The Book of Daniel (22 page)

“Why is that?” He peered at me curiously. His eyes, so much like JT’s, held intelligence and mischief. “Seems like I’ve heard you found your own firefighter.”

Did no one in this town have anything better to do than gossip? “That is
exactly
what I hate about small towns.”

“Me too.” Carl grimaced. “No matter how long I’ve been here, I cannot get used to having everyone all up in my business.”

“I heartily agree. I can’t wait to get back to my regularly scheduled life.”

“I understand that.” He draped his hand casually next to his coffee cup and leaned back as though he had all the time in the world. “So tell me, why are you still here?”

I broke my muffin apart and picked up a small bite. While I chewed, I thought about it. “I don’t know. First I had nowhere to go, so I came to hang out with Jake. Then we had the accident. Jordan is a great PT, and now there’s the wedding…”

Carl simply watched me. “Seems to me you’ve been here quite a while. Maybe you like it more than you think.”

“I don’t like it at all.” I was adamant. “As soon as I’m done around here, I’m going to buy myself a loft in San Francisco and get back to work.”

“Gets a little tight, doesn’t it?” Carl gestured around his throat with his hands. “Right around here, huh? Like you can’t breathe? Like if you don’t get on the road, you’ll never be able to get a breath of air again?”

“Oh, yeah,” I complained. “You feel that too?”

“I have, yes.”

“How can you stand it?” I asked. “I walk out to get my paper, and this town curls around me, squeezing at me until I want to crawl out of my skin. Everyone talks like St. Nacho’s is this big comfortable shoe, and to me it’s like I’m wearing some woman’s size 0 stilettos with the antitheft tag still inside.”

Taciturn, understated Carl laughed so heartily he startled the women in the next table over. “Welcome to my world. I hate this place.”

Get out of town
. “Seriously?”

“Sure.” He waved and winked at MC. “With certain notable exceptions, St. Nacho’s doesn’t do a thing for me.”

“Haven’t you been here forever? Why the hell did you stay?”

He shrugged. “St. Nacho’s was my Meg’s comfortable shoe. She loved it here, and here is where I had to stay if I wanted to be with her. After she passed there were the children to raise. JT got his job with the fire department here, and I had the motel to run. There just never seemed to be a good time to escape. Everything conspired against me.”

“Oh, man.” I gripped my coffee so hard the lid popped off. “Muse says you can tell if St. Nacho’s want you.”

“For a long time I might have said St. Nacho’s most certainly did not want me. Now I have to think she fought pretty hard to keep me here, even though I didn’t want to stay.”

I started to speak, then closed my mouth. Is that what was going on? A battle of wills? And when had I become the type of person to anthropomorphize a whole town and let it run my damn life?

It sounded like a Martin Short comedy sketch. St. Nacho’s is a fickle mistress.

Fickle mistress my ass.

“I’ve come to believe it’s not my cup of tea, you know? Nothing wrong with it, but I don’t belong here.”

Carl’s gentle eyes studied me for a minute and then he said, “I don’t know if we always get to pick where we belong, Daniel. I don’t think I did.”

So what? St. Nacho’s was quicksand, and I should just stop struggling and let it pull me under? Because that’s what it felt like—the inexorable pressure of being crushed under a ton of sand.

“I don’t…” I tried to get up but felt light-headed. “I just—”

“Whoa. It’s not as bad as all that.” Carl frowned at me as I picked up my coffee and muffin. “It can be nice here. That’s what I wanted to tell you. There are things here you’ll never find anyplace else. It’s compensation for the freedom you lose.”

“Oh, my fucking—” I admit to having a panic attack right there in my brother’s café. “This is
The Town That Ate My Life
.”

Carl laughed again. “That’s funny. Okay. Sorry I said anything. You can relax. You’re free to go, you know. Any time. Just leave.”

I felt in my pockets for my car keys. “Okay. You’re on.”

The highway was calling again. Carl watched me with an amused grin on his face, then shot me a minimal wave. “Buh-bye.”

“I’ll see you later, Carl. Okay?”

“All right. See you. Drive safely.”

I’d begun to make my way to the door when JT and Cam rushed into the place, calling my name. JT was obviously upset about something. Cam had his hands shoved in his pockets. He looked as tired as I felt.

“What is it?”

“Where’s Yasha?” JT asked.

I glanced from one of them to the other. “He’s at our place. He was asleep when I left.”

“We were just there, and he’s not.”

“What?” I guess I’d just assumed he was still there because it was his day off, but I hadn’t really checked. “Seriously? Did you go in?”

“We did,” Cam acknowledged. “We used the spare key you keep in that fake rock thing. Jake isn’t there, and neither is your car.”

“Well”—I had given him permission to use it anytime, but—“so call him. He must have needed to go somewhere. He’s a grown man. Why are we even having this conversation? Were you supposed to meet somewhere and he didn’t show up?”

Cam spoke first. “JT thinks—”

“He went to see your dad.” JT folded his arms. “I’m sure of it. He was talking last night about confronting him about your childhood once and for all, and the fact that he’s gone this morning… It’s no coincidence.”

“Ah, shit.” I looked at Cam. “He probably did. We talked about that last night too. About why Pop might have written to me and not him.”

JT slumped. “I told him I’d go with him, but I was working today. He told me he’d wait.”

“He didn’t, apparently.” I asked, “He isn’t answering his phone?”

“Nope.”

“That little shit. I’m going to text him that if he doesn’t pick up his phone, I will kick his ass.”

Cam’s lips twitched into a smile. “That will make him laugh.”

“Not if I’m speeding down Highway 101 after him. Tell him I’m on my way, and he is not to even enter that house without me. Got that? Tell him I need to be there with him.” I felt in my pockets for my key fob and realized. “He took my fucking car!”

Cam flipped me his keys. “I’ve got your bike. You go. Take my truck.”

“Are you sure?” I couldn’t help it. I drew him aside and stood way closer to him than I probably should have, given that we’d decided the thing between us was fairly hopeless. “I might be gone a couple days. A while…”

“I’m sure.” Cam reached out to me, and I sought the comfort of his arms. I got sucked into his heat—his warmth and his goodness—like I was gravitationally predisposed to be there. It seemed whatever freedom of motion I ever had suddenly shrank in size until I was locked into orbit around this one man. “
Cam
.”

“Drive safely, Daniel.” He held me there for a moment with his cheek against mine, and I knew,
I just knew
the sands of St. Nacho’s thought they had me sucked under for good. I loved him. I fucking
loved him
. I didn’t have to look at Carl to know he had a mocking grin on his face.

“I’ll be back soon, Cam.”

A tiny smile played over Cam’s lips. “I know.”

* * *

In Santa Barbara, I got a text from Cam telling me they’d been in touch with Jake, and he would wait and walk in the park for a couple of hours. Despite driving like a maniac for most of the day, I didn’t hit the LA traffic until three in the afternoon. By that time, I could kiss going over twenty miles an hour—for the most part—good-bye. Yet, mercifully, it was still light when I reached Long Beach. I got off the 605 Freeway on Spring Street, in unfamiliar territory, and headed north a short way until I got to Studebaker Road. On my left was a huge regional park, and on the right, a tree-lined neighborhood full of low-slung fifties ramblers, ranch-style homes with cutesy shuttered windows and curving driveways. I could no more picture my father here than I could picture him in the pricey ocean-view home I had lived in with Bree. I couldn’t picture my father at all, anymore.

I texted Jake’s phone when I got off the freeway. It had been a grueling drive, but I pulled up in front of my dad’s poorly kept, modest house at about six p.m.

I could smell the sea and feel its moisture on my face when I opened the door of Cam’s truck. Someone was grilling meat, and it reminded me I hadn’t eaten since that muffin from Bêtise. The wide, blue sky had only just begun its burning lightshow in the west, ready to put on one of the Southland’s spectacular sunsets—enhanced courtesy of LA’s grimy air.

While I waited, my car came creeping around the corner with Jake at the wheel. He parked behind me. I could tell he was nervous. Maybe he was ashamed he’d sneaked off without me. I wasn’t going to give him a hard time over it. I was too worried about how all this was affecting him to give a damn how we got there. The main thing, the important thing, was that he knew I would stand by him.

“I get why you came alone.” I told him.

“I’m sorry.” He looked small, just then, and I hated that.

“Aw, don’t be sorry. You know what? You can do this alone, if you need to. I can deal with that. What I can’t handle is wondering if you need me and I’m not here.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I know.”

“I’ve been doing this a long time, Jakey. I have this thing inside me that kills me if I don’t—if you need me and I’m not around. Maybe it’s more like I need to be here, just in case. Maybe it’s more for me than you, after all.”

“I know,
Danilo
. No worries.”

I felt tears sting my eyes. “I wasn’t there so much lately though, huh? Bree wasn’t big on family stuff.”

“Not your family anyway.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, if I had a dime for every time I had to go to one of her cousins’ insufferable weddings… Hell. Her parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary was like
Tales from the Crypt
.”

Jake laughed. “I never could have stayed with that bitch as long as you did, man.”

“Aw. Bree was all right.” I responded automatically. “She was my wife for a long time. I owe her some loyalty for that, anyway.”

I was going to pay handsomely for the privilege too. Contrary to what I thought I’d feel, it was kind of…okay, actually.

“So. What’s it going to be? You want me to wait here while you go? Or do you want me to come with you. Either way, man. No pressure.”

“You really drove all that way to stand by Cam’s truck?”

“I drove all this way to stand by you, Jakey. You tell me.”

Jake flung himself forward and wrapped his arms around me, and maybe that’s what I’d come for. Maybe that’s what we both needed, right there.

Nothing the old man could do or say, nothing our new siblings could ever have to offer me, would eclipse that moment when my brother pulled me into a hard hug and let me know that no matter what, no matter who had actually fathered us, who entered our lives, or what happened to us, we were solid. We were the Livingston brothers. And nothing could take that away.

He threw an arm around my shoulder and pulled me with him. “Let’s go find out what Pop’s been up to all these fucking years.”

Chapter Twenty-two

A middle-aged Asian woman answered Jake’s knock. She wore one of those smock aprons with wide, stitched-on pockets over scrubs and introduced herself as Sally. She was a smiling, nodding type of woman, pleasant and probably very nice. We didn’t know what to expect, so I told her who we were and why we were there and asked about Joyce. Sally said Joyce didn’t live there but her brother—Lonnie—would arrive home from school soon.

There were a few signs that a young person inhabited the house. A console table where stacks of mail sat unopened also held a bowl of movie-ticket stubs and what looked like the detritus of someone’s social life—receipts for fast-food restaurants, CDs, and change—as though someone emptied their pockets out there when they arrived home in the evening. A colorful gym bag and some well-used athletic shoes waited by the door.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but Sally took us at our word that we were Elton Livingston’s sons. She led us deeper into the house. Despite fans and open windows, it reeked of cat and illness. That was the first time it really hit me. Pop was a very, very sick man. Sally turned the television she’d been watching off, and took us past the living room, down the hallway to the master bedroom. There was no door—only hinges. Maybe they’d had to take it off to get the bed inside.

The room—repurposed as a sickroom—was cramped and stuffy. Besides the standard hospital-style adjustable bed there was a recliner and an old dresser. A television mounted on the wall was tuned to
Animal Planet
. Poor quality paintings graced the walls, along with a few pictures of what I assumed was Pop’s new family in happier times.

Sally turned the sound down. “He likes to watch the nature shows.” She said this to us, then raised her voice to almost shouting and turned to Pop. “Don’t you, Elton. You like the animals, huh?”

Her head bobbed enthusiastically, and Pop nodded back once, almost reflexively, as if he didn’t really know what he was saying yes to.

For the life of me, I couldn’t really make myself believe it was him. Internally, I knew that brittle human shell was our pop. Who else could it be? But at the same time, it wasn’t. Jake stepped closer to me, and automatically, I put my hand on his back.

I’m not sure Pop recognized us either.

“Pop.” I made a marginal effort. “It’s me, Daniel. And here’s Jake.”

Pop’s salt-and-pepper caterpillar eyebrows drew together. His cheeks had sunken into hollows beneath high cheekbones. A nasal canula fed him oxygen in rhythmic bursts. He hissed something through dry, open lips but I didn’t catch what it was. What teeth we could see protruded a little, unbrushed for the most part. A tray by the bedside held water. Sally offered this to him, and he drank greedily. It made me think the television in the living room had claimed her attention for long enough that he’d grown thirsty. Whatever I felt about him that made me unhappy, that he’d had to lie there thirsty while she watched
Jeopardy
or whatever.