Prodigal Son Read online

  “Misty Cashmere,” Evan said, “sounds like a stripper name.”

  Her head jerked over. She scanned the street. It took a moment for her glare to zero in on him, but when it did, he felt it like a retaliatory laser.

  “You take one more hit off that vape pen,” Evan said, “and Bridger’s gonna wake up tonight knowing what a choke hold feels like.”

  “That’s so perfect. I make my own choices as a woman—”

  “You’re not a woman—”

  “—and you blame the man. Like, I have no agency.”

  “You have more agency than I can keep track of,” Evan said. “But you don’t even know this guy.”

  “That’s the point of dating,” she said. “To, like, get to know someone.”

  “The guy’s a communications major—ironic given his lack of verbal acuity—and he barely maintains a two-point-oh. Been on academic probation twice. And he had a jaywalking ticket—”

  “Uh, you just butchered six dudes in an impound lot.”

  “Context is everything.”

  “Yeah?” Joey said. “Well, maybe he was jaywalking to help a nun not get run over by a bus.”

  “An unlikely array of circumstances. Plus, that would’ve been on the ticket write-up.”

  Her face was red. “Pulled that up already, did you?”

  “Yes. And he has an outstanding speeding ticket. Not exactly responsible.”

  “Not exactly Ted Bundy.”

  “That’s your standard now, Orange Blossom Girl?”

  Bridger stepped back to the table, drying his hands on his pants in a manner unbefitting a legal adult.

  Joey said, “This is me hanging up on you.”

  “He’d better pay for dinner,” Evan said. “He’s got a five-thousand-dollar limit on his Mastercard, and he hasn’t even used half of it this month.”

  He watched her reach for her phone.

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t you want to know his late-payment history?”

  Click.

  Joey smiled at Bridger as he slid into his chair. When he adjusted his napkin in his lap, the grin vanished and she shot a death stare over at Evan.

  Bridger looked back up, caught the tail end of her expression before she produced a new radiant smile. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Joey said, swirling her straw in her water glass. “It’s nothing.”

  A truck passed between them, disrupting the reception. Evan adjusted his headphones and picked her back up again.

  “—just issues with my uncle.”

  Bridger said, “That angry guy?”

  “Yes,” Joey said. “I agree that he comes off real angry. He doesn’t think so, but he lacks self-awareness.”

  “Yeah? That sucks. My dad’s like that. He doesn’t get what a dickhead he is all the time, like, ‘I’m not paying for you to get C’s,’ you know?”

  But Joey was barely paying attention to her date, instead casually letting her gaze sweep the street. It stuck for a moment on Evan, her defiant smile magnified through the Steiners. “And lack of self-awareness isn’t even his worst trait.”

  “What is, then?” Bridger, ever the conversationalist.

  “He’s really demanding. I work for him, kind of. But he needs everything on his time frame.”

  “I hate that shit.”

  “And he’s not appreciative,” Joey continued. “Barely at all. And right now he needs me to arrange an appointment for him tomorrow, but I made clear there’s no way I’ll help him if he doesn’t give me the night off tonight. So.” She smiled once more, flashing that hair-thin gap in her front teeth, a dimple indenting her right cheek. It was ridiculous how elegant she looked across the table from that mouth-breathing reprobate. “We’ll just see if he’s smart enough to not disturb me for the rest of dinner…”

  Bridger looked confused. Or that was just his resting facial expression.

  “… and to remember that I will handle any work that needs to be handled the way I always do, which is with earth-shattering competence—”

  “Uh—”

  “—before he comes over tomorrow morning. At, like, seven A.M., ’cuz I know it’s pressing. Anything my uncle and I have to deal with we can deal with then.”

  “O-kay,” Bridger said.

  “And he should know me well enough by now to trust that I can take care of myself,” Joey continued. “And that I will get home safely tonight, isn’t that right, Bicks?”

  Bridger said, “Sure?”

  Evan lowered the binoculars into his lap. She was his charge, and he had to look out for her and keep her safe. Didn’t he? What was the right amount of protective and what was too much? A low burn started in his chest like an overstretched muscle. Anger? Concern? He didn’t have a good sense for things like this, not the way Mia did.

  He tugged off his headphones and threw them and the surveillance device into the passenger seat. Pulling the truck out into traffic, he flipped a U-turn. When he passed the front of the restaurant, Bridger had his face buried in the menu, but Joey’s eyes flicked up and watched him sail past.

  She mouthed, Thank you.

  As he headed back to Castle Heights, that burn in his chest spread out, descending the rungs of his ribs, creeping up his neck. An image came to him unbidden, Veronica on that endless sweep of a couch, her gaze lowered to the rim of her champagne glass: I thought if I named you, I couldn’t bear to part with you. And then it slammed home, the name for the warmth expanding from his torso, the realization making him wince.

  No wonder they called it a four-letter word.

  37

  To Be Continued

  Mia answered the door wearing a Columbia Law School T-shirt that drooped to midthigh. She smelled fresh from the shower, green-apple shampoo or conditioner, her mop of wavy chestnut hair brushed back and for once subdued.

  “Yes,” she said. “I checked the peephole.”

  Evan said, “And you answered anyway.”

  “You look a little banged up.”

  Given the ringing in his ears from the close-proximity gunshot, her words came in slightly muted. “Rough day at the office.”

  She opened the door and offered a hug. Her body felt distinct beneath the T-shirt, every contour of her pressed against him. For a moment he lost himself in the familiarity of her. His mind cast back to the warmth of her bare stomach against his, her mouth at his ear, the arch of her spine. He felt an urge to slide his hand off the midline of her back to the dip of her waist and wrap her into him.

  Instead he patted her shoulder blade once and stepped back. Behind her he could hear the TV, something cartoony and symphonic.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Mia said.

  “You asked me to talk to Peter. About the stuff he’s been grappling with. Your husband—he died when Peter was three, right?”

  “Good memory.”

  Evan had gone upstairs only to burn his clothes from the impound lot and grab a shower. Standing under the pounding heat of the jets, he’d realized that if he felt lost in regard to Veronica, Peter must have felt the same way about his father. But was trying to process it with a nine-year-old brain.

  And that no matter how busy Evan was dodging missiles and mercenaries, he owed it to the boy to try to clear a few obstacles from his path.

  Not that he had any idea how to do that.

  Mia beckoned him in. “He earned a bit of screen time this week,” she said somewhat defensively. “And tomorrow’s an admin day, so no school.”

  Evan said, “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Peter’s head popped up above the back of the sofa. “Evan Smoak!”

  As Peter zipped into full view, Evan saw he was wearing pajama bottoms and another man’s dress shirt, the tail and front hems swaying down past his knees. The fabric was wrinkled, the collar out of whack, and Evan wondered if he’d been sleeping in his father’s shirts, too.

  Peter tried to engage Evan in an elaborate handshake that he couldn’t keep up with. �
�No,” Peter said, seizing his hand and forcing it into various contortions. His fingers were grubby, sticky with some sugar residue, but Evan restrained himself from drawing away or commenting.

  He blundered his way through the ritual, looking over at Mia, who grinned at his discomfort. “I’m gonna finish the dishes,” she said. “Why don’t you two watch TV.”

  Peter made a fist, yanked it back beside his waist. “Yesss.” He grabbed Evan’s arm and pulled him around the couch, flopping onto the cushion.

  Jerked down next to the boy, Evan grimaced against a rib bruise he’d sustained in his death match with Keller.

  On the television a donkey-boy cried out, “Mama, Mama!” braying and kicking everything in sight, and then Pinocchio sprouted equine ears and tugged at them in horror.

  It was one of the few children’s movies Evan was familiar with. He remembered watching it on Papa Z’s crappy console TV with its wooden frame, the reception fuzzed by static. How the lost boys of Pride House had fanned out around the screen on the worn carpet of the living room, transfixed like toddlers at story time. What had the movie of a motherless boy meant to them all? To Andre?

  What had it meant to Evan?

  On the floor beside the couch rested a poster board with color-printer photos pasted haphazardly on it, apparently drying. A crayoned oak tree with the pictures dangling like fruit from the limbs—Mia; Peter’s father, Roger; Mia’s brother and parents; and so on.

  The stupid family report.

  Evan snuck a peek at Peter, but he was focused intently on the movie. They watched a few minutes, Evan glancing over at Peter from time to time, gauging an opening. His own childhood, devoid of heart-to-heart talks, had left him ill-prepared for this.

  “He’s a puppet,” Peter said. “But he wants to be a real boy.”

  Evan nodded. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Duh,” Peter said. “Everyone wants to be real. But I guess…”

  “What?”

  “I guess you could get hurt more. ’Cuz wood, you know? But once you’re real, it’s scarier.”

  Evan thought about the Ten Commandments, how they wrangled the world into a rigid order. His penthouse upstairs, airtight and defended against intrusion. Clean hard surfaces, every item in place, accounted for. So comforting and so lifeless. Not a single mess or splinter, every rough edge sanded down, smooth as the limbs of a marionette.

  Very much opposite to the chaos engendered in him at the thought of Veronica. This person he was bound to, human and flawed, blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh. He recalled her hands on his shoulders, the tinge of chardonnay on her breath. She’d gazed at him with maternal adoration. And recoiled from him in disgust when he told her what he’d been trained to be.

  Maybe that’s what intimacy was, a discomfort like the burning he’d felt in his chest when Joey had told him she could take care of herself. A sense of dread at what could go wrong, a stifling of fear, a baring of the vulnerable self to the judgment of someone else. The jagged edge of one soul meeting another, tearing and rending, a connection and a diminishment both. All that imperfection, all that friction—it wore down the tread, expending rather than preserving.

  What if that was the point?

  To expend ourselves in the care of people who mattered?

  Without that, what was there to preserve?

  He felt a rush of grief that he’d taken this long—the better part of four decades—not even to learn this but to consider it. Once again he pictured Veronica crouched over that marble newborn in the cemetery. He was so much like that inanimate likeness rendered in stone, carved into a facsimile of a human being. What had Veronica told him in Bel Air? To survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. He’d certainly expended himself in the service of others, for Andre and those he helped, but now all those missions lay revealed to him for what they were—proxies for actual intimacy, surrogates for real connections that could pierce through his defenses and touch him at the tender core.

  Joey mouthing, Thank you, as he drove away from her.

  Veronica’s hazel eyes glazed with emotion and champagne.

  Peter swimming in the rumpled pinstripe shirt of his dead father: Once you’re real, it’s scarier.

  Evan felt that heat moving through him once again and blinked a few times to regain his focus. He noticed he was clenching his jaw and relaxed it, bringing himself back to this couch, this living room.

  Pinocchio was following Jiminy Cricket now, pursuing his conscience up a craggy hillside and leaping into the black, black sea.

  Peter was watching Evan. “What are you thinking about?”

  Evan cleared his throat, which he was surprised to find needed clearing. “How much wiser you are than me.”

  “When you were my age?”

  “Maybe now, too,” Evan said.

  Peter beamed.

  Evan tried to find what to say next, but this wasn’t his language. His head felt murky, words just out of grasp. He picked a starting point. “Your shirt’s big.”

  Peter looked down, picked at it. “It was my dad’s.”

  “Do you remember him well?”

  “Not really.” That raspy nine-year-old voice still upbeat, contemplative. “I remember the scruffles on his cheeks when he kissed me. And some kind of whaddayacallit he wore. Like, to smell good?”

  “Aftershave?”

  “Whatever. Some guy at the mall had it once when he walked by, and I remembered.” His charcoal eyes looked impossibly large, and Evan sensed an opening into something bigger. Peter tugged at a button. “But…”

  Evan’s mouth was dry. He stayed hushed, his muscles tight with anticipation. He waited. Waited some more.

  “But how do you know someone you never knew?” Peter said.

  The question left Evan breathless. An image flashed into his mind, the moment when Veronica’s wide cheeks and dark, shimmering eyes had first come clear beneath the brim of that black summer hat, how he’d known that it was her without knowing her at all. Something twisted free inside him, an unknotting into a new space.

  He’d been drawn down here for Peter. But for himself, too. His head was pounding, his senses fired.

  “I don’t know,” Evan said. “But your dad knew you. And maybe … maybe that went into your cells. I think you know him in there. Deep.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because I know what kind of kid you are. Open and confident and…” Evan searched for the word in the murk. “Secure.” The conversation was moving fast and required terrific focus, like skiing a black diamond where any second he could catch an edge and it would all go horribly wrong. “And a lot of that is from your mom. But I’m pretty sure it’s from him, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  Evan thought about it. “Because I know your mom. And I know what kind of mom she is.”

  Peter blinked up at him. Nodded.

  “Which means we know what kind of man she’d marry,” Evan said. “Don’t we?”

  Peter nodded again.

  “And that’s why you’re wearing his shirts, I think. To be close to him.”

  “But…”

  “What?”

  Peter said, “Even if that’s true…”

  Pinocchio and Jiminy had made their way home across dark cobblestone streets, pounding on the front door with frustration. But no one was home.

  “Even if that’s true…” Peter took a deep breath and scratched his nose, hiding his eyes. “I don’t have anyone to be proud of me.”

  There were a hundred pat answers, none of them suitable. Evan sat with the words Peter had entrusted to him. Then he reached over. His hand looked so big resting on Peter’s knee.

  “I know what you’re gonna say.” Peter kept his face tilted down, away. “But Mom doesn’t count. She has to be proud of me. She’s my mom.”

  Evan marveled that Peter could take something like that for granted.

  Again he pictured Veronic
a on that big white couch.

  Why didn’t you want me?

  My circumstances weren’t suited to it.

  Peter placed his hand on Evan’s, a double stack atop his knee. He returned his focus to the movie, and Evan followed suit.

  They watched for a time, the boy’s hand warm against his.

  Finally Mia called over from the kitchen: “Okay. Bedtime for Bonzo. Brush, floss, pee.”

  “Mom! Evan Smoak’s here! Twenty more minutes.”

  “Are you kidding? You are way past bedtime already.”

  “Ten more minutes?”

  “Hmm. Let me consider. How about…” Mia came around to the front of the couch, a finger rested alongside her cheek, pondering theatrically. “… no more minutes. You know why?”

  Peter singsonged, “You don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can I have a glass of eggnog?”

  “No. Too much sugar. And besides, it’s expired.”

  Peter slouched off toward his bedroom. “Like my dreams.”

  Mia pursed her lips, rolled her eyes. Evan followed her back to the kitchen and helped her put away the last few dishes. A Post-it stuck next to the telephone had another quotation from that Jordan Peterson book she was always reading: Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.

  She often scattered notes around the condo as parental touchstones for Peter. It was always a challenge for Evan to wrap his head around the notion of a childhood guided by carefully curated life lessons. Especially in contrast to his own, shaped by the rule of the foster-home pack and a set of Commandments designed to sharpen him into a lethal implement.

  She gestured to a top shelf in the cupboard, out of her reach, and then handed him a salad bowl. He took it, their fingers brushing, and set it high in its place.

  “Did that go okay?” she asked, head tilting toward the couch.

  “I think so.”

  “Just getting him to talk about it is a help,” she said. “It’s hard for him to bring it up to me. I think he thinks it’s … disloyal somehow. Like I’ll take it that he’s saying I’m not enough for him as a parent. And I’ll let you in on a secret.” She leaned close, and again Evan caught the scent of green apple from her damp hair. “No one’s enough as a parent.”