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“It was nothing.”
“She what sent you to Las Vegas?”
I felt that stab of memory, the pain no less intense ten years down the road. I’d loved her and I’d left her and it had been like tearing apart my body.
“In a way,” I said. “But nothing’s there anymore.”
“Oh!” Richard said, laughing long and hard. “Oh, son, that’s a good one. Try selling it to some other sucker.”
“Didn’t you ever want something normal, Dad?” I asked, knowing it would get me nowhere. “A home?”
“Home?” Richard said. “I tried that,” he said, and shuddered dramatically.
“Aren’t you ever tired of being alone?”
“I’m not alone,” Richard said, his grin wide and white and perfect, a man with no cares in the world. “I am never, ever alone, I’ve got friends—”
“Friends who implicate you in credit-card fraud,” I said. “Are they really your friends? Can you count on them? Do they know you?”
“No,” Richard said, the answer apparently needed no thought, no contemplation. “I have you for that. Just like you have me. We know each other because we’re the same. You know, maybe we should go back to Vegas. I knew having that boy around was going to cause trouble.”
I shook my head. “This has nothing to do with Miguel. Trust me.”
Richard narrowed his eyes as if staring at me from a long ways away. “Women are trouble, Tyler,” Richard said, his voice ominous.
“Not all of them,” I said. I thought of Margot and Savannah. Of Juliette. Some women were gifts. Gifts that you didn’t recognize until it was too late.
“If we’re not going to search for gems, I’m going to take a shower.”
I heard it all from a hundred miles away, lost in some dark and desolate place. Alone. Always alone. Thoughts of Juliette stirred the ghosts in my head.
And I knew, without a doubt, I didn’t want to become my father, casual and hurtful, without a place to call home.
Without someone to love me back.
Friday afternoon, I was done babysitting my father and had moved on to babysitting my juvenile delinquent, which was by far the more preferred gig.
Despite the kid’s attitude.
Or maybe because of it.
It was hard to say.
“You want to get off your butt and help me, Tyler?”
I leisurely turned the page of the newspaper, stretched out my legs then settled a little deeper into my lawn chair. “Not particularly. You tried to steal my car. I’m holding a grudge.”
Miguel pushed the skinny edge of the crowbar under the last of the rotten floorboards and leaned into it, pushing as hard as he could until finally the wood splintered, cracked and flew off into the lawn.
Barely missing my head.
“Hey!” I yelled, wiping the sun tea I’d spilled down my shirt. “Watch it. I told you, Miguel, you’ve got to be more careful.”
“And I told you I don’t know how to do this crap!” Miguel yelled back. “Show me what to do!”
“What makes you think I know how to do this shit?”
Miguel swore at me in Spanish but I only swore back.
The boy couldn’t hold a silent grudge, and within minutes he was yammering on again.
“So,” Miguel said, kicking aside some pieces of porch. “When you had those two aces, you had no idea that the Japanese dude had a straight?”
I turned the page, hiding my grin behind the sports section. Every day Miguel had some kind of question for me about that World Series of Poker game. The kid must go home and study the clips on YouTube.
“You ask your teachers as many questions as you do me?”
Miguel shot me a give-me-a-break look while wedging the crowbar under another board.
“I’m just saying, if you cared about your books as much as you care about gambling, you could go to college, stop busting up porches for a living.”
“This is hardly a living,” Miguel said. “You’re barely paying me minimum wage.”
I swatted at a small yellow butterfly that hovered around me. Nature, so…annoying.
“Did you go to college?” Miguel asked.
“No,” I lied—well, partly lied. I didn’t graduate college.
“So, you’re doing all right?”
“There’s more to life than money, Miguel,” I said quietly, folding the paper carefully along its crease. Not that I expected Miguel to believe that; I certainly hadn’t believed it when I was Miguel’s age. It takes a whole lot of money to make you realize what you can and can’t buy with it.
“Says the guy driving a Porsche,” Miguel scoffed.
I turned my head to look at Sweet Suzy sitting under the late-afternoon sun. She was a pretty wicked car. But this car, my whole damn lifestyle, came at a price. And these days I felt that price keenly, a bitter knife in my gut.
“I bought that car with my first big win,” I said.
“Yeah?” Miguel ran his eyes across Suzy’s curves like a sixteen-year-old should, like the Porsche was a woman full grown.
