“Here you are, lad.” John pressed the mug into Fletcher’s hands, and the man looked down at it the way I wanted him to look at me.
Patrick seemed to note the shake of his wrists as he drank, the tremble in his legs. He turned sympathetic eyes on me, and I hated it. “How long has he been on the bluff for?”
I shrugged. “Long before me.”
Patrick nodded, then regarded the man sitting now on the one kitchen chair. With a heavy exhale, he stepped forward, leaned down on one knee. “Get that in you, man, eh?” he said. “You ain’t got a shift today?”
“Ain’t a shift to be had,” said Fletcher from the depths of the mug. “Mines’re barren.” With every sip my father took, he seemed to come back into himself.
Patrick grimaced. “And what of the coppers? How many stayed?”
“They guardin’ the pubs now. Guardin’ the liquor an’ sittin’ on their arses. Fuckin’dogs.”
Patrick watched the spittle leak out the side of Fletcher’s mouth and descend into his beard. “You got any food in here, lad?”
Fletcher slugged the whiskey and winced, then he looked up and around, his eyes landing squarely on me.
They stuck, held. He seemed to stutter in a barrage of thought. “Rose?” he said, eyes narrowing and widening, as though I was expanding before him. “Is that my Rose?”
A tear came free. I let it wheedle its way down my face. I hated this house. I wished I were anywhere else. “It’s Nina, Dad,” I said yet again.
And like some wire had reattached, recognition struck him. He stood slowly, the way an old man gets to his feet. “NotmyNina?” he said.
I nodded once. “Yes.”
“Nina’s some fair Artisan now,” he said disjointedly, waving a hand. “At school.”
“I’ve come home,” I said, trying to stand taller, to shake off the feeling I was regressing into a little girl. I was more afraid of being a child again than anything else.
He left the mug on the table and came toward me, hands out. And I thought, for one foolish moment, that he might take my hands in his and check they were real. That he might turn them over and view the lines gouged into them over time, the brand burned out of my forearm, the scars puckering the skin.
But he didn’t do that. Instead, he kept them outward, proffered like a beggar. “You got any coin?” he asked with renewed fervency. “Anythin’?”
Another tear fell. I had feared he would be unrecognizable. I hadn’t known to fear him being the same. “No,” I said.
“Nah, you gotsomethin’,” he said, hands at the lapels of my coat now, shaking it out for proof I carried nothing.
I didn’t tear his hands away. Not yet. “I don’t.”
“Swank bitch” was what he muttered, his teeth baring themselves, his hand fishing the inside of a pocket, and then he was yanked away.
Patrick had the scruff of his neck in his hand the moment the words left his mouth, his expression having morphed into that of the devil. He pulled Fletcher Harrow back into his chair with the ease one dragged a dog to the back door.
“Patrick,” I warned. “He doesn’t know himself.”
But Patrick was already standing over him, his body a barricade, a wall of bricks. “That ain’t the way to speak to a lady,” he said, hand pinned to Fletcher’s shoulder, thumb digging into his collarbone, holding him there.
“Patty, he’s off his rocker.”
“Nevertheless,” Patrick growled, eyes promising violence. “He’ll mind his manners, or I’ll mind ’em.”
Fletcher’s eyes rattled around his head, directionless.
“Get your wits about you, digger,” Patrick said now, tapping Fletcher’s cheek harder than he ought to.
John poured more liquor into the mug. “Here, lad,” he said, passing it to my father. “Take the buzz out of your head.”
That’s how it once was. Killing the clang of his skull with the booze andthe bluff until his head was swimming. If I could crack him open now, I’d find nothing but mush.
