“He died because he was at that party, because he was dumb and naive.” There’d been drugs there. Mateo was impressionable, breaking the rules for the first time. He wasn’t like Mina, who tried to be smart when she was doing something dumb. “He overdosed.”
Val’s mouth formed a silent ‘O.’ He furrowed his brow, looking the picture of a man who was considering his next words carefully. “That’s terrible. I wish I’d known about it, about what really happened, back then. It must’ve been terrible to go through alone.”
Mina pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth. His words had set her aching, and she didn’t want to cry. There’d been so much guilt, and he was right. She’d been alone, because she hadn’t had the courage to tell anyone she’d been at that party.
Val’s eyes were soft as he looked at her. “Mina, I didn’t know. You can’t possibly blame me for him dying, can you?”
“You should’ve been there.” She was well aware she sounded childish, but she couldn’t help it. Even now, so many years later, she remembered the raw agony of it, of being alone in her room. It was him she wished for—his strong arms to hold her up while she cried for her friend and tried to convince herself she wasn’t the one who’d killed him. But if Val had been there, if he’d followed through on his promise, if he’d been dependable just once in his life, Mateo would be alive and everything would be fine. She wouldn’t have to carry that dark spot, that heaviness, that even now tugged on her shoulders. “You weren’t there when I needed you.”
He stared at her, conflict in his eyes, but then, he scoffed, looking down. “Yeah. That sounds like me, doesn’t it? All my damn life. Never where I needed to be. Never who I needed to be.”
When he raised his head, there was something twisted in his expression, something desperate in his eyes. “Is there ever any point when I get to say someone needed to be there for me? Not you. Not then. You were just a girl then, but Christ, Mina. Your friend died. That’s horrible. I get that. I hear you. But all I knew was that you were a high school girl with high school problems. I didn’t want you to hurt, but that’s the name of the game sometimes. We all gotta hurt a little bit.
“I didn’t know it was going to get bigger than a disappointment. Everything in my life was so big. Think of what that time was for me. I was trying to figure out how to start a life with nothing.” He gestured with a sharp jab, his hand wide. “So you tell me, huh? What was I supposed to do? And don’t you think once, just once, it’d be nice if there were someone there for me?”
She stared, torn between a desire to yell at him—how dare he take that tone when her friend had died?—and to cry for him. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, unsure what would come out if she tried to speak.
His shoulders slumped, and he sighed, looking away. “I’m sorry,” he said in that flat, broken tone she hated. “I’m sorry for what happened to your friend. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
Old arguments warred in her head. She should’ve been able to depend on him rather than take her friend—a boy who she knew damn well would do anything for her because he was crushing hard—into going with her. He should’ve—
But those were things an immature sixteen-year-old girl, guilty out of her mind, had told herself. She’d chosen to go anyway. She’d chosen to take a boy she knew wasn’t as street-smart as she was.
“It’s not your fault,” she conceded, the words a revelation to herself as much as they were a reassurance to him.
And that raised a lot of questions Mina had been brushing aside for a while—questions she definitely wasn’t ready to think about at 2:30 a.m. after the night she’d had. “I’m going to bed.” She pushed back her chair and left Val staring after her.
Chapter 11
As soon as the waiter walked away, Val held the ice-cold beer to his temple, letting the condensation cool him. He closed his eyes.
Why didn’t life ever make sense? He could deal with life being hard. Making ends meet, working, his relationship with his family—all those things could be difficult. He wasn’t looking for easy, but damn. Wasn’t there a point where he’d just have it figured out? Where he knew what he should be doing? The next step to take? Not forever. Just for a month. A week. Anything.
“You look like a man in need of something much stronger than beer.”
Val peered up at Tuck with a smirk. “You have no idea.”
“Let me guess. Girl problems.”
A high-pitched laugh, almost a giggle, escaped Val before he could stop it. He dug his fists into his eyes and shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start.” He lifted his head again. “Not that you actually asked.”
“No, man.” Tuck pulled the seat across from him out and sat. “Go ahead.”
Val raised a skeptical eyebrow. He opened his mouth to say he was fine, but that wasn’t what came out. “My mom and her husband adopted a little girl when I was twenty-one and she was six.”
Tuck looked perplexed. “Okay.”
“I kissed her last night.”
Tuck’s eyebrows shot up.
“Well, she kissed me first.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“You kissed your sister?” Tuck asked, deadpan.
“No!” Val glared across the table. “She’s not my sister.”
“But your parents adopted her.”
“Dante isn’t my father. And they adopted her as guardians.” This, he knew, was a technicality. While she didn’t think of them as her mother and father, she did think of them as parents.
“Okay.” Tuck furrowed his brow. “Wait. So if she was six when you were twenty-one, what does that make her now?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Okay.” Tuck blinked a couple of times. “So, she’s legal and not your sister.”
“Not my sister. Definitely not my sister.”
“But still your mother’s child.”
Val nodded. “And she’s mad at me.”
“Your mother?”
“No. Mina.” Christ, he didn’t even want to think of what would happen if his mother knew.
“Mina’s your not-sister.”
“Right.”
Tuck nodded slowly. “She’s mad at you. Wait. Why? You said she kissed you first, right?”
“She’s not mad at me about the kissing. Well, at least I don’t think she is. She’s mad at me because I said I would go to a party, didn’t, and then her friend overdosed.”
Tuck stared. “Wait. What?”
Val groaned and slumped down in his seat, running a hand over his eyes. He tiptoed around, but the whole sordid story came out. How he’d been a good-for-nothing teenage hoodlum. How, a couple of months before his eighteenth birthday, he and his hoodlum friend stole a car and ran over his defenseless little brother—that was what he’d been accused of, what he’d been convicted of. He’d been sentenced to prison for attempted murder the day he turned eighteen. He’d been released at twenty-two and gone back to the same home as the little brother he’d been accused of trying to kill, his angry stepfather, his torn mother, and Mina—seven years old, mute, and traumatized.
Maybe that was why they’d bonded. Prison had changed him. He was calmer than when he’d gone in but also smaller somehow. He knew who he didn’t want to be, but he had no idea how to be better. Then there was Mina—a small, sad little girl whose big, scared brown eyes made his heart ache. She needed him the way no one else in the world did. After a year of silence, he’d been the one to get her to start talking again, and she adored him.
“She thought I was awesome. Poor little fool,” Val said with a chuckle. “So what choice did I have, right? I had to try to be the person she saw.”
He’d found a cheesy retail job that would hire felons, and he’d gone back to school. Little Mina gave him a sense of purpose. She’d needed him to be her friend and her voice. He understood her in a way Cora and Dante didn’t. “Things were okay for a few years. I moved out of
that awkward house. I had a tiny, crappy place of my own.” He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “And then I went home with a woman one night. I didn’t see her for three weeks afterward until she showed up at my job and told me she was pregnant.”
“Fuuuuuck,” Tuck hissed under his breath.
“Yeah, they say that’s how these things happen.”
Because he was on a roll, Val went ahead and told the watered-down version of that mess too. Sure. Why not? He got the feeling Tuck liked him, like they were close to becoming friends, which was a weird thought for Val. He may as well get this part over with. If Tuck didn’t think he was an asshole for getting sent up for the attempted murder of his little brother, then surely abandoning his kid would do it.
“Your kid’s mom is an asshole,” Tuck said when he finished.
Val stared. “What? Really?”
“Of course. What’d she even bother telling you for if she didn’t want you around? She was trying to stay on her moral high horse.” Tuck shook his head, looking disgusted. “A lot of guys would’ve wanted to stay away, but you ran yourself into the ground trying to do what was right, trying to love your kid.”
“I… Yeah.” He blinked, trying to figure out the look on Tuck’s face. It was an open, sympathetic expression. At least, that was what it looked like to Val. He kept trying to find derision on the other man’s face and kept coming up empty.
So he finished his story, telling Tuck about his antagonistic stepfather; his know-it-all, holier-than-thou little brother; his disappointed mother; his meager, go-nowhere job; and Mina—confusing Mina and how he knew she was in trouble. He knew she was into something bad, but hell if he knew what to do about that.
Hell if he knew what to do about any of it. “I keep telling people I’ll figure it out, but the list of things just keeps getting bigger.” Val rubbed the back of his neck. Just talking about it made him so tired. He shrugged. “Well, whatever. At least I figured out why the hell she’s so pissed at me. That’s one thing.” Sure, it had been replaced by wondering what the heck that kiss had been about, but whatever.
“Jay-sus.” Tuck sat back in his seat and stared at Val. “You’re right. There’s not enough beer in the world for a story like that. How are you not an alcoholic?”
Val scoffed. “I probably got genetics to thank for that. Or dumb luck, which is the only kind of luck I have.”
Tuck hummed. He had a weird look on his face now, all scrunched up like he was concentrating on something. “You okay?” Val asked.
“Am I okay?” Tuck laughed. “Yeah, brother. I’m fine. I mean, up until I sat down here, I thought I was having a bad day because my regular delivery guy bailed on me and I can’t sell glazed carrots tonight. And trust me when I say people come in here for the glazed carrots. My awesome vegetable sides are how I get the vegetarian crowd into a BBQ restaurant.”
Tuck shook his head and leaned forward over the table. “Listen, I know we don’t know each other that well, so I don’t know how this is going to sound. I got good intentions, but my momma has a few choice words to say about intentions. You know what I’m saying?”
“Story of my life.” Val waved a hand, indicating the other man should continue.
“Here’s the thing. The restaurant industry isn’t bad for ex-cons.”
Val straightened up in surprise, but Tuck held a hand up. “Hear me out. It’s true. Restaurants have a high turnover rate.”
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate where you’re going with this, but I don’t have the patience to be a waiter. People are dicks, and I have a smart mouth.” Val shrugged. “Works out okay at the gas station. The most you get is some asshat complaining about the price of his cigs. Maybe I have to chase off some kids who think they’re going to slip a fake ID past me. I can deal with that, because I’m allowed to be a bit of a dick back. I couldn’t do that in a restaurant.”
“There’s plenty going on behind the scenes.”
“You mean like a busser or something?”
Tuck shook his head. “I don’t need a busboy right now. How do you feel about cooking?”
Val blinked, sure he’d misunderstood. “What?”
“I need a prep cook.”
“A what?” He knew he sounded spaced out, but damn. What the hell was this guy going on about?
“There’s a pecking order in the kitchen. Several levels of chefs. Prep cook is at the low level. It’s a whole lot of chopping and dicing. When it gets down to crunch time, the real chefs don’t have time to cut up the veggies, and that’s where a prep cook starts. Onions, carrots, celery—that kind of thing. You’d have to keep the bins filled so all the line cooks have to do is grab what they need and toss it in the pan.” Tuck tilted his head. “So what do you think?”
Val laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Are you offering me a job as a cook?”
“That’s the idea.”
“But that’s nuts. Don’t you have to have some kind of training? They have schools for that kind of thing.”
“Sure. No one’s saying you could walk onto a job as head chef, but that’s not what I’m offering. All lower-level chefs really do is follow instructions.
“Look, I won’t lie to you. It’s not an easy job by any stretch of the imagination. The only skill you need at the bottom is the ability to follow instructions, stay focused, and keep a consistent quality in the work.” He gestured around them at the busy restaurant. “All this has to look good and appetizing to keep people coming back.
“But if you keep up, you move up. Simple as that. If one of my line cooks leaves nine months from now, there you are. And on and on. Not to mention, the restaurant industry’s a pretty buddy-buddy business, which is why it’s good for ex-cons. You get to know the others, have each other’s back, and work well, and then when one of them moves up and out to bigger and better things, they’re more likely to take you with them, you know?” Tuck shook his head ruefully. “I had one of my people get a head chef position at a swanky joint after five years of being with me. He took all my line cooks and my saucier. But it’s cool, man. I was happy to see it.”
Val stared. It still wasn’t clicking. There was a catch. There had to be. “And you’re just going to let me walk into this whole thing?
Tuck shrugged. “It’s like anything else. You’re either going to sink or swim. Like I said, it’s not easy.”
“But… Why?”
Another shrug. “Because I want to. Because I can’t do anything about your family or your girl, but I can do this. It’s no risk for me. It’s not like I’m a stranger to replacing people who don’t work out around here. That’s the name of the game.”
His expression softened. “Look, a million years ago, you fucked up. You fucked up really bad, which is kind of what seventeen-year-old kids are good at. My sister goes off on this kind of thing all the time. Every time she sees something about a kid being tried as an adult, she starts yelling at the TV. She says that our brains are still developing well into our twenties, right? And sure, a teenage kid knows right from wrong, but there’s this disconnect on things as final as death.”
He waved a hand. “Anyway. I’m not saying there shouldn’t have been any repercussions, but I think you’ve paid enough for something your teenage-self did, even if it was attempted murder.”
“I didn’t—” Val pressed his lips together with a grimace. He had this urge for Tuck to like him, to not believe he could do something like that, even if he had been a stupid kid, but what was the point? What Val said had never mattered before, and it wasn’t going to matter now.
He blew out a slow breath, considering. “This is, uh…” He was dismayed to find his voice was husky and his throat tight. He forced himself to take a calming breath and look Tuck in the eyes like a man. “This is a big thing you’re doing. A break is…” He huffed. “I don’t get a lot of breaks, and I feel like a tool for asking a favor, but you know, crappy as it is, I have a job right now. If I quit and f
igure out I can’t handle being a cook or whatever after the fact, I’m screwed.”
Tuck nodded. “Yeah. When you have a day off, we’ll take you on a trial run. Give me a day, and I’ll teach you what to do. Then see how you handle the lunch rush—it’s not as bad as dinner—and you can give me a final answer.”
Val grinned. He ducked his head, laughing. This had to be some kind of dream. When he looked up, he offered Tuck his hand. The other man put his hand in his, and they shook on it.
What was it his annoying little brother had said? Getting ahead was more about who you know? Well, damned if he wasn’t right about that one.
Chapter 12
Living with three other people, especially given the hours she and Val worked, Mina rarely had the house to herself. But Dante had convinced Momma Cora to go out for dinner and a movie. Who knew where Val was? She thought he had the night off, but what did she know?
Anyway, it was better—better to be alone in the quiet for a while. It had been a long time since she’d had quiet.
Then again, the quiet was so damn loud.
There was this weird tingle under her skin. She was restless, but she didn’t know what to do about it. Movies didn’t hold her attention. Neither did her laptop. She got up and paced. She stood still and rubbed the back of her neck, massaging her fingers into flesh.
What would’ve been good right about then was a night out, but she had to be back here in this town, where Celeste was the only friend she hadn’t fallen out of touch with. Celeste was working. Mina could’ve been working, but the idea gave her the creeps.
It really was an awful lot of money, though.
She thought about the interview she’d been on earlier that day. It was another fruitless attempt. Dante would say not to be so pessimistic, but Mina only had her experience to work off of. These interviews hadn’t worked out so far; there was no reason to think anything would come of it.
She also didn’t want to think about how that was kind of a relief.
Never Enough Page 8
