He dried his hands on the dish towel and opened the back door.
Galen stood on the deck, looking a little out of whack: messed-up hair, bloodshot eyes, stale smell. Smudged fingerprints on the lenses of his Coke-bottle glasses. Will had his own crazy-gauge—a scale of one to ten—and Galen was peaking around a five. The guy had the appearance of someone off his meds, but then again, he could have just woken up. And forgotten to shower in the past twenty-four hours. Or maybe the convalescing had taken a turn for the worse.
Should he have asked Hannah if Galen’s illness was contagious? The old man was in good health but he was also eighty. Sniffles and sneezes weren’t quite so benign at that age. Damn, he should have pressed Hannah for an explanation, but thinking as a caregiver had never come naturally. It was at least a year before he’d felt confident enough to be the parent-in-charge anywhere but FAO Schwarz.
“Can I take you up on that offer?” Galen held out a bottle of wine.
“Sure, man.” Will opened the door wide. His universe was shrinking, more people crowding into his space with each passing day. But this time, he’d extended an invitation.
“I didn’t hear your mom’s truck.” For reasons he chose not to explore, Will found the sound of Hannah’s truck coming down the driveway oddly reassuring. “She working late tonight?”
Galen gave a sneer. “She’s always working late.”
Ah. A mother/son spat. The one thing Will had no experience with. Well, he did, just not within the realms of normal. And Hannah, surely, did normal mother all the way. He should probably avoid the subject of Hannah.
“How about we sit in comfort.” Will glanced into the living room, where his dad was asleep in an armchair, mouth open. The old man gave a snort. Nice. “Or maybe not.”
The crazy look in Galen’s eyes dropped a notch. “What are you going to do, about your father?”
Will had never been one for confidences, but pussyfooting around just increased his heart rate. He hated subtext and innuendo: Sorry my mom missed the parent meeting. She was indisposed. Yeah, my dad, too. We were all indisposed. Sometimes honesty was the answer.
“I’m trying to find the right assisted-living facility. Trouble is, they’re so depressing. And he has days when he’s fine. I don’t want him locked away with the psychos. Know what I mean?”
“I always worry that’ll be my future. Looking after Mom.” Galen scraped around a chair and straddled it. He draped himself over the back with the insouciance of an English major who believed genre fiction belonged in the ninth circle of hell.
“You think she’ll need looking after?”
“She may.” Galen stared for a moment, and Will sensed a meaningful exchange pass between them, even though he didn’t understand the meaningful part.
“Mom’s alone. She’s going to stay alone, and my brother isn’t responsible. Sucks being the eldest.”
“Sucks being an only child.”
“You haven’t met my brother.”
Will smiled. He liked this guy a lot better when he wasn’t being a complete tool.
“Where’s your dad?”
“Split six years ago. And Mom hasn’t been on a single date since. You know my dad’s gay, right?”
Holy shit. That could put you off dating for six years. “I don’t really know your mom. She’s been kind to my dad, though. Adopted him.”
“Yeah, well, she would. She likes to take in strays—whether they’re pets or people. And half the time she doesn’t charge. At best, she undercharges.” Galen sniffed. “She’s good at what she does, but she doesn’t know where to draw the line, when to put family first. She can drop everything for a client, even if it’s during Christmas dinner.”
Will raised his eyebrows. Ruined Christmas dinners? That was his territory.
“She’s a people pleaser with really shitty boundaries,” Galen said.
Interesting. Will had pegged Hannah for someone who was generous, not someone who was incapable of saying no. But Galen’s version was more appealing. It painted her as flawed...vulnerable. A people pleaser—that made sense given how she’d allowed his dad to slot into her daily routine. Never once had she accused Will of taking advantage, but the thing is, he had. And he hadn’t been aware of it until now.
“Must have been tough when your dad left.” Although Will’s secret fantasy had always been for at least one of his parents to leave.
“Not really. Dad excels at pimped-out emotions so it was easier without him around. He performs everyday life as if backlit with floodlights, but Mom sucked the drama out of divorce.” Galen sighed. “She and Dad are still friends, so it never really affected us. Although my grandparents cut us off as if we were unclean. Can’t say I miss them. Dad’s parents are jerks. Mom’s parents, though? They were awesome. Especially her dad.”
“He died?”
“When I was ten. My grandmother was killed in some freak boating accident while they were on vacation in Florida, and he never recovered. Papa moved in with us after that. Mom and Dad had this cottage built for him, but he never lived here. Died the week it was finished—of a broken heart. How sad is that?” Galen’s head sank to his arms. “You know, when I came out this morning and saw your father standing on the deck staring into the forest, I thought of Papa. They’re nothing alike, but memory follows its own piper.”
So, that explained why Hannah took them in, why she’d changed her mind. The bestselling-author bit had never been part of the equation. Good for her. And the no parents/gay husband was enough to bring any woman to her knees. Not Hannah, though.
Will rummaged through kitchen drawers, searching for a corkscrew. He wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but Galen looked like he needed a drink. And drinking alone never solved anything. Just gave you a worse hangover. As he well knew.
“Not sure if we have any wineglasses,” Will said.
“Upper left cabinet by the window. I normally stay here, when I come home.”
“We displaced you? Sorry, man.”
Galen shrugged and retreated from his family history dump into silence. Silence in solitude was good; silence in company was bad.
“So,” Will said. “Not a fan of genre fiction, then?”
“I guess I would be if I were making the kind of money you must make.” Galen turned even paler. “Shit. That was unbelievably crass.”
“Forget it.” It was Will’s turn to shrug. “My earnings are pretty much a matter of public record. But it’s not a conscious decision, you know—to write commercial fiction. I write what I want to write. I grew up with characters and stories in my head. At some point, I had to release them onto the page. My hero, Agent Dodds, has been keeping me company for many years.” Until I bailed on him three months ago.
“Don’t you ever want to write something serious?” Galen said.
“Entertaining people is serious.” Even though he was treating his business with all the aplomb of a retarded rookie. Will winced. He never, ever used the word retarded, even in thought. Grief was clearly desensitizing him, thought by thought, word by word.
“But when you read a novel like The Road, don’t you wish you’d written it?”
“I’m not reading much fiction these days. But, for the record, I loved The Road just as much as I love every Jack Reacher novel. Now he’s a fabulous hero.”
“Who’s Jack Reacher?”
“Dude! You were an English major and you’ve never read Lee Child?”
Galen gave a shrug that seemed hardly worth the effort. He shrugged a lot, this guy. Will found the corkscrew. How quaint, an old-fashioned twist and turn model. He put the wine bottle between his legs for better leverage, and then nearly let it smash to the floor when Hannah burst in.
She grabbed the bottle and tugged it free, and Will staggered back. Was this an extension of the mother/son
spat? Galen slumped forward again and buried his face in his arms.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Hannah’s voice hit like a bullet fired through a silencer.
Will considered asking the same question, but he kept his eyes on the bottle of wine. If only these two people would take their argument away from his kitchen, away from him.
“Galen, sweetheart?”
Galen said nothing. Hannah held up the wine, and Will ducked. In his experience, a woman who raised a bottle often did so to make it a projectile.
“How did you find it, Galen?”
“You need better hiding places, Mom.” Galen spoke into his arms.
She turned, slowly, to Will. “My son isn’t supposed to drink.”
“Don’t,” Galen groaned.
“No,” Hannah said. “If you’re going to spend time with Will, he needs to hear this.”
“Mom—” Galen raised his head.
“Hear what?” Will fought the urge to run out into the night and keep running.
“My son is in A.A., Mr. Shepard.”
He’d become Mr. Shepard?
“Mom, please. Enough.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Will said. Really, neither of you need to take this any further.
“You know what?” Galen kicked back his chair and stood in one swift movement. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing fucking matters. What my mother wants to tell you, but she’s too polite and God forbid she offend someone, is that I just spent three and a half days in a locked psych ward. After I tried to kill myself. Biggest regret of my life is that I failed.”
Jesus. Will took a step back and hit the fridge.
“Sweetheart, you didn’t actually—” Hannah reached for her son, but he shied away, raising his elbow in a protective gesture.
“Does it matter what I did or didn’t do, Mom? I wanted to end my life. I wanted to die.”
Galen blundered across the kitchen like a fatally wounded warrior. The front door smacked into the edge of a cabinet, feet shuffled down the back steps and he was gone.
A memory crystallized inside Will’s brain, forcing him to hear, to see, to reexperience the horror of Freddie’s first temper tantrum. Will hadn’t cared that his son was behaving like a brat in public; he’d seen worse from rich kids in New York restaurants. But the sudden breakdown in mood had reawakened Will’s long-suppressed terror of messed-up family DNA. If Freddie had lived, would the shadow of madness have manifested in him, too?
Will raised his chin, grew tall in the face of public panic. Keeping his eyes on Hannah, he concentrated on presenting his blank face, the face that had served him well since grade school.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. “I didn’t mean to drag you into my family drama.”
“Because I have enough of my own?” He should probably smile, but it wasn’t possible to multitask through the adrenaline rush turned sour.
Two moths drifted in, and Hannah closed the open door. “Something like that. Here.” She handed him back the bottle. “You keep it.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Sorry, I forgot about your dad.”
His heart rate began to slow, and then instinct kicked in. He wasn’t wired for physical contact unless it came with sex, but he stepped forward and touched her. A light touch on the arm. All that he was capable of. Should he attempt a hug?
Hannah stared at the bottle. “My favorite. I was so excited when I found it on sale. I threw out all the liquor yesterday, but I kept this in case Poppy needed cheering up after her date. It’s so hard to make good decisions, so easy to make bad ones.”
She had him on that.
He took the wine from her. “How about we hide this somewhere neither my dad nor Galen would think to go? Then you can come over and have a glass whenever you want one. What about my bedroom?” That was so not what he meant to say. Had he just given her an open invitation to his bedroom?
“I can’t believe I was so stupid. What kind of a mother leaves her alcoholic son alone with a bottle of wine?”
“You did hide it.”
“Not well enough.”
“At some point he’s going to have to learn to desensitize himself. Galen’s a grad student—he’s going to be around alcohol. No parent can protect his child 24/7. No parent.” Will clenched his teeth. “What happens when he goes back to college and his friends have a keg party or invite him to a poetry slam in a bar?”
“I’m not sure he is...going back to school.” Hannah glanced at the closed door.
“Maybe we should open the wine, anyway.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry—for asking you to keep an eye on Galen without giving you the facts. I’m not normally so irresponsible, but this—” she rubbed at her mouth “—this is unknown territory for me. I really don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”
Me, neither, he wanted to say.
“We’re both sorry?” He wasn’t sure why he was apologizing, since he’d acted out of ignorance with the wine. Then he gave his public smile, the one he used for sold-out author readings because it made his gut knot a little less.
“I should go after him. Good night, Will.”
And she left. Quietly.
Will slid down the fridge and sat in a heap on the cool tiled floor. A suicidal writer. A young guy who had the gift of life—a gift his son no longer had—and wanted to throw it away.
He had to speed things up; he had to get out of here; he had to get back to New York.
* * *
What were Willie doin’ on the floor? And why’d he have a bottle of wine between his legs?
“Son, we got our choice of chairs, you know.”
But Willie just sat there, all curled up like he did when he were a boy tryin’ to make hisself real small so his mama wouldn’t notice. ’Course, she always did. You couldn’t hide from your mama, now, could you?
“Dad, we need to talk. About where you go from here.”
“Don’t reckon I want to go nowhere, son. Feel like I’m home.”
“I know, but we can’t stay. I’m only renting the cottage.”
“So buy it.” He patted Will’s knee. “New memories to make, and I have a mind to do it here with Poppy and Hey You.”
“Hannah. Her name’s Hannah,” Will said, and got a real distant look. “We have to find you somewhere to live permanently, Dad. And I have to get home.”
But that made no sense. Willie were home.
“I have to get back to New York, Dad.”
“So you been tellin’ me all week, son. But you’re still here.”
Will pushed hisself up to standin’. He looked tired, his boy.
“C.R.S., son. Can’t remember stuff, but that don’t make me a baby. I don’t need lookin’ after, but if you need to go, those two little ladies will keep an eye out.”
“Hannah and Poppy have to work. They can’t look after you.”
“You’re not listenin’ so good, son. I don’t need lookin’ after. But if it makes you feel better, you can stay, too. Hell, you can bring Freddie.”
“Dad, Freddie—”
“Where is he today, anyways? He and his mama still travelin’?”
He didn’t like the look on Will’s face, like he was figurin’ out how to say somethin’ real bad.
“When you talk about Freddie, you come back to me, son. So many years, you were distant. Your mama, now, she didn’t make it easy for you, but we did all right, didn’t we?”
Will nodded, but he wasn’t in agreement. A father could read his son’s eyes.
“Tomorrow we have to talk, Dad. You have to look at some of the pamphlets for these retirement communities. We have to start making decisions.”
A plan came to him, just like that!
He needed to write it down real quick, before he forgot. He started tappin’ on his palm. Poppy plan, Poppy plan.
“You go on up to bed now, Willie. You look done in.”
“Dad, it’s only nine o’clock. I haven’t been to bed before midnight since I was in diapers.”
“Sleep when you’re tired, son.”
And Willie obeyed. Got up and took that wine with him. Good kid, his Willie. Always done what he were told. Knew how to be quiet, too, so as not to upset his mama. And knew when to go to his room. One time, had to lock the boy in for a whole night while he went searchin’ for Angeline. Came home and found Willie curled up asleep in the corner of his room. Felt real bad about that, but couldn’t hire no babysitter. Family secrets, they weren’t for sharin’.
Now. He had somethin’ to do. What was it? Go to bed hisself? Nah. He just woke up. He had a mind to sit out on the porch, look at the stars and listen to the katydids. Might even hear that rascal owl again. He was one active bird, that owl. Always out in the evenin’, sometimes in the mornin’, too.
He tapped his palm. Poppy plan. But first, he had to write hisself a note.
Nineteen
How could you avoid someone on a mission to apologize? Damn A.A. and their steps of forgiveness. Will jogged past the main house and glanced at the porch cluttered with coziness. Galen was curled up asleep on the metal rocker, submerged in a mound of brightly colored cushions. Behind him, a mass of mature houseplants in huge, glazed pots—all of them shades of midnight blue. A twinge of longing jabbed at Will, longing for his jungle of a roof garden. He’d fire off a text to Ally after his shower, remind her to give the pots a good soaking.
Using his T-shirt, Will wiped sweat from his face and then paced until his body slowed. Not the most relaxing run after a second day spent either hiding from Galen or trying to figure out what was going on with Poppy and his dad. A subplot was developing right under his nose; he could smell it. And it had nothing to do with art, although the painting they were working on wasn’t half-bad in a primitive way. Very Gauguin.
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