The Last Family

26

‘He did what?” Laura shrieked. She studied her son, who was angry and not about to listen to anything she had to say. His face was bright red, his eyes seemed to be on fire.

“Nothing I could do,” Thorne said. “He insisted he had to speak to Paul. Threatened to blow the whole surveillance.”

Reb’s bottom lip was extended in anger. “If he’s not in the mountains like you said, I wanted to talk to him. He has a telephone now. What’s so special about him that I can’t talk to him? He’s my father, isn’t he?”

“You go upstairs,” she said. She didn’t move until she heard his bedroom door slam.

“What on earth did he say to Paul?” she asked.

Erin stood in a nearby doorway, listening with her head cocked.

“Reb told him that he should come here. He told Paul that he was selfish. He told him that growing up without a father was a hardship. He basically said that Paul was a selfish asshole and to come now or never.”

“He said that?”

“Oh, more than that. But that was the gist of it-the high points. He spoke to Paul like Paul was the child.”

Laura smiled. “Good,” she said. “What did Paul say?”

“I’ve no idea. I think he hung up.”

Reb was lying on the bed when Laura came up a few minutes later. Wolf put his head on Reb’s leg, and his mother sat on the edge of the bed.

“Reb. You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“You know what you did was wrong?”

Reb fought to control his quivering lip. “He doesn’t love us, Mama. Why?” He sat up, and she hugged him as he sobbed against her shoulder. “What did we ever do to him? Were we bad? Cause we were just little… we didn’t mean to make him mad.”

“Reb, you didn’t do anything, and it isn’t that your father doesn’t love you. He does.”

“But he yelled at me like he hates me. He said I should be turned over someone’s knee and that my behavior could cost us all our lives and that this wasn’t a game. He yelled some other stuff, but I wasn’t listening. He’s a horrible, mean man. I wish I hadn’t called him. I wish he was dead. I wish those bad men had killed him dead and dead.”

Laura did the best she could, but Reb would not be consoled. His face was like a mass of tight cables all pulling in different directions. Laura had never seen him in such a state. She left his room and ran into Erin in the hall.

“Just who the hell does he think he is?” Erin yelled.

“Erin!” she said. “Language!”

“The hell with him!”

“Erin, please.”

“Just because he looks like a damned scarecrow doesn’t give him the right to treat Reb like that! I don’t care how he treats me, but I do care how he treats my little brother. How dare he?”

“Erin, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.”

“Oh, so just keep on taking up for Mr. Slime Varmint. I’m sorry he got shot in his precious face.” She looked directly into her mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry it didn’t kill him, too.”

“Erin!”

“Oh, Mother, you’re as bad as he is.” Erin ran to her bedroom and slammed the door. The noise echoed through the hallway like a shotgun blast.

Laura went to the kitchen, poured herself a large glass of red wine, and drained it. “Thorne,” she said, speaking to the window, which was like talking directly into his earphones, “do us all a favor and tell him we don’t need to see him ever again. Tell him he can go straight back to his mountain. Tell him if he hurts my children again, I’ll kill him myself.”

Then Laura took her bottle of wine into the studio and turned up the stereo so she could cry in privacy.

Erin was furious. Her father had turned her family’s lives upside down, put her social life on hold, and she didn’t appreciate it a bit. She thought about the new boy in school, who might be the most beautiful boy she had ever laid eyes on. Eric Garcia had told a friend of hers that he had a crush on her. Earlier that day he had spoken to her while she’d been eating lunch. He had asked Erin out, and normally she would have jumped on it in an instant. Her friends had been sick, they were so jealous. But with everything that was happening she had had to put him off by saying that she was busy, although she had been careful to leave the door open for the week after. I mean, how long can it take all these experts to nail one old creep? After school that agent, Sean Merrin, had been waiting and had shadowed her, even on the streetcar from her high school. It made her feel like an idiot, a small child.

She decided that she would show them. She’d slip Eric a note arranging to meet him, and then she’d slip Sean Merrin. Fuck ’em.