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“Are you safe?” My savior complex emerges again.
“From Walt? Yes, of course.”
Anger. I recognize the emotion as if I transferred it to her. She’s pulling away, building her wall again. “I have to go back to my desk. I already stayed out fifteen minutes longer than I should have.”
She turns, but I catch her hand. She lets me keep her there, and in that brief wordless exchange I sense she wants me to hold her and tell her it’s going to be okay.
“Dinner tonight,” I tell her. “My place.”
“But my brother—”
“Is a grown man. He can reheat lasagna by himself.”
“I’m not sure how long he’s staying, Nate.”
Part of me wants to insist. But I know better than most that family pulls rank.
“I’ll check in on him and maybe come over after, okay?”
“Okay,” I agree, even though that “maybe” was in there and she stood me up once already. But I’m hanging on to it because she owes me. Not only a meal, but also an explanation. Specifically, about why her brother is the infamous Walter Steele’s namesake.
Now I know exactly what Vivian “Vandemark” has been hiding.
Vivian
Nate was wrong about my brother. Yes, Walt is physically a grown man, but he’s not capable of caring for himself. He’s been under the care of nannies, drivers, house managers, and rehabilitation centers for most of his life. So was I, but I also ran a chunk of our father’s company.
That ghost haunts me. I was co-captain yet completely in the dark. I don’t know what irks me more, that I didn’t notice the discrepancies or that my father didn’t trust me enough to confide in me.
I open my front door and call out. No answer. I check the rest of the rooms for my brother even though the cavernous feel of the place tells me no one’s there. I look in the fridge and find the three portions of lasagna I’d separated into glass containers this morning. If he was here, he didn’t eat.
I call his phone.
No answer.
I stare numbly at my father’s urn before lifting the lid on the canister next to it. It reads “tea,” of which it holds a lot. Beneath the netted bags I have two hundred dollars in cash.
After a brief check, I see I’m incorrect.
Had.I had two hundred dollars in cash.
“Dammit, Walt.” I try my brother’s phone again. A recording informs me his voicemail box isn’t set up. I text him next.
Don’t use. Whatever you do. I’ll give you all the money you need.
It’s a desperate plea, but I type in, You’re thirty days sober. I love you.
I scrape my keys off the counter and rush for the door, nearly bowling over the man in the doorway.
Walt.
I blink at him dumbly.
He’s holding four large reusable grocery bags, barely. “Hey. Heard the phone but my hands were full.” He passes me to set the bags down on the kitchen counter while I stare at him like he’s back from the dead. He might as well be. When I noticed cash missing, I pictured him facedown in an alley or holed up in some meth house in a seedy, falling-down neighborhood.
I peek into one of the bags and find a lot of fruit. I never buy this much fresh fruit.
“You didn’t have a juicer,” he tells me. “Now you do.”
