Parker Security Complete Series

by Camilla Blake

  “And we’re planning on coming out to see it!” Holden said, which I didn’t necessarily believe because my family was always saying they were going to come see me fight and they rarely did. Which was probably good, because it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they started a few fights of their own. “Dad and Uncle Frank—boy, they’re just waiting for you to make it big in the UFC so they can start wagering some bets on you.”

  “Really the vote of confidence,” I said. “That’s entirely why I’m doing this—so Dad and Uncle Frank can have another get-rich-quick scheme.”

  Holden grinned. “Well, you gotta win the fights first.”

  “Yeah, no shit. Which means I actually have to fight, which isn’t gonna happen if I’m out doing this sort of thing with you.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “I know that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Don’t try to show off and use big words around me that I don’t know the meaning of. Everyone knows you’re just jealous because I’m better-looking.”

  I did have to crack a smile at that—it was sort of his running joke, had been for as long as I could remember. Physically, Holden and I had zero distinguishing characteristics—even our mother couldn’t tell us apart sometimes. This worked out great when we were younger and trying to pull some sort of prank, but was working out less so as adults, now that Holden pretty much always had someone who wanted to beat his ass.

  “Look, I know I ask a whole lot more of you than you do of me,” he said. “I get it. But we’re bros, right? I mean, we’re really more than bros. And I’d always have your back, no matter what. This isn’t going to be an all-night thing or anything,” Holden continued. “We’re going to make quick work of it. You won’t even have to get out of the car.”

  “How many times have you told me that before and that’s exactly what’s happened?”

  “Maybe once or twice.”

  I snorted. “Try more like eight or nine. Or maybe twelve or thirteen.”

  “Hey—I’m not keeping track of things like that. All I know is you’re my brother, and if you were asking me for help, it wouldn’t matter what I had going on—I’d give it to you. Because that’s what brothers do.”

  “I don’t need a crash course from you about being brotherly, thank you very much.”

  “So you’ll do it, then?”

  I sighed. “Yeah, I’ll do it. But this is the last time.” How many times had I said that before?

  Holden grinned. “Sure, buddy,” he said. “Whatever you say.”

  ***

  We played one more round, and this time I didn’t let him win. At that point, my mother summoned us out to the kitchen table, where there was a box of Krispy Kreme donuts and some Minute Maid orange juice.

  “It’s so nice to have both my boys back under the same roof again,” she said. “Can I get anyone some coffee?”

  “Why don’t you sit and I’ll get you some coffee,” I said, as Holden helped himself to one of the donuts, demolishing half of it in one bite. “It is Mother’s Day, after all.”

  “Donut?” Holden said, pushing the box to me.

  I shot him a look, but he was oblivious, just nudging the box of donuts closer in my direction.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  I got a mug from the cupboard and poured my mother some coffee. “You sure, honey?” she said when I set the mug down in front of her. “You can’t make one exception, just for today?”

  I used to have quite the sweet tooth, it was true. All sorts of things: cookies, candy, cake, you name it. But my diet now didn’t really have room for that sort of stuff, and certainly not Krispy Kreme donuts. I actually didn’t even crave any of that kind of food now, but that was something else my family seemed unwilling to accept. I knew it was because they wanted the “old” Shep back, the one they assumed would always be around to do whatever it was they needed. With the exception of my dad’s youngest brother, Cody, who had moved so far up north he was almost in Oregon, no Parkington had ever left the family business, or the family compound, really. Parkingtons just didn’t do that.

  “Leave him alone.” Dad’s voice was a slow boom of thunder as he strode into the room. Dad was the smallest of his brothers, average height and wiry, but he had a voice you’d expect from a much larger man. When he spoke, people listened. He took one of the donuts from the box. “More for us this way.”

  He flashed me a grin as he bit into the donut, but I could read between the lines. Yeah, he’d just gotten Holden off my back, but in doing so, he’d made it clear that because I was still living in the city, doing my own thing, I was separate from the rest of them.

  “When are you going to move back home?” Mom asked. “We all want you to come back home. It just doesn’t feel right having one of you living elsewhere.”

  “Doesn’t that sound a little weird?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m a kid or anything. Most people move away from their parents.”

  “Actually,” my cousin Jeannie said, waddling into the room and taking a seat, “more and more kids are coming back to live with their parents these days than in any other generation. They’re called boomerang kids.” Jeannie was pregnant, again; father unknown, again. I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say what I was really thinking: Jeannie’s dad, my uncle Frank, would probably be elated if Jeannie were to tell him she was going to move out and stand on her own two feet.

  “Well, I’m not part of that generation,” I said. “And even if I was, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to live on your own.”

  “You could live on your own!” Mom crowed. “You could move right on in to the blue house. It’s just waiting for you.”

  “Oh, you mean the house that doesn’t have a working toilet? The house in which Jeremy tore half the walls down to get the copper piping out?”

  “So, it needs a little work. It would give you something to do, when you’re not helping your dad and your uncles.”

  I sighed. Though I knew it hurt my mother’s feelings, I made it a point not to come around too often. I had spent the night last night because today was Mother’s Day and she said that it was the only thing she truly wanted—to have her boys back under the same roof again. The way she went on about it, you would’ve thought she was going to die of a terminal illness within the next couple of days, so I relented. I hoped that my family might see that I was actually doing all right on my own, that I might not be making as much money as a bartender as I would if I stayed in the family business, but I was happy and able to pursue things that I wanted to pursue.

  “It’s not like you’ve got a girlfriend or anything,” Mom continued. “It’s just you living over in San Francisco on your own. I could maybe understand if there was a girlfriend in the picture. Of course I’d still want you to live out here—with your girlfriend—but it would be a bit of an easier pill to swallow if I knew you weren’t just shunning your family so you could live completely by yourself.”

  “I don’t live by myself—I have roommates. There’s no way I could afford to live in San Francisco on my own.”

  “If you moved back here, you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

  “Are you still working at that gay bar?” Jeannie said suddenly.

  I gritted my teeth. I had hoped that wouldn’t come up, because certain members of my family were definitely homophobic. I wasn’t gay, but that actually seemed to work in my favor—meaning the gay guys that I served at Audacious tipped me even better precisely because I wasn’t gay. It was like the fact that I was untouchable (to them) made me all the more appealing.

  “Yes,” I said. “Unlike some of us, I actually need to make money to pay my bills.”

  My mother threw up her hands. “All this talk!” she said. “I’ll never understand it, Shepherd. You keep acting like you have no family support, when in fact you’ve got the most supportive family of anyone I know! We’re offering you a place to live, an excellent opportunity to make money, yet all you seem to want t
o do is martyr yourself by working at some homo bar and living in one of the most elitist and expensive cities in the world! Why?”

  “Because he thinks he’s better than us,” Holden said. He had a smile on his face as he said it, but I knew that was what he actually thought. “He thinks he’s too good for this. Turns his nose up at us.” He always knew just the things to say to get our mother going.

  “I know you don’t really think that!” Mom bawled. “But, oh, I wish you knew how badly just hearing that hurts my heart. It just doesn’t make sense, Shepherd! It doesn’t make sense to any of us, how you could just turn your back on your family.”

  “But if I had a girlfriend, then that would be different,” I said. “Do you want to just pretend that I have a girlfriend?”

  “Pretending isn’t going to change anything.” Mom shook her head. She wiped at her eyes, though I knew she wasn’t actually crying. “I worry about you being all alone. If you had a girlfriend, at least then I would know that you had someone with you. That you weren’t alone. It wouldn’t make things all better by any means, but I would at least feel a little better knowing that you weren’t there all alone.”

  “Again, not all alone—I have roommates. Two of them. Nick and Ethan.”

  Jeannie cocked her head to the side. “Are they gay?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No.”

  “What happens if you get sick?” Mom asked. “Who’s going to take care of you?”

  “Well, let’s see. I had the flu last year and I somehow made it through.”

  My mother’s eyes widened. “You had the flu? And you didn’t tell us?”

  “No, Mom. I didn’t even go to the doctor. I had the flu, I stayed in bed for a couple days, and then I was fine.” I glanced at Holden, who was picking at his fingernails. “Not everyone needs to make a huge deal out of every single ailment that happens to come their way.”

  While I wouldn’t quite go so far as to say that Holden was a hypochondriac, everyone would certainly know anytime he got any sort of injury, regardless of its severity (or not). Which was why I was a little surprised that he still hadn’t mentioned how he got the black eye—but I figured I’d find out eventually.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mom said, shaking her head. “You had the flu and I didn’t even know about it.”

  “It’s really not a big deal, Mom.” I tried to give her a placating smile. “It was last year, and I recovered, and it wasn’t like it was life-threatening in the first place. I don’t think most guys call their moms just because they get sick. Do you think Dad would have called Nana just to tell her that he had a cold?”

  “He wouldn’t have had to,” my mother said, “because he never moved that far away. We worry about you, Shep. You’re all the way over there in San Francisco; you don’t have any family nearby, no girlfriend… How could we not worry about you?”

  I decided not to mention the irony of my drug-dealing family worrying about the one member who was actually on the right side of the law.

  “Let him make his own choices, Darla,” my dad said. “He knows his family will be here when he wants to come back.” He took one more donut from the box and turned and left without saying anything else.

  ***

  It was a relief when it was time to finally leave and head back to San Francisco. I did not go to my apartment but went straight to the gym. West Coast Mixed Martial Arts was my home when I wasn’t at work. I was thirty-four and had been practicing MMA for seven years, still hoping for my chance to sign with the UFC. I didn’t need anyone to tell me, though, that with each passing year, that was looking less and less likely. I was strong and fit and dedicated, but there were guys a decade or more younger than me, guys who could bounce back from injuries a lot faster than I could now. I knew there was no point in looking back, in wishing that I could change the past, but I did—I wished more than anything that I had gotten into this sooner, when I’d had a better chance at success, at really making some good money.

  There were plenty of people who would probably say to just give up the dream. Keep doing the MMA, because it was good for you in all respects—physical, mental, emotional—but hang up the dream of ever making it big. I loved fighting because it was the ultimate contest, because when the match started, it was just you and your opponent and who would be able to outlast the other.

  Because it was later on Sunday, the gym was relatively quiet when I got there. A fact which I actually relished, the peace of it, and stepping inside really did feel like I was coming home. This was my place. I could never explain that to my family, though—they just wouldn’t get it. Sure, my dad and my uncles and my brother brawled, but it was always reactive—they didn’t like what someone said to them, someone owed them money, someone was encroaching on their turf. That sort of fighting, they could understand. What they couldn’t understand was the sort of fighting that involved discipline, practice, making modifications to what you ate or drank. They knew I could fight, but they couldn’t understand why I would go to a gym day after day, and spar with people, or do strength-training exercises, or watch videos of my past fights, not to relive the big hits and takedowns, but to critique myself and figure out how I could improve, how I could do better. And that was what made me different from the other Parkingtons: I wanted to improve; I wanted to do better.

  My next chance at doing so and getting some recognition was this Saturday, actually; I was fighting in the middleweight division against a guy named Andrew Boardman, whose record was identical to mine: 8-2-0. If there were any guys from the UFC there, and if I could finish the fight in a notable way, then that might be the chance I needed.

  The gym’s owner, and my trainer, Kurt, greeted me as I walked through. The gym was in a converted warehouse, with exposed steel beams and brushed-concrete floors. There was an octagonal ring in the middle of the gym, and the rest of the floors were covered in mats. The south-side wall was made up of shatterproof mirrors, and then there was the usual assortment of training equipment: training bags, kettlebells, thick cords of fitness rope, weights.

  This evening, though, I was just going to work on cardio, maybe a little sparring if I felt up to it after, if Kurt was still around. A lot of the guys—the newer ones, anyway—at the gym were only interested in sparring, lifting weights, and weren’t that interested in cardio. But that was one of the best pieces of advice Kurt had given to me, a few months before my first fight: Cardio will win the fight.

  Unless of course you got knocked out, but I’d never been KO’d and didn’t plan on starting anytime soon. Thanks to my brother, thanks to the skirmishes I’d been in, I had a pretty strong chin and could take a hit. Unlike, say, Jordy, who just about anyone could drop to the ground if they brushed their knuckles across his jaw.

  I actually enjoyed cardio, though, not just because it had the potential to win me a fight. I climbed onto the treadmill and started at a brisk walk to warm myself up. I liked cardio because it could obliterate any and all thoughts from your mind, even the ones that you were desperately trying to hang on to or wanted to obsess over. And right now, I wanted to forget everything with my family: the way they guilted me about moving away, about not wanting to participate in the family business. I wanted to forget about my brother who seemed to think that I’d always just be there for him—and why wouldn’t he think that? That’s the way it had always been, and that’s probably how it would continue. I pressed the control on the treadmill and started to jog. Sometimes, I wondered what it would be like to come from a normal family.

  ***

  The week before a fight I would take a few days off, so this week I only had to work at Audacious on Monday and Tuesday, generally the two slowest nights of the week anyway. Which was fine with me; I’d still make good tips but wouldn’t have to run my ass around as much.

  It really didn’t bother me working at a gay bar. I knew my dad and my uncles and my brother couldn’t fathom it, if I wasn’t really gay, but I didn’t mind it. The guys were actually all pretty
humorous, and they knew I was an athlete, so they never tried to overpower me. I’d been there long enough now that I was known about town: newcomers would always stop in and say their friends told them they had to come check out the bar where the straight guy served drinks. Was I sure I was straight? They had changed a few minds before. I couldn’t tell you how many times I had heard that line—often several in one night.

  Some of the guys were actually pretty cool; one of them was the barback, this kid named Tucker. I believe the technical term for his type would be “twink” but he was also into watching UFC fights, and not just because he wanted to see two guys grapple with each other.

  “I’m super excited about this Saturday!” he said. I hadn’t invited him to the fight, but when he found out I was going to be fighting, he immediately put in for that night off. “I might bring a couple of friends. We’ll be your own personal cheering squad! Are you nervous?”

  “Not yet.” And I wasn’t. The nerves wouldn’t start until Friday evening, and they’d stick with me right until I stepped into the cage. Once that happened, everything else just melted away and my only point of focus was my opponent.

  “You know, I might really think about joining your gym and training. I don’t know if I’d be any good in a fight or not, but I’ve definitely thought about it before.”

  “Even if you never did a fight, you should definitely join the gym,” I said. “It’s a great atmosphere, all the people there are really supportive, and you’ll get in awesome shape.”

  He grinned. He was lanky, tall and blond, the sort of boy-next-door type. The sort of guy that all the girls would love if he ever did happen to do a fight, amateur or pro. “Yeah, ’cause most of the gyms around here aren’t really so much fitness as they are a meat market. And while that’s all great and everything… I’ll think about it. It’d be good to have some fighting skills, even if I will probably never get into a real fight.”