Chapter 23
“Brendan, is that you?”
His mom was calling him and he hadn’t even closed the front door yet.
“Yes, ma’am
.”
“Get in here and give me a hand will you?”
Brendan poked his head into the living room to see his dad watching the first half of some NFL game. His dad jerked his head towards the kitchen, showing Brendan where he needed to go. With a sigh Brendan cut through the dining room to reach an apocalyptic scene with his mom as the source.
“You’ve been busy,” he said, losing count of how many pots and pans were lying around in various states of use.
“Take this.”
His mom handed him a casserole to hold while she flipped the oven open. The hot air blasting out of the open door felt nice compared to the refrigerated temperature in the house. Without any warning, his mom grabbed the dish out of his hands and slid it into one of the few available spaces on the oven racks. She slammed the door shut and started chopping carrots on a wooden board sitting on the counter.
“Wash those dishes, would you, hun?”
Brendan followed her eyes to the double sink. Both sides overflowed with dishes and bowls and trays and utensils. Fearing the worst, he popped the dishwasher open and saw it was full.
“Don’t turn the dishwasher on until you’re done in the sinks, otherwise you’ll never get any hot water,” his mom advised sagely. Hot water could only be used for one task at a time. Such was the beauty of old houses with ancient water heaters.
Brendan started the process of clearing out one side of the sink, stacking the dirty dishes wherever possible, playing a dangerous game of Jenga with the crockery. Eventually he could see the bottom of the basin, so he got the hot water running and squirted some soap into the warm stream. He watched the bubbles form white mountains in the sink and asked his mom why she was making so much food.
“Michelle called to say Grant’s back in town, so I thought it would be nice to invite the whole family over.”
Brendan froze, his mind reeling.
“You better turn off that water before you flood it onto the floor,” his mom warned.
Absently he shut the water off and started washing dishes.
The menial distraction helped avoid the violent outburst he felt searching for an outlet. The nastier part of him sought to stir up some extra trouble for some reason.
“The whole family, huh?” he said. “That include Taryn and Serge?”
His mom shot him an uncharacteristic sideways glare. He tried not to smirk, but did so anyway. The two continued on in a vacuum for about thirty minutes, his mom piling up more dirty dishes faster than Brendan could clean them. Additionally aggravating, she kept grabbing the clean ones and reusing them. The oven timer dinged as Brendan found himself washing the same knife for the third time.
“Oh, shoot,” his mother exclaimed, pulling a huge dish from the oven and setting it onto a small rack on the counter. “Hun, can you take a break and set the table for six?”
“Six?”
“Yes, six,” his mother said as she darted around, exasperated. “Blain will sit in a booster seat at the table and Sadie will sit in her highchair next to her momma.”
Brendan perfectly aligned all the silverware and placemats, giving in to the over-the-top attention to detail the Marines had instilled in him for years. With each completed setting, he dreaded dinner more and more. His dad liked to make innocent little comments about heavy subjects from time to time, and with his low opinion of Brendan, tonight seemed like a great time to break out the big guns. All it would take would be one question about Michelle feeling safer with Brendan sleeping on the couch in Grant’s house last night. Then the old man would sit back and watch the fireworks begin.
Before he knew it, his brother’s family showed up and the charade commenced.
Everything rolled around pretty smoothly as three-year-old Blain repeatedly assaulted his laughing grandpa, and Sadie lay still, cradled in her momma’s loving embrace. Grant was talking to Brendan about something, but seeing Michelle sitting on the couch with a one-year-old tugging down the front of her shirt, Brendan had a flashback to the brief, yet explicit dream he’d experienced while waking up next to her. Michelle looked up and caught his stare, and returned it with a harsh glare and a quick head shake. That brief snippet that kept playing over and over, was that actually a memory? Part of him wished it was, even if it just proved to incriminate him further.
“So we still on for a beer tonight?” Grant asked him, slapping his shoulder.
Brendan recovered from his daze. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Dinner went off without a hitch. His father made no weird references to the previous night, and Grant h
appily yapped away about everything under the sun, playing the role of the good son and engaging their parents in all of their favorite subjects. The meal drew to a close and Brendan volunteered to pick up some of the plates. He gathered up a short stack of dirty dishes and made his way into the kitchen.
Michelle followed closely behind and dragged him forcefully just out of line of sight from the table next door.
“Get your shit together,” she whispered viciously. “You want to screw this all up?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You keep looking at me funny.” When he looked at her in disbelief she added, “Just quit staring at me; it’s weird.”
Contrary to everything he knew about his father, the old man rumbled into the kitchen with a huge stack of plates and precariously balanced silverware. Michelle smiled sweetly to him as she casually strode back into the dining room. Brendan watched her go, but then heeded her words and took to scraping the crud off each plate into the open trashcan.
“Son,” his dad said in hushed tones, standing right next to him. “Nothing had better’ve happened between y’all last night.”
Brendan didn’t answer.
“Just saying, we all know what happened last time you pissed your brother off.”
“She was scared because of the attack and wanted me to stay and sleep on the couch,” Brendan insisted quietly. “That’s it.”
With that, Darryl Rhodes patted his son on the shoulder and sauntered back out of the kitchen, scooping up an escapee toddler in the process. The old man really took to the role of grandpa with gusto, displaying all kinds of overt emotions that Brendan had never seen before.
Little Sadie burst into the angry song of tiny infants, drawing a concerned look from her mother. Michelle tried in vain to console Sadie, but in the end relented and announced that she hated to dine and
dash, but the little one hadn’t been sleeping well recently and really should get home. She started to pack up all the kids’ stuff as Grant came into the kitchen to talk to Brendan.
“Okay, I’ll drop the missus and kids off at home, then I’ll meet you at Trish’s in an hour. Sound like a plan?”
“Sure,” Brendan said as he opened the dishwasher to find it still jammed full of dirty dishes.
“I’ll try to be on time, but I’ve been gone for
a while and you know how it is.” Grant winked for effect. “I can only do so much to keep her paws off me; I’m just a weak man.”
Brendan detected nothing other than gross machismo in his brother’s expression, but the parting words haunted him while he scraped and scrubbed his shame away.
Chapter 24
Brendan walked into Trish’s Place five minutes early and immediately spotted the same bartender behind the counter as always. Did that woman ever take a night off? His mom had agreed to finish cleaning up the mess in the kitchen so that Brendan could get here before Grant, but to Brendan’s surprise, his brother was already sitting in a booth along the wall. He swung past the bar to order a pair of Shiners, opened a tab, and then transported the beers to the table. Grant had apparently polished off his first already, because he started on the next beer as soon as it hit the table.
“You struck out?” Brendan asked.
“Ha, yeah,” Grant said with a rueful smile. “Something about a screaming baby really kills the mood.”
“I bet, I bet.”
The two brothers focused on drinking their beers and paying more attention to patrons at other tables than to each other.
“Thanks for the beer.
” Grant touched the bottom of his bottle to that of Brendan’s. “And thanks for saving Michelle’s ass the other night.”
“It was nothing.”
“No, I really mean it,” his brother continued ardently. “That could’ve been really bad. I don’t even know what I would’ve done. What
we
would’ve done.”
“Anytime.
” Brendan picked a little at the scabs still remaining on his knuckles. Punching people in the face was never as clean as they made it out to be in movies.
“I still don’t get what they were after, though,” Grant mused. “Or what the pair of you were doing behind the bar.”
Brendan desperately wanted to ask about what Michelle had told him exactly, but knew that was a bit suspicious. A little piece of the truth could probably hide the more dangerous revelations behind it.
“Scott Fisher and his boys beat me up the other day over some stupid crap. Michelle felt bad and took me out to Schmidt’s. I wanted to make up for her paying the bill and brought her here for a drink.”
Grant watched him like a hawk deciding which side of the throat to attack. “Go on.”
“Okay, well, uh, I maybe said something stupid that pissed her off, and she ran out the back of the bar.”
“Something stupid? Like what?”
It was time to test the deceptive waters.
“Honestly, Grant, I asked her if you’d ever hit her.”
Grant’s steely expression hid little of the rage behind his eyes.
“And why’d you ask something like that?”
“Because you’ve got a short fuse and I wanted to make sure you’re good to your wife,” Brendan said, matching his brother’s intensity. Now Grant was in a precarious position, because if he flew off the handle, he’d only be proving Brendan’s intentions
both correct and valid. After a moment’s restraint, Grant’s features softened.
“I’m a changed man now,” he said, smiling again. “A couple of bad experiences were all I needed to reform my ways.”
“Glad to hear it.” Brendan slowly turned the bottle in his hands. “You know, it’s a bit weird you didn’t ask me why Scott and his crew would want to kick my ass.”
“So tell me.”
“I was trying to score some meth from him.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To prove he’s dealing in that crap.”
The waitress cruised past and Brendan put two more
beers on his tab. When she’d gone on her merry way, he asked Grant if he knew anything about the drug problems in town.
“Not really.” Grant leaned forward across the table
conspiratorially. “I hear about break-ins, robberies, some muggings in town, but that’s about it.”
“Mom or Dad tell you some ass
-wipes broke into their house the second night I was here?”
“No,” Grant seethed
, eyes boring into Brendan’s. “What night was that?” His brother’s knuckles turned white around his beer bottle.
“Last Monday.”
“Anyone get hurt?”
“Just them,” Brendan said, a little proudly. “I probably broke one guy’s arm with the poker from the fire.”
“They take anything?”
“No, but Mom almost
took my head off with the shotgun.”
Time skipped a few beats before
Grant suddenly lightened up.
“You guys must’ve done a good job patching the place back up,” he said. “I didn’t notice anything earlier.”
“You know how Mom and Dad are about appearances.” Trying to steer conversation away from family matters, Brendan asked his brother what he does for work.
“I’m the county’s best and brightest agricultural supply salesman,” he announced with overacted prowess. “If you need cattle feed, pesticides, fertilizer, you name it, I’m your man.”
Grant promptly launched into a prepared pitch about his rank in the district, and how his numbers are so much better than some other guy’s, and what his top secret plan for next year is. Brendan promised not to tell, honestly not giving a crap about any of it.
“You travel a lot with your job?” he asked.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of conferences to attend, and customer visits, and even a couple of tradeshows each year,” Grant explained. “Keeps me busy. I’m probably gone three or four days most weeks, but I try to fit in as much family time as possible. Family’s got to come first.”
The intonation on that last phrase irked Brendan, but he still couldn’t tell if his brother was just messing with his head or not.
“In any case, I’m glad I caught you when I did, little brother. I’m heading back out on the road again the day after tomorrow. Got a big sale to make out in the country.”
City people usually considered places like Shallow Creek “the country”, but everything was relative.
“You know what, it’s getting late,” Grant announced, getting up from the table. He called out to the bartender, “Hey, Jenny, I’ll cover his bill. Just throw it on my running tab.”
“Sure thing, Grant,”
Jenny hollered back as she ran a rag through some presumably clean pint glasses.
“You don’t need to do that,” Brendan said as he exited the booth.
“Don’t mention it. How often do I get to buy my little brother a drink? It’s an honor.”
Brendan followed Grant out through the door and watched
him unlock a shiny new red Chevy pickup, sporting all the bells and whistles. Brendan’s own truck wasn’t anything to sneeze at, but it still looked cheap by comparison.
“I’ll see you around,” Grant said as he climbed up into the cab. “Don’t be a stranger.”
And with that, his brother drove off into the night. Brendan got into his own truck and wondered why everyone kept saying that, and why neither brother had mentioned either of the eight-hundred-pound gorillas in the room.