Page 54 of Badd Daddy
Eva blushed, smiling at me. “You’re sweet.”
I shrugged. “She was wearin’ a short pleated white skirt and a red sweater, black boots with weird little heels.” I was losing myself in the memory, now. “She, uh. Damn, she was so beautiful. Filled out that sweater like nobody’s business, and the skirt was just short enough to make you think you might get a glimpse of somethin’. Never did, but you’d hope and look and hope. She stopped in front of the cafe for some reason—and that was the moment it all started. She was standing just a couple inches away on the other side of the window, and she looked at us. Now, this part was the subject of argument between Liam and I for fuckin’years, but Liam ain’t here no more so you’re getting my side of it. She looked at me first. She stopped, saw us, and her eyes went right to me. Then to Liam, and then back and forth between us. And let me tell ya, those big green eyes went wide, and she smiled, and god, right then, she was smitten. With me, with Liam, who the fuck knows anymore? We was twins, and she liked what she saw.”
“Sounds like the start of a Hallmark movie,” Claire said.
I scoffed. “Coulda been, I bet. Not that I’ve seen a Hallmark movie, mind you.” I rolled a hand. “So, she came in, pulled a chair up at the end of our booth, and that’s how the friendship started. For us, she might as well have been a fuckin’ movie star. She was from the city, drop-dead gorgeous, funny, easy to talk to, and she seemed to like us, despite us bein’ the kinda boys we were—no manners, uneducated, all kinds of rough around the edges, basically.” I finished the food on my plate and pushed it back, sipped at my water. “We kept finding all kinds of excuses to come down here, then, and we always managed to track her down. Then, one day, she talked us into letting her follow us up to the cabin.”
“From the way you’ve described things, it sounds like that took quite a lot of courage on her part,” Liv says.
I laughed. “She was a city girl, through and through. If you could call Ketchikan a city at that time but, to us, it was the big city. Never been anywhere else up to that point, so this wasit.” I shook my head. “That was Lena, though. Absolutely fearless. Barely knew us at that point, but she jumped in the truck and sat between us all the way back to the cabin. Didn’t even blink at how…rustic it was, and just to be clear, rustic is bein’ generous. Dad and Gramps were shocked as hell when she climbed outta that cab, lemme tell ya. Coulda knocked Dad over with a feather.”
“I bet,” Bast said. “What was she like? Mom, I mean.”
I sighed. “Your mother was…one of a kind. Ballsy as hell, but all woman. I mean, when she got outta that truck, Dad was standing there in denim overalls and no shirt, a shotgun in one hand, a hatchet hangin’ from his belt, a dead rabbit in the other hand that was drippin blood all over his bare feet. Keep in mind, Dad was a monster of a man. Ain’t no Badd man ever been small, but Dad was probably the biggest. Stood, oh, six-six, I’d say, and was damn near four hundred pounds of mostly muscle, though by that point he’d put on some weight around the gut. Big ol’ beard, black as night, gone to gray in spots. Scary motherfucker, I’ll tell you, even to grown men. He’d go with us to town on rare occasions, and grown-ass men would cross to the other side of the road.” I couldn’t help a laugh. “Gramps wasn’t any less intimidating—he was like Dad, only older. Not quite as burly, but hard as nails and cold as ice. One of those old guys who you just knew, just lookin’ at him, that he’d seen some shit and done some shit. He had those old soldier eyes, the permanent thousand-yard stare, even fifty-some years after the war.” I shook my head. “And Lena, she just walked right up to ’em and shook their hands, never minding the blood on Dad’s hand.”
All was silent and absolutely still as I told my story. I felt everyone around me, clustered, hanging on each other, sitting on stools and chairs, and even perched on the bar. Gramps had been a storyteller, taught us history and the Bible by telling stories to us, so I guess I’d learned the art of drawing out a story from him.
I mused in silence for a minute, maybe two, and no one spoke, waiting.
“Get to the good shit, already,” Zane growled.
I gave him a hard glare. “There is nogood shit, punk. We’re talking about history that turned me into a reclusive alcoholic, and resulted in my twin brother and I not speaking for the last forty years of his life.” I couldn’t help a snarl. “So have a little fuckin’ respect, would you?”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Just impatient. I’ve waited my whole damn life to hear this.”
I frowned. “What do you mean? You didn’t know I existed until what, almost three years ago?”
“Whatever happened with you and him affected him, too. He turned to drinking after Mom died, but he was a pretty heavy drinker before that—Mom’s death just made him drink himself to death.” This was Bast answering. “He wrestled with somethin’, our whole lives. He’d sit out there,” he pointed at the door, “on a chair, a bottle of Jack in one hand and a rocks glass in the other, staring out at the water, drinking, clearly thinking hard about something. Never would talk about what, though.” He shrugged. “Now we understand…or at least, we’re beginning to.”
I nodded. “Alcoholism runs in the family, sad to say. Dad and Gramps, both. Great-Gramps too, but I didn’t really know him. I just remember Dad talking about Gramps in not exactly glowing terms. So all of you boys best keep a weather eye on your drinking. Just be aware, you got it in your blood to end up like me, if you ain’t careful.” I noticed the way Dru glanced at Sebastian, and gestured. “You have thoughts on that, don’t you, sweetheart?”
She palmed her belly with both hands, rubbing gently in circles, her eyes on her husband, loving and affectionate in a way that made my heart twist. “He gets…maudlin, sometimes, and turns to drinking to deal with it.”
“Don’t know what the fuck maudlin means,” I murmured.
“Means I get stuck thinking about things, and sometimes a little depressed.” Bast crossed his big tattooed arms over his chest. “Shit. If I say I don’t have a problem, it’ll sound like denial.”
Zane rumbled wordlessly, pointing at me with a thick finger. “We ain’t talking about you, Bast, we’re talking about Uncle Lucas.”
I sighed, nodded, scraping at the grains of the wood bar top. “Fair enough.” I fiddled with the fork. “Forgot where I was.”
“You were telling us what Mom was like when she was young,” Lucian said. “I’m very curious. I barely remember her.”
Lucian was the quiet one, from what I knew. His woman, wife, girlfriend, live-in significant other, whatever—I wasn’t sure—was an exotic-looking young thing with dark caramel skin and dreadlocked hair and stunning eyes. She was hanging on his shoulder, nuzzling into his neck as he sat sideways on the stool to face me, his arm slung low around her hips in a casually possessive curl.
I rubbed my jaw. “Lena…god, how do you describe an entire person?”
I felt my gut twisting, my heart hammering, my entire being reacting with a physical, mental, and emotional wrench in trying to recall Lena for all these family members, when I’ve spent every day of the last forty years trying to forget her.
“She was…” I glanced at Liv, an apology in my eyes.
She rubbed my shoulder. “Go on.”
“She was magical. No other way to put it.” I scraped my hand through my hair. “It ain’t a physical thing, either. I mean, sure, she was damned beautiful. But you kinda stop seeing that after a while, you know? That ain’t quite accurate because you don’t stopseeinghow beautiful someone is, you just…get used it. She wasn’t someone you could ever take for granted, though. She was smart, smarter than just high school learnin’. She would go to the library every week and check out as many books as they’d let her. She carried around this bag, a big old sack she’d made out of old jeans and flannel shirts and that ugly green canvas the Army uses to make rucks out of. It was always full of stuff—it was more than a purse, it was…I don’t know how to put it. She lived out of it. Didn’t register to Liam or I right off the bat because she was shy and quiet about it. But the fact was she had a terrible home life, and she was basically a runaway. And you know it had to be pretty fuckin’ terrible if she preferred to be at our log cabin, which barely had running water and electricity, rather than her own home.”
Bast, who’d been perched on the same stool as his wife, shot to his feet. “Wait, hold on. Hold on, hold on.”
I blinked at him. “What?”