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“You’re safe here, Kael.”
He gives me a sad smile and then shrugs. “My old man headed out not long after the beer stealing incident. He just got up one morning, told my mom she made him sick, told me I was impossible to love, and then he got into his car and he drove away.”
I blink, long and slow. “He said what?”
“Yeah, can you believe it? That’s the last thing he actually said to his thirteen-year-old son,‘you’re impossible to love, kid. I’m outta here.’”
“And he never came back?”
“You got it on one, Jonesy.” He sits back on the couch and crosses his foot over the opposite knee, pressing down on his thigh, letting it bounce a couple of times beneath the weight of his hand. It’s a nervous movement, edgy and fidgety. “We never saw or heard from him ever again.”
“He never contacted you?”
“Nope.”
The man sounds like a nightmare.
“Good fucking riddance to him, I say…” Kael picks up his coffee mug again. He takes a sip, swallows quickly. “Because that bastard laid into my mom most nights, and I can’t even tell you how many broken noses and black eyes I ended up with over the years trying to protect her.”
I feel sick to my stomach. “He beat your mother, too?”
“Yeah, he’d roll in at all hours of the night stinking of booze and sex, and when he was done beating on her, he’d come looking for me because why the hell not?”
“Did your mother ever report him?”
“Nah, she just took it. She’d drop me off at school with bruises in various stages of healing all over her face, and when a teacher would ask her what happened, she’d make up some bullshit story about walking into a door, or tripping on the living room rug. I tried to stop him. I swear I did, Jonesy. I’d lay awake all night waiting to hear him come through the front door. Then I’d jump out of bed and run down the hallway, doing whatever I could think of doing at the time to provoke him. Sometimes I only had to look sideways at him. Other times, I only had to say his name. It didn’t really take much.”
“Why would you do that?”
“So my mom didn’t get hit again. See, the beauty of it was, if I aggravated him enough, then he’d take out his anger on me, and he’d leave my mom alone. When he just used his fist, it was almost a relief. It’s when he grabbed his belt, or a baseball bat, that’s when shit got real. When he finally left us, I was…relieved.”
“Does he know who you are? I mean, of course he knows who you are, but does he know that you’reKael Jenkins, bass player for Cold Neptune?”
The pad of Kael’s thumb rubs back and forth over his bottom lip as he considers my words. I pick apart every movement, every nuance, trying to find some hidden meaning within.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly, and I can tell he’s actually giving it some genuine thought. “I don’t think so. He’s never reached out or tried to make contact with me. I wondered once if he might try to look for me when the band really started making a name for ourselves, in some lame attempt to get money out of me. But he never did.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
Guilt suddenly sweeps across Kael’s face, thick and heavy. His eyebrows draw tightly together, and there’s a quiet deepness to his movements. He gives the ceiling a long, pained look, and silence stretches out between us for seconds, minutes. His arrogance from earlier is completely gone now, and in its place is something that closely resembles shame.
Or remorse?
“Kael, what’s wrong?”
He swallows thickly, scratching at his chin. “We have a private investigator who works for the band. His name’s Sal. He’s the best in the business, and we use him for different things, a way of covering our asses if our asses ever need covering. I know it’s not entirely ethical, but I paid Sal to find him once. My dad, I mean. I had the band’s PI track him down. It was a few years ago now. I was emotional, or maybe I just wasn’t thinking straight. Obviously I wasn’t thinking straight, but anyway, Sal got me an address and a phone number.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, I did absolutely nothing with it, and you know why I did nothing with it? Because it turns out the bastard was living in New Haven, Connecticut the entire time.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“He’d been living there since the day he left us. Sal said the deeds to the house he was living in were in his name, and he had a decent amount of cash in the bank. The whole time, growing up, while my mom was going without, trying to make ends meet, giving me everything she could afford while she was dying of fucking cancer, my dad lived less than two hours away, and the sack-of-shit never once offered her a cent to help raise me. He never once checked on us. He never dropped by, not even a goddamn phone call for the holidays.”
