Chapter 11
ELEVEN
CAL
“Why does it smell so good in here?” Lane asks as he walks in, having taken a rideshare home from the detective agency.
I’d left earlier in the day, just after a job came in to retrieve a family ring that an ex claimed was lost, but our client knew he was keeping it somewhere.
Knowing that it was a job Felix would excel at, he rushed off with far too much glee on his face…
I think it made our client rather confused.
“I made cookies, tarts, and a cheesecake,” I explain.
“Are we… going to have room to eat all of this?” Lane asks when our phones beep.
I open mine to see the text while Lane clicks his to have it read aloud.
Felix: Mine, motherfucker!
And then I see he sent a picture of the ring and a dog.
“Cal, can you… clearly explain what the picture is? My program is trying to tell me it’s a ring and a dog. But that’s not right, is it? Is the dog just like… in the background chilling or something?”
“No… there’s definitely a dog in there. It looks so happy.”
Lane: DO NOT brING ANOTHER ANIMAL HOME.
Felix: He’s so cute! We’re already soulmates. He saw me and went “rooooo” and it was so cute. It meant “I love you and you can never leave me.”
Lane: NO. PUT IT BACK.
Felix: Why are you using so many capitals? I feel like you don’t understand. I think that program of yours is giving you fits again.
Lane: Cal made you cookies, tarts, and cheesecake, and you’ll get none of it if you bring that dog home.
Felix: So feisty!
And then silence.
“You shouldn’t have left him alone,” I say.
“I really shouldn’t have,” he replies with a sigh. “He’s joking, right?”
“I think so.” I look down at the menagerie that’s hovering at my feet in case I drop something edible. “Maybe. What if you just get him that horse he wants and tell him if you do, he can’t steal any more animals?”
“Where are we putting a horse?”
“I don’t know. Your dad likes building things. He can build him a little fence.”
“My dad likes tearing cars apart and then spending fifteen years going, ‘Huh… I think this part goes here.’”
“Board it.”
“Maybe.” Then he looks alarmed. “Do not tell Felix I said ‘maybe.’”
I hear a car pull into the driveway as Copper rushes over to the window to bark at whoever has joined us.
“Is that Felix? If he has that dog, I’m locking this door,” he says.
I head over to the window but Copper isn’t wagging his tail, telling me it’s not Felix. Instead, the person who gets out of the car is the last one I expected.
“Why’s Grayson here?” I ask.
“I… don’t know. I don’t think he texted me. Maybe he talked to Felix.”
He knocks on the door as Lane turns to me. “What do you want me to say to him? Do you want him to know you’re here?”
Instead of answering and being like, “No, I will hide,” I foolishly stand there in the window long enough that Grayson looks over and catches my eyes.
“My dumb ass stood in the window long enough he saw me,” I mutter.
“Ah. I mean… we can still pretend,” he says as he walks over to the door and pulls it open.
Lane unhelpfully greets Grayson with, “Cal’s not here. That was his ghost you saw in the window.”
“Can I speak to Cal’s ghost for one minute?” Grayson asks.
“Cal’s ghost… do you want to speak to Grayson for one minute?”
I growl out my dissatisfaction before grudgingly walking over. “One minute.”
“Hey,” he says as Lane leaves and Copper tries to sniff him over.
“I thought you said you’d wait for me to come to you?”
“I will. I actually didn’t know you were going to be here. I was going to tell Lane or Felix to let you know.”
“You drove hours to tell them something?” I ask.
“I… was also hopeful… that maybe you’d want to see Trav,” he says as he points at the car where the dog waits.
And I realize that I really do want to see him.
I push past him and rush out to the car then pull open the back door. “Oh, you cutie pie!” I coo as I reach for him.
The dog was a stray that had severe mange when we found him. While he is all cleared up now, his skin is still funky in a few spots, so his hair grows in patches. But he’s still adorable and sweet.
He leaps into my arms, so happy to see me that he nearly knocks me down.
“You are just the sweetest cutie pie ever,” I say, sitting down in the grass as he dances, flips, and flops all around. He crashes into my legs, flips onto his back, and wiggles this way and that while I try to pet his stomach.
Grayson quietly walks over and sits in the grass near me. “He missed you.”
“I missed him,” I say.
“I missed you.”
I swallow hard, refusing to answer that. I don’t know how to. It hurts too much.
“So the reason I’m here is because I got a call from the evilest old man. He cussed me out for apparently no reason at all. He told me that among your things, he found my number because you wouldn’t answer your phone.”
My stomach tightens.
“He said, and I quote, ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you don’t bring that shitty asshole over here, I will find you, and I will make you regret it.’ Did you get wrapped up with the mafia?”
“No, that’s just my old neighbor.”
“Well… I’ve come to take you to see him.”
I hesitate as I absorb this. “I can’t go see him.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I can’t.”
“He said it was important, that he had to see you or he might not get to see you again.”
“Fuck…” I whisper before nodding. “Fuck. Okay.”
I don’t want to go, but what else am I going to do? What if his cancer has come back? What if something really bad has happened and I can see him one last time?
Grudgingly, I get into the car with him. Trav tries his hardest to climb into the front seat with me so I can hold him like a baby. He’s like forty-some pounds, so the comfort of this is quite poor, but he’s happy, so I’m happy.
Grayson is quiet for a moment before saying, “The other day was a shit show. An absolute shit show.”
“Why’d you join them?” I ask.
“You don’t want to get involved, do you? If I tell you why, you’d be getting involved.”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“You had a panic attack getting involved last time. I don’t want you involved.”
“I didn’t have a panic attack,” I say, well aware I’m lying. “I just…”
“I think you should stay out of it.”
“Why are you involved?”
“What part of that is staying out of it?”
What can I say? I’m a stubborn man. “I want to know.”
“Tell me about this old mean guy.”
“He’s old and mean.”
“Tell me about him.”
We fall into silence while I pet Trav. I feel like if I tell him anything, it requires telling him about myself.
And even as we spent all of that time together in the past, that’s one thing I always tried to avoid.
I don’t know why. Maybe I felt like if I told him about myself, I’d be letting him know that I wasn’t good enough…
because that is what I’d always been taught.
Fuck, Felix has given me more familial love than anyone else ever has. He’s hugged me more than anyone else. He’s held me…
I take a deep breath.
“Growing up… this grumpy old man was the only one I had most of the time,” I say.
“He never exactly… wanted me, but I gave him no choice. And it’s not that he specifically didn’t want me around; I don’t think that grouchy old man wanted anyone around.
He had kids who didn’t like him, a wife who cheated on him…
“And I… I had nothing. My mother never wanted me. My father died when I was young. I think she kept the house just so she had a place to store me as she moved on with her life without me. And whenever she did see me, I never said the right thing. I never did the right thing. I was always so fucking wrong all the time. So I saw him shooting some targets one day after my mom was especially shitty to me and I wandered over. I don’t even know why.
We didn’t say a damn word to each other.
I just sat on the ground, hugging my legs to myself, wanting something to distract me from the shit that was my life, and he played around with his rifle.
Then we went home… and I did it again the next day.
He told me I was a ‘nosy little bitch’ and then that was that.
“He became my only noise in a quiet world. He taught me to shoot and he taught me to shoot damn well. If I ever did anything wrong, I was chastised and forced to do it again and again until it was perfect. But it’s weird…
it wasn’t the same as the way my mother made sure I knew that I could do nothing right.
She made me feel like absolute shit, whereas when I did it right for Arthur, he made me feel so good.
He made me feel like I accomplished the biggest damn thing every time I did it right. ”
“Why didn’t you go to him after all of this? Why did you wander around alone?”
“I couldn’t fucking face him. The first time I did, drunk off my ass, he was so damn disappointed in me, Grayson.
The disappointment… I can’t even explain it.
And it hurt so badly. He was going through cancer at the time.
And I was over there losing my fucking mind, drinking until I couldn’t think straight.
I was… doing shit to hurt myself. And there he was…
struggling to care for himself, let alone me.
“So I ran away like the fucking coward I was. I called his son up and I told him that I would go over there and beat his fucking face in if he didn’t take care of his father… Thankfully, he listened.”
“You’ve been doing better, so why haven’t you gone back?”
“I couldn’t,” I whisper. “I couldn’t face him after all the shit I did.”
“Cal… you need to stop being so hard on yourself,” Grayson says.
“There’s a lot I need, Grayson… but I don’t know if I can do any of it.”
“I have faith in you.”
“At least one of us does.”
“Far more than you realize.”
When he pulls into Arthur’s driveway, I find myself too reluctant to get out of the car. I’ve wasted so much time avoiding him. I wasn’t there for him when he needed me the most, even though he was there for me for so much of my life.