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The women averted their gazes to their half-finished drinks.
His father stumbled toward the bar. “Brenda, get me another whiskey.”
As she wiped a glass with a bar towel, the gray-haired owner shook her head. “Sorry, Earl. You’re done here for tonight. Let your boy take you home to sleep it off.”
Earl snorted and nearly fell over as he tried to walk backward away from the bar. “Ain’t no son of mine.”
Through the years, Keith had wondered if that could be true. He’d heard it enough as a child, but the physical similarities between him and his father were too striking to ignore. Or at least they had been before a lifetime of drinking, shooting up, snorting, and swallowing any pill he could get his hands on aged Earl before his time.
“You hear that?” his father yelled to the room of patrons who wanted nothing to do with him. They all knew him and tried not to engage with him when he got like this. Which was often. “No son of mine would abandon his fucking father.” He got right up in Keith’s face. The stench of booze and stale cigarettes nearly knocked him out. Smelled like it’d been weeks since his dad had stuck a toothbrush in his mouth.
“Yep, heard this all before, Pop. Come on. Brenda doesn’t want you chasing away her paying customers.”
“Don’t give me a damn penny. I put a roof over your head your whole fucking childhood. Now you show up when you want to embarrass me. Told that goddamned woman she shoulda let me use the goddammed coat hanger on her.”
Hatred boiled in Keith’s gut, bubbling until it nearly spewed out the top of his head. Only two things kept him from wrapping his hands around his father’s throat and dragging his limp body to the car.
The first was a promise he’d made to his mother in the last seconds of her life. And the other was his younger siblings. At eighteen, Keith joined the military. He’d never planned on college and needed money and to learn a sustainable skill. He’d been an Army mechanic, trained on all types of ground vehicles from Humvees to tanks to basic trucks. Every spare penny went to a house fund and when he left at twenty-two, he purchased the home he shared with some of his siblings now.
But enlisting meant he’d left his siblings and mother to deal with their father’s bullshit and abuse on their own for four years. Since then, he’d worked his ass off to make sure none of them ever had to deal with the man again. It was the only way to assuage his guilt over abandoning them for four years. They didn’t need this garbage tainting their lives. As long as Keith dealt with it as quietly and efficiently as possible like he always did, the toxicity wouldn’t touch them.
For their sake, he resisted the urge to turn and storm out, and tried yet again to get his father to leave.
“Let’s go. Car’s warm, and we’ll swing by a drive-thru before I drop you home. Get you something solid to put in your stomach.” At least he’d have something in his gut to soak up the liquor.
Earl swayed on his feet. “Don’t need your fucking charity, boy. Can get my own damn food.”
Sure he could, if he didn’t blow his government checks on his flavor of the month drug. First, it was Keith never helping his father, then it was not wanting to take charity from him. No matter what he did, Keith couldn’t win with the man. Not that he wanted to gain any ground. What he wanted was never to see the bastard again.
Unfortunately, his luck didn’t run that way. No wonder the wealthy Audi owner looked down at him. He sure lived fucking beneath someone like her.
Earl spun toward the bar once again. “You call him?” he asked Brenda. “Always fucking selling me out.”
Having owned this bar her entire adult life, Brenda wasn’t fazed by drunken assholes anymore. Apparently, the pathetic relationships between father and son got to her, though. She shot Keith a pitying look before nodding. “I did, Earl. It was him or the cops. You were making a scene. Bothering my customers. Figured leaving with your boy and sleeping in your own bed was better than spending another night drying out in a cell.”
Some shred of rationality must have still lingered somewhere in Earl’s booze-soaked mind because he grunted then trudged past Keith toward the door without a word. Guess a ten-minute ride in the car with a son he hated won out over trying to sleep on a concrete bench in a jail cell.
How flattering.
“Sorry, Brenda,” he said with a nod to the older woman.
“Don’t worry about it, honey.”
He tossed two twenties down on the bar. “Please buy those ladies a round on me. Keep the rest for yourself.”
