Fireside (22 page)

Daisy was scared for him on this J-term training mission. She knew he was going to practice, among other things, how to jump out of an airplane at 20,000 feet, and survive.

And of all the things the ROTC demanded of him, all the mental and physical challenges—the early-morning wakeup calls, punishing endurance training and numbing drills—this was surely the coolest.

The kid next to Julian shifted restlessly in his seat. Julian could tell he was anxious about something. No, scared. That was what Julian sensed, and he grew mildly curious. The boy exuded a kind of toughness most people would find off-putting. Not Julian. He had no idea who the kid was, but he recognized him, because not so long ago, he’d been there. He’d been alone in a crowd and scared shitless, and he covered his fear with that same tough, slit-eyed reserve.

“How you doing?” he asked. Not in a phony-interested way. He was just cracking the door open a little in case the kid felt like talking.

The boy turned and eyed him briefly. Julian knew he intimidated some people. He was biracial, but he looked a hundred percent black. He was naturally big, and had grown broader and more muscular from the Air Force’s relentless physical training. His head was shaved like an eight ball. He used to have dreadlocks but, of course, they were anathema to military training, so he’d left them on the floor of a barbershop the day of his induction into the program.

The Latino kid merely shrugged. “I been better,” he said.

Julian didn’t want to push, but his curiosity was piqued. “Yeah? How’s that?”

“I’m okay,” the boy muttered, obviously thinking better of trusting a stranger.

“You headed to the city for a visit?” Julian inquired, still casual, not pushing at all.

“Yeah.”

Julian wasn’t sure how he knew, but the kid was lying. Or hiding something. Or both. “Me, I’m headed down to Montgomery, Alabama,” he said, then stuck out his hand. “Julian Gastineaux.”

“AJ,” the boy replied. He shook hands, though he leaned away from Julian.

All right, I can take a hint,
thought Julian. He tried one more time. “You from around here?”

“Nope.” The kid’s hands tightened on his backpack.

Okay, then. Julian decided to make one final attempt to draw the boy out. “I grew up in New Orleans.”

No response from Mr. Happy, so Julian sat back, shut his eyes for a few minutes, thinking about New Orleans. It was just Julian and his dad, back then. The two of them against the world. A physicist at Tulane, Maurice Gastineaux had raised Julian in a loving but haphazard fashion, pretty much what you’d expect from an absentminded professor. Maurice had been a rocket scientist, same as Julian aspired to be. Except unlike his late father, who was all cerebral, Julian hungered for action. He didn’t simply want to be a rocket scientist. He wanted to be the
rocket.

He dozed a little, then was awakened by the vibration of his mobile phone, indicating a text message. He flipped it open. Miss you already, Daisy had written.

There was nothing to say to that. She already knew the way he missed her. It was the kind of missing that felt like a limb blown off, a huge void of hurt beyond imagining. His roommates at Cornell told him repeatedly that he was nuts. What guy in his right mind fell for a girl who lived a three-hour drive away, and who had another guy’s baby, for Christ’s sake?

Then Julian would show them a photograph of Daisy and they’d be like, oh. Now we get it.

She had the kind of looks that made people stop and stare, dropping whatever they were doing for a few seconds. She had that yellow-haired goddess thing going on; you could picture her in a Renaissance painting, surfing on a half shell, her long blond hair twisting in the wind. But the thing Julian’s roommates didn’t get was that, even if she looked like one of the gorgons, Julian would still probably be into her.

But her life was complicated. She had a baby. And not just any baby. Charlie had the red hair and blue blood of his father, Logan O’Donnell. Logan was the opposite of Julian in every way. Lily-white, he’d grown up surrounded by wealth and privilege. The only thing Julian and Logan had in common was that they were both in love with Daisy Bellamy.

Agitated, he opened his eyes again. The kid next to him was watching intently out the window. Julian studied him for a moment, remembering the seminar in military intel he’d taken as part of his training. The boy was exhibiting signs of stress—jiggling his foot, chewing his lip. Something about this boy reminded Julian of himself when he was younger. He’d been about the same age as this kid when his dad had wrecked his car, eventually dying of his injuries. Julian used to deal with his own stress and uncertainty by taking physical risks, anything from jumping off a high dive to skateboarding a dry concrete spillway, knowing it could flood without warning at any moment.

“So you’re headed to the city to do what, if you don’t mind my asking?” Julian said.

“I mind.”

“Just trying to make conversation. It’s a long way to the city.” Julian shrugged and turned his attention to his phone. He felt a little strange doing it, but he sent a message to his brother, Connor Davis. Connor’s brother-in-law was Rourke McKnight, Avalon’s chief of police. This kid was no criminal, but it probably wasn’t a terrible idea to let someone know.

Fourteen

K
im took a break from going over her mother’s books. She pushed the papers away from her on the library table and stretched her neck one way, then the other, frowning as she kneaded her tense muscles.

Bo was across the room at his laptop, where he’d been alternately muttering under his breath and shifting in his seat for the past hour. The downstairs rotunda was the designated place for work, and at any given time, one of the guests could be found here, checking e-mail or surfing the Web. Kim suspected it was no coincidence that Bo had decided to work at his computer the same time she did.

Her stomach knotted as she sat back down and stared at the screen of her laptop, which displayed a spreadsheet.

“Everything okay?” Bo asked. “You’re looking stressed out there.”

She nodded, the figures blurring before her eyes. “Money troubles,” she admitted, then paused.
A person’s finances are a strictly private affair.
She could still hear her father’s imperative voice, echoing across time. She used to regard this as an admirable notion, but now she knew why he had refused to talk about money.

Guess what, Dad,
she thought.
I’m breaking the cycle.
“I’ve been trying to get a handle on something here,” she told Bo. “My mother was widowed a few years back, and that’s when she discovered that my father had incurred a massive debt. Neither she nor I had any idea he was in trouble. She kept it from me until recently, taking a crazy loan against the value of this place. She also bought some kind of annuity and an insurance policy, both of which appear to presume she’ll live to be a hundred and fifty.” Kim found herself revealing a list of disturbing discoveries she’d made as she parsed through the records. Her mother had been paid a visit by a smooth-talking salesman. He’d managed to disguise the liability aspects of each transaction until the deal was closed and he was long gone. The next month, Penelope had been hit by exorbitant origination fees and crushing monthly payments.

“She didn’t even tell me,” Kim said. “She just started falling behind every month, and then taking in boarders. I can’t believe she didn’t tell me.”

“Probably didn’t want to worry you,” he said. “Or embarrass herself. People will pay almost any price to save their pride.”

She thought about the explosive night in L.A., and nodded glumly. “True.”

He leaned back in his chair, folding his arms behind his head. “Well, I’m not saying I know much about this stuff, but I bet there’s help available. See, this state has laws to protect people from predatory and pressure sales of financial products.”

She lifted her eyebrows in surprise. “How would you know?”

He indicated a fat three-ring binder on the table next to him. “Part of my rookie training,” he said. “Most rookies are a lot younger than me, and even more ignorant.”

She thought of the cars, jewelry, boats and even airplanes some newly fledged professional athletes often flaunted. So-called financial advisers circled like buzzards, enticing naive players with too many bewildering and expensive choices.

“Something tells me you’re not ignorant at all. Do you have some kind of hidden talent for finance?”

“Not particularly, but I’ve been broke before. You learn a lot about yourself, being broke. And if you’re smart, you learn how to avoid it in the future.” He flipped through the pages of his binder. “If you think your mother’s been victimized, you should call the state attorney general.” He handed her a page from his reading, and she copied down the number and e-mail address.

“I feel so bad for my mom,” Kim said. “She’s supposed to relax and enjoy her retirement. Instead, thanks to my late father, she’s in a world of trouble. And it looks like she unknowingly compounded the problem with this horrific loan.”

Kim caught the look on Bo’s face. “My father wasn’t a bad man,” she said. “He wasn’t even a bad father. But it turns out he was a lousy businessman, who happened to be good at covering his tracks.”

“Was he doing something illegal?” Bo asked.

“No. Just lived beyond his means. Far, far beyond.”

“It’s the American way,” he said with an ironic smile.

“In my father’s case, it was his pride run amok. I wish I’d known that, but I never really saw his heart. God, there was a time when I would’ve done anything to please him.” She’d lived her life to fulfill some vision he’d had. She thought if she could just be the daughter he wanted her to be, her life would be perfect. Her father had taken up so much room in her life, and all along, the things he’d valued were built on a false and shaky foundation. She wondered how much her father had to do with the choices she’d made. He’d been so proud of her career; he’d loved knowing she had an exciting, dynamic job that seemed both glamorous and prestigious. The fact that her father was so impressed by her career probably kept her on the job long after the fun had gone out of it.

“He always expected so much from me,” she confessed to Bo. “He wanted my B-pluses to be A’s. My performances in music and sports always had to be first-place finishes. And my father was all about social connections, too. The older I got, the more he would urge me to cultivate the ‘right’ friends.” She’d attended the best private school in Manhattan, not only for the education but for the boost it would give her in her climb to the heights of society.

“Maybe it would have been sort of all right,” she said, “if he’d really had the money he wanted everyone to think he had. Instead, it was all a pretense. He wanted the world to think he could afford our lifestyle—and for what? I wonder if he even thought about what would happen after he was gone.” She flipped through an old file, the pages marked with the slash of his signature. “Now I’m finding out things I never knew about him. Things I was happier not knowing.”

“Be glad you knew him, even a little,” Bo said. “Mine was almost never around. My brother, Stoney, and I grew up half wild. Our mom wasn’t big on supervision.”

She tried to envision him and his brother—
Stoney
—as wild kids, making a mental picture of long hair, skate-boards, black T-shirts, ripped jeans. As a girl, she would have been fascinated. But in high school and college, she’d dated only the most conventional of boys. She knew instinctively that Bo had not been the sort you introduced to your parents. Her father always wanted to know the most random things about a guy—who his parents were and where they’d gone to college and what business they were in, what clubs they belonged to and what their politics were.

Once, she’d asked her father to explain his obsession with connections. She had expected him to dismiss her. Instead, he’d actually given the question some thought. “Safety and security,” he said. “That’s why connections are important. When someone is well connected, it means he is offering so much more than himself.”

Now she stared down at the quagmire of paperwork he’d left behind, and the remembered words echoed with cruel irony. “I was
over
supervised,” she told Bo. “That’s got its downside, too.”

“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Don’t be too hard on the guy. It’s tough, arguing with a ghost.”

“I take it that’s something you’ve tried.”

“My mother’s been gone five years, and sometimes I still catch myself.”

“I’m sorry.” She watched the play of firelight on his face, feeling an unexpected bond with him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Makes me want to do a good job with AJ.”

“You will,” she told him. “You are. And thank you for this.” She indicated the information he’d given her. Kim felt her stomach unknot a little more. “It’s funny, how things work out. I had no idea she was in such trouble, and if I’d stayed in L.A., I still wouldn’t have known. So even though it wasn’t part of my plan, coming back here turned out to be a good thing. For my mom, anyway.” She watched the flames dancing in the fireplace. “Maybe for me, too. I tried to plan out every detail of my life and ended up walking away from it all. I should feel bad about that, but I don’t.”

He provided a surprisingly sympathetic ear and it was a relief just to share the burden. To look into his sapphire-blue eyes and see real interest there.
Don’t be attracted to him,
she admonished herself.
That’s the last thing you need in your life.
Yet it felt so good to simply talk to someone. It had been literally years since she’d had genuine people in her life, yet she’d been so busy in L.A., she hadn’t even noticed.

“Yeah, I gave up trying to plan stuff out,” he said. “That way, everything that happens to me is a surprise.” When he smiled, his blue eyes conveyed a message of utter sincerity. So much for not being attracted to him.

“I take it you like surprises,” she said.

“They’re a mixed bag. Getting tapped for Yankees spring training, with a shot at the roster—I’d call that a good one. Being asked to take care of AJ—now, that’s a mixed bag. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a dream come true, getting to meet him at last, but I wish the circumstances were different.”