When Sam had called him, he’d been busy thinking about Randall Finley’s veiled threat to tell Ethan the truth about the circumstances of his mother’s death, the son of a bitch. That had been after David had pushed Finley about whatever under-the-table deal he had going on with developer Frank Mancini.
Then his phone had rung, and he’d seen who the caller was, and he’d answered in a second.
Cheerily. “Hey!” he’d said. A call from Sam would be the best news he’d had so far that day. But it turned out not to be that kind of call.
“Where are you?” Sam had screamed. “They’re going after Carl!”
At which point his afternoon plans — he had been thinking of paying a visit to Randall Finley’s wife, Jane, to get a better handle on the man — changed abruptly.
Adrenaline kept him going through the chase and the police interview afterward, but by the time he came through the door, he was shaking. He fell into his mother’s arms and started breathing so quickly she wondered whether he was having some kind of panic attack.
David admitted he was, at that moment, overwhelmed.
“I could have been killed,” he said, realizing it for the first time. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. It could have gone wrong a hundred ways. He could have crashed that truck. He could have rolled it over. I could have fallen out when he was moving.”
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Arlene agreed.
He pulled himself together and got his mother to promise not to tell his father, or Ethan, that he’d temporarily lost it.
But now that dinner was over, and he was sitting, alone, on the front step of his house, he was starting to feel back to normal. A couple of beers had helped.
Now he was back to thinking about Randall Finley. David decided that whatever Finley had going on with Mancini, he couldn’t worry about it. At least, not yet. If David wanted to work with only ethical politicians, then he might as well collect welfare.
But the thing with Ethan? There was no way David was going to put up with that. He couldn’t allow Finley to have that kind of control over him.
David got up, opened the front door, and called inside: “Ethan!”
His son bounded down the stairs, came outside. “Yup?”
“Let’s you and me take a walk.”
“Where?”
“Nowhere in particular. I just want to talk.”
“Is this about Carl? Because I know I’m not supposed to get in cars with strangers. Or pickup trucks. So you don’t have to give me that lecture.”
“That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, but yeah, you should never get into a car with someone you don’t know.”
“I just told you I know that.”
“Okay.” He placed his palm, briefly, on his son’s back as they walked down the sidewalk. “Did what happened to Carl scare you?”
Ethan shrugged. “Not really. I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it that way. Is that what you wanted to talk about?”
“No. I wanted to talk to you about your mom.”
“What about her?”
“She died when you were only four—”
“I know.”
“What I was going to say is, because you were only four, it was hard to explain a lot of what happened.”
“You mean like what happens to someone when they die? Like, if they really go to heaven, or they’re just dead?”
David glanced down at the boy. “That’s another discussion. No, I mean, there are a lot of things about your mom I didn’t tell you at the time, that I kept from you, because it would have been hard to understand at that age. But you’re older now, and there’s things you probably should know. Things you should hear from me, instead of hearing them from somebody else. It kind of helped that we moved away for a while after she died, and no one knew us in Boston. And by the time we moved back here, people were kind of done talking about her.”
“Okay,” Ethan said.
“The first thing you need to know is, regardless of anything your mom did, or what anyone might say about her, she loved you very much.”
“Okay.”
“The last thing your mother did, before she died, was to make sure nothing bad happened to you. There was a very bad man, and he was threatening to hurt you, and she stopped him.” David hesitated. “She killed him.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “I kind of knew that.”
“I know there’s bits and pieces of this that you know — you’ve probably heard your grandparents talking about it when they didn’t think you were listening. The thing is, even though she loved you more than just about anything else in the world, your mother wasn’t a very good person.”
Ethan glanced up at his father. “I know.”
“You know?”
He nodded. “I’ve read all about her.”
“You have?”
Ethan nodded. “There’s lots of stuff about her online. That she had a different name when she was born, that years ago she cut off the hand of that guy she killed, that she stole some diamonds that turned out to be—”
“You know all this?”
Ethan stopped. His lip quivered. “Am I in trouble? I just wanted to know. Anytime I’ve ever asked you about Mom, you just said there wasn’t much to tell, and so then I would ask Nana and Poppa about her and they said I should talk to you, so I Googled her instead. There’s a whole bunch of stories. Most of them are from around the time everything happened, like, after she died.”
David felt an enormous weight coming off him, but at the same time, he felt saddened.
“I should have guessed that you’d do that. It’s pretty impossible to keep anything a secret these days. Especially from kids.”
“Yeah.”
“So, how’d you feel about what you found out?”
Ethan shrugged. “I don’t know. A bit weird. But it was also kind of cool.”
“Cool?” David said sharply.
Ethan recoiled from his father’s tone. “I don’t mean cool, like, as in cool, neat. More like, you know, cool, interesting.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat. I think I understand.”
“Like, I’m glad that you’re sort of normal and ordinary, but it was kind of, you know, neat that my mom was someone people were talking about. I mean, if she was still alive, it would be awful, but because it happened a long, long time ago, it’s not so bad.”
To him, five years is an eternity, David thought. For me, it was yesterday.
“Is that it?” Ethan asked.
“Is what it?”
“That’s why you wanted to talk to me?”
“Yeah.”
“So can we go back?”
“Yeah, sure. Come here.”
David pulled the boy into him, put his arms around him. But Ethan pushed back.
“Dad, we’re on the street,” he complained, twisting his head, looking up and down the sidewalk.
“Sorry,” David said, releasing his grip. “Don’t want to embarrass you.”
“You can hug me when we get home if you still want to.”
“I might. I just might.”
When they got back to the house, they found two people waiting for them. Sam Worthington and her son, Carl. Her car, slashed tires replaced, was at the curb.
“Hi,” David said.
“Carl,” Sam said, prodding her son.
“Mr. Harwood, thank you for what you did today,” the boy said.
David smiled. “No problem.”
Turning his attention to Ethan, the boy said, “Do you have trains here, too?”
Ethan shook his head. “Just at my grandpa’s house. But Nana — that’s my grandma — made some blueberry pie, although you have to be careful not to get it on your shirt because it won’t come off.”