Ruthless Daddy_A Romance Collection

by Emily Bishop

Her calling him “brother.” Slipping my fingers through her hair, I tried to coax her back to sleep. I wished I could explain to her—a four-year-old—that sometimes you fucked up your life in ways that you couldn’t take back.

  “Baby, I want you to know something,” I told her then, my voice soft, coaxing. “I want you to know that if you ever get into trouble—with anything at all—I’ll be there for you. I’ll fight for you. And I’ll never make you feel guilty about it. Okay?”

  Maggie just nodded, without context. She knew she was meant to yawn. That this would fill the gap in time. I made a mental note to tell her this every year of her life. Every damn day, if I had to. I wouldn’t become Isaac Holzman. I wouldn’t become Anthony Thames. I would be Eric Holzman, a man Maggie could lean on. The man who stuck around. I’d shucked off the old Eric Holzman a long time ago. And despite the fact that he’d reared his ugly head back in Randall, I was leaving him behind once more. Never to return.

  “But what about Max?” Maggie asked again, her voice light. “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I think he’s going to be fine, baby,” I told her, allowing my chin to fall to my chest. I felt heavy with regret, knowing that I was abandoning someone who needed me. But did he need a father who fought his grandfather? Did he need a father with such a shadow in Randall? It would lurk behind him the rest of his life, ensuring that everyone in Randall thought the same about him. I couldn’t taint him, the way Isaac had ruined me. “He doesn’t need us anymore,” I continued, lifting Maggie into me. I pressed my lips against her forehead, walking her into the bright, fluorescent lights of the rest stop. “He’s going to be just fine.”

  Once inside, Maggie insisted on using the bathroom alone. I waited outside the thick door, watching the gas station attendant as he traded in the greasy hot dogs for a fresh round. They rotated on their sticks, gleaming in the strange, off-color light. The kid was probably twenty-two years old, his arms like strings. He flicked his eyes toward me, then said, “Hey, sir. Holding up okay?”

  “I used to work in a gas station like this,” I found myself saying, remembering a time when I’d been twenty, twenty-one years old, myself. Living in Missouri, a few years before I’d headed off to New Orleans. I’d watched trucks stream in and out of the stop, hankering for their freedom. Their ability to flee.

  “Yeah? It fucking sucks,” the kid told me, scoffing. “How did you get out of it?”

  Maggie snuck out from the bathroom and dove beneath my arm. Her hands flicked with wet droplets.

  “I guess I got out of it the way you get out of anything,” I told the kid, stepping toward the counter to pay for gas. “You just find that you move on. Time is your greatest asset. Until it’s gone.”

  “That’s fucking depressing, man,” the kid told me, sliding my credit card through the machine. “But I don’t get much happy advice from any of you men driving through the night. Can’t say it’s been all flowers and happiness and sunshine on your end. And I fucking doubt it’ll be the same for me.”

  The kid’s words echoed around my head as I drove further south that night, charged with caffeine and an off-brand chocolate bar. How strange that people could see right through you, to the core of whatever had happened. It was impossible to hide. Again, I considered calling Olivia. I knew she was awake, probably hungry for any words of reassurance. But I held back, railing the facts back down my throat. I wasn’t good for her. Had nothing for her. We had to start fresh, anew. For good, this time.

  Chapter 23

  Olivia

  The day after the incident, Rachel, her son, Raffi, Max, and I walked through the grocery store. Max’s face featured a long, thick bandage near the eye, with a bit of fabric over his eyelashes. It bothered him when he blinked, so that he often touched at it, trying to flick it out of his field of vision. I brought my hand over his shoulder, leaning my lips toward his ear. “If you mess with it, it won’t heal correctly,” I told him, echoing words my father had told me after my own accident.

  It had been otherworldly, going to the hospital with him the night before. I’d felt so much like my teenage self, as the doctor had mopped up his face, sliding a needle through his skin to stitch him up. “You really took a tumble,” the doctor said. It might have been my imagination, but I felt the doctor’s eyes trace over my own scar, finding it incredibly close to the one that would rise over Max’s skin.

  Like mother, like son.

  Like father, like son.

  It all circled back around.

  Rachel had offered to stay over at our place for the next few days, and I’d whole-heartedly agreed. I knew it would be difficult to wage the war on the next months, knowing that Eric wasn’t coming back. Knowing that my mailbox wouldn’t fill with his letters. Beyond that, I had to figure out what to do next. I knew I needed to sever ties with my father, once and for all, and pull myself up by the bootstraps. If anything, Eric’s arrival back—a changed man—had made me realize that I was wasting time. No one was going to enroll me in college, if not myself. No one was going to make money that wasn’t “guilt” money, unless it was me. I had to move on from the events of the past, and build a reality that suited Max and me. With or without Eric, and absolutely without Anthony Thames.

  At the cashier, I positioned paper towels, chips, salsa, vegetables, and a few beers for Rachel and I on the conveyer belt. Turning my eyes toward Max, I muttered, “Why don’t you pick out a candy bar for you and Raffi to share?” But his expression was lax, his eyes holding onto something beyond me. Turning around, I spotted a line of papers, all flapping in the breeze as the grocery store door opened and shut, automatically.

  With a jolt, I realized what they were. Each paper held a massive image of Eric, with the words “IF YOU SEE THIS MAN, CONTACT LAW ENFORCEMENT.”

  Rachel just stared at me, her jaw lax. Shaking my head, I muttered, “That fucking asshole,” before striding toward the center of the line of papers and tearing one down. Beneath the larger font, the paper read, “Wanted for striking mayor of the town of Randall. May be armed and dangerous.”

  Whirling toward the cashier, I shook the paper toward her. The teenager gazed at me with wide, frightened eyes. But I couldn’t control my words. “Who the hell told you to put this up?” I demanded, my nostrils flared.

  The teenager shrugged, stuttering. “Some police officer came in here. I dunno!”

  “Well, I demand you take them all down,” I said. Max’s eyes followed my motions as I whirled back toward the line of papers, ripping one after one down and into my arms. My entire body shook with anger. “This man isn’t armed or dangerous at all. He was lynched up by this horrible fucking town—and they’re doing the same to my son—”

  When I’d finally torn the rest of the papers from the wall, I smashed them into the trash can and waited, watching as the entire grocery store stared me down. Raffi giggled to himself, clearly enamored with the proceedings, but Max’s face was stony. I recognized that this wasn’t going to just “go away,” that I had to face it head-on. Reaching forward, I gripped his hand and nodded toward Rachel and Raffi, explaining, “We have to make a stop at my father’s. We have to figure this the hell out.”

  Leaving the supplies behind, I brought Max alongside of me, into the parking lot. The sunlight steamed overhead, feeling more like August heat than May. Max coughed into his hand, not speaking. I wondered at the anxious stirrings of his mind. Wondered if he thought of me as a bad mother, someone he couldn’t rely on. I imagined him at twenty years old, speaking in dull tones to a therapist. “I was an accident. But it was more than that, man. She couldn’t fucking deal with me. And my grandfather ran my father out of town. Not just once. But twice. Like, I never had a chance.”

  My parents’ house was only a few blocks away. As usual, my mother sat out on the front porch swing, her face aging and sagging over her embroidery. When we appeared at the base of the steps, I heard her mutter, “Oh, dear. Oh, dear…” before hobbling to the living room, where, I was sure, m
y father was stationed in front of the television. I heard his voice rise up, demanding something. Beside me, Max shifted his weight, clearly anxious.

  “Mom? What are we doing here?” Max whispered to me, his eyes turning up. I couldn’t quite see his right eye, beneath the bandage, and my chest felt squeezed. I wanted to tell him I should have done something like this a long time ago. That I should have tried to save us.

  “Just hold on, baby,” I told him, squeezing his hand. But he let his grip grow lax and pulled free, bringing his hands behind his back.

  The whole bulk of my father appeared in the doorway. He stared down at me, his expression far different than anything I’d seen before. Taking my first step up, I pointed at him, my voice sure, steady.

  “Listen, Dad,” I said. “What you’re doing with these signs around town. It needs to stop.”

  “Oh? Is this my daughter standing up to me?” my father asked me, his nostrils flared. “This should be good.”

  “Dad, that’s—that’s not how you should speak to me,” I said, hating the way my tongue felt so lazy, floundering. “Max is your grandson. You know that? And the fact that you’re smearing his father around town, it’s so disrespectful of Max. How do you expect him to live like this?”

  “I’d posit something else to you, little miss,” my father said, crossing his arms. “I’d ask you how you think you can talk to me like that—me, the mayor of this town, and the man who let you stick around, even after disobeying me and getting yourself pregnant with that boy next door. I have been nothing if not Christian to you. And this is how you expect to repay me?”

  My mother was running around the back of the house, looking almost rodent-like in the kitchen. She’d never put a foot in front of my father, had never tried to argue with him. I saw myself within her. That I’d been cowering, just like her, for the past twelve years.

  “Dad, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” I told him. “Really.” Still, my hands were clenched in fists. “I just want to reason with you about what you’re doing to us. To Max.”

  I stepped up onto the porch. My father stared at me, volatile, his face bright red and looking ready to pop. But as we faced off, I heard a shuffling beyond the porch. Max was tearing down the road, running as fast as he could away from us. I watched him, aghast, feeling smacked. I hopped down the steps and cut across the grass. But already, his long, Eric-like legs had him six houses down. He slid into the forest on the far end of the block, disappearing between the trees. I called out to him, hoping it would remind him who I was. That I wasn’t this crazy woman, screaming at his grandfather on the porch. That I wasn’t the woman who’d chased his father away.

  “MAX!” I cried. “MAX, PLEASE! COME BACK!”

  My father clucked his tongue, lifting his eyebrows. He looked at me, his voice mocking. “He’s only eleven years old, Olivia,” he said. “I don’t think he’ll make it that far. He doesn’t have half the brains of you. Or even the brains of his father, if we’re being honest here. I’ve seen him stumble through life too long. Now, maybe, he’ll scrape himself up like Eric did, and learn something.”

  “So you admit you gave Eric a hard time? You admit he left town because—because you’re a goddamn bully?” I asked, tears spitting down my cheeks.

  “I admit no such thing. In this life, there are winners and there are losers,” my father said to me. “And for so much of your life, baby girl, I thought you were a winner. Like Freddy. Like Cynthia. But dammit, Olivia, you proved me wrong. And I don’t like being wrong.”

  “We’re going to get away from you,” I said. “We’re going to leave this town and build our own life. We don’t need you now. You’re the poison of this town, Dad. I should have been strong enough to see it a long time ago.”

  I raced down the steps of the house, finding my footing on the grass. The sun had begun to filter down over the horizon, casting orange hues over the pavement and the tips of the trees. My legs stretched, long and thin, across the grass, before finding a path through the woods. I knew that following this path would chuck you out over near the house where I lived with Max, and I felt sure I would find him curled up on the couch, probably crying. We would order a pizza. I would hold onto him, as if he were a much younger boy. And I would apologize, over and over again, for allowing everything to go to shit. “I should have been your mother, first and foremost,” I murmured to myself, hating the way my lungs burned in my chest. “I shouldn’t have ever allowed anything to get between us. Especially not Anthony Thames.”

  But when I found myself at the house, Max was nowhere to be found. I stomped through the house, calling out his name, hunting for him in all the familiar places: under his bed, where he’d hid as a six-year-old, inside the closet, out back, near the shed. But each place was empty. On a whim, I yanked open the shed door. The darkness within felt ominous. In the corner of the room, there were small tire lines in the dirt, where Max’s bike had been. I realized, with a lurch in my stomach, that Max had taken his bike, if only to get further away, faster.

  I didn’t know what to do. I fell to my knees, my fingers quivering against my cheeks. Maybe he hadn’t gone far. Maybe he’d just raced off, blowing off steam on the pavement. After a long, heavy moment, I stood from the grass, entered the back of the house, and tore open the far cabinet. This was where we kept the spare change. Max had recently rolled up over one hundred dollars’ worth of quarters and dimes and pennies and nickels, and we’d been keeping the change here, “for a rainy day.” I expected we’d go to an amusement park together or take a drive to the beach. But instead, the small lunchbox in which we’d stashed the cash was empty, a shining box lined only with metal.

  “Shit,” I muttered, smashing my fist against the wood of the cabinet. “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

  He was gone, armed with about a hundred and twenty dollars. And I had no clue where to find him.

  Chapter 24

  Eric

  We hadn’t been back to our place in New Orleans longer than an hour or two before the calls came rippling through from Olivia’s cell. Maggie was all tucked into her bed upstairs, exhausted, after staying up all day singing silly songs in the back of the car. Downstairs, I poured two inches of whiskey into a tumbler glass, watching as one call turned into the next. She sent text messages as well—but I didn’t want to read them. It would only make things more difficult. With every jolt of my heart, I was reminded that I was in love with this woman. That Olivia Thames could have been in my life, all this time, if things had gone differently. But now, I had to think, first and foremost, about my children: Maggie and Max. One of them needed me. The other one truly needed me gone.

  The next day, the phone calls continued, making me feel stir-crazy and apt to turn off my cell for hours at a time. Maggie and I scoured the city for corndogs, hand-in-hand, trying on the banter of our previous life. But something felt stunted, now that we’d had that “family” day in the barn field.

  Outside the ice creamery we loved, I dropped to my knees before her, wanting to get on her level. “Baby, you’d tell me if you need a mother. Wouldn’t you?” I asked her, as if a four-year-old knew what they needed.

  Maggie didn’t answer straight away. She twirled her fingers through her shining blonde hair, before dipping strands between her lips. “What, Daddy?” she asked me, tilting her head.

  “It’s okay, baby girl,” I told her, snaking my arms around her and holding her, my hug a bit too tight. “It’s okay.”

  She lifted her chin against my shoulder, peeping words. “Daddy, do you think Olivia could be my mommy now? Now that mommy isn’t gonna come back?”

  I chose not to answer, like a fucking coward. I lifted her higher, ordering her strawberry ice cream cone. She licked it with sad motions, allowing drips of it to fall on my shirt. I wondered if the sadness in her eyes would be reflected in her memories. If this would “stick.”

  That night, I dialed the babysitter, Sarah, deciding that I needed to get out of t
he house, see something. Dig New Orleans again, as an adult. Get some music dancing in my blood. Sarah cooed into the phone, saying, “Oh, honey, I hadn’t heard from ya’ll in a few days. I was getting worried I’d lost my best clients.”

  Sarah agreed to come watch Maggie for a few hours, or “a spell,” as she put it. When she arrived, I smacked a twenty in her hand, straight-out, telling her I didn’t know how long I would be, and that she should order a pizza, if she felt like it. Sarah nodded at me, her eyebrows lowering.

  “Ya look different, Mr. Holzman,” she told me. I hated when people referred to me this way. It was the name of my father. The man I was still, somehow, running away from.

  “It was a long drive,” I told her, trying on a smile. “Forgive me if I don’t look my best.”

  “Oh, you always look good, Mr. Holzman,” she sighed. “It’s just you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I fled from the New Orleans apartment whisking my long legs toward the French Quarter. Even from a half mile away, I heard the blaring of trumpets, the yawning of trombones. I tried to inject this optimism into my heart, make myself excited about this next chapter. It felt like we’d leaped a fence, started something new. But instead, my fingers began to twitch, wanting to rip my phone from my pocket and call Olivia back. Tell her—what?

  I knew if I called I would just stand there, listening to her cry. I wouldn’t have the energy to tell her what to do, or what we should do, together. It would be the same as Maggie, licking that ice cream, alone with her sadness.

  I cut into a nearby dive bar, slipping into a booth near the back. The barmaid was one I didn’t recognize, yet she was like all the rest: her cheeks hanging low, her eyes cat-like and darting about the bar. She asked me what I wanted and brought me a stern-looking whiskey with a single ice cube floating in the top. I thanked her.

  On the television screen, the news played, so somber, with the subtitles ticking away across the bottom. My fingers followed along with the words, typing on an invisible typewriter on the tabletop. I tried to flirt with the concept of going back to work in the following days. Of returning to a normal schedule. But this dripped the whiskey down my throat faster, forcing me to call for another. “You’re drinking these fast, Eric,” the barmaid told me. Apparently, she remembered me, even if I held no memory of her.