“Yeah.”
“You don’t know how sorry.”
“You’re right, I don’t.” Kyle felt his anger subside and fought to keep it boiling. “You said there was other stuff that made him want to leave. What kind of other stuff?”
“I don’t know. Women stuff.”
“What are you talking about, Max?”
“Well, you know, there was his wife and your mom and—”
“Someone else?”
“Yeah.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter? There was always someone else, that’s just the way he was. And he said it was getting too complicated. He’d said he do them all a favor with the insurance and start over.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Yeah.”
“He was a son of a bitch, wasn’t he?”
“That’s what I been telling you. I thought it would work out for the best.” Pause. “So we still good?”
“No.”
“Okay. We’re still not good,” said Max. “We’ll never be good.”
Kyle took a peek at his uncle. “Maybe not never.”
“Not never, maybe, but not for a while,” said Max. “I know. I got it coming.”
“Damn right.”
“Damn right is right.” Another drag. “How you doing, Kyle? Really.”
“I don’t know. Good, I guess.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s good that you’re doing good.”
“Yeah.”
“Good that everything’s good.”
Kyle stared at his uncle for a moment, then turned his head to look at Fred, smiling like an idiot behind the bar. “You want to know something, Uncle Max? I hate this fucking place.”
CHAPTER 51
KYLE BYRNE WAS drunk with whine.
It might also have been the beers he had consumed at Bubba’s and at the Olde Pig Snout that intoxicated him, or the growl of the engine between his legs, or the bugs caught in his teeth, or the way his tie snapped behind him as he sped recklessly on Skitch’s motorcycle through the wilds of West Philadelphia. But more than anything else, it was the whine.
Yet who the hell had more of a reason to whine than Kyle Byrne? Everyone blames his parents for purposely screwing up his life, but Kyle now had absolute proof. His father had deserted him not out of fear for his own safety or for the safety of his only son, as he had claimed, but out of greed and lust. The truth of it filled Kyle with anger and resentment, with a sour consolation at being proved right all along, and with a feral sadness that tore through him like choked sobs. Betrayal to the left of him, betrayal to the right, and here he was stuck in the middle, stuck in this nightmare, stuck in this life.
For a time he pretended not to know where he was headed, imagined he was just accelerating into the setting sun, feeling the wind in his face and the pumping of the pistons through his bones. Speed was what he was after, raw speed, as if he could outrun the emotions that were overwhelming him. But he wasn’t running away from the source of his pain, he was running to it, inexorably. He was like the noble salmon jumping up the falls as it returned to its childhood home. Except he wasn’t a fish. And he wasn’t going to spawn. And he didn’t go well with a beurre blanc and a risotto, though being poached that very night was a real possibility.
It wasn’t long before he was back in the old neighborhood, back on the old street, sitting on the bike and surveying the charred ruins of house and car. And at the sight of it, the sadness nearly overwhelmed him, until he transmuted it into raw bitterness. Aimed at his father.
Liam Byrne was responsible for this, for everything about this. The fire, yes, of course, because of his ruthless pursuit of the O’Malley file for his own damn profit. But even before the fire. The loss of the house, because of the way he had left Kyle and his mother practically destitute. And the loss of his mother, as if the sadness of Liam’s fake death had metastasized into the cancer that failed to respond to any treatment and overwhelmed her body. And the ruinous choices in Kyle’s own life that had led him to where he was at this moment, without anything to claim as his own but the suit on his back and the target on his forehead.
He was wondering how to play the next few hours, but the sight of the burned wreckage made everything clear. He was going to do whatever he needed to betray his father the way his father had betrayed him. Ashes to ashes, baby.
He looked up and saw a police car slip onto the street, and suddenly he remembered all the trouble he was in. With his toe he tapped the gearshift into first as he popped the clutch, lurching off down the street, speeding away, a left, a right, losing the cops when he made another left. He didn’t think it mattered where he was headed, but it did. Because he was traversing a course that had become familiar in the past year. Up City Line, down Lansdale Avenue, up State Road, along the low stone fence to the cemetery. The same cemetery where his father’s fake funeral had happened fourteen years before and where his mother’s real burial had taken place just about a year ago.
He parked the bike on the narrow road that wound its way through the burial ground and walked over to her grave. He read her name, the dates, the words on the stone: loving mother and sister. Not wife, though. You couldn’t say wife. He had betrayed her there, too.
Kyle leaned over to brush some leaves away from the grass atop her plot. He rubbed his hand across the carving of her name. He dropped to one knee.
“The old bastard’s come back,” he said to the stone.
He knelt there for a moment, as if waiting for a response. He lifted his chin and saw a woman in the distance who appeared to be walking toward him, and his heart clutched with an insane hope. But why the hell shouldn’t she come back from the grave just as his father had? It only fit everything else that had happened to him the past few days. And he’d trade a hundred of him for one of her. But it wasn’t her, it was just some older woman who stopped and turned and bowed before a patch of grass far away. And like a stone falling in a dark, cold pond, his heart fell.
No, his mother wasn’t coming back, and yet he could hear her voice, soft but insistent, the way she spoke to him whenever his father made those rare visits to the house. Go to him, she would say as they sat on the porch and saw his car pull up. Go to your father.
He closed his eyes, and he remembered a shard from his boyhood, when he’d asked his mother about the father who had always been a mystery to him. They were sitting on the porch, and his mother was in the rocking chair, smoking, staring off with those impassive eyes of hers. “He’s a complicated man,” she had said to Kyle. “He’s difficult to understand.”
“And do you understand him?” Kyle said.