Page 19
“Don’t be. He was a bastard, and he’ll be missed by no one.” It come harder that I intended, so I soften it. “So, you’ve been looking me up online?”
“Maybe,” she flushes, turning to the simmering pot. “I was curious about you after the night you saved me from the drunk. There isn’t much about you. Not like your brother.”
“Hmm,” I hum, tucking my hands in my pockets. “Pope’ been the apparent heir since we were old enough to walk. My father loved to show him off. That’s why he’s everywhere.”
She turns to me, and I read the pity in her eyes. I don’t care much for it, except from her. “Are you two close?”
“We were when we were younger. Grew apart. We’re working on it.” I hear myself sigh. “We’ll get there, eventually.”
“Why did your father favor him? Is it okay to ask that?”
It isn’t something I want to talk about. But she’s standing in a kitchen on her only day off cooking a meal and looking at me like the answer matters. I find I can’t shut her out.
“We’re fraternal. Pope favors our father—same jaw, same build, same way of filling a doorway. I look more like our mother.” I shrug. “She left him when we were five. Couldn’t take any more of him. He never forgave me for having her features.”
She goes very still at the stove.
“He said that to you?”
“He said worse than that.” I hear the flatness in my own voice and let it stand. “His favorite was that if we hadn’t been born twins, he’d have assumed she whored herself to somebody else and passed me off.”
She ladles a little soup, blowing on it, and brings it me without a word. I lean in for a bite, groaning at the taste.
“Good?” she asks, her eyes smiling. She knows it’s good and doesn’t need to ask.
“Good doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“Hmm, it could still use a few more minutes.” She sets the lid back on the pot and leans against. Didn’t the counter across from mine, arms folded on her chest. “I never met my dad. Don’t even know what he looks like. I don’t know which is worse—knowing yours and hating his guts, or never meeting yours at all.”
“Both are horrible, in their own ways.”
“I guess you’re right.” She laughs a little. “My mom was working as a waitress at a bar restaurant in her early twenties. The night I was conceived, she was off shift, hanging out with her friends, drinking and dancing. And this charming man came up to her as drunk as she was. Navy uniform. In her Words, she could never resist a man in uniform. They spent one night together, and by morning, he was gone.”
“Did you ever think to look for him?”
When she shakes her head, I offer, “I could help you find him.”
“What for?” She shrugs. “I had my mom and my uncles. I had a family that loved me. There’s no use hunting down a ghost. He has his life, wherever he is, and I have mine.”
“There’s something to be said for that.”
She catches the tone. “For what?”
“For not knowing.” I turn my glass on the counter. “I had a father. Present, every day of my life, and I’d have traded him for a ghost by the time I was fifteen. He entered Pope and me in a boxing tournament that year. Eight matches each and we came out the other end facing one another in the final.”
Her hands have stopped moving.
“We wouldn’t fight. Forfeited the whole thing, both of us, standing in the middle of the ring in front of four hundred people. No winner declared.” I can still hear the crowd turning. “He never forgave that either. Spent the next several weeks working on us. Sowing things. Taking sides in arguments that didn’t need sides. ‘A man has no friend. A man can trust nobody but himself. This bond you two have makes you weak.’”
“Bishop.”
“It took him about six weeks.” I look at her. “There was no ring the second time, no crowd, no rules. Two boys in a yard tearing each other apart with their hands. Rook’s father pulled us off each other, and I’ve never once been sure which one of us he saved.”
What happened to you?” she asks quietly.
“He got what he wanted out of it. Twenty-three years later he was still getting it—three letters left with his lawyer when he died, one each and a third nobody’s opened. Terms attached. Conditions. A last go at putting his sons at each other’s throats from underneath six feet of dirt.”
She doesn’t push. She moves to turn off the stove, then steps in front of me. Her fingers find the buttons on my shirt, and I let out a breath I’ve been holding since I was fifteen years old.
