Chapter 36 #2
“I’m dying, Bellini. Do this for me. Please.”
I closed my eyes for a second, as one emotion after another threatened to overwhelm me. “No. I don’t owe you anything.” I had already given him everything. He had won. I had lost. What was the point?
“She doesn’t want to come, Dad. So that’s a no.”
“Why do you want to see me, Drake?” I asked.
“I want to talk to you.”
“About what?”
He paused. “Please, Bellini. I am an old man. I have a lot of regrets in my life, and the way I treated you is one of them.” He coughed.
It was a bad cough. “I don’t deserve your company, Bellini.
Laina, she was good to you. I should have been like Laina.
I’d like to see you.” He paused again. “Please. I will behave. I’m begging you. ”
Begging me? Drake Hamilton was begging. That was a first. “I’ll come, Drake,” I said. “But if you’re rude to me, even once, one word, I’m leaving.”
“I will not be rude. I promise.” He coughed again, deep and ugly. “Thank you, Bellini. Thank you.”
That Drake was saying thank you was surprising.
“You don’t have to go,” Logan said after hanging up.
“It’s okay. I’ll go.” Maybe if I saw Drake, it would give me closure. Or maybe Drake would change his mind and give Logan his mother’s land no matter what. I could hope for a Christmas miracle.
I put my hand out, Logan put his hand in mind, and our fingers, as usual, intertwined as if they’d been together for decades. It brought a few hot tears to my eyes.
“So, you’re back in town, Bellini,” Drake said to me.
“Yes, it appears that I am. I’m here for Christmas.”
Drake sat hunched in his wheelchair, looking like a defeated gnome, in front of the fire, a red blanket over his skinny legs. He had been a tall man, almost as tall as Logan, and robust. Now I saw a small, wrinkled, defeated man who knew his time was up.
The log cabin exuded warmth because Logan had paid to have it fixed up. When he was younger, after his mom died, it started falling apart. It was like all the love she had put into her family was in the home, and when she died, the love left.
But Logan told me that he had fixed the log walls so air wouldn’t blow through them anymore, tore the decks off and built new, and added a new roof and a new heating and cooling system.
He had put in an electric fireplace so that Drake only had to flick a switch and wouldn’t have to chop or haul wood.
But Drake was a dark and dreary man, and he kept the curtains shut so it was dark and dreary inside.
The home was inhabited by a man who had spent most of his life making others scared and intimidated.
He was a controlling and demanding person, which was why he had to spend the end of his life mostly alone—except for a moral son named Logan who would not look away and felt obligated to help him because he had the heart of his mother and not the tar pit of hate of his father.
Logan and I sat together on an old leather couch across from Drake, who was hooked up to an oxygen tank.
“It’s nice to see you, Bellini,” Drake said, his voice coming in gasps.
I nodded. “Thank you. I’m sorry you’re ill.” I wasn’t sorry.
“Me, too. I was hoping to live to be a hundred. Drinking and cigarettes made sure I won’t.” The flames from the fireplace created shadows on his thin, hollowed-out face.
I couldn’t help thinking that meanness, anger, resentment, revenge, and vindictiveness helped to make him sick, too. All those seething emotions wears a body down.
“Logan,” Drake rasped out. “Go on out to the barn. I have a gift for Bellini out there. It’s on the wood table in the center.”
“What do you mean a gift?” Logan said, suspicious.
He was outwardly calm around his father, but I could feel how on edge he was, waiting for his father to pop off, to criticize, to attack.
The years of being a helpless child under this roof, with this unhinged man, had been filled with fear and anger.
“A gift?” I asked.
“Yes.” Drake nodded at Logan.
“I don’t think so, Dad,” Logan said, shaking his head. “I need to be here.”
“You don’t trust me with your girl?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t trust what you’re going to say to her.”
“I’ll be good,” he wheezed. “I promise.”
I didn’t want to be here at all. I wanted to be at work, and then I wanted to be at home, with my mother, who was going to put together a Christmas puzzle with me. The puzzle was of five cats in Christmas clothes.
I was also looking forward to the annual O’Donnell Christmas Monster Cookie Decorating Contest.
It would be at my aunt Debbie’s, as usual.
It was another tradition. Other, normal, families baked sugar cookie reindeer, wreaths, stockings, and Santas, but not us.
We baked and iced Christmas cookies that looked like monsters, then voted on our favorite.
The person who won was crowned Monster Cookie Winner for the year. Plus, they earned bragging rights.
“It’s okay, Logan,” I said. “It’s three minutes.”
Logan looked back and forth between his father and me, wary and suspicious. “Dad. I’m going to tell you right now. You are not to say anything that would be even slightly offensive to Bellini.”
“I won’t. Out you go.”
Logan didn’t want to leave. He has a stubborn streak, which I highly admire. “Go,” I said. “It’s fine. He’s on oxygen. If I have to, I can outrun him.”
Logan reluctantly left. I heard the back door open and shut, his footsteps swift.
When he was gone, Drake removed the oxygen mask and stared at me with his beady eyes. He was exhausted. Sick. Half in the grave. “You kept our deal.”
“There was no deal,” I told him.
“Yes, there was. I told you to stay away from Logan so he could have the future he deserved.”
“You told me more than that.” Rage surged through me while pain emanated from deep in my soul and spread throughout my body, as if I were being hit by splintering metal. I tried not to hate him, because I shouldn’t hate anyone, but it was hard.
“I did. I wanted him to go to that college on the East Coast. He worked hard. He endured a lot because of me. He lost his mother. He deserved to go.”
“He did endure a lot because of you. You were way too tough on him. You’re an alcoholic, and a mean one at that. After Laina died, everything got worse for Logan. She wasn’t here anymore to run interference or protect him from you.”
He hung his head. “You’re right. I won’t deny that Bellini.”
“There’s more, Drake. Why don’t you admit it? Have you conveniently forgotten?”
“No, I haven’t.” He closed his eyes before opening them, saying, in a trembling voice, so weak, but still loud somehow, “I told you that if you married Logan, I would sell the land to a builder who would build condos on it.”
“That’s right. You did.” My voice was laced with disdain. “This is his mother’s land, not yours, and you had no right to threaten to take it away from Logan and sell it. You threatened me. You broke Logan and me up. You had no right to do that either.”
“He does love it, but I couldn’t have an O’Donnell marrying him and taking our land, which is what your family has done to Hamiltons for years, including the land my father left me.”
“Our families fought, years ago, about land and water rights. In the past. However, we didn’t take your land, Drake.
One of your relatives lost his parcel because he was arrested for multiple assaults and went to jail and had to sell the land.
My family bought it. Another one of your upstanding relatives went bankrupt from gambling debts and sold another piece of land to us.
Your own father sold fifty acres to my grandfather because he wanted to buy an expensive sports car he’d seen in a movie, which he promptly crashed. We didn’t steal your land.”
“That is not what happened.” He sucked in oxygen. “Your family took advantage of mine. Took the land for a cheap price when we were down and out and desperate. And you went to court for my water rights.”
I waved my hand. “They were our rights, which is why the judges always ruled in our favor. Drake, I’m not here to listen to this.”
His shoulders slumped as the flames in the fireplace danced. I couldn’t wait to leave. I stood, and he waved a hand as in, Sit down.
“Please, Bellini. Sit. Indulge an old and dying man.”
I sat. Surely Logan would be back soon.
“I’m curious, Bellini. You never told Logan that I told you I would sell the land if he married you. Why?”
Drake was broken down. He was shaky and wheezing.
He was dying. But he was still Drake Hamilton, devil incarnate.
“I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want him to lose his family’s land.
He would have been so hurt.” I did not want to cry in front of this man, but through my own hot tears, I thought I saw a flash of pain in Drake’s eyes.
“This land was—is—his connection to his mother.” I choked on a sob.
“If we got married, you would have sold the land to that builder, and it would have torn Logan apart as he watched his mother’s family’s land get destroyed.
Where there was a forest, there would be condos.
Where there was a quiet lake, a tourist trap of souvenir stories.
Where there was a meadow, a new golf course.
“I didn’t think then, as an eighteen-year-old girl—and I don’t think now—that I am worth Logan losing his land.
” I sniffled and took a swipe at my eyes.
“I didn’t want to be the cause of that loss.
I truly thought he would meet someone else, a beautiful woman, probably at college out East, and have a lot of kids, and he would then get to keep his mother’s land.
He would forget about his high school girlfriend, forget about me, and he would be happy with his new family.