Page 56 of Badd Daddy

Bast was sipping beer from a pint glass, and slammed the last half of it so fast he nearly choked, and then slammed the glass down on the bar hard enough to crack it. “You’re tellin’ me our mom slept with you…andour dad?”

I shrugged. “Who was first, I don’t know. Was she goin’ from one of us to the other? Don’t know that either, not for sure. I want to say no.” I couldn’t look at him, at any of them. “I…all I know for sure is me and her spent just about every single day together for three months.”

“What changed?” Brock asked. “What happened?”

“Liam…noticed. Saw us getting closer. Saw himself getting pushed to the side a little, not being in on jokes. So he cut back his hours at the bar and started seeing her while I was working. He’d get up early and take her to breakfast, or…I dunno. Shit like that.”

“So she was messing around with both of you?” Zane asked, anger tingeing his voice.

I held up both hands palms up. “Told you, I don’t know for sure what was goin’ on with her and Liam. I know that once she and Liam started spending more time together, her and I were over. She still went hiking and stuff with me, but anything physical was over. Which is why I figured she started having feelings for Liam and stopped things with me.” I swallowed hard, staring at my plate. “I want to think the best of her as much as you boys do, but you want the truth, so I’m tellin’ it.”

“Keep going, Uncle Lucas,” Lucian said. “Good or bad, tell it.”

I nodded. “She was tryin’ to balance us both for another month or two. We’d basically moved into Ketchikan by that time, Liam and I living in a little one-room apartment. I dunno where Lena was living, to be honest. She was…she was hard to get to know. Very private. Kept her past locked down tight as a drum. All these years later, I don’t know shit about where she came from, other than I suspect her family life was rough. Brutal, even. But she never let it keep her down. She was…sunny. I dunno how else to put it. She was just…sunny.”

Bast cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it. That’s how I remember her.” He blinked hard, and I watched him dash at his eyes without any hint of embarrassment. “When I think of Mom, I think of sunlight, and…warmth. She was quiet, never raised her voice.”

“She was always humming,” Zane murmured. “I remember that.”

I laughed, nodding. “Yeah. She was. She’d find something to do, knitting or sewing or a crossword or whatever, and she would just hum. Not a melody I ever recognized, just…a constant musical hum.”

Bast tipped his head backward. “Yeah.”

I let out a harsh, fast breath. “So. It started to become obvious to me that she was choosing Liam. More of her time was with him. When the three of us were together, she would sit close to him. Address most of her comments to him. She still talked to me, we were still…friends. But that…magic, I guess, was gone. Whatever we had, it was gone. And I…”

I had to pause for a long time to summon the courage to tell the truth, out loud, for the first time in my life.

Absolute silence.

“I got bitter. Angry.” I clenched my fists, hid them under the bar—tried to hide the shaking. “I started resenting Liam. Even her. I was still in love. She’d chosen him, but my heart hadn’t gotten the message. Things kept going. I started seeing them holding hands, whispering. I got more and more angry, and bitter.”

I glanced at Liv, and her face was a mask of sadness and compassion. I couldn’t figure out why she’d look at me like that now, how she could feel anything for me.

“I, um. I figured I may as well try and move on, you know?” I shook my head. “Caitlin. God, that girl deserved a hell of a lot better than she got from me. I was usin’ her, plain and simple. Relief, you might say. Plus, either revenge, or an attempt to make Lena jealous. To this day I dunno why Caitlin put up with it—she was a smart, beautiful girl, a good person. She had to know what was going on. But she hung around with me for a couple months. Called it goin’ steady, back then, and I guess it sort of did help me stop pining over Lena in an obvious way.” I laughed bitterly, shook my head. “That’s a lie, though. At best, all it did was mask my hurt.”

“You guys ended up in Seattle,” Rome said. “The four of you.”

I nodded. “Yep. All four of us were born-and-bred Alaskans, never been south of Ketchikan, so we decided to take a trip down to Seattle. Just for the weekend, for fun.” I stretched my arms over my head, then dropped my hands onto the bar top. “We ended up staying a week. Had two little rooms in a motel, three doors down from each other. Liam and Lena, and me and Caitlin.”

“Was that hard?” Remington asked.

I nodded again, staring once more at a single spot on the bar, a whorl in the grain. “Fuckin’ agony. Thank god my room wasn’t next to theirs. I knew by then which way the wind was blowin’, what was happening with them behind closed doors. They weren’t crazy with public displays of affection, but it was still obvious they were a couple. I was tryin’ my damndest to pretend I was over her, but…” I rolled my shoulder. “I wanted her. I thought I was the better man for her. I thought…stupid romantic kid that I was; I thought we was meant to be together. That she’d see the error of her ways and be with me, at some point. That there was somethin’ I could do, somethin’ I could say that would make a difference. I knew deep down I was foolin’ myself, but at that age, when you’re that lovestruck, you don’t know jack shit.”

“There’s no convincing a lovesick nineteen-year-old of anything,” Liv said. “There’s no logic powerful enough, no argument convincing enough. The love, or obsession, or infatuation of a nineteen-year-old is an invincible, all-powerful force.”

I laughed bitterly. “Got that right, Liv.”

“I remember what I was like when I was nineteen and lovesick myself…and I’ve got five daughters who have all been through that.”

“The lovesick me was a blind fool, and the king of all dumbasses,” I said. “Things all started boiling up toward the end of the week. Caitlin and I were flaunting things, I guess you could say. And so Liam and Lena started to do the same. I kept seein’ Lena look at me sometimes, sorta hurt. Confused. I don’t know. Just these weird looks when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You said you and Uncle Liam came to blows about it,” Ram said. “Over Lena.”

I nodded. “Yeah, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The week was awful. I was with Caitlin and lovesick over Lena, watching her get cozier and cozier with my brother, watching her look at me like she didn’t know me, like seein’ me with Caitlin was somehow painful for her even though she didn’t want me. I was confused as hell. We went to this park, the four of us. Sat there watching the sun go down, smokin’ dope and sippin’ whiskey from a bottle. One of those rare beautiful sunny days in Seattle, where it’s just…magical. And Liam ended up sittin’ off by himself, and Caitlin went over and talked to him, so that left me and Lena. She sat down with me on this bench. Didn’t say nothin’ for a minute or two. Maybe longer? I don’t know. A long time, anyway. It was an uneasy, tense silence. Like, we both knew there was a fuckin’ world of shit we both needed to talk about, but neither of us wanted to start. Eventually, Lena turned and gave me this look…I knew it was goodbye.

“I remember what she said as clearly as if it was yesterday. ‘Lucas, I know you’re in love with me.’”

Silence.