by Erin Huss
"About you and Al? No."
She frowned. "Not even Mac? You girls tell each other everything."
Criticism laced her voice along with censure and jealousy. Mom didn't approve with the open and honest communication that Mac and I shared. Yet for some reason I doubted her attitude was just about my relationship with my daughter. Maybe it was my imagination, but sometimes I got the feeling that Mom wished she and I were as close as Mac and I.
What she didn't understand was that sort of closeness can't be manufactured or forced. It came from shared experiences, similar interests, and total acceptance. Three things Agnes and I sorely lacked.
"No, I didn't tell Mac. It's your secret to tell." That was a cop-out. In reality I wasn't sure how to tell my daughter the truth. Should I just come home carrying pizza and wings, drop them on the counter, put a hand on her shoulder, and say, Hey Mac, you'll never guess, but your grams shtupped her future brother-in-law and then passed me off as your grandfather's for my entire life. Pizza?
"What about Hunter?" Agnes probed like an alien seeking the prostate of an abductee.
It was an effort not to roll my eyes. "Mom, when I said no one, I meant no one. Not Hunter or Mac, not even the freaking puggle, all right?"
She nodded as though taking it all in while continuing to sort the sweeteners. There were four more sugar packets than the rest. She frowned at the outcome and then separated them by color before stowing them back in the plastic container, making sure all the labels faced the same direction.
We sat in silence until Marge returned with our food. The plates were hotter than the pancakes, but I dug in anyway. "So, how did you two crazy kids meet?"
She shot me a startled look. "Albert and I? We took a photography class together."
"I didn't know you were interested in photography." Just one of the many things I hadn't known about the woman who'd given me life. Agnes hid her true self behind a mess of tasks. She could never sit still, always needed to be doing something, accomplishing something. It was an admirable trait, but it hadn't made her happy.
She reached for her mug filled with green tea. "I wasn't very good. Didn't have what they call the eye. Albert was amazing though. He helped me get through that class."
"So that's what the kids are calling it these days." I waggled my eyebrows at her.
She sent me a sour look and then spooned up some grapefruit. "It wasn't like that. We were just friendly."
I took a bite of bacon. "Hate to break it to you, Mom, but you don't get knocked up from being 'just friendly.'"
"Lower your voice," she hissed.
An exasperated noise escaped. "Mom, no one cares, okay? Do me a favor and stop worrying about who knows what about some long-ago nail and bail."
"You can be so crude," she muttered and reached for the sugar dish again.
I slid it away from her, forcing her to make eye contact. "Look, I got up at oh-dark-hundred and spent way too much time with my liver pressed into my spleen for my comfort just to get to this moment. Now it's your turn. Talk to me. Tell me what happened. How did you and Uncle Al go from just friends to making a baby?"
She looked away, tears brimming in her eyes. A dark thought surfaced. I put my hand over hers. "Tell me it was consensual."
She blinked in rapid succession. "Consensual?"
My throat closed up. The lukewarm pancakes sat like lumps of lead in my stomach. "He didn't rape you, did he?"
She snatched her hand away as though I'd burned her. "No, of course not!"
I let out a breath, feeling a little light-headed. "Okay. So, you two were friends and…?"
Her lips parted just as my phone belted out Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You."
"You'd better get that." Agnes appeared relieved, like the tune gave her a pass.
I ignored the phone, more accurately the person to whom I'd ascribed that ringtone. Kelly and I both had some serious daddy issues to work through. "I'm on vacation. Mac's in school. Anything else can wait. Come on, Mom. They say confession is good for the soul."
"You already know what you need to." She attacked her grapefruit with a vicious stab of her spoon.
Deep in my pocket the phone stilled. "I don't, actually. I have no idea how you went from being just friends with Uncle Al to knocked up with yours truly and married to his brother. And I'd kinda like to hear your side of it before I see the Captain again."
She blinked. "You aren't going to talk to him about this, are you?"
I let out a breath. "Mom, he already knows, right? I mean, I guess that's why he's been freezing me out for months now?" Not that he'd ever needed a reason before. If my relationship with my mother was strained, the one I had with my father could barely be termed civil.
"Yes, but…" Agnes shook her head. "I don't want…that is to say…you shouldn't…" She looked to be on the verge of a full-blown panic attack, eyes wild, unable to complete a sentence.
The phone started up again, now the more neutral ringtone for people who didn't have the honor of a theme song.
"It might be the school," she said on a sigh. "It might be about Mac."
With my thoughts running along the same track, I extracted the phone, saw an unfamiliar local number, and slid the green answer bar over. "This is Mackenzie."
"It's me." The Captain's voice was all business.
"Hi," I said, the Dad catching in my throat, like the word had a fishhook embedded in it. "Is everything all right?"
"No. I need your help." His tone was clipped, just slightly accented with Boston, familiar yet somehow strange.
"You need my help?" First time for everything. I snuck a look at Mom. Across the table Agnes had abandoned her grapefruit and started shredding a paper napkin into even strips. She lay one horizontally, one vertically.
Over the phone, the Captain's gruff voice corrected, "Not for me. It's for a friend of mine. He's a business owner in need of a private investigator."
"And you thought of me?" I knew for a fact that dear old Dad had tried to hire Mac's father to tail my mother a few months ago, so he wasn't above looking in the yellow pages. "Unfortunately, I can only work officially through the attorney who pays me, but maybe we could work something out?"
"I'll text you the address. Meet us there at five o'clock."
I could have said no. In fact, if Agnes hadn't been sitting right across the table from me doing her crosshatch pattern, I probably would have told him to keep hunting for a PI. I couldn't officially investigate without Len's A-okay. But the man I'd thought of as my father, who'd been my father—gruff and absent but still a looming presence in my life—was asking for help. And looking at Mom, hearing about what little she'd revealed about her relationship with Uncle Al, I wanted to hear the Captain's side.
"I'll be there."
"Thank you." He disconnected. Not one on long good-byes, my father.
Or was it uncle? My life was so messed up.
"Who was that?" Mom practically pounced on me the second I set the phone down. "New case?"
"Not officially. Just a friend who needs a favor." I crunched on the last piece of bacon and tried my best to look innocent.
Her brows knit. "What friend? You don't have any friends."
"Gee, thanks, Mom." I rolled my eyes.
"I mean, I know all of your friends. So, who is it?" She leaned forward, shredded napkin lying in a tidy pattern by her plate.
I realized something as I stared into her avid gaze. My mother would glom onto any subject to avoid talking about her and Uncle Al. Her nerves were raw, her obsessive-compulsive behavior worse than usual. She was always persnickety, but just since she'd shown up at my apartment, I'd notice her sorting and counting as well as critiquing. Was the change in her behavior because of my interest in the past? She said they were friends and whatever had happened—my mind veered away at the thought of my mother in bed with anyone—had been consensual. So why not talk about it?
One thing was clear—the answers I was ready to receive were not going
to be forthcoming. We could've sat there all damn day, me doing my level best to pry information out of her and her guarding each kernel of truth like a griffin hoarding treasure.
Tension crept along the back of my neck. I was fresh from a two-day-long stakeout investigating a case of illegal dumping. By the time I'd gotten the evidence of a shady doctor's office disposing of biohazard bags in an abandoned building, my eyes were gritty from lack of sleep, and my whole body ached from sitting still for so long. I wanted to hang with my kid and spend some quality time with my boyfriend, not dredge up the past for hours on end with my tight-lipped maternal unit.
"Look, Mom—" I began.
But she didn't let me finish. "Oh, I forgot. I promised Nona I'd meet her at eleven thirty. We're hosting a card game tonight, and we need to go over a menu."
"Okay." Relief filled me, and I waved down Marge and asked for the check.
"It's on me," my mother insisted.
I smiled tightly and finished my coffee. "Whatever you say, Mom."
* * *
The building Uncle Al had left my mother and me was a brick two-story located in East Boston. Originally it had been a single-family home, but sometime after the Second World War, the building had been converted into four separate apartment units. Mac and I occupied the largest one, the only two-bedroom. My main squeeze, Detective Hunter Black, lived in the other ground-floor unit. Nona, our friendly neighborhood Yenta, perched above us, and Agnes's place was directly above Hunter's. We all shared the basement storage and laundry facilities as well as the sizeable backyard.
It caught me at odd moments, that I was a thirty-something living with my mother. At least we didn't need to share a bathroom or a fridge, but she was always nearby. The knowledge never left me, like an itch between the shoulder blades that I couldn't quite reach. Especially when we would get frisky at Hunter's place. The knowledge that my mother was asleep directly overhead… If I ever heard her up there with a man, I might never recover. Good thing the prewar construction was sturdy and semisoundproof.
"So, how was yoga?" Mac didn't even try to keep a straight face as she barreled through the door.
"Less pleasant than waterboarding." I stood from my bent position over the refrigerator, where I'd been studiously investigating its contents. The prospects for dinner were grim. "I didn't expect you back so soon."
Neither did Snickers, Uncle Al's part pug, part beagle, all Mac devotee. She leapt up from her spot at the couch, curly tail wagging in greeting for her favorite human.
I was just happy when she didn't growl at me.
She shrugged and snatched an apple from the fruit bowl. "Pete's mom was having a meltdown, and I thought it best to make myself scarce."
"I have taught you well, grasshopper." Then I blinked and pointed at the copper bowl filled to the brim with unexpired produce. "Where did that come from?"
"The produce was from Nona. She dropped it off last night on her way back from the market."
Part of our upstairs neighbor's ongoing mission was to see that the girls ate right. She wasn't a fan of our all-takeout-all-the-time lifestyle. "And the bowl?"
Mac washed the apple and dried it with a paper towel. "Basement storage. Uncle Al had some epic stuff."
A chill went through me. "What were you doing in the basement?" The words came out harsher than I'd intended.
She paused, the apple an inch from her lips, and then scowled at me. Mac's features are more delicate than mine, her body more waiflike, courtesy of her dad's French contributions to the Anglo-Celtic Taylor genepool. "I was just looking to see if there was any tech I might be able to break down for parts. Why are you so upset?"
"I'm not," I protested.
"Mom." Her tone was flat, her gaze assessing.
I turned back to the fridge, feigning casualness. She could read my expressions as easily as her computer language. "It's just that it's not our stuff. It doesn't seem right to pillage it for spare parts. I didn't know Uncle Al very well."
Or at all.
Mac's infallible logic reared up to punch holes in my half-assed excuse. "Right. But I mean, he left you the building and Helga. You carry his manuscript around in your bag. He's practically your life coach. Do you really think he'd care that we are using his fruit bowl?"
"Probably not." What I couldn't tell her was that this wasn't about the fruit bowl or spare computer parts. My panic was over what she might unearth in the man's personal belongings, the deep dark family secrets, and the lie I'd been shielding her from.
The floor creaked under her weight as she stepped closer to me. "You were so fascinated with him when we first moved in here. What's changed?"
"I've been busy." I stood upright and shut the fridge. Mac would never buy the I've been busy line on its own. Desperate, I fell back on my mother's distraction technique. "Look, we'll go through everything soon. I promise. By the way, the Captain called today."
Her big blue eyes got even bigger. "What did he say?"
"He wants to hire me."
Her jaw dropped. "No way. What for?"
"Not sure. He made it sound like it was for a friend of his, not him directly. I'm meeting up with him at five if you want to tag along."
With Mac riding shotgun, I probably wouldn't have the chance to ask the Captain about Mom and Uncle Al, but it was better than playing twenty questions with her over the loot in the basement and why my attitude to our benefactor had changed.
"If you're sure." Her teeth sank into her lower lip.
"Of course." I didn't have to force the sincere smile at the thought of hanging with my offspring. She's hands down my favorite human.
"Just let me log on real quick. I promised Pete I'd upload the file we'd been working on as soon as I got home. Oh, and I have to let Snickers out." She snatched up her backpack and scurried out of the room, the puggle following in her wake.
I sagged onto one of the barstools. Resentment for my mother and even Uncle Al churned in my stomach. I hated keeping things from Mac. I'd rather do yoga all day every day until the end of time than keep my daughter in the dark. Oversharing has contributed to our bond, and my stomach twisted every time I coughed up another lie or rerouted the conversation.
If this was how Agnes had felt all these years about keeping my parentage from me, it's no wonder our relationship was so strained.
Half an hour later, I parked Helga across the street from a dingy-looking Irish pub on Boston's North End. Someone had painted a cartoon shamrock on the wooden sign that grudgingly proclaimed O'Flannigans. Then, on what appeared to be a poster board directly beneath that, was painted the claim Good Beer! Hot Food! Live Music!
As though the exclamation marks could make the customers more excited to enter the shabby place.
"Huh." Mac studied the grimy windows. "Are you sure this is the right address?"
With my thoughts running along the same line, I pulled up the text message from the Captain then double-checked the faded brass. "339 Liberty Way. Right?"
Mac nodded. "It's not a bad neighborhood. The bakery over there looks awesome. This is a big tourist street. Doesn't seem like Grandpa's type of place. What exactly is your case supposed to be again?"
"I don't have any details. He just said a friend of his needed a PI." Which didn't make sense. As far as private investigators went, I still had much to learn. I didn't even have my license yet, which was why I worked for Len. The only real differences between me and some amateur sleuth who had watched every episode of CSI were my gift for getting people to over-share and the fact that I never said die. Perseverance kept me on a trail long after a reasonable person would have moved on.
She wrinkled her nose. "It looks like he's in need of more than that. Is this place even open? I can't make out any lights."
"One way to find out." I popped the door to Helga then dashed through the freezing drizzle to the grimy front door.
Mac followed close to my heels as we passed from the street to the darker interior of the pub. The firs
t thing I noticed about the interior of O'Flannigans was that it was clean, if cluttered. Every square inch of wall space sported a photograph of a famous Irish figure or oil landscapes of the Emerald Isle. Someone had strung fairy lights up and down behind the L-shaped bar that separated the kitchen from the main dining area. In a case above the cash register sat a framed dollar bill and a sign proclaiming it O'Flannigans first sale, 1919.
"Wow, this place is a century old." Mac scanned the tattered booths that sported duct tape over the torn vinyl seat covers, the scarred wood on the tabletops.
"It looks it," I muttered.
A hand landed on my shoulder. I turned, my boots squeaking on the polished oak floor, and spied the Captain.
"Mackenzie." His face appeared older than the last time I saw him, more haggard. "Thank you for coming."
My head bobbed in acknowledgment. We stared at each other awkwardly, pretty common face time with Dad. Normally I'd make a fresh remark and he'd say something caustic and then get to the point. I don't know what the hell he was waiting for, but my mouth had gone dry, and in a rare occurrence, I didn't know what to say. I'd been angry at him for the way he'd treated Mom after the divorce. Then when I found out the why of it, a new wave of sympathy had opened up for the stern man who wanted everything to make sense. Did he feel like his whole life was a lie? Was looking at me too painful? My smart-aleck attitude had gone dormant. Thank Java I'd brought backup.
"Grandpa." In classic Mac style, she didn't wait for an invitation, just stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his stiff form. Even though she hadn't seen him in six months, to Mac, it didn't matter because family was family.
My father didn't react at first. He wasn't a man who was comfortable with open displays of affection. Yet a soft smile tugged up the corners of his stern mouth. Mac's gift was even more impressive than mine. Where people talked to me, they flocked to her. She naturally put everyone around her at ease. Though she's more comfortable with her tech than with the teeming masses, the kid had a heart of gold.
"You're getting so tall." His tone was gruff yet held a warm note he'd never demonstrated toward me. "Isn't she tall, Mackenzie?"
