Chapter 6
Bennett
“You’re late.”
I looked at my watch. “It’s three minutes after twelve. The 405 had a backup.”
Fanny wagged her crooked, arthritis-stricken finger at me. “Don’t be bringing him back late just because you couldn’t get here on time.”
I bit my tongue, holding back what I really wanted to say in favor of, “Yes, ma’am.”
She squinted at me, seeming unsure whether my response was patronizing or if I was really being respectful. The latter was impossible since you need to have respect for a person in order to show them some.
We stood on the porch of her little house, staring at each other. I looked around her into the window, but the blinds were drawn.
“Is he ready?”
She held out her hand, palm up. I should’ve realized that was the hold up. Digging into my jeans pocket, I pulled out the check, the same payoff I’d given her every first Saturday of the month for eight years so she’d let me spend time with my godson.
She scrutinized it as if I was going to try to rip her off, then tucked it into her bra. My eyes burned from accidentally seeing some wrinkled cleavage as I watched.
She stepped aside. “He’s in his room, punished all morning for having a foul mouth. Better not be getting that language from you.”
Yeah. That’s probably where he gets it. It’s the five hours every other week I get to spend with him that screws him up. Not your drunk-ass fourth or fifth—I’ve lost count—redneck husband who yells shut your fuckin piehole at least twice during my five-minute pick up and drop off.
Lucas’s eyes lit up when I opened the door to his room. He jumped from his bed. “Bennett! You came!”
“Of course I came. I wouldn’t miss our visit. You know that.”
“Grandma said you might not want to spend time with me because I’m rotten.”
That made my blood boil. She had no right to use my visits as a scare tactic.
I sat down on his bed so we were eye to eye. “First, you’re not rotten. Second, I will never stop visiting you. Not for any reason.”
He looked down.
“Lucas?”
I waited until his eyes made their way back to mine. “Not ever. Okay, buddy?”
He nodded his mop-top head, but I wasn’t so sure he believed me.
“Come on. Why don’t we get out of here? We have a big day planned.”
That brightened Lucas’s eyes. “Hang on. I need to do something.”
He reached under his pillow, grabbed a few books, and walked over to his backpack. I figured he was putting away his school stuff until I got a good look at the cover of the top book in his hands.
My brows drew together. “What is that book?”
Lucas held it up. “They’re my mom’s journals. Grandma found them in the attic and gave them to me after she read them.”
A memory of Sophie sitting on the curb writing in that thing flashed in my head. I’d forgotten all about those journals.
“Let me see that.”
The first book was a leather-bound journal with an embossed gold flower on the front, which had mostly faded away. I smiled as I flipped through the pages and shook my head. “Your mother wrote in this thing on the first of every month—never on the second, and always in red pen.”
“She starts the page with Dear Me, like she doesn’t know she’s writing the letters to herself. And she ends them with these weird poems.”
“They’re called haiku.”
“They don’t even rhyme.”
I laughed, thinking back to the first time Soph showed me one. I’d told her I was better with limericks. What was the one I’d recited? Oh wait… There once was a man named Lass. He had two giant balls made of brass. And in stormy weather, they clung right together, and lightning shot out of his ass. Yeah, that was it.
She’d told me to stick to drawing.
Once, in high school, she’d fallen asleep when we were hanging out, and I got my hands on this one and read it. She was pissed when she woke up and caught me almost done with it.
I looked over at Lucas. “Your grandmother knows you’re reading this?”
He frowned. “She said to learn everything about my mom and then do the opposite. Said it would help me get to know who you are better, too.”
Fucking Fanny. What was she up to? “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for you to be reading these right now. Maybe when you’re a little older.”
He shrugged. “I just started. She talks about you a lot. You taught her how to stop throwing like a girl.”
I smiled. “Yeah. We were close.”
I couldn’t remember the specifics of the parts I’d read a long time ago, but I was reasonably certain it wasn’t something an eleven-year-old should be reading about his dead mother.
“What do you say I hang on to these for you for a while and maybe pick out some parts for you to read? I don’t think you’ll want to read your mom talking about boys and stuff, and that’s what girls usually write in journals.”
Lucas scrunched up his face. “Keep ’em. It was kinda boring anyway.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
“Are we going fishing today?” he asked.
“Did you make us new lures?”
He ran to his bed and crawled under until only his feet were sticking out. His smile was ear-to-ear when he came back out with the wooden box I’d given him and opened it.
“I made a woolly bugger, a bunny leech, and a gold-ribbed hare’s ear.”
I had no clue what the hell any of them looked like, but I knew if I Googled them, his lures would be made to perfection. Lucas was obsessed with everything fly fishing. About a year ago, he’d started watching some reality TV show about it, and his enthusiasm hadn’t dimmed. Which meant I’d had to figure out how to fly fish.
Once I’d been watching a YouTube video about lakes in Northern California to fly fish in, and when I’d mentioned I was thinking of taking him up for the day, he started to recite all the best spots to fish for different things around the lake. Apparently, he’d watched the same video I’d stumbled upon—only about a hundred times.
I took the lures from the box and checked out his handiwork. They looked no different than the ones you’d buy in the store.
“Wow. Good job.” I held up one. “I call dibs on using the woolly bugger first.”
Lucas chuckled. “Okay. But that one’s the bunny leech.”
“I knew that.”
“Sure you did.”
***
“So how’s school going, buddy? We’re getting close to summer break.”
“School’s okay,” he frowned. “But I don’t want to go to Minnetonka.”
My body turned rigid. I knew Lucas’s dad lived there. But I didn’t think anyone else knew that. “Why would you go to Minnetonka?”
“Grandma’s making me go to her sister’s. She lives in the middle of nowhere. I’ve seen pictures. And when she comes to see us, all she does is sit on the couch and watch dumb soap operas and ask me to rub her feet.” He paused. “She’s got onions.”
“Onions?”
“Yeah. On her feet. They’re like weird bumps that are all bony and stuff, and she wants me to rub them. It’s gross.”
I chuckled. “Oh. Bunions. Yeah, they can be pretty gnarly. How long are you guys staying?”
“Grandma said a whole month. Her sister’s having…” Lucas held his fingers up to make air quotes “…lady-parts surgery.”
His delivery would have made me laugh if we’d been discussing anything other than him leaving for a month and going to a place his mother never had any intention of taking him. “She said I’m gonna meet a whole bunch of family. But I’d rather stay home and go to soccer camp.”
What the hell was Fanny up to now? The two of us definitely needed to have a talk when I dropped Lucas off this afternoon. She hadn’t mentioned anything to me about missing any visits, and I’d already paid for the summer-long soccer camp it seemed he would miss. But I’d learned better than to promise Lucas I could make his grandmother see what was best for him, so I attempted to put the topic on the backburner for later and not let it ruin our Saturday.
“How’re things going with Lulu?” Girls were a new topic of discussion lately.
Lucas cast his line out into the lake, and we watched it plunk down into the water at least sixty feet away. I’d be lucky to reach half that. He locked the drag and looked my way. “She likes Billy Anderson. He’s on the football team.”
Ah. Now it makes sense. Two weeks ago when I came to pick him up, he’d asked me if I could talk to his grandmother about him trying out for the football team. She’d told him it was too dangerous of a sport. He’d never expressed an interest in anything but soccer before, and God knows I tried to get him to throw a baseball and football around. But he was almost twelve now—about the age I was when I discovered twelve-year-old Cheri Patton would jump up and down and cheer for me if I scored a touchdown. Damn, that girl had great pom-poms.
“Oh yeah? Well, don’t worry. There’re plenty of fish in the sea.”
“Yeah.” He moped. “I think I’m gonna like an ugly one next time.”
I held back my laughter. “An ugly one?”
“All the pretty ones are so bossy and mean. But the ugly ones are usually pretty cool.”
Maybe he should be advising me on girls, instead of the other way around.
“That sounds like a good plan. But let me give you one piece of advice.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell the girl you decided to like her because she wasn’t one of the pretty ones.”
“Yeah. I won’t.” He reeled in his line with a smirk on his face. “I bet the girl wearing your shirt when you changed her tire a few weeks ago was really, really mean.”
I laughed. The kid didn’t miss a thing. Normally, I didn’t bring women around Lucas. Not that I didn’t think he wouldn’t be cool with it, but because the relationships I had didn’t generally last too long. Except a few weeks ago when he’d met Elena—the hot little meter maid who took care of more than one fantasy I’d had about a girl in uniform. We’d spent the night before my regular every-other-Saturday visit with Lucas at my place. Ten minutes after I’d picked him up, she called my cell to say her car needed a jump outside of my building—where I’d left her still in my bed. I couldn’t very well not go back and take care of her car when she’d taken such good care of me. So Lucas met Elena. I’d said she was a friend, but apparently he’d put two and two together. The little shit.
“Elena was very nice.” Until I didn’t call the entire next week. Then she told me to fuck off. And suddenly yesterday I started getting parking tickets when I parked in my usual spot outside the office.
“My friend Jack says you should ask a girl three questions, and if she answers no to any of them, you shouldn’t like her.”
“Oh yeah? What questions are those?”
Lucas counted off on his fingers, holding up his thumb for one. “First, you ask if she’s ever let anyone copy her homework.” He raised his pointer finger. “Second, you ask if she can eat more than one slice of pizza. And third…” He added his middle finger. “You need to know if she’s ever gone out in her pajamas.”
“Interesting.” I scratched at my chin. I might have to test this theory myself. “Does Lulu eat more than one slice of pizza?”
“She eats salad.”
He said it like the word was a curse. But there was something to that. When I take a woman to a nice Italian restaurant or steakhouse and she orders a salad—half the time not finishing it because she’s too full—that’s never a good sign.
“Let me ask you something. How did your friend Jack come up with this test?”
“He’s got an older brother who’s eighteen. He also told him that if you tell a girl you have three testicles, she’ll always let you show her your wiener.”
That one I’d most definitely be trying out. I wondered if it would work on Little Miss Daddy Owns a Winery.
“Uh, I don’t think you should try out that last piece of advice. Could get you arrested for indecent exposure.”
Lucas and I spent our entire day fly-fishing. He caught a bucket full of trout. I caught a tan. When I drove him back to Fanny’s house, she was her usual friendly self. I had to stick my foot in the door to keep her from slamming it shut in my face after Lucas and I said goodbye.
“I need to speak to you a minute.”
Both hands flew to her hips. “Is your check not gonna clear?”
God forbid that happen.
“My check is fine. As was the one that I gave to Kick Start, the day camp I paid for Lucas to go to this summer.”
Fanny was a pain in the ass, but she was sharp. She didn’t need anything explained to her.
“Have to help out my sister. He’ll get to go for half of it.”
“And what about my Saturday visits?”
She ignored my question. “You know, he’s been asking a lot of questions about his mother this week. I found some old journals of Sophia’s. They make for some pretty interesting reading.”
“He’s too young to read his mother’s journals.”
“That’s the problem with young people today. Parents protect them too much. Reality isn’t always perfect. The sooner they learn that the better.”
“There’s a difference between giving a kid a dose of reality and scarring him for life.”
“I guess we’re lucky it’s up to me to determine what will scar him and what won’t, then.”
Yeah, right. “What about my weekends?”
“You can keep him until six instead of five when we get back. It’ll make up the lost hours.”
Unbelievable. “I promised him I’d see him every other Saturday. I don’t want to let him down.”
She flashed a vicious smile. “Think that ship’s already sailed.”
My jaw flexed. “We had an agreement.”
“Maybe it’s time we renegotiate that agreement. My electricity’s gone up because of the new phone and computer you bought him.”
“You get your check right on time every month, and I pay for plenty of extras like camp, school supplies, and whatever else he needs.”
“You want him to go to that camp so badly. You keep him for the month I’ll be taking care of my sister.”
“I work late and travel all the time.” Not to mention my job was at stake, and I’d be working even more the upcoming months.
Fanny stepped back from the doorway, into the house. “Looks like you’ll be breaking your promise come next month then, won’t you? Just like you did to his mother. Some things never change.”
She slammed the door in my face.