11. Rhodes
ELEVEN
Rhodes
Ghost Marks: When a wall comes out, the framing leaves a shadow on the plaster that no amount of paint will fully cover. The house keeps a record of what used to stand there whether the family wants one or not.
My gym bag hits the wall by the door, sliding an inch before resting on the floor. My shirt's soaked through and stuck to my back, and my legs are already telling me tomorrow's going to be worse.
Deuce buried me on squats, and I let him. Then I buried him on the last set just to keep it even.
It's a good morning, the kind that leaves me loose and stupid and thirsty.
My phone buzzes in the bag. I bend down, unzip it, and pull it out to see a text from Deuce.
nash wants to go out tonight. u in or u gonna be boring?
Miss me already?
Then I give a thumbs up on his text, walk to the kitchen, and drop the phone on the counter. The house is still, with the fridge hum being the loudest thing in it.
Her truck is parked in the driveway, where it always is. I saw it coming up the walk. I peek down the hall and see that her bedroom door's shut.
Is she sleeping in after the before-dawn start we pulled yesterday? That would track. Or maybe she's sitting at the desk, working through her shell counts. She could be getting ready to go somewhere later, dinner with Trey, whatever weekend she's got that I don't know about.
I look away from the door. My phone buzzes again. It's Deuce again. Goddamn, he's annoying.
so??
So, what?
what time can you meet up?
You're the one who told me Nash was making plans. You tell me. I have to go by the office shortly, but I doubt I'll be long.
working on a saturday?
You know better than that. Ridge asked me to swing by to talk about something.
oh, right. ridge is working. OK, text me when ur done. b ready to drink.
I leave it there and head for the shower.
The water runs hot. The steam fogs the mirror while I scrub the salt off my skin. My forehead resting against the tile, I let the water run over me.
Twenty minutes later I'm dry, in dark jeans and a clean button-down that still smells like dryer sheets, boots on, and keys in my hand. My legs ache in a way I earned.
I have no idea what Ridge wants, but I plan to be in and out of there quickly, and then I'll hook up with the boys.
The hall's quiet on my way out. Her door hasn't moved.
The elevator opens into an eerily quiet fiftieth floor. There are no keyboards clicking or assistants behind the reception desk greeting me. Saturday has emptied out the top floor, leaving nothing but glass, polished floors, and a bird’s-eye view of the Delta.
The Mississippi fills the windows on the far side. Beyond it, cranes move over the terminals, and container stacks line the docks, ships sitting low in the water while the whole Stone Intermodal machine keeps running whether anybody up here is working or not.
My boots hit the floor loudly because there is nothing to drown out the noise. I walk around the corner to Ridge's corner office and tap on the door.
He's behind the desk, our father's desk, with his sleeves rolled, showing off his forearm tattoos, and his laptop open to the side. A folder is open directly in front of him.
"You know normal people take Saturdays off," I say, dropping into the chair across from him without being asked. "There are laws. Labor laws. I could report you for harassing me."
He doesn't look up from whatever it is he's reading. "You're eight minutes late."
"I lifted this morning. It was a big leg day, so I'm moving a little slowly. I didn't know you summoned me for a hard time. Sorry, bro." I stretch my legs out under the desk and grin at him.
"Do you think you're the only one whose time is important?"
"Chill, Ridge. Jesus. I need to call Coco and tell her to keep you home on the weekends, at least. Get that corncob out of your ass."
"Coco's none of your business."
"It's a little my business. I'm the one who has to visit you here when you die at that desk."
He closes the laptop halfway. "She's in Sonoma, doing some girls’ wine weekend with her friends. Happy?"
There he is, under the mask. Ridge in a silent house doesn't rest. He relocates. I almost let him off the hook for it.
"Calling me to come to your place to watch a game and drink a beer would have been a much better way to hang out with your favorite baby brother," I say with a smirk.
"This isn't a social call, Rhodes."
"Whatever this is, it couldn't have waited until Monday? You dragged me downtown on a Saturday, so let's get to it. I have beers to drink."
His face doesn't move much, but the joke drains out of the room before I finish landing it.
Three weeks of you-and-me-need-to-sit-down, and now here we are, the whole floor cleared out, nobody left to overhear anything. Something I thought I'd killed off a long time ago sits up in my chest and starts building a version of what he's going to ask of me.
"I wasn't putting this in an email," he says. "And I didn't want to talk about it when everyone's at the office. That's why I was hoping you'd stick around on Friday."
He slides the folder across the desk. The sound of it, paper dragging over wood in a dead-still room, grates on my nerves.
"What is it?" I ask, not reaching for it.
"Vin's estate cleared probate."
The name slices through me, and I go still before I decide to. My hands stop, my legs stop, the ache in them stops mattering. Vin. The man who was as much a part of my life as my own father, and who betrayed me by making me care for him at all.
"How does Vin have an estate? I thought you and Wells stripped him of everything? And what the fuck does this have to do with me, anyway? I don't want to hear his name."
Wells, another older brother who is a cyber genius and can find anything a man has ever touched, is the reason we know what Vin did at all.
He handed Ridge every account and every address, suggested that stripping him of everything was better than killing him.
Ridge ultimately agreed, and the decision was made without input from any of the rest of us.
Taking all of his dignity and money, and leaving him to live out his life alone, was the better revenge, according to my brother. I still disagree.
Vin was the closest thing to a father figure I had when I was very young, spending time with me after my mom died and when my own father buried himself in work in his grief. He taught me to love engines and how to talk to girls. He gave me my first beer.
Then he had my father tied to a chair in a dirty warehouse and executed over greed and power.
"We took everything, but missed the car he kept in an old garage across the river. The car wasn't ever titled, and he paid for the garage in advance for twenty years, so it didn't show up on anything," Ridge says, flat, no warning in it and no cushion. "He left you the Corvette."
I don't say anything.
Not looking at it is worse than looking, so I pull the folder toward me. The paper's dry under my fingers, cheap and stiff, and I flip it open. There it is, typed in the middle of a paragraph full of legal words that don't mean anything.
One (1) 1967 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, Marina Blue.
The abstract words turn into a thing, into a car I know down to the bones. We worked on that car over years. I specifically remember the summer when I was ten or eleven, the whole thing spread across a garage floor in pieces I could name with my eyes shut, fenders up on sawhorses.
There was one bolt on the passenger side that would not break loose no matter what we tried, and Vin handed me a longer breaker bar and told me to lean into it, that I had more than I thought.
When the engine caught the first time, my chest did something I didn't have a word for as a boy. That's where I caught my love of tinkering and rebuilding, and it's still with me.
The wanting arrives before the thought does, and I hate it. I hate that it's there.
"Before letting you know, I made sure it was there and found out about the prepaid rent," Ridge says. "It's an old garage across the river."
He sets a key on the desk, a small metallic click against the wood.
I'm going to tell him to sell it, put it on the street in the warehouse district for someone to steal it, or take it to a scrapyard. That's what my mouth's built to do. But what comes out is sideways.
"So many people are dead because of him, including our father, and we let him keep his prized Corvette in a garage on the river. So quaint, don't you think, that he wanted to leave that to me? Mother fucker."
It still eats me up that Ridge made the decision not to torture and kill him like Vin did our father. I wanted to look in his eyes while it happened, for him to know that we are the ones that ended his life, not natural causes.
Ridge doesn't defend him. I know he hates him as much as I do, so it’s no surprise.
"Killing him would've been the easy thing." His voice doesn't move. "We took everything down to nothing and left him breathing. A bullet ends it too easily. Rot doesn't."
I look back at the paper still in my hands. The death record's clipped behind it, and the date on it catches my eye. It's a good three weeks before the night Ridge gathered us and said Vin was gone. I glance up at him, but his face gives nothing.
"I don't want the car."
He doesn't argue. I can't believe he dragged me downtown on a Saturday, instead of putting this bullshit in an email.
All for a dead man's car.
I stand. My legs remind me of what I did to them this morning.
"I won't change my mind.”
"Okay." He picks the key up off the desk and puts it in his shirt pocket, which is not the same as putting it away. "I'm keeping it. It's yours whenever."
He doesn't try to stop me or convince me of anything when I turn to leave. I don't have anything else to say about the matter.