Chapter 42
RICHARD MONTES IS IN THE house.
From her seat at the table, Cole turns to find a man both familiar and unfamiliar standing in the kitchen.
As tall as Ray, but with thirty less pounds on his lean, lanky frame, the hair that she remembers as thick and dark is now thinner and gray, and the signature full beard is gone.
So is the leather Devil’s Dukes cut he always wore.
Dressed in black work pants, a denim shirt, and a pair of steel-toed boots, the man looks like someone else entirely.
Someone who isn’t her father.
But appearances can be deceiving. No one knows that better than herself. She turns back around and refocuses on the vodka, as yet untouched.
“How many days you got sober?” he asks.
“One,” she answers. “How many days you got sober?”
“Twenty-five years, six months, four days,” he says.
“Well, you’ve been in prison,” Cole says. “I’m sure it was by circumstance more than choice.”
“Same result, though,” Richard says, his tone amiable. “Can I join you at the table?”
She shrugs. “It’s not my table.”
Her father takes a seat across from her. She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She continues to stare at the glass instead.
“So what’s just happened that you don’t want to get to day two?” he asks.
She barks a laugh. “That’s a deeply personal question coming from someone I haven’t seen or spoken to in twenty-five years.”
“I’ve written to you,” he says. “Dozens of letters.”
“Never got them,” she says, but it’s a lie. She did get them, and they’re currently in a drawer back at the house in Toronto, unopened.
“I’m sorry for—”
“Don’t.” Cole finally looks up at him. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He nods. “Okay. What do you want, then?”
“From you? Nothing at all.”
His face is sad, and it’s strange to see.
She’s seen many expressions on her father’s face, but regret was never one of them.
The Richard Montes she knew was never sad.
He was angry. He was mean. He was indifferent.
He doesn’t seem like any of those things today.
Today he looks . . . concerned. For her.
“I’m getting divorced,” she says, and her voice cracks on the last word. Which is also strange, because it’s not like she hasn’t been aware that her marriage to Jordan has been falling apart, slowly and consistently, for years. But saying it out loud, here, to him, somehow makes it real.
“Good,” Richard says, and she blinks. “Marriage is bullshit. When I married your mother, I kept expecting to be happy. That she’d make me a better man.
Obviously she didn’t. And that wasn’t her fault.
So I made her worse because she couldn’t make me better.
I punished her because she couldn’t fix me.
Fairy-tale endings don’t exist. People are terrible, and everybody lets you down. ”
“Everybody?” Cole says, unable to resist. “Like you?”
“Especially me.” He nods. “I let you down. And your husband let you down. So don’t you dare let yourself down by taking that drink. He’s not worth it. I’m not worth it. But you are, Nicolette.”
Her father fishes in the pocket of his jeans and pulls out what looks like a gold coin. He places it between them, and she sees it’s a sobriety chip with the number 25 on it. Then he leans forward, his gaze fixed on hers. They have the same eyes. She’d forgotten that.
“Took me twenty-five years to get here, one day at a time,” Richard says. “I can’t fix the past, but I can sure as shit help you get to day two. After everything I’ve done, it’s the least I can do for you.”
He waits.
Cole sits, frozen. Then, slowly, she nods.
Her father takes the glass and dumps it down the sink while she cries.
* * *
There is no warm embrace, no kiss on the forehead, no fatherly clap on the shoulder, not even a perfunctory handshake. He seems to know better than to try.
Instead, they both walk to the living room and take a seat at opposite ends, Cole on the sofa, Richard on the chair in the corner.
She takes the striped throw pillow beside her and hugs it to her chest, wondering what to say, wondering what he’ll say.
Since the house is so small, they’re not that far apart, six feet tops.
She can see every line on her father’s face that wasn’t there before, but he still looks strong, his posture straight and his haircut the same.
It’s his demeanor that’s changed. He looks tired.
Really tired. Like a dog who’s just come back from the vet, exhausted and a little bit traumatized, with no real fight left in him.
It’s disconcerting. In her memories, there was never any sign of weakness in Richard Montes.
He was always the looming presence, the man who sucked all the oxygen out of the room, the storm.
“It’s wonderful to see you,” he begins. “Had we known you were coming, we—”
“Who’s ‘we’?” she asks. “This is mine and Ray’s house. You’re the guest. There’s no ‘we.’ ”
She can’t remember the last time she and her father actually had a conversation, but whenever it was, it would have been in this house, and her tone would have been very different.
It would have been gentler, more tentative, and laced with fear.
The Richard Montes she knew was easily triggered by any hint of disrespect, and the only way to survive an explosion was to avoid setting one off in the first place.
She’s never spoken to her father like this before, in a voice so cold she half expects a stream of vapor to flow out of her mouth.
He doesn’t seem bothered by it, though. She regrets that she cried in front of him.
“Yes, of course,” her father says. “I’m glad the two of you kept the house. I just meant to say that had me and Ray known, I’d have moved into a motel to give you some space. You could have taken the studio. In fact, I can still do that.”
“Motel? With what money?” Cole stares at him. “Are you actually working now? Or are you still running guns?”
“I work at the lumberyard, cutting wood. There’s a ton of new construction going up in town, as I’m sure you’ve seen.
They were hiring, and they weren’t picky.
” Richard smiles ruefully. “And I’m too old to run guns now.
Hell, half the guys I knew from the club are dead, and the rest are too old or too sick to ride.
I take the bus to work. There’s a stop about two blocks from here that drops me off right by the lumberyard. And sometimes Ray gives me a ride.”
Cole says nothing. But the image of her father using public transportation—the same scary biker who used to ride a custom Harley that he loved more than any living person—is a mindfuck.
She can’t seem to reconcile this man with the father she remembers.
This man is older, milder, softer. She wants to fight, but she can’t fight with this version of Richard Montes, and it’s pissing her off.
“You look well, Nicolette,” he says. “Quitting drinking is fucking hard. Do you have a sponsor?”
“It’s Cole, and no, I don’t.”
“You need one. There are AA meetings at St. Agnes’s every Tuesday and Friday evenings. You can find one there.” He pauses. “It’s where I found mine.”
“Which day do you go?”
“Tuesdays.”
“Then I’ll go Fridays.” She hugs the pillow tighter.
“I know you’re going through a tough time,” her father says. “I follow the news. I know what you’ve got going on.”
“Actually, you don’t,” she snaps. “All you know is what you read. It’s never the whole story.”
“Cole.” Her father says the word slowly, sounding it out. “I know you hate me. And I’d hate me, too, if I were you. I was a shit dad—”
“You were a shit person.”
“—and I can’t go back and redo it, as much as I wish I could.
” Her father’s gaze is steady on her face.
“But I’m out of prison now, and I’m staying out.
When I’ve saved up some money, I’ll be leaving Seaside.
I’d like to spend what years I have left in a place where the weather is warm all year round.
My bones don’t like the damp winters anymore.
And there’s too many bad memories here.”
“Most of which you created.”
He nods. “It’s okay that you hate me. I deserve it. But don’t let it eat you up. I spent my whole life being angry and it got me nowhere. It ruined everything, Nico—” He clears his throat. “Anger is a poison, for yourself and everyone around you.”
“Did you read that in a book?”
“Yeah,” Richard says, and lets out a small laugh.
Instantly he looks younger. “I had a lot of time to read, and spent a lot of time in the prison library reading everything I could get my hands on, including more than a few of those self-help books. I also watched a lot of TV, especially your show, though I never told anyone that you were my daughter.” He chuckles.
“They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. You were the favorite.
And that Cecily was pretty popular with some of us older gents. ”
“She’d be flattered, I’m sure.”
“I also played a lot of games—backgammon, Chinese checkers, Texas Hold’em for cigarettes and stamps.
But chess, that was my favorite. I must have played a thousand games of chess with this cellmate I had for a time.
I actually got pretty good playing with him, and now I play down at the community center every Saturday afternoon. In fact, I wrote to you about him—”
“I don’t give a shit about your cellmate,” Cole says. “And I burned all your letters without reading them.”
He really did send her a lot of letters. She keeps them in a shoebox with her old Nicolette Montes ID.
“It’s amazing you could ever think I’d give a flying fuck about what you have to say to me,” she says.
“What I do care about is you getting out of my house. You can stay in the studio, but I don’t want you letting yourself in here as long as I’m staying here, do you understand? You need something, you knock.”
“Understood,” Richard says, standing up. “But I really do think we need to talk about my cellie—”
“Do you even know what it was like growing up in this house with you and Mom?” Cole asks, rising up off the sofa.
“All the two of you ever did was drink and fight, whenever you weren’t out cheating on her.
You know what that did to her? It made her a hateful person.
She hated me, and she really fucking hated Ray, but most of all, she hated herself.
And maybe that’s not all your fault. But if she was the gasoline, you were the match. ”
Cole’s breath is coming out hard and fast. It feels like everything she’d carried with her since the day she left Seaside was coming out now, and she can’t stop it even if she wants to.
To his credit, Richard isn’t leaving. He remains standing in the living room, facing her, absorbing all the verbal blows without throwing any of his own. In fact, he’s nodding at everything she says.
It’s infuriating. She finds herself wishing he’d fight back so they could go toe-to-toe once and for all, and he’d see that she isn’t small anymore. That he can’t scare her anymore. That he isn’t anything to her anymore.
“I’m glad you watched me on the show so you can see the life I’ve built, not just without you, but despite you,” Cole says. “I clawed my way out of this dirt hellhole you and Mom had us in, and built a better life all by myself.”
“Is it better, though?” Richard asks. “Sure, you got nice things, you got money, but that husband of yours—”
“Don’t you fucking say a word about Jordan,” she hissed. “You don’t get to criticize him.”
“Sure I do,” her father says with a small shrug. “He’s on TV, isn’t he? And whether you like it or not, he is my son-and-law. I don’t like him for you, never did. He’s a liar.”
“Wow.” Cole let out a bitter laugh. “You’re one to talk.”
“God knows I did a lot of shitty things,” Richard says, his tone serious. “But I never lied to you, Nicolette. I never pretended I was a good man. You always knew exactly who I was.”
Cole says nothing, because he’s right, though she would have phrased it differently. It wasn’t so much that her father never pretended. He just never bothered to hide it. Because he didn’t care if he hurt them.
“It was actually Sam who pointed out all the tells in your husband’s face,” her father says. “Sam was really good at spotting a liar. He was good at reading people that way.”
“Sam? That was your cellmate?”
“Yeah,” Richard says. “Samuel Figg. For about a year.”
Cole opens her mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. The room is suddenly very hot, the edges of the walls blurry. She feels herself falling backward, but all that happens is that she lands back on the couch in a seated position.
“Don’t worry, I never told him about our connection, that you were my daughter,” Richard says.
“In prison, you never tell anyone anything, especially when it comes to family. You never know what they’ll do with it.
Anyway, we mostly played chess. Occasionally he’d talk about the past.” He pauses. “Lorelei did come up a few times.”
“And . . . and what did he say about her?” Cole manages to croak. “Because whatever he said, it’s a lie.”
“He talked about that night, told me he left the Starlight because you girls were getting on his nerves. Arguing and whatnot. Made him realize how young you all were. It wasn’t until he was arrested in Seattle that he was even aware anything had even happened to Lorelei.
He said when he left the drive-in, she was alive. ”
She feels like she might faint. “Do you . . . do you believe him?”
“I believe that a man Sam’s age had no business spending time with you and your little friends,” Richard says, his eyes narrowing. “I believe that Sam deserves to be in prison for the crimes he committed. And I believe whatever happened to Lorelei that night was a terrible tragedy.”
Cole can’t seem to find her voice.
Richard looks down at her. “I wouldn’t worry about that docuseries, in case it’s been keeping you up at night. Samuel Figg is an old serial killer with a few months left to live, indulging the questions of a producer trying to make a name for herself by stirring up the past.”
Of course it’s been keeping her up at night. And of all the people she thought could offer her comfort at a time like this, the last person she expected it to be was her father.
“Know what the difference is between a truth and a lie?” Richard asks. “Perspective. And from where I’m sitting, there’s only one villain in your friend’s story, Nicolette. And that villain is Sam.”
With all her heart, Cole wishes that were true. Because of all the villains in Lorelei’s story, none of them was Sam.