“Okay. Good, even,” Colin said. “If you’d thrown it in my face the way my kids did, I don’t suppose I would’ve busted you, either. But I wouldn’t’ve wanted to marry you, or I don’t think I would.”
“I sorta figured that out,” Kelly said, quiet still.
“Uh-huh. You’re no dummy.” Colin nodded and made that unhappy noise again. “Darren Pitcavage, though—” He took another sip of scotch, as if to wash the taste of Darren Pitcavage out of his mouth. “My kids aren’t mean. Mm, Vanessa is sometimes, I guess, but she’s snarky mean, not bar-brawl mean. If the chief hadn’t done some fancy talking, there’ve been a couple of times his precious flesh and blood might’ve found out more about the inside of a jail than he ever wanted to know.”
“Ah. Okay. Now I know where you’re coming from,” Kelly said. “This just happened again?”
“Too right it did,” Colin agreed. “There’s a bunch of bars and strip joints on Hesperus up near Braxton Bragg, and Darren thinks it’s cool to hang out in ’em. Maybe he picks up the girls. Maybe he just watches. I dunno. But the people who run those places, they sure know who he is—and who his old man is. Does he get free drinks?”
“Ya think?” Kelly said sarcastically.
“Yeah. Like that. And the bouncers cut him slack. For all I know, some of the girls give him a throw to keep him happy. But not everybody who goes to those joints knows who Lord Darren Pitcavage is.”
“Or cares,” Kelly said.
“Or cares. That’s right,” Colin said. “Some of those guys, they’d want to rack him up good if they did know. This latest fight he got into wasn’t like that. He was drunk, and so was the other fellow. The guy said something, and Darren coldcocked him. He’s got a nasty left hook—he knocked out two teeth and broke another one.”
“Let me guess—they called it self-defense?” Kelly asked.
“Right the first time,” Colin said heavily. “But if that Mexican’d hit Darren, then it would have been assault with intent to maim. Bet your sweet wazoo it would.” He gulped down the second drink.
Kelly reached into the refrigerator—which was, like most people’s these days, half-full of ice to keep things fresh when the power was out. She grabbed some steaks. “Here. I’ll pan-broil these. That’ll help get the taste of today out of your mouth.”
She does know how I work, Colin thought. The power wasn’t on right now, which meant the stove’s fancy electronic brain was useless. But natural gas still flowed when Kelly turned the knob. She started it with a match. Not elegant, but it worked . . . till the gas stopped coming, if it did. When it did.
Marshall must have had some radar that told him when supper was ready. He walked in the front door right when Kelly took the pan off the fire. “Smells good,” he said.
“Sure it does—it’s food, isn’t it?” Colin said. “You can drag up a rock and help us eat it. And you can tell us how your little brother’s doing.” Morbid curiosity? Probably. But he had it, morbid or not. And it gave him and Marshall something to talk about. Fathers whose grown sons lived their own lives understood how important that could be.
The rock in question was a chair at the dining room table. “He’s, like, at the age where everything is no all the time,” Marshall said as he planted his hindquarters on it. “I mean, everything. You want to take a nap? No! You want me to read a book? No! You want to play outside? No! You want to turn into a centipede and crawl up the wall? No!”
“I remember those days,” Colin said, realizing he’d probably see them again himself, at least if he hadn’t started firing blanks. “You all went through ’em. Vanessa especially.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Marshall said with a crooked grin. “Anyway—”
Before he could get to anyway, Kelly broke in: “Did you really ask him if he wanted to turn into a centipede?”
“Sure,” Marshall answered. Colin believed him. His youngest would never set the world on fire when it came to foreign languages, but he was the one who’d translated An elephant is eating the beach into Spanish in high school. He had that surreal turn of thought—or else he was just flaky. He might be cut out to make a writer after all.
“When Vanessa had it worst,” Colin said reminiscently, “I went and asked her if she wanted a cookie. ‘No!’ she said, the way she did for everything for a couple of months there. Then what I said sank in, and she started to bawl.” After more than a quarter of a century, he could call up the expression of absolute dismay that had filled her face.