by Sam Burns
Miles, who had been starting to open his mouth, closed it again. Dad gave him a narrow-eyed look, then nodded when it was clear he’d settled the matter.
“What about you, Dad?” Jon asked his father. “I thought Mom might be home since it’s a Monday, but this is early for you.”
Dad glanced at Miles and then back at Jon, and shrugged. “I wanted to be here, so I decided to come home early. All I had this afternoon was a meeting with the marketing department, and they weren’t really ready to show me what they had, so I gave them a reprieve and took the afternoon off. Your mother is in meetings on a new project until late tonight. What about you, young man? There must be a good reason for you to be here.”
Sliding into the seat next to his brother’s, Jon eyed the cookie dough thoughtfully. He wondered what raw cookie dough tasted like. He wasn’t one for rule breaking, and he’d never tried it before, but it looked good.
“Jonathan?” his father asked, concerned. “Are you okay?”
Miles had turned to look at him too. “No way. You’re thinking about eating that cookie dough, aren’t you?”
Jon crossed his arms on the table and put his chin down on top of them. “I had an interview today for work.”
“Like, for a new job?” Miles asked.
Their dad gave him a sigh. “Like, for an investigation, Miles.”
“Right, I forget you do that. I always expect the FBI to be all secret agents and stuff. You don’t hunt aliens?” Miles gave him a goofy smile. His mood seemed improved—at least Jon’s visit home had accomplished something. Even if Miles’ happiness wasn’t what he’d gone in looking for, he would count it as a win.
“No, Miles, I don’t hunt aliens.” Coughing into his hand, he muttered, “much,” then turned back to his father and the conversation at hand. “I had to interview Brendan Quinn’s son today.”
“Shouldn’t that be a secret?” Miles asked.
Jon rolled his eyes at his brother. “It doesn’t work like that, Miles. We didn’t drag him to Guantanamo Bay and take a rubber hose to him. I went to his place of business and asked him some questions.”
Miles made a face. “That sounds really boring. Isn’t the FBI supposed to be all catching killers and shooting at bad guys?”
“Do you even hear yourself right now?” Jon asked him. “Do you spend all of your free time watching bad TV shows about unrealistic FBI agents who go around breaking the law and randomly shooting at people?”
For a moment, Miles considered that. “Not all my free time,” he said finally. “What? Engineering is boring.”
Jon sighed and put his head down. “So is the FBI, Miles.”
“Funny,” Miles answered. “You don’t seem bored. Brendan Quinn’s son. He’s like, a gangster or something, right? I remember seeing him on the news a couple years back. Was he scary? Did he threaten you?”
Jon sighed again, shaking his head without looking up. “No, he isn’t scary and he didn’t threaten me.”
“Then what happened?” his father asked quietly.
“He kind of, um, okay he actually kind of threatened me,” Jon said, considering what would happen to his job if he went out with Keegan Quinn. “He threatened to ask me on a date.”
Silence descended on the kitchen.
“So he’s, like, hot?” Miles asked, followed by the sound of a spoon whacking skin again. “Ow! I wasn’t trying to eat the cookie dough, I swear!” There was a short pause. “Oh. Right. Probably not a good question. Sorry, bro.”
“No you’re not,” Jon said.
Pulling his hands fully out of their father’s reach, Miles grinned down at Jon. “Nope. Is he?”
Jon groaned and buried his face again, hoping it would muffle his voice when he answered. “Yes.”
It didn’t work. Miles howled with laughter. His dad sighed and leaned across the counter to put a hand on Jon’s shoulder. After a moment, he picked up the bowl of cookie dough and looked at the two of them expectantly. “Who’s up for some mindless explosions?”
“What about the salmonella?” Miles asked.
“Some days you have to live dangerously, Em,” his dad answered, then he gave Jon a long look. “You’ve got to decide what’s important to you, the cookie dough or the possibility of salmonella.”
Miles snorted as he grabbed a spoon from the silverware drawer. “You just want him to get fired from the FBI so he’ll have to get a nice cushy teaching job and not carry a gun.”
His dad gave them both a bright smile and took a bite of cookie dough off the giant wooden spoon. “One man’s cookie dough is another man’s source of salmonella.” He jerked his head toward the living room. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go watch some fake FBI agents who go around breaking the law and shooting at people.”
As it turned out, raw cookie dough was delicious.
CHAPTER THREE
Keegan's Rude Awakening
It was six in the morning when the phone started ringing. Keegan had worked until the bar closed at one a.m., didn’t get home until two, and hadn’t gone to sleep till after three. At six a.m., his cell phone was ringing like some kind of awful torture device.
He grabbed the thing and pressed it up to his face. “What?” he mumbled into the speaker. The phone rang again. Ugh. He tried to focus on the screen and actually tap the accept button. “What?”
Owen’s panicked voice was already going before Keegan finished his single word. “Keegan you have to come to the hospital. Dad collapsed this morning, and they think he has pneumonia.”
Keegan sat straight up in bed, fully awake. “Which hospital?”
He took down the address and phone number Owen gave him on the closest paper he could find, a Chinese takeout receipt, and set to dressing and trying to calm his brother at the same time. “O, I’m sure he’s gonna be fine. He’s a tough old bastard.”
“I’ve been fighting with him,” Owen confessed, as though that were something new and shocking. “He might be dying, Keegan, and yesterday I told him that sometimes, I wish he weren’t my father.”
Keegan flinched at that. Owen was never one to pull his punches. Their father’s business was in direct conflict with Owen’s career of choice, and it was an unending source of conflict for them.
“You said it’s pneumonia?” Keegan asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “They can treat that, he’ll be okay.”
“But what if he isn’t?” Owen demanded. He sounded like he was five again, demanding that Keegan come with him to kindergarten instead of going to middle school, because he was worried Dad wouldn’t come pick him up.
“Owen.” Keegan took the authoritative tone of voice he always used when forced to be his little brother’s keeper. “Stop it. Wondering isn’t going to help you, or Dad. Stop thinking about it, and tell me exactly what’s happening.”
Details always calmed Owen when he was feeling out of control. He started recounting the morning, from the exact time he’d woken, to the one-and-a-half slices of toast he’d eaten before Dad came downstairs looking ashen and out of breath. He’d tried to play it off as a bad night’s sleep or a hangover, Owen told him, but they both knew their father never drank to excess. He always said he wasn’t interested in fitting any more stereotypes than necessary.
While Owen ran through his story—list of details, really—Keegan finished dressing, grabbed his keys, and stepped into the elevator, punching the button for the garage level. “Owen, I’m getting in the elevator, so I’m gonna lose you. I want you to open your phone notepad, and write all of this down there, okay?”
There was a small hesitation, and Keegan pressed the hold button on the elevator. He had to make sure his brother was okay before losing the connection.
“Okay Key,” Owen said in a small voice. “But he’s gonna be okay, right?”
Keegan made his own voice as forceful as he could, and lied to his brother. “I’m sure he’s gonna be fine, O. I promise.”
There was a sniffle on the other end, which Keegan pret
ended to ignore, before Owen’s voice came again. “Okay. I’ll see you soon.”
“Soon,” Keegan agreed. “And I want that list when I get there, okay?”
“Okay.”
Keegan needed the list as a job for Owen more than as a diagnostic tool, but he was confident that his brother would do what he promised. Keegan wasn’t sure how, but after being raised by a gangster and a teenage gangster-in-training, Owen had turned out pretty decent.
Keegan made a point of obeying traffic laws on the way to the hospital. The law loved to pull people like him over for basic traffic violations, assuming they were going to find a pound of coke in the trunk or something. Even at his worst, Keegan had never had anything to do with drug running. It was one of the aspects of the business that his father hadn’t allowed him anywhere near.
When he got to the hospital, Owen was pacing the waiting room, typing away on his phone. He looked better than he’d sounded over the phone, frowning but focused on the task at hand. He looked up, and when he caught sight of Keegan, he threw himself at his brother. O had forgotten that he didn’t like hugging. Keegan decided not to point it out.
“Key,” he whispered. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even call nine-one-one. I called Joey down at the guard house, and he called them.”
“That’s okay, O,” Keegan told him, leading him over to a hard, plastic chair. “Calling Joey was a good idea. That way, he knew to let the ambulance in when they came.”
Owen searched Keegan’s eyes for a moment, and nodded, satisfied with Keegan’s surety. Still, he hung his head. “I feel like I screwed everything up.”
“That’s ‘cause everything is screwed up and you can’t fix it, baby brother,” Keegan said, pulling his brother’s head to rest on his shoulder. “And you always think you should be able to fix anything.”
Keegan was well aware that Owen wasn’t the only member of the Quinn family who felt that way. If only he’d insisted that his father see a doctor, maybe this never would have happened.
#
A hand shook Keegan’s shoulder gently, and he went for his gun. Then he woke enough to remember that he didn’t carry a gun anymore, hadn’t in years. Also, he was sitting in a hospital waiting room, he hadn’t fallen asleep on a job.
Owen was still leaning on his shoulder, snoring away like Keegan hadn’t almost jumped out of his skin.
“Sorry, dude,” came the whisper from above him. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Keegan blinked his eyes clear and found his friend Alex looking down at him. Alex was another employee and the bassist for a band that played Wilde’s sometimes. Behind him was his lead singer, Jenna, who held up two huge takeout bags from the restaurant, posing with them like she was on a runway.
Keegan smiled sleepily. “You brought us food? How did you even know we were here?”
“Mickey,” Alex told him. “He came to see Brigit as soon as the place opened this morning, and he’s been giving us updates. Not that there’ve really been any.”
Trust Mickey to quietly make sure that everyone knew what they needed to know. Keegan only wished he could get the man to leave his father’s employ. He could have been so much more than a thug.
Jenna was unpacking food from the bag, and it smelled incredible. Carefully, Keegan turned his left wrist, the arm still wrapped around his brother’s shoulders, and checked the time on his watch. Almost four in the afternoon. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, and Owen, not since the toast he’d had for breakfast.
“Owen,” he said, shaking his brother’s shoulder lightly. “You gotta wake up and eat something.”
Owen snorted awake and looked around, sleepy and confused. His face fell when he remembered where they were. He started to open his mouth, no doubt to ask if there had been news of their father, but Keegan shook his head. Instead, Jenna put a bowl of soup in front of him. For a second, he looked like he wanted to refuse it. Then his stomach growled loudly, and he blushed and accepted.
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
“Anytime, short stack,” Jenna answered brightly, earning herself a glare from Owen. She reached back into the bag and pulled out another container of soup for Keegan, handing it off. “It’s a pain to tote, but we figured soup was exactly what you needed. I’ve got some bread in here too, and bottles of soda. Or water, whichever you want.”
After both Owen and Keegan were settled with all the food that they could keep in their laps, Jenna broke out containers of soup for herself and Alex too.
Owen raised a brow in her direction. “The truth comes out, huh? You helped in exchange for free soup.”
“Puh-lease,” she answered, giving Owen the best unimpressed look Keegan had ever seen. “I helped because Keegan is pure awesomeness, and Alex loves him like a brother.”
Keegan swallowed a mouthful of soup and chuckled at that. “You’re just saying that because a record producer found you guys at my place.”
“I assure you,” Jenna said, sniffing as though offended. “Alex loved you way before that.”
Alex sighed and shook his head, giving Keegan a “what can you do” shrug. “So, how’s your dad doing?”
“We haven’t gotten much out of them, other than that he’s a stubborn old goat who should have been to see a doctor days ago.” Keegan took another spoonful of soup. It was an odd choice for April, but it was also perfect for dealing with being at the hospital. It felt healthy in that socially programmed way that chicken soup always did.
A nurse walking by gave them the evil eye, probably for eating outside food in the middle of the waiting room, but she didn’t say anything.
They all sat in silence, eating and staring at their own food instead of making eye contact, until Alex sighed. “Dude, this stinks. I don’t even know your dad, but I hate this.”
Owen gave a little laugh, but it sounded amused instead of angry or bitter, which was what he’d been all day.
“I know,” Alex continued. “Imagine how you feel, right? I can’t, not really. My dad didn’t get sick. We just got a call one night and they dragged Mom down to the morgue to identify him, like that was a normal, okay thing to do.”
“It is a normal thing to do,” Jenna said, frowning. “Maybe not ‘okay’ though.”
Owen frowned. “I’m sorry, that sucks.”
“Nah, dude, this isn’t about me. You guys are—” Alex broke off in the middle of trying to change the subject back to the Quinn family, and seemed to think better of it. “My mom was pretty messed up over it for a while. She’s better now, but I think Dad was the only person she ever really loved. I mean, there’s me, but it’s not the same.”
Owen cocked his head to the side, looking confused, but Keegan nodded. “It’s a different kind of love. Being in love with someone is big. Your family might suck, but you love them because they’re family. You just do.”
“Exactly,” Alex agreed, then blushed. “I think being in love with someone is bigger. You have to take a chance on someone who might not love you back. If you’re lucky and they do, then you’re choosing each other, faults and all.”
For a long time, Owen thought about that. “How does anyone ever fall in love if they have to trust each other?”
The question made Keegan’s heart hurt. He hadn’t raised Owen as well as he’d thought if his little brother couldn’t imagine trusting someone.
Alex, though, waved it away like nothing. “Sometimes it just happens. Maybe you’ve got no reason to trust a person, but everything in you says to do it anyway.”
Keegan’s thoughts drifted to the men he’d dated over the years, and he found that Alex was probably right. There weren’t any men he’d trusted implicitly. A few he had thought he loved, but none whose betrayal would have shocked him. He didn’t think he was a cynic who didn’t believe in loyalty. He trusted his family, though some might argue against it. He trusted Alex completely, and Brigit. He just couldn’t date them, since they were family too.
Owen shrugged. “I dun
no. Maybe it’s different for other people.”
“Quiet, you,” Jenna told him. “Or I’ll toss my bread at you, and I know you’ll catch it and eat it, which will make me sad. It’s not different for other people, you just haven’t met the right guy yet, which makes two of us.”
“Darn right I would eat it. They have the best bread at Wilde’s,” Owen shot back.
“We have the best everything,” Alex told him proudly. “But Jen’s right. You just gotta wait for it, man. It’ll happen.”
Owen looked dubious, but didn’t question further. Alex still had that bright-eyed, honeymoon look five months into his current relationship. And Owen, he’d dealt with their father long enough to know when someone wasn’t going to cede an inch.
“For what it’s worth, I agree,” Keegan said to no one in particular. Owen pulled a face at him, and he grinned. “What? We do make the best everything at Wilde’s.”
Owen and Jenna groaned, but Alex beamed. Keegan stuck his tongue out at Alex, felt like a child, and then did it again for good measure.
They were all chuckling softly when a doctor came into the room. “Mr. Quinn?” he asked aloud.
Keegan shot up, almost dumping soup everywhere, but Owen caught the bowl and set it down, then stood next to Keegan, shoulders tight. “That’s me. Us. I mean, we’re here for Mr. Quinn.”
The doctor came over, looking at Alex and Jenna, who hadn’t budged from the floor, and then back at Keegan. “You’re the son?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Do you need ID or something?” Keegan was already reaching for his wallet, just in case. No one was going to keep him from finding out about his father.
The doctor forestalled him, though, reaching up a hand and shaking his head. “It’s fine, Mr. Quinn. I wanted you to know that we’ve determined that it’s bacterial pneumonia, and he’s reacting well to the antibiotics. He’ll be here a couple of days for some breathing treatments and to be sure that there aren’t any complications, but he’s in remarkably good health for a man of his age, so I don’t foresee any problems.”
A collective sigh went up from the assembled people, Owen almost collapsing against Keegan’s side and taking deep breaths. Keegan squeezed his shoulder. “Anything we need to do? To know?”
