That was the part where it would probably get nasty. It certainly did at Harrison’s dinner party. “I’m a food delivery driver by day and I wait tables by night.”
HB continued to stare at her as she waited for his putdowns. “So you’re a hustler?”
Harrison was offended. “She’s not a hustler.”
But Jayda wasn’t offended at all. “If hustling means doing whatever honest work I can get to pay my bills, then yes, sir, I’m a hustler.”
Harrison actually liked that response. He squeezed her hand.
“You can call it hustling or whatever you want,” she added.
“What do you call it?” HB asked her.
“I’m a survivor. I call it surviving.”
HB continued to stare at her. “As do I,” he replied.
Jayda was floored. He actually agreed with her? She looked at Harrison. She could tell he was floored, too, because he was staring at his father.
And then his father looked at him. “How have you been, Harrison?” he asked him.
It was the first time they had actually had a conversation. Harrison nodded his head. “I’ve been good. And you?”
“Oh I’ve been better. But I’m not dying anyway.”
“You’re not . . . What do you mean? I thought the doctors said--”
“Oh they said a lot of things. But I told them to try every experimental treatment they could find. My cancer is rare, so it needed a rare treatment in my view, not the standard courses. One of those treatments happened to work. We had to go all the way to Africa to get it, but it worked. Which means that as of this day I’m cancer-free.”
“Oh Father!” Harrison said with an exhale of such relief that he leaned over and gave his father a hug.
Jayda was astounded. She’d never seen Harrison so emotional. And at first she could tell his father was super-stunned too. But then his father squeezed his eyes shut as Harrison hugged him. And then he returned Harrison’s hug.
“I wanted to tell you I was so sorry,” Harrison said to his father as they embraced, “but you wouldn’t receive my calls.”
“There was nothing to be sorry about,” said HB. “You weren’t the driver.”
Jayda could tell that such a statement surprised Harrison by the way he stopped embracing his father. “What do you mean? I thought you believed what they were saying.”
HB shook his head. “Not for a second. Not you. Felix maybe. But never you.”
“Then why didn’t you accept my calls?”
“Because I’m a stubborn bastard who was angry with you for allowing her to get behind the wheel of that car in the first place when you knew she was drinking too.”
“Father, I was plastered. I could barely stand up. I didn’t even know how I got in that car or who was driving or any of that until after the accident. How was I going to stop anybody else when I had no control over myself that night?”
For a few seconds they just stared at each other. Then HB looked away. But Harrison was still staring.
It seemed like the perfect time to ask, Jayda thought. “Why would Gweneth blame you for that accident?” she asked Harrison.
“Because it became a conspiracy theory in my stepmother’s family that got out of hand. More people in our circles were believing the lie than the truth. Even the police confirmed that I was in the backseat passed out, along with my then-girlfriend, and both of us had alcohol levels in our system that would not have allowed either one of us to drive two feet let alone ten miles before we crashed. But they wanted to sue me for reckless endangerment or whatever it was and needed me to be guilty too.”
“Did you settle the case?”
“I couldn’t. That would have confirmed the conspiracy. And I wasn’t going to do that ever.”
“But I settled the case,” HB said, “which angered him. That was why he didn’t try very hard to get in touch with me. A few attempts in four years wasn’t very difficult to do.”
