horribly true. Perhaps I’d never realized it, perhaps I’d never wanted to understand, but certain things, neighbors talking, veiled comments, insinuations disguised as idle speculation suddenly fell into place like tumblers in a lock.

  Holy fuck. “Maybe…”

  I remembered Jakey’s birth vividly because he’d come weeks early. He’d been jaundiced—the color of pumpkins—and like me, had our mother’s thick, curly hair. Pop, who’d been in the habit of drinking heavily already, left us alone a lot at night after that. Maybe I hadn’t noticed because a steady stream of well-meaning neighbors and friends had come and gone with food and sundries, helping my mom by cleaning and shopping for her. More than one person I’d never seen before showed up, seemingly interested and kind but more curious to see the baby than the new mother. At the time I thought it was the novelty of a new baby that brought them over, but now…in this context, I wondered if they’d come to see…

  Oh, fuck. “No way. You and Joyce both have Pop’s eyes.”

  He turned to me then, and in those very eyes I saw what he’d believed all along.

  Damn. “Did you honestly think Mom had another man’s child?”

  “No.” He hid his face again. “Yes. I didn’t know what to think.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her? She’d have told you. She’d have set your mind at ease or given up her secret if she’d known it was eating away at you like this.”

  “And how was I supposed to ask our mother if she’d cheated on Pop?”

  “You’ve been carrying this around for how long?”

  Jake shrugged. “He hated me. He always hated me. I just never knew exactly why. While I was in Israel I started thinking about whether—”

  “Well, shit.”

  He refilled my drink, and it took a while before I could talk again.

  “Surely Zeyde said something about all this at some point? Did you ask him outright?”

  Jake shook his head. “We had a huge fight about it once. I had to fill out some paperwork, and I said it was a shame I had to claim my father. He muttered something about my father never claiming me, so it would serve him right.”

  “He did?”

  Jake smiled ruefully. “I pressed him about it, but it just upset him. He asked me if I loved our mother. Of course I loved her. I wouldn’t judge her. He said it was none of my business unless she made it my business.”

  “Maybe even Zeyde wondered.”

  “Maybe we’ll never find out the truth.”

  “I don’t know. Looking at you with Joyce today, there’s little doubt in my mind that you’re Pop’s kid.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of Joyce and her brother Lonnie as children, Jake. There’s a lot to be said for genetics.”

  “Did you ever wonder? Did he ever tell you I wasn’t?”

  “Oh, hell no. Do you think I would keep something like that from you? Jeez, if I’d had the slightest suspicion I’d have had us DNA tested and rid you of him once and for all. The very thought of a blood connection to him, of sharing traits and maybe temperament, the idea that someday I could become like him freezes the blood in my veins and keeps me awake at night. Are you kidding?”

  “Dan.”

  “If I’d believed you weren’t his natural child, I’d have taken you out to the best steakhouse in New York to celebrate.”

  Jakey’s eyes swam, and for a second he looked about five again. It was funny how that could just empty my sails. All my anger—all my righteous indignation—was gone, whoosh, in the face of some kind of crazy, protective love. His voice was hoarse so he whispered, “You will never be like him. Never.”

  I shook my head, unable to speak.

  “It’s time the Livingston brothers declared their Independence Day.” He held up his glass, and I knocked it gently with mine. He looked right into my eyes as we drank and then heaved a last shuddering sigh. He put his glass down but didn’t refill it.

  Maybe things were going to be okay after all.

  We still had a decision to make. “What I don’t understand is why Joyce approached you.”

  Jake
huffed a rueful laugh. “She didn’t. Or she didn’t mean to. Someone in your office told her you could be reached through Bêtise.”

  I told Jake about the note Joyce had left for me in Santa Cruz. “Bree forwarded it, but I wanted to sit on it while I decided how to respond. I guess I waited too long.” I’d been doing that a lot lately.

  “What are you going to do?”

  That was a really good question. I wanted to lob Pop’s letters into the trash and forget about them. I’d planned to ignore his pleas for a face-to-face indefinitely, and I guess I imagined that one day the letters would simply stop coming. Sooner or later the old bastard had to die. But Jake looked like he needed some kind of closure.

  “What do you want to do?”

  He shook his head. “I have no idea how to respond. I never expected this. Joyce came for you, not me. I told her if she gave me the address, I’d go down to LA to see him but the more I think about it, the more I wonder, why should I bother?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I’m not sure I would.”

  “He wants you not me.”

  “Pop’s a piece of shit, Jakey, and Joyce doesn’t even know us.” I clenched my hands into fists. Even my worthless right hand gave the impression it was in it to win it, the knuckles nearly white as pain shot up my arm. “You are the only family I have.”

  His brown eyes shimmered again. “Maybe you should meet them. It’s got nothing to do with me. Maybe you should go just for you.”

  “There’s nothing there I want, Jakey. You’re all the family I will ever need.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  For the second day in a row, I walked the short distance to Bêtise hungover. It was early enough that I didn’t think it would be crowded and I was right. There was only a scattering of people seated at the many tables, some nursing coffee, some hidden behind newspapers.

  Mary Catherine worked the counter and several Miss Independence Pie employees manned the kitchen and waited tables. My brother and his core staff typically took Mondays off, and Mary Catherine’s pie ladies came in to handle things while he was out.