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“Maybe it’s better that way,” Billy growled. “Fucker deserves to be blocked out.”
“It’s not better.” His brothers both looked his way again. He focused on the intersection of his fishing line and the water, the ripples it made as he jerked the rod.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Billy asked impatiently. “What kind of dreams?”
Galen swallowed through the tightness in his throat. “It was something that happened before Dad went to prison. I was the only one who saw it.”
Thomas abandoned his fishing rod altogether and set it on the deck of the boat. He fixed Galen with the stern gaze that had served him so well when he was fire chief…and when he was raising two younger brothers. Galen knew that look well. “Go on, tell us what you saw.”
“Dad came to the apartment, all bloody. I was in the bathroom getting him the first-aid kit when someone showed up and took him away.”
He described the whole scene, moment by moment. More details came back as he recounted it to his brothers. The blood on the slip cover on the armchair. He’d had to take it to the dumpster and hope no one missed it. The fact that his father never even put his shoes on as he was dragged out the door.
His brothers listened in stunned silence.
Billy was so upset he dropped his fishing rod into the lake. Galen watched it drift away. He knew the currents so well that he’d be able to find it, unless it got snagged somewhere on the bottom. Whatever. Fishing rods weren’t hard to come by in Lake Bittersweet.
“You never told anyone?” Thomas finally asked.
“He said not to! I was afraid.” That suffocating fear came back to him and he nearly choked on his next words. “I thought he might be held captive and that they’d kill him if I told anyone. Then after a while I was afraid they had killed and it was my fault because I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t fucking know what to do. When Mom said he was in prison, I was relieved because at least he was alive. But I know people get killed in prison, so I still didn’t say anything.”
Thomas’ hand settled on his shoulder, and he realized with a shock that he was crying.
“Fuck.” He blotted the tears with his gloves. Good thing he was wearing his lined waterproof fishing gloves.
“Who was it that took him away?” Thomas asked. “Did you recognize him?”
“No. But he looked like a criminal. He had those dead eyes. Scary dude. Was Dad involved with criminals?”
“I mean, he must have been. I always thought it was small-time stuff, but he went to prison for armed robbery.”
“Armed robbery?” That just didn’t sound like the Marshall John Cooper that Galen had idolized. And how strange, now that he thought about it, that he’d never known the charge against his father until now. He really had blurred out everything to do with him.
“Jesus, Galen, I can’t believe you had to carry that all this time.” Thomas squeezed his shoulder. “They shouldn’t have put that on you.”
Galen nodded numbly. That was true. They shouldn’t have. But that man hadn’t cared about a little kid, and his father…well, what had he been thinking? Would Galen ever know?
“For a while I got scared every time the phone rang. Then they cut our service off and that was a relief. After a while I just stopped thinking about it. My brain wouldn’t go there. Anything about Dad, it would start moving really slowly. And then I forgot that night completely.”
Billy spoke up for the first time since Galen’s revelation. “I used to tell myself he was dead. It was easier that way.”
Galen’s heart ached for his younger brother. That must have been his survival strategy.
“I was little when he left,” Billy went on. “I hardly remember anything about him. By the time I was born he was bored with the whole kid thing. I just remember him yelling at Mom because she smoked all the weed, or whatever. I was glad when he left for prison.”
“I was too, at first.” Thomas unscrewed the top of his Thermos and took a swig. “I thought it would be easier without him coming around and getting Mom upset. But I was wrong. She really spiraled after he left. None of the men she got involved with were any good for her.”
Galen remembered that spiraling. A few years later, the force of it had sent the three of them to Lake Bittersweet. “I wonder if she knows he’s on a reality show.”
“She hasn’t mentioned it to me. Part of her personal addiction program is that she knows they have a toxic relationship and she needs to keep her distance. Also I’m pretty sure there are legal issues. I don’t think she’s seen him in person.”
In person.
Those two words reverberated through Galen like a gunshot. His father was out there, in the flesh, not in a dream. In Hollywood. Living a new life. Good for him, he supposed. But this wasn’t about Marshall Cooper.
Thomas had his hands full with his new family. Billy didn’t really seem to care. But Galen, the one in the middle, the one who’d longed for his father’s attention, the one who’d knitted that yellow and black beer coozy, the one who’d kept that secret for so many years…Galen finally knew what he needed.
“I’m going to go see Dad.”
