Muffin Top

by Avery Flynn

  “Whoa,” Ford said, looking between Frankie and their dad as if he’d never seen either man before. “What’s all that about?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Because Frankie was done keeping his old man’s secrets.

  Finn and Ford both turned their dad, who sat leaning forward in his chair, his elbows planted on his thighs in an exact replica of how Frankie was sitting. Like father, like son.

  Finally, he let out a long, weary sigh. “Is this about Becky Rimwald?”

  The way he said it, as if it was just some silly thing, made something snap in Frankie and made his pulse roar in his ears. He jumped off the couch. “It’s about the fact that you couldn’t keep your dick in your pants even though Mom loved you more than anything and you always acted like you loved her.”

  Everyone in the room tensed. Wild, frenetic energy pulsed through Frankie, and he had to move. It wasn’t a choice. He started pacing the length of the living room from the front door to the far wall.

  “What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On,” Ford asked, his voice low and deadly.

  Finn let out an annoyed snort. “Dad didn’t screw Becky Rimwald.”

  Of course that’s what his twin would say, Frankie had sent him away to the store the second he’d turned the corner and seen Becky and his dad.

  “You didn’t see what I did. I protected you from that.”

  Finn got up from the couch and stalked over to Frankie. Mr. Even Keel’s cover was finally blown. His hands were curled into fists, and his entire body radiated wrath. But he didn’t take a swing. Instead, he got right up into Frankie’s face.

  “You are such a moron,” Finn said. “I’m surprised you can chew gum and walk at the same time.”

  “Wait.” Ford shoved himself between the twins, giving each of them a hard shove in opposite directions. “Rewind. Who is Becky Rimwald, and why in the hell would Frankie think that about Dad?”

  “Because Frankie saw me kissing her,” their dad said, his voice uncharacteristically flat.

  Whatever Frankie had been expecting when he’d imagined this moment, his father finally admitting his transgression, it hadn’t been this. There was no relief. There was no happiness. There was only a sick, gut-churning wave of disappointment that knocked his knees out and forced him to lean his ass against the windowsill or go down for the count. And that’s when he realized there’d always been a part of him that hadn’t believed, had hoped that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen.

  “When?” Ford asked, breaking the heavy silence.

  Finn shoved his fingers through his thick, dark hair and sat down on the couch. “Our senior year in high school.”

  “I tried to tell you then, and I’ll tell you now,” Frank Sr. said. “It wasn’t what it looked like.”

  “Really?” Frankie all but snarled. “Her tongue wasn’t stuffed down your throat?”

  His dad looked like there was nothing more in the world that he’d like to do at that moment than reach out and cuff his oldest—the Hartigan temper was as legendary as their ability to go wild—but he didn’t. Instead, he closed his eyes, let out a breath, and then focused his attention on Frankie.

  “Do you remember the string of warehouse fires we had that year? Andy Rimwald was one of the firefighters who died in them before we caught the firebug.”

  That summer had been awful. Ten firefighters had been killed in the fires, which had been rigged to do the most damage once everyone was on the scene. Katie Hartigan had spent most of the nights their dad was on shift sitting at the kitchen table polishing and polishing the set of silver utensils her great-great-grandmother had managed to sneak out of Ireland when she’d run off because the English had threatened to hang her for stealing. Frankie had organized it so that there was always one Hartigan kid sitting up with her, at least until she sent them to bed in the wee hours of the morning. He wasn’t sure if she ever slept while Frank Sr. was working that summer. The second he’d walk through the door, though, she’d collapse against him and allow herself thirty seconds of holding him before straightening up and starting a huge breakfast with all of his favorites. They’d all been keyed up and on edge.

  After a few seconds, no doubt to make sure everyone was thinking the same thing as Frankie, his dad went on. “Well, you’ve been on the job for some time now, Junior. You must have seen families go through hell after something like that happens. They cry. They scream. They fight against the darkness. They go a little crazy.”

  Maybe there were other jobs where things were like that—the military, cops—but in the firehouse they really were a family. When one went down, they all mourned. And the wives and kids of the fallen firefighter? They did whatever it took to make sure they were taken care of, something that occasionally crossed some lines. Something started the tingle on the back of Frankie’s neck, that oh-shit signal that had saved him more than once in the middle of a fire.

  “Becky came into the firehouse to collect Andy’s things even though we told her we’d take them out to her,” Frank Sr. said, his shoulders hunching forward as if even this many years later he needed to ward off the blow of what came next. “She said she wanted to take a look at the place he loved. And before she left, I gave her a hug. She was a lost widow grieving, and I was a friendly port in a storm. She didn’t mean it. I had been just extricating myself when you walked in.”

  Frankie pulled up the memory of walking into that firehouse. His dad had been against the wall, his hands at his sides. It was Becky who’d been plastered against his old man.

  “That’s a pretty convenient story that you didn’t share all those years ago,” he said as he kept running it over and over in his head.

  “Junior,” his dad said with a frustrated sigh. “I love you, but don’t think for a minute that I need to explain myself to you when I haven’t done a damn thing wrong.”

  Maybe the explanation wouldn’t have mattered when Frankie was seventeen, but after years as a firefighter, he’d seen that agonizing place when someone went down in a blaze, where a spouse was experiencing so much pain that became so overwhelming that all they wanted to do was just be rid of it for a little while. Still, he’d been so sure then and had never let go of it, even when the doubts started creeping in.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Finn said, his voice sounding as tired as Frankie felt at the moment. “I ran into Becky outside of the firehouse when I came back from that bullshit errand you sent me on. She was talking to Mom, who’d come by to drop off lunch for Dad since it was a Saturday and she wasn’t working. Becky was crying to Mom, hanging onto her as if her whole world had been blown away. She kept telling Mom she was sorry, that she didn’t mean to kiss him. Mom just held Becky tight and told her it was okay, that it was all going to be okay. So I gotta ask you, do you really think you know more than Mom?”

  The question landed like a two-by-four to the side of the head. There wasn’t a Hartigan sibling alive who would dare think they knew more than Katie Hartigan, because his mama didn’t raise any stupid kids. He turned to his dad, still half-processing what in the hell he’d just learned, almost afraid to hope that he’d been wrong.

  “Is that really what happened?” Frankie asked.

  His dad didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  All those years, all those times that he thought he was protecting everyone, he’d just been digging a hole for himself because he thought he knew best. Instead of talking it out and asking questions, he’d given up and walked away from a man who up until that moment had been his real-life hero.

  He’d been a fucking idiot.

  “I gave up too easily,” he said, realization sucker punching him in the gut.

  Ford snorted. “That’s because everything always came easy to you. School. Friends. Women. Life. So when something didn’t fit within your accepted parameters, you didn’t have a damn clue what to do about it. That’s why you fucked shit up with Lucy, because you thought you could blast in like some knight in shining armor when that was the l
ast thing she needed or wanted.”

  Frankie, Finn, and Frank Sr. all turned to look at Ford, wearing almost identical expressions of shock and horror.

  “When did you turn into some crackpot TV doctor?” Finn asked, blinking in surprise.

  Ford glared at them. “Gina has recommended some books.”

  Who in the hell had taken over his emotionally clueless brother’s body? Looking around, he saw he wasn’t the only one with that reaction. Frank Sr. and Finn were staring at Ford like he was one of the Pod People, too. For his part, Ford just tapped his thumb to his fingers as the tips of his ears turned red.

  “The thing is,” Ford said, zeroing in on Frankie, “I’m not wrong and you know it.”

  What Frankie wouldn’t give to tell Ford to fuck straight off. Maybe he could even draw his baby brother into tossing down like they had the night Frankie had enlightened Ford about what an idiot he was being when it came to Gina. Sure, he’d walk away with a few bruises, but that was better than the guilt jabbing into him like an electric cattle prod.

  Because he hadn’t just seen something and gone into automatic protector mode when it came to what had happened with his dad. He’d done it with Lucy, too. When that guy at the bar had gone off like a moron, he should have walked away. Instead, he’d given in to the need to try to be her knight on a white horse. Lucy didn’t need that. She didn’t want a protector, she wanted someone she knew would always be at her side. He’d had the opportunity to show her that he would be with her, always. But he’d fucked it up.

  “Shit. I fucked up.” He looked around at his brothers and dad. “What in the hell am I going to do now?”

  Finn shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I’m happily single.”

  True enough. He turned to Ford.

  His youngest brother rolled his eyes. “To paraphrase what a giant jackass told me recently on the deck of this house, go get your girl.”

  None of this was helpful, so he faced the man who would be totally within his rights to tell Frankie to go jump off a bridge. “What do I say?”

  “You gotta figure that one out for yourself, Junior, but whatever you do, go big. A woman like Lucy isn’t someone you just sweet-talk your way back to. You’re going to have to work for that job.”

  The last word jumped out at him. That’s what Lucy had asked him about on the floating deck back in Antioch. Sure, she’d been joking, but he wasn’t—not then and definitely not now.

  “Can you help me arrange a thing tomorrow and help me get Lucy to it? Maybe tell her it’s a wedding thing?” he asked Ford.

  “Have you ever planned a wedding?” His brother looked at him like he was the Pod Person now. “That shit is complicated. There are color-coded spreadsheets.”

  “What if it’s not related to the wedding?” Finn asked. “What if it’s just family and close friends?”

  That would be perfect.

  Ford grumbled something under his breath before answering. “This had better work, because otherwise Gina is going to kill me for messing with her scheduling.”

  A few minutes of planning later and Ford and his dad were heading toward the front door, but Frankie couldn’t let his dad walk out without apologizing.

  “I’m sorry for thinking the worst, Dad,” he said, emotion making it hard to get the words out. “Can you forgive me?”

  His dad gave him the same easygoing grin that Frankie saw in the mirror.

  “For doing what you thought was the best thing to protect this family?” Frank Sr. asked. “There’s nothing to forgive. You responded the way a man should—not by thinking of yourself, but by thinking of those around you that you loved.” Then he pulled Frankie into a full-on man hug with hard back-patting. “Just try not to jump the gun quite so fast next time. Now, don’t mess this up, or I’ll never hear the end of it from your mother.”

  “She knows about me and Lucy?”

  His old man gave him a look that screamed out duh. “She’s Katie Hartigan, isn’t she? The woman knows everything.”

  It was true. The woman always did. And that should have been his first clue that what he’d thought he’d walked in on all those years ago wasn’t what it had looked like. Instead, he’d been so determined to protect her that he hadn’t even given it a thought. He wouldn’t make that mistake again, not with family and definitely not with Lucy.

  Now it was time to get to work. Number one on his list? Sweet-talk Fallon into committing a kidnapping.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  That morning, Lucy called her dad as soon as she could, considering the one-hour time difference and her hangover. Vodka and Mountain Dew were both dead to her for the next good long while.

  He picked up on the third ring. “Hey there, Muf—Lucy.” He paused and sighed. “Sorry about that. Old habits die hard.”

  But he was trying to change, and that meant something. “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “So what do I owe this surprise call to?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut against the sun streaming in through her bedroom window like a laser beam aimed right at all of her most tender spots—especially the emotional ones. “I need your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “I messed up with Frankie.” And that was the undersell of the year.

  After her girls had left, she’d stayed up way too long thinking about everything that Gina, Zach, and, most importantly, Frankie had said to her, stripping away her own natural defensiveness to see what they were all trying to tell her. All three of them had zeroed in on the same thing. She was so sure Frankie was going to eventually grow bored with her, she’d picked a breakup fight with him out of nothing. It seemed like something at the time, granted, but after hours of reliving the moment, she realized she didn’t even give him a chance that night. Had she ever?

  She thought she was being smart by prepping for disaster. In reality, she had been expecting everyone to carry her own emotional baggage.

  “What happened with Frankie?” her dad asked, his voice soft with concern.

  She inhaled a deep breath and told him everything—well, at least the G-rated version. About how she’d spent most of her time with Frankie waiting for everything to go to hell, just like it had with her parents. They hadn’t lost their chance to be together—she’d never allowed them to have one in the first place.

  “You think you’re the reason why your mother and I got divorced?”

  She nodded even though her dad couldn’t see her, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  “Lucy,” he said, managing somehow to put enough love in her name that it sounded like a hug. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. There were many factors that went into why our marriage didn’t work, but you were never on that list. Understand?”

  Sniffling a little, she nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  “But even if you had been, holding that against Frankie wouldn’t be fair. We all bring our emotional histories to relationships, and no one is perfect. However, it’s how well your imperfections fit together that makes a relationship work. Do you love him?”

  She didn’t even have to think about it. “I do.”

  “Then why are you wasting time talking to me?”

  “Because I don’t know how to fix this.” Her entire career had been built around moving beyond a crisis point, but when it came to her own personal disaster she didn’t have any tools.

  “What do you think you should do?”

  She swallowed her first response of, If I knew I wouldn’t have asked for your help. “Get in my time machine and go back to when we were in Antioch.”

  Her dad’s chuckle set off Gussie, whose whiny let’s-play bark carried over the line. “That’s not exactly an option.”

  “Science really needs to catch up with what people really need.” She settled back against her pillows, already feeling a little better just by talking things out with her dad.

  “Or you could just go apologize and try to work things out like adults.”

  Ow. Truth hurts. �
�Harsh.”

  “Tough love has its place, and I do love you, Lucy. You’ll figure this out. You always do.”

  “Love you too, Dad.”

  After saying their goodbyes, she hung up and got into the shower. She didn’t know what in the world she was going to do next, but whatever it was, it would probably go over better if she didn’t smell like vodka. By the time she was standing bent at the waist so she could blow her hair dry upside down, she had half a plan worked out.

  Her dad was right. She needed to apologize for going right for Frankie’s vulnerable underbelly with a rusty shank. But she’d been hurt and mad and afraid when she’d gone for the one thing she knew would hurt him the most. He’d pegged her right that first night in Marino’s, she had been scared—not just of going to her high school reunion, but of giving people a chance. There was a reason why she led with the insults. The whole time she’d thought she’d been taking others power over her away from them, but all she’d been doing was taking it away from herself. And Frankie had paid the price because she’d put all of her baggage on him when he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Just the opposite. He’d done everything to show he cared about and respected her just the way she was.

  She had to make this right.

  Half an hour later, she was wearing her favorite red dress with her strappy sandals, determined to do what it would take to find Frankie and make him listen to her. She grabbed her purse, flung open her door, and stopped dead in her tracks.

  Fallon, Gina, and Tess stood in the hallway wearing identical guilty faces. Gina was holding a petal pink pillowcase.

  “What’s going on and why are you holding a pillowcase?” The question flew out of Lucy’s mouth.

  “We couldn’t find any potato sacks,” Tess said as if that made any sense at all.

  Fallon rolled her eyes. “We’re here to kidnap you.”

  Not surprisingly, that didn’t make anything any more clear. Another time she would have wanted to play along, but not right now.