There's This Guy

by Rhys Ford

  “I’m more respectful of the man we found upstairs.” Dallas scratched at his cheek, wondering if they had fleas in the building or if there’d been mosquitoes at the graveyard. “Jake’s… he’s over at Evancho’s right now finishing up some stuff, then heading over here.”

  “Man just put his father in the ground.” She made a face, wrinkling her nose. “Okay, a whopping asshole of a father, but still. He jumped right back into work instead of taking some time. It’s been what? Almost three weeks now? He should take some time off.”

  “And we spent more than half a week waiting for the man to kick off before that,” Dallas reminded her, then sobered, dropping the edges of his smile. “Babe, Jake’s been on a death watch for years. He’d broken and beggared himself to get his father the best care he could. Yeah, I think he should take time off. Hell, I’d spring for a vacation someplace tropical with rum drinks served with little umbrellas, but he wants to work.”

  Celeste sniffed at him. “You’ve never bought me a vacation with rum drinks and umbrellas.”

  “I bought you boobs.” He nodded toward her chest. “You wanted boobs. You got boobs.”

  “True.” Celeste cupped her chest and smiled at Dallas, making smooching noises at him. “And they are spectacular. Haven’t bought myself a drink since.”

  “How about if we get some work done today? We’re scheduled to have the air-conditioning guys install that new compressor, so we’ll need to be done painting the trim in the loft by this afternoon so we’re out of the way.” Spreading the plans out on the desk, Dallas ran through the build schedule in his head. “There’s so much little crap to do, and I’m kind of tight on time here. Once the AC is in, we can get more workers onboard. The electricians and plumbers hit Monday, and then hopefully we’ll be back on track. We’re also going to have to meet with a couple of the marketing guys who handle Mars and—”

  “Well, look at you.” A woman’s silhouette darkened the office doorway, her voice a blend of honey and peaches with a touch of steel. “I never thought I’d see the day when the little boy who couldn’t even put his toys away would be running his own business.”

  There was always a bit of panic in Dallas’s chest whenever he heard her someplace other than the ranch. An anxiety he couldn’t quite shake. She was the ever-present looming authority figure who’d show up at school after he’d spent half an hour cooling his heels outside of the principal’s office and the enraged Valkyrie who swooped down with a flaming temper and sharpened tongue the times he’d been arrested for protesting one thing or another. There’d been a few times when he’d been brought home in the back of a police car during his teen years, but she’d always keep her head on straight and listen to whatever nonsense he babbled out to excuse what he’d done.

  He’d won some debates, fewer than he’d like, but they were usually the ones he was the most passionate about. She’d raised him to have a voice and to know when to use it, to speak up against someone’s fist with strong conviction, and to turn the other cheek when someone talked shit. When he dragged the flotsam and jetsam of his world into her house, she’d welcomed each and every lost, wandering soul with open arms, shoving another chair up to the dining room table, then asked about food allergies.

  She’d taught him how to be a human being, and Dallas couldn’t have imagined a greater mentor, flawed, beautiful, and honest, with a sensible eye on what was necessary and a silly sense of humor. He’d grown up thinking if he could be half the woman she was, he’d turn out okay.

  But she still scared the shit out of him when she showed up in his life without warning, a wild card dealt by a capricious God looking for a good chuckle and a bit of chaos.

  Because his mother always brought a little bit of chaos with her.

  Still, it was a delight to see her, and something happy burst into fireworks inside of Dallas as he came around the desk. “Mom!”

  A few strides and he was across the room, scooping her up into a tight hug. She smelled of sunshine, root beer, and bubble gum, a mental poke for him to buy a few cases of the sweet brown soda before he got home. Her arms were thin, strong considering her slender frame, but he’d seen her sling a wild pig over a fence more than a few times. Her back was unbowed, and the embrace she’d gotten him in threatened to squeeze every bit of air out of his lungs if she didn’t let go soon.

  “Hey, sugar.” Celeste bumped his hip. “Leave some for me. Hi, Auntie Martha!”

  “Oh, look at you,” his mother exclaimed, breaking free of Dallas, then cupping Celeste’s face. “Aren’t you simply the most gorgeous thing ever? After my son, of course.”

  Dallas stepped back so they could hug, digging the desk’s rounded corner into his thigh for a moment as he tried to make room. They were an odd pair, a curvaceous New York Jewish girl with slightly sad eyes lined with black caterpillar lashes and a lanky, beautiful silver-streaked blonde belle who’d been raised on Texas oil, money, and cotillions, but they’d both walked away from their families in order to live their own lives, a tangible grit binding them together.

  Their hug was a fierce battle of murmurs and giggles. Then his mother stepped back, pinning Dallas in place with a canny pale blue gaze, one he’d gotten from her. A graceful, elegant woman, she’d come dressed casually, worn jeans and a raglan shirt he’d worn during high school, considering the faded dragon sitting on a pile of D20s silk-screened across her chest, even though she’d been built for Chanel.

  “Nice shirt.” He grinned down at her. She wasn’t short, not like his baby sister, Victoria, but he’d been looking at the top of his mother’s head since he was fourteen. “Didn’t you make me throw that out? Said something about it being indecent.”

  “It was indecent.” She tilted her nose up at him, tugging down the shirt’s hem. “On you. Walking around showing your belly like some tart. On me, it’s fine. Now, I was planning on surprising you and seeing the building, but a funny thing happened while your brother and I were heading to the airport. He was telling me you’d called him a while back—how did he put it?—found someone you wouldn’t mind waking up next to in the morning. So my number two son, why don’t you start telling me about this boy you’ve been seeing. Jake, is it?”

  “Fucking Austin,” Dallas swore under his breath. His mother didn’t interfere. No, she stalked, waiting for the right moment to sidle up to someone and weasel her way into their lives. He was sure she wasn’t going to be happy until the ranch was overrun with people she’d taken in. Martha Yates was sweet, adorable, and made it her life’s work to crowd in on her children, then keep track of their every move. “Swear to God, I’m going to kill him.”

  “Don’t blame your brother,” she murmured, straightening his shirtsleeve. “I’d booked the tickets two weeks ago. And you should know by now, if you want to keep a secret, the last person in the world to talk to is your brother. All I’ve ever had to do to find anything out is not say anything and he babbles to fill the quiet.”

  “Hey, at least you hadn’t gotten around to telling him about the dead body you found upstairs. You can tell her that too.” Celeste leaned around Dallas’s shoulder, grinning at Martha. “He and Jake found a dead guy up in the loft.”

  “A dead man? In here? So, a maybe-boyfriend and a dead body.” His mother crossed her arms over her chest, and Dallas could have sworn he heard Wagner start playing somewhere behind her. “How about if you sit your little ass right down over there on that chair, Dallas, so you and I can have a little catch-up?”

  “JAKE, COME here.” The intercom broke through the hissing from torches and a bit of chatter in the main workroom. “To my office.”

  It normally wasn’t a good thing if Evancho called a guy into his office in the middle of the day. Usually. For all his gruffness, Peter Evancho was a fair man, willing to forgive mistakes if his employee learned from them, and Jake knew of at least three occasions when a guy ruined thousands of dollars of work and Evancho gave him a chance.

  He’d been one of those guy
s, and it’d been years since he’d fucked up that royally. Still, a walk through the work area was a gauntlet of puckering lips and groans with a soft murmur of “good luck” from Brent, working on a mesh screen attachment for a custom door.

  The door to Evancho’s office was open, a sure sign he wasn’t pissed off. He made people knock if he was pissed off at them, probably to give him time to take a breath so he could start off with a hearty yell. There was still a bit of lime-green paint on the edges of the window, left over from when a younger Jake’d been tasked to freshen up the door and hadn’t masked the trim properly. Evancho told him to leave it, saying it added character to the battered old wood, but Jake itched to scrape the blob off, especially since his boss rubbed at it every time he opened his office up in the morning.

  He knocked anyway, a short rap just to let Evancho know he was there, and a loud grunt shoved its way past the door, ordering Jake to come in.

  The office was small, tucked behind the reception desk, barely large enough for a single man to work in, much less two. A heavy utilitarian desk sat facing the door with a short end against the wall, bisecting the space, and was rigidly clean, holding a laptop connected to another monitor and a few papers. The walls were lined with bookcases and filing cabinets filled with reference manuals and catalogs. An overhead fan turned in lazy rotations above the desk, barely stirring the air, but the air conditioner vents were open and blowing cold.

  Sitting behind the desk was the first man Jake ever truly respected and, all things considered, was probably more than a little bit afraid of.

  Peter Evancho was a bull of a man, nearly a foot shorter than Jake but about that much wider, with powerful muscles and a hearty personality. He’d come to California from the Ukraine with a few stops along the way, a square-jawed force of nature with a somber face and a gruff demeanor, but Jake’d always liked him. His solid, bulky arms strained his T-shirt sleeves, a wiry spread of pale blond hair peppering his forearms, and Evancho shifted in his chair, the office’s fluorescent light picking up the silver in his short-cropped hair. He tapped away at a keyboard, his stubby fingers hammering at the plastic pieces as if he were working a punch press, his eyes keen on the flat monitor sitting to the side of his desk.

  Stepping into the cramped space, Jake edged past a coat rack laded down with welding masks. “You wanted to see me, boss?”

  “Yeah.” Evancho jerked his chin toward the door. “Close that and have a seat.”

  Jake eased into one of the chairs in front of Evancho’s work area, angling it when his knee hit the front of the desk. While rubbing at his knee to get rid of the tingles running up and down his right leg, Jake glanced up to find Evancho looking at him, the side of his mouth pulled into a wry smile.

  “I keep forgetting to move the desk back,” Evancho growled, clipping his words with his thick accent. “You’re too tall, Jake, and too skinny. My wife sees you, you’ll be eating nonstop for the next month. Quit fidgeting. I just want to talk to you, see how you were doing. What with… your father.”

  “I’m fine.” Evancho gave him a stern bulldog look, and Jake shook it off. “No, really. I’m fine. I’m okay.”

  He’d spent a few days with Dallas doing stupid things he’d never done before. A walk down Santa Monica’s sidewalks to taste cheeses at a specialty shop. Having pancakes and bacon for dinner and beef stroganoff and buttermilk biscuits for breakfast. Then he’d thrown himself into his routine and caught himself parked in front of the nursing home one afternoon, panicked because he was late with his father’s cheeseburgers when they were serving fish that night. He’d almost tossed the burgers, then handed them off to a guy begging for change near the intersection.

  Then he went home, got slightly drunk, and stared at the scaffolding he’d begun building the night Dallas found the gun in his bookcase.

  That was yesterday, and in the morning, he’d gone in to work aching a little less inside than he had before, but the guilt lingered, souring his thoughts. Now, two hours later, he was sitting in Evancho’s office, wondering what he’d done to deserve sitting in front of the man’s desk.

  “Really,” he assured Evancho. “I’m fine. It wasn’t a surprise. He’d been sick for—”

  “Did I ever tell you I knew your father up in Montreal? Back when he worked the shipyard?” Evancho cut in, pushing his chair back in a long scrape. “Back when I was younger than you. Just getting into the business. I went up there for seasonal work. Did he tell you he knew me?”

  Jake’s tongue stuck itself to the roof of his mouth, and he tried swallowing around it, confused. His father never said one word about Evancho, or knowing him from before. Shaking his head, Jake replied, “No. I didn’t know.”

  “I didn’t know you were his kid when I hired you.” Something on the screen beeped, and Evancho pushed a button, killing the monitor. “I found out one day when he came down here and you were working on a job up in the Hills. You hadn’t been here long, I don’t think, but he knew who I was. Evancho, it is uncommon, and he knew it. I did not remember him until I saw him, and then I remembered why he was not my friend.”

  “He never mentioned that either, sir.” If he was confused before, Jake decided he’d upgrade to bewilderment and maybe even a little bit past that. “Don’t know why he’d come here. Or how. The home shouldn’t have let him out.”

  “This was before he got really bad, back when you two were still living in the house over on Hancock.” Evancho pulled out a pack of gum, offering it to Jake, then taking a stick when he refused. Folding it past his teeth, he chewed at it, then said, “He was drunk. Drunker than he should have been for nine in the morning, but once I recognized him, I wasn’t all that surprised. He looked like shit, but still, not surprised. He came to accuse me of sleeping with his wife—your mother—back in Montreal. And I’d hired you only because you were my son.”

  Jake’s stomach curled, folding in on itself, and he took a sharp breath, unsure what to say. “I look like him, a little bit. More my mother but—”

  “You look much like her, and I am sorry, but you are not my son, Jake. I am sorry that I am not your father. Understand this, but I never was with your mother. Your father was a jealous, angry man, and despite that, your mother loved him,” Evancho asserted. Then he leaned forward, spreading his hands over the desk. “I didn’t know her well. Mostly by sight. She brought him food once in a while, and I saw her belly begin to grow before I left. She was nice to me, fed me a few times. Even found me kalach for Christmas, but I did not know her. I am sorry she is gone. But I am more sorry she remained with him. I’d have hoped she’d left him and given you a better life.

  “And you are probably wondering why I am talking about this now, after your father is gone. And why I didn’t mention this before.” Evancho rubbed at his face, his palm raking over the stubble on his chin where he’d missed shaving. “I’ve been sitting on this since you’ve been back, and well, I talked to the wife. Actually, I should have talked to you sooner. But here we are. Now. Thing is, you know we have a son, yes? Andre?”

  “Yeah, met him. Nice guy.” Jake tried to recall anything about the tall, slender blond man who’d come to the office Christmas party a few times. Other than a shy smile and a gentle hello, he’d kept to the background, letting his boisterous mother bustle around and order him about. “He was here with your wife.”

  “Tasia, my wife. She loves that boy. She loves the girls too, but that boy is her world,” Evancho proclaimed softly. “He is like you, that boy. He likes other men, and for a while, it was hard. Hard for me. Hard for her. Hard for him. Mostly because of me because I had an idea of how my son would be, and suddenly, he was not.”

  If Evancho had reached across the desk and punched him in the face, Jake couldn’t have been more surprised. Finding his throat closing up, he rushed in. “I’m—”

  “Do not deny this to me, Jake. I know. And because there is nothing wrong how you are, who you are. I’ve seen you with that one across the street,
the one with the loud friend, and the two of you are….” Evancho steepled his hands together, nodding. “Knitting in together. So do not lie to me. I know. And I am telling you now, it does not matter to me. Tasia and I talked… I told you this… and then we prayed, because that is what we do. Do you pray? Do you go to church?”

  “I don’t think you can ask that here in California,” Jake murmured, trying for a smile, and Evancho shot him a reproachful glance. He hadn’t thought of God or church in forever, not even when he stood over his father’s grave and a priest laid him to rest. Jake’s mind whirled around everything but prayer. “I haven’t been to Mass in a long time. Not since before… Maman.”

  “Well let me say, we did not pray for your father. What I knew of him, I did not like. I prayed for forgiveness because I did not step in, step up when God sent me you.” Evancho screwed his mouth up tight, then sighed. “You have been good for me. You have helped me see there are many different kinds of men and strengths. I love Andre. He is my son. And he will make me proud doing the film thing he loves, but you… you should have known how proud I am of you, of your skills, of your art. I am sorry for not saying that. I am sorry it took the death of your father for me to see those words should have been said.

  “That is why I called you in here.” He grabbed a set of keys sitting on the desk near the monitor, then slid them over to Jake. “Those are for the shop. They are yours. You can do your work here. You need better equipment than what you have at home. The back room is useless. Clean it out and set up there. Anyone gives you a hard time, they’ll answer to me. But this place, that bay, is yours. We continue as we do. I will give you scraps, and you will take them and not complain. Make art, Jacques. Make your art, and one day you will give me your notice because you are a famous man. And we will drink heavily to celebrate that day.”