Page 95 of Goose

Ally

Aweek had passed since our bank job, and the situation with Cash hadn’t changed. I’d given him his wallet back, claiming that he’d dropped it in the back seat of the SUV. I didn’t expect the gesture to change anything, but I hoped my continued existence would prompt him to slowly begin treating me with respect.

I wasn’t so lucky. Nothing had changed yet, anyway. Although I tried not to express my frustrations around the other men, Goose knew how I felt. Talking about it in bed on a Sunday morning would ensure I could make it through another week without doing or saying anything I’d later regret.

I rolled to my side. “There’s a difference between respecting someone and treating someone with respect. A person doesn’t have to respect me to treat me respectfully. My problem with Cash is that he does neither. I’ll earn his respect, one of these days. Until then, I wish he’d stop being a dick.”

“I understand the respect thing,” Goose said. “Believe me. I can like someone and not respect them. Hell, I could be friends with them, for that matter, and still not respect them. But I’ll always treat them with respect.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I try to treat everyone respectfully. It’s how I was raised. If someone gives you reason not to respect them, it still doesn’t mean you’re disrespectful toward them. You just walk away. They’re not worthy of your time.”

He grinned a guilty grin. “Thank you.”

“What was that weird smile about?”

“You and I are more alike than I thought we were,” he said. “My parents did something shitty and disrespectful. After that, I couldn’t find a way to respect them. I walked away, and never looked back.”

He’d mentioned the day we met that he left home at eighteen and hadn’t talked to his parents since.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “It’s not that big of a deal, though.”

“Obviously it is.”

“No. I mean I’m not still torn up about it. It happened. It’s over. I’ve moved on. I’ve forgiven them. But I’ll never forget what they did.”

“Do you want to tell me what it was?”

He fluffed his pillow and plopped his head down on it. He gazed at the ceiling. After a moment of silence, he began.

“Ghost’s grandfather died when he was two or three. He didn’t have a dad, so his grandmother and mom were his parents. They all lived together. His mom was always playing the good cop role, and his grandmother was more of the bad cop. She was strict on him, but he respected her for it. You know when you’re a kid and you hate authority?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He looked at me. “It wasn’t that way with them. They were both cool. Much better than my parents, that’s for sure. His grandmother baked cookies all the time, and that’d get us over there after school. Half the time we’d all eat dinner there. Five of us. Right before our freshmen year, his grandmother died. Breast cancer. It crushed all of us. She wasn’t just his grandmother, she was our grandmother.”

“That’s sad that she died,” I said. “But it’s sweet you all looked at her that way.”

He nodded and then shifted his gaze to the ceiling. “Well, we made it to our senior year, and his mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. They said it wasn’t that bad, but halfway through our senior year, she died.”

“Oh my gosh,” I gasped. “He didn’t tell me that.”

“He didn’t like talking about it,” he said. “None of us did. We all came from pretty fucked up homes, and not all of us had parents. Good parents, anyway. She was the closest thing to a mother some of us had.”

“That’s so sad. For all of you.”

“So, the funeral.” He let out a sigh. “Cash’s mom went. Tito’s mom went. Baker’s aunt went. Out of respect, of course. My parents said they were coming. The night before the funeral, I’d stayed all night with Ghost. It wasn’t an easy time for him, you know. So, the next day, we went to the funeral. My parents didn’t show. Afterward, I had Ghost drive me by the tavern. They were in there, drunker than a couple of fuckin’ monkeys. They got sloshed instead of paying their respects to a woman we all loved and respected. That was the last straw for me. It was disrespectful, and embarrassing. I decided that was the last time they were going to make me feel like shit, and it was.”

I knew a little about the poor decisions that drunks made. It was time I tell Goose a little more about my father.

“I never reached that point with my father,” I said. “Where I gave up, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

It was my turn to stare at the ceiling for a while.

Admitting the truth wasn’t an easy thing to do. Luckily, there was only one person I trusted with my heart, so there was only one person for me to tell. Considering the story of what his parents had done, it was easy to convince myself that he’d understand.