by Cara McKenna
“Like?”
“Photos of him from ages before I was born, with people I don’t know. Road maps for northern California, from when he was in his twenties. All this proof that he must’ve had a thousand stories I never got to hear.”
The kettle whistled, and as Duncan poured steaming water through the grounds he asked, “What was he like, as a father?”
A quiet, fond laugh. “He was sort of terrible, in some ways. Not, like, a terrible father. Just clueless. He had two brothers, no sisters, and apparently my grandma was kind of a hard-ass—not the nurturing type. So he had, like, zero clue how to relate to a girl.”
“Ah.”
“But we had fun. It’s not like I was some pink sparkle ballerina princess . . .” Another sweet, soft laugh. “He was famous around town for accidentally leaving me places, at first. Like leaving the stroller parked outside Wasco’s while he went in to buy cigarettes, then forgetting I was there until he’d walked halfway home. But I mean, you could get away with that, back then. In Fortuity, anyhow. I’m sure if this was some civilized suburb, I’d have gotten swept away by CPS. He sometimes walked a fine line between ‘flaky’ and ‘negligent.’”
Duncan let the filter drain, then carried the mug to the table. “Well, you turned out the better for it, I’d say. Autonomous. Self-sufficient.”
“Hardhearted commitment-phobe,” she corrected with a smile.
“Better than doormat.”
She lifted the mug. “Hear, hear.”
“Let me help you with the rest of the cleaning,” he said firmly.
“I dunno.”
“I’ll be a terrible bully, keep you moving too quickly to have time to think very hard about any of it.” You’ve bossed me around enough. Let me boss you back. He’d felt so out of control the past two days; he’d take a hit of that security wherever it might be found.
“Maybe.”
He smiled dryly. “Again—not a request.”
She held his gaze, a smile playing at the very edges of her lips. “Fine.”
“And no more alcohol. It pairs dangerously well with the sloppier emotions, and quite terribly with work.”
“Agreed. But I have rules, too.”
“Shoot.”
“If I come across, like, some Father’s Day card I made him in second grade that he’s kept, and I start crying, you pretend you can’t tell.”
He nodded. “All right. Anything else?”
“Just . . . Just don’t be nice or anything. Don’t change how you and I are with each other, just because I seem emotional or whatever.”
He felt a funny shiver to hear her encapsulate them like that. You and I. As though they were a unit somehow. That the two of them linked together created something altogether new.
“You treated me differently,” he said. “Last night.”
She frowned. “I just made you tea and a sandwich.”
“And now I’ve made you coffee.”
“Just don’t treat me gently. Just because I might cry doesn’t mean I’m delicate or want to be hugged or whatever. Pet your cat backward and her reaction’ll show you roughly how well I handle other people’s sympathy.”
“Noted.” He stood. “And rest assured, I don’t hug.”
“Good.”
“So let’s get to work.”
Duncan led the way into her father’s room. “We’ll need a system. What’s the plan—things to keep, things to donate, things to bin?”
“Yeah.”
“Everything worth keeping—more or less than what would fit on the bed?”
She considered it. “I guess that might be a good way to keep it under control.”
“Good. Anything on the bed, we keep. Anything on this side of the bed,” he said, gesturing toward the far wall, “is rubbish. Everything on this side, we find homes for.” He grabbed a black trash bag from a nearby box. “Let’s do his clothes. Anything for charity, give it to me.” He whipped the bag open and held it at the ready.
Raina went to the closet and began stripping shirts and sweaters from their hangers with an admirable efficiency. “Donate. Donate,” she said, dropping things into Duncan’s waiting bag. “Hmm, too mothy.” She tossed a holey sweater toward the door. As she went, she said, “If you see anything that’s your style . . .”
He laughed. “Cheers.”
“I bet all this stuff, every last thing, back when it was all new, wouldn’t be worth as much as even one of your suits.”
“Probably not.”
She smirked. “I Googled your cologne. It costs five hundred twenty-five dollars.”
He shrugged. “It lasts for years. I don’t think a few dollars a week is such a steep fee, in exchange for smelling nice.” Did she like how he smelled? he had to wonder. Did she hate it? If she did, he’d pour the couple of hundred dollars’ worth left in the bottle straight down the nearest drain.
“So, how much do your suits cost?” she asked. “Help me put your priorities in perspective.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t. How much? Like that really dark, espresso brown one. I’ve seen the pants and vest, and there’s bound to be a jacket.”
“Of course.”
“And I’m sure it’s some crazy posh wool from, like, endangered Italian yaks. And lined with silk from the last worm of its kind. How much?”
“With tailoring? Probably close to three thousand.”
She shook her head, though she looked more amazed than disgusted, he thought. “Jesus. That’s literally more than I’ve ever spent on any one thing. Including vehicles and bar supplies and tattooing equipment. Anything. What do you get for three grand, aside from the suit itself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Something about it must get you hard.” She dropped a load of musty flannel into the bag, their knuckles brushing. “Is it because you want everyone in the room to know you can afford it, and they can’t?”
“Perhaps that’s a part of it . . . Though I genuinely like nice things. I get pleasure from owning and wearing nice clothes.” Clothes made to fit only him, never so much as tried on by another person. The fetish objects of an angry boy who’d resented every last scrap of ill-fitting, castoff clothing he’d been handed.
“I bet I don’t want to know how much your car cost,” Raina said.
“Likely not.”
“How would you feel,” she asked, tugging the last sweater from its hanger, “if you had to just put on a crummy old T-shirt and jeans and white sneakers, climb into some beat-up car, and cruise around for a day? Would that, like, kill you?”
“It might give me a panic attack,” he said, knotting the overstuffed bag, “but no, it wouldn’t kill me.” He’d lived the equivalent for the first half of his life.
“Why would it be so awful? What do you care what people think about you?”
“Can’t a man simply be vain?”
“Not simply, no.”
Touché. But she needn’t be made privy to the why of it all. Like her, he resented sympathy. She needn’t know about the boy he’d once been, the one who’d been treated like this dead man’s possessions—eyeballed in the name of deciding keep versus discard. He’d only once been deemed worthy of keeping, but that hadn’t lasted. His childhood had made him feel not unlike the trash bound for the tip, or at the very least a burden, like the donations. Left behind and unwanted, yet demanding that someone take pity and give him a home. The detritus of charity.
“Well, I suppose I don’t know why I care,” he said. “Only that I do.”
“It was a hollow threat, anyhow, offering you my dad’s stuff. I don’t need to see his old clothes anyplace except in photos. I’ll be dropping all this stuff off in the next county. Don’t want to see some local walk into Benji’s wearing any of it. I’ve
got enough ghosts in my life at the moment.”
He considered that, thinking of Alex Dunn. The man at the heart of Duncan’s own problems. He’d been having trouble sleeping lately, and often found himself thinking about those alleged bones, the ones everybody was so swept up in finding. Bones indeed. They were the skeleton strung through the center of everything that had gone terribly wrong lately, but without them, the shape of the greater whole was indiscernible. Duncan hadn’t thought much of the mystery before, but now that he’d been dragged into it, he’d begun finding himself preoccupied, guessing like everyone else where those bones might be. Who they might’ve belonged to. Who might be missing that person . . .
Perhaps those bones belonged to someone like Duncan. Someone easily misplaced, with no one caring enough to come looking for him. Disposable people. Not worth missing.
He eyed Raina, thinking how she’d cared enough to threaten him, to force him to let her look after him. The thought brought a taut, painful sting to his jaw and throat, and he pushed it away.
Raina went through the drawers next, and they quickly filled another bag with donations. Every now and then she’d pause to smell a sweater or shirt and smile to herself.
“Is this easier, with two?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yeah.”
He smiled at the silence that ensued. “You’re welcome.”
Raina rolled her eyes. If they hadn’t been standing in a room scattered with her dead father’s things, he’d have been sorely tempted to push her down onto that bed. If ever there was going to be a right time for the two of them to collide, it was now. With Duncan spread open by everything she now knew about him—and had exploited—and Raina exposed by these tasks . . . Given how stubborn they both were about admitting their feelings, it was now or never.
Fear had Duncan almost hoping, however, that it would be never. She knew him too deeply already, had too much power. To welcome her to see that most uncivilized side of him . . . Too much. He wasn’t sure he could survive being known so thoroughly by any one person. It’d feel too much like handing her a knife, inviting her to slit him wide open and handle his most vulnerable organs.
“I’ll keep all the photos,” she said, hefting the albums. “I’ll move them to the den and look at them later. Same as his journals or whatever these are.” She added three battered old notebooks to the pile, their spiral bindings squished and misshapen.
“What can I do?” Duncan asked.
“Um . . . You can clean, I guess. It’s pretty dusty in here. If you strip the bed, I’ll get the laundry started.”
He followed her out of the room, heading to the kitchen when she stopped to move the albums into a bookshelf. She’d left his bucket and gloves on the floor by the door, and he filled the former with hot water and found rags beneath the sink.
He stripped the bed and remade it with spare sheets Raina gave him, old, pilled flannel with an awful pattern of autumn leaves, but he was too weary of his own judgments to care. He turned his energies to the cleaning.
The room was dusty, but with every swipe of damp cotton, and every stripe of clean wall or wood they revealed, he felt the calm coming on. All the aggression he’d been feeling toward Raina—anger and attraction alike—dulled under the influence of the act.
He cleaned for what felt like half an hour, but as always, the act altered time. When he next checked his phone, he realized he’d been working for three times that long. His fingers were wrinkled, grime packed under his nails. He had aches and pains he hadn’t registered, and his eyes stung from the dust. He stood from where he’d been wiping down the baseboards, and surveyed the progress.
Better.
Not perfect, but a great improvement. He had to thank his compulsions at moments like this. Cheaper and more productive than the pills, and just as mood-altering.
He’d tackle the bathroom next, he decided, eager to poke through Raina’s cabinets—a more subtle version of the snooping she’d undertaken when she barged into his motel room this morning. Fair was fair. She’d seen inside him, against his will. She owed him a few secrets of her own. And when she went down to babysit the bar, he’d most definitely be stealing a good long snoop through her bedroom.
But as he carried the bucket and rags into the den, the sight of her banished that righteousness. She was curled at the corner of the couch, the window behind her making her hair burn bright auburn at the edges. One of her dad’s notebooks was on her thighs, and her brow was furrowed, gaze scanning rapidly.
Peering into the shadows of one’s bathroom was one thing. Reading a dead loved one’s journal was quite another beast. Duncan knew that for a fact.
The moment it had become clear that his kind foster mother’s stroke was going to send Duncan away, he stole her bedside diary. He had it locked in his wall safe in San Diego, though he hadn’t read it in years. He didn’t need to—he’d memorized every fact he could glean about her from those two hundred twenty-nine handwritten pages. Turned her assessments of him into commandments, striving to embody the things she’d praised. Hardworking. Smart. So eager for a job. I daresay he’s going to go places, this one, if he takes enough pride in himself. So preoccupied with order and fairness . . . With a thicker skin and a respectable accent, he could make a fine lawyer someday.
She’d seen something in him. Mapped out a path for him to follow with her words, a recipe that might make people like him, as she’d liked him. She’d wanted him. He’d done just as she’d prescribed. Thickened his skin, refined his accent, taken pride in himself. She’d been right—he had gone places. He was as alone as he’d been as a child, but he liked to imagine she’d be impressed with him nonetheless.
What had Raina’s father hoped for her, he had to wonder, and was it spelled out on the pages she held?
“What have you got there?”
Her eyes kept scanning, taking in line after line after line before she finally replied, “It’s a journal. Sort of.”
“Personal?”
“Yes. And no. Business plans, for the bar.”
That place had a business plan? He moved to sit by her, approaching slowly and giving her plenty of time to tell him to fuck off.
“May I see?” he asked, scooting closer.
After a minute, she brought her feet to the floor and rested the book on their touching thighs. Duncan fought to smother the fire that contact roused, focusing on the page.
There were drawings, as well as lists and notes. Business plan? No. More a journal of the man’s hopes and dreams. He’d sketched floor plans in a steady, elegant hand, making Duncan wonder if Raina had inherited her artistic side from him . . . and curious for the first time to see some of her tattoo work.
“Looks about right,” Duncan said, meaning the floor plan. Same horseshoe layout of the bar, and the pool table and jukebox were right where her dad had meant them to be.
Raina turned a page, and the spread had several magazine and catalog scraps taped to it. The furniture and fixtures pictured were outdated, but handsome. Far nicer than what Benji’s currently boasted. He pointed to an image of finely lathed spindles that created a lattice around the top of a bar, stained a dark, lustrous brown. “Those are quite nice.”
“And this,” she said, their fingers nearly touching as she tapped another photo. It pictured recessed shelving, backlit to illuminate rows of liquor bottles. “Kind of eighties, but I like the general idea.”
“Indeed.”
“There’s pages of this. Pictures he liked, budgets he’d sketched out for stuff—mostly stuff I’ve never seen downstairs.”
“A wish list?”
She shook her head. “Plans. To-do lists, but they’re all dated in the months before I got dumped on his doorstep. Look, here’s when it happened—December third. I was born December first, we’re pretty sure.” She turned to the dated page, to a single entry, on a single line.
December 3. Going to need to rethink the mahogany.
He glanced up to find her smiling faintly, then looked back to the page. December fourth’s entry was a far different sort of list, in a far messier, more frantic hand.
Things we need: crib, car seat, diapers!!! stroller, formula, powder? lotion? birth certificate?? Must talk to Janine.
“Who’s Janine?” he asked.
“Janine Wasco. She and her husband own the drugstore—though it’s only her now. I can just see my dad running in there with me, like, wrapped in a tablecloth or stuck in a picnic basket or something, asking her what he needed to keep me alive. She has five kids—she’d have set him straight.”
“The poor bastard. I can only imagine what a demanding little terror you must have been.”
She elbowed him for that. “Anyhow, that’s where all the interior decorating clippings end. Look.” She turned a page, then another, another, each looking much the same—primitive spreadsheets of projected bills and income.
“He wanted so much more than he ever accomplished downstairs. He’d planned to put a kitchen in the back. I never knew that. He even made notes about what the menu would look like. Curlicues and all.”
Duncan tried to gauge her expression, but her sadness was a flat, unreadable expanse. He angled for clues to how she felt about it all, offering, “I doubt he’s ever regretted trading his dreams of a fine dining establishment for fatherhood and a slightly more colorful bar.”
“He never made me think Benji’s wasn’t exactly what he’d wanted it to be . . . But to see it all here, in ink on paper. Everything he’d imagined, and how little of it he actually got to realize.”
“Change is coming,” Duncan said gently, just as Astrid leaped onto the next cushion to assert herself into the scene. “Property scouts will be here soon. There’s no reason to think perhaps you couldn’t partner with one of them, find some middle ground between their business model and maybe achieving a few of your father’s original goals.”
