Sanctuary(74)

"That's not what I meant," Sam said evenly. His nerves were scraped raw, his temper closer to the surface than he liked. He concentrated on not losing it. "I just didn't know you had an interest."

"You don't have a clue what interests me. You don't know what I think, what I want, what I feel. Because that's never interested you."

"Brian Hathaway." Kate's voice snapped as she stepped into the room with Lexy beside her. "Don't you speak to your father in that tone."

"Let the boy have his say." Sam kept his eyes on his son as he set his beer aside. "He's entided."

"He's not entitled to show disrespect."

"Kate." Sam shot her one quelling look, then nodded at Brian. "You got something in your craw, spit it out."

"It would take years, and it wouldn't change a goddamn thing."

Sam moved behind the bar. He wanted that sour mash after all. "Why don't you just get started anyway?" He poured three fingers of Jim Beam in a short glass, then after a brief hesitation, poured a second and slid it down the bar to Brian.

"I don't drink bourbon. Which probably makes me less of a man as well."

Sam felt a dull pain center in his gut and lifted his own glass. "A man's drink of choice is his own business. And you've been till grown for a time now. Why should it matter to you what I think?"

"It took me thirty years to get here," Brian shot back. "Where the hell were you for the last twenty?" The lock he'd put on the questions, and the misery behind them, gave way to frustration and snapped open as though it had been rusted through and just waiting for that last kick. "You walked away, just like she did. Only you were worse because you let us know, every tucking day of our lives, that we didn't matter. We were just incidentals that you dumped on Kate."

War in her eyes, Kate surged forward. "Now you listen to me, Brian William Hathaway-"

"Leave him be," Sam ordered, his voice cold to mask the hot needles pricking at his throat. "Finish it out," he told Brian. "You've got more."

"What difference will it make? Will it make you go back and be there when I was twelve and a couple of outlander kids beat the hell out of me fe)r sport? Or when I was fifteen and sicked up on my first beer? When I was seventeen and scared shitless because I was afraid I'd gotten Molly Brodie pregnant when we lost our virginity together?"

His fists balled at his sides with a rage he hadn't known lived inside him. "You weren't ever there. Kate was. she's the one who mopped up the spills and held my head. she's the one who grounded me when I needed it and taught me to drive and pictured and praised. Never you. Never once. Nong of us needs you now. And if you treated Mama with.

the same selfish disregard, it's no wonder she left."

Sam flinched at that, the first show of emotion during the long stream of bitterness. His hand shook slightly as he reached for his glass again, but before he could speak, Lexy was shouting from the doorway.

Yirby are you doing this? Why are you doing this now? Something's happened to Ginny." Her voice shattered on a sob as she raced into the room. "Something terrible's happened to her, I know it, and all you can do is stand here and say these awful things." Tears streaming, she clamped her hands over her ears as if she could block it all out. "Why can t you leave it alone, just leave it all alone and pretend it doesn't matter?"

"Because it does." Furious that even now she wouldn't stand with him, Brian whirled on her. "Because it does matter that we're a pathetic excuse for a family, that you're running off to New York and trying to replace the hole he put in your life with men. That Jo's made herself sick and that I can't be with a woman without thinking I'll end up pushing her away the way he did Mama. It matters, goddamn it, because there's not one of us who knows how to be happy."

"I know how to be happy." Lexy's voice rose and stumbled as she shouted at him. she wanted to scream out the denial, to make it all a lie. "I'm going to be happy. I'm going to have everything I want."

"What the hell's going on here?" Jo braced a hand on the doorjamb and stared. The raised voices had brought her out of her room, where she'd been trying to nap to make up for the sleep she'd lost worrying over Ginny.

"Brian's hateful. just hateful." On another wild sob, Lexy turned and rushed into Jo's arms.

The shock of that, and the sight of her brother and her father facing each other across the bar like boxers at the bell, had her gaping. Kate stood in the middle, weeping quietly.

"What's happening here?" Jo managed as her head began to throb. "Is it about Ginny?"