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1
CIARAN
Men always made fools of themselves around my mom.
Tall, statuesque, and a former Vegas Showgirl, blond bombshell Theresa Galbraith was forty-three but looked thirty. No one on the planet believed she had a seventeen-year-old son, to include the eager sportswriter leaning over our deli’s meat and cheese glass display, asking her out on a date.
Hell, if I wasn’t her son, I wouldn’t believe her age, either.
“Dinner, coffee, lunch, anything, Theresa,” Bruce the Sportswriter begged. “Or how about a hockey game. The Stanley Cup Finals are underway.”
Bruce wore a Las Vegas Golden Knights jersey over a button-down shirt, beige khaki pants, and a pair of scuffed up brown loafers. Bruce was a tall man in his early-thirties with short dark hair and a pair of sunglasses perched on his block-shaped head. I studied his overeager face. It was only May, but a scorching heat wave hit Las Vegas two days ago, so his face was covered in sweat.
It was not a good look on him.
Mom’s dazzling blue eyes flew to mine as I stood at the cash register, notebook in hand, as I worked on the outline of a detective novel. Two small dimples appeared in her cheeks and I couldn’t hide my grin. Bruce the Sportswriter, who was a regular, could not take a hint.
These days my mom was less showgirl and more “scraping-by-the-skin-of-her-teeth” deli owner, complete with deli-branded visor, pulled-up hair, and a lightly soiled red apron. Beautiful, yes, but a layer of exhaustion clung to her skin. I wondered if all moms displayed the same kind of exhaustion.
Oblivious, Bruce continued. “Tickets are impossible at this point, Theresa, so it will be my treat.”
“Ciaran,” Mom said to me as she prepared Bruce’s Italian hoagie, “ring Bruce up for his usual footlong combo meal.” She turned her attention to Bruce. Smiling, she added, “It’s kind of you to offer, but you know I don’t date my customers, Bruce.”
“Then I’ll never eat here again, Theresa.” Bruce’s tone was earnest, like usual, and I wondered if he meant it this time.
“That’ll be fifteen dollars, Bruce,” I said. What I wanted to say was, Stop hitting on my mom and develop some self-respect.
He dug for the credit card in his wallet before studying me a moment. I’d had a growth spurt last year and I was now eye-level with the guy who’d been hitting on my mom for the last three years.
“Ciaran, my man,” Bruce said, butchering my name to make it sound like Karen. “How goes the writing?” He glanced down at my chaotic notebook, where most of everything I’d written thus far had been scratched out and re-written. Most of our customers knew I was a budding novelist. “I’ve got a degree in journalism. If you need help in the writing department, I’d be happy to come by any night.” Bruce shot a glance at my mom as he stressed the word any. “To help you brainstorm.”
If I answered Bruce truthfully, I’d tell him that everything I wrote was shit and that it was a hopeless quest to get admitted into the college creating writing program of my dreams. But Bruce was not a friend. He was a man who used my love of writing as an excuse to talk to me and make inroads with my mom.
“What do you know about badgers?” I asked Bruce instead.
The detective in my novel was a badger—Badger Detective Inspector First Class Earl Shiremarch—investigating a casino heist.
“Badgers, huh?” Bruce scrunched his eyebrows. I could see the struggle in his expression as he finally gave up, shrugged, and lifted a meaty eyebrow. “I’m guessing you don’t mean the University of Wisconsin’s Badgers hockey team?”
“Nope.” I slid his combo meal across the counter. “The animal.”
“I’ll do research tonight, after the game,” he called out as he shuffled to the soda machine before heading toward the door.
Sure you will. I rolled my eyes but smiled. “See you tomorrow, Bruce.”
I spent the next few hours scribbling in my notebook while tending to customers in a deli shop that had seen better days.
After Grandpa Tommy died three years ago, mom took over Tommy’s Deli, but it had been—and continued to be—a financial struggle. Thankfully, Grandpa Tommy also owned the tiny one-bedroom apartment above the shop. Mom had ended the lease at our rental unit and we moved in after the funeral.
Mom took the sole bedroom and I crashed each night on the foldout couch in the living room. It wasn’t glamorous by any stretch of the imagination, but at least we had a roof over our heads, clothes on our back, and as many sandwiches as we could possibly want. When we first moved in, Mom cheerfully said, “When you sell your first novel, Ciaran, we’ll buy a big house on the beach and read books all day.”
“With mimosas?” I’d asked after dropping the box filled with science fiction, fantasy, and romance novels on Grandpa’s dusty floor.
“You bet your ass we will,” she’d said with a mischievous wink. It was a sweet, if misguided, gesture. I’d barely finished drafting a few short stories, let alone a novel. That said, I loved that she believed in my ability to become a successful novelist.
If only we didn’t spend eleven hours a day running the deli. Okay, let me amend that—on school days, it was only six hours for me, but still. It wasn’t easy working in the deli, helping my mom tend to customers, while finding time to finish homework, study for all five of my AP classes, and manage to carve out time to write fiction.
My high school guidance counselor was doing everything he could to help me knock out as many college credits as possible before graduating next year. Given the fact that Grandpa’s meager life insurance money had run out and the deli was now operating in the red (Mom never kept these facts from me), I knew funds for college would be hard to come by. It was a dream—a pipe dream—to attend UCLA where my favorite author taught there as an emeritus professor in the creative writing department.
