Remarkably Bright Creatures(76)

A couple hundred bucks left over. He should save all of it. Totally should. But he pulls up a site he knows well, one that sells music for indie bands. Moth Sausage used to have their tracks listed there, but that’s not why he’s here. He searches his own name out of curiosity, but nothing comes up. Well, that’s not surprising. Brad probably had the band’s stuff taken down. Oh well. Instead, he searches until he finds two under-the-radar jam bands, ones that he knows are pretty decent. Like the Dead, like Phish or something, Ethan’s style, but new. Cameron Cassmore may be a loser and a burnout, living in a shitty camper, but he knows good music. He buys digital albums from both bands and enters Ethan’s email for delivery.

It’s a start.

THE CAMPER’S WINDOWS are still black when his phone buzzes. Cameron pats around until his hand finds the device. When he sees Aunt Jeanne’s number on the screen, his stomach drops. The last time she called him in the middle of the night, it was from the hospital, when she had a dented head and a shattered hip and two cops in her hospital room, trying to take a statement about what had happened in an altercation at Dell’s.

“Hello?” he says, breathless. When he’d rushed to the hospital back then, it was twenty minutes away. Now, he didn’t want to think about how long the drive would be.

“I’m fine, Cammy,” she says, apparently reading his anxious tone.

“Then why are you calling me now?” He checks the time. “At one in the morning?”

“Did I wake you up?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Thought you’d be out at the bar or something.”

“No. I was sound asleep. I worked my ass off today.”

“Sorry. Just wanted to let you know I got your bank transfer. You sent too much.” Aunt Jeanne lets out an off-key whistle. Has she been drinking? A muffled male voice shuffles in the background, and Cameron wonders whether Wally Perkins is there, with her, in her trailer.

Cameron sits up, rubbing his eyes. “The extra is interest.” He doesn’t add that he’d calculated it in his head based on the current prime rate and what she might have plausibly gotten from bonds, if the money had been invested there, which it never would have been, but did that matter?

“We never said anything about interest.” Her voice is cool.

“But I owed it to you.” And I owe you so much more, he doesn’t add.

“You don’t owe me anything.” Her voice is slurry, for sure. Definitely some whiskey. “You know I never expected you to actually pay me back.”

“For sure I was going to pay you back.” Cameron hesitates, kicking off the blanket. “Actually, I was thinking once I square things up with Simon Brinks for everything he owes, we could use the money for a down payment.”

“A down payment?”

“For you. A house, back in town. Get you out of that trailer park.”

“I happen to like this trailer park.”

In the background, a grizzled male voice pipes up. “What’s going on?”

“Wally, did you realize we live in a dump?”

Cameron sputters, “I never said it was a dump!”

“Not in so many words,” Aunt Jeanne says dryly. “Look, I’m glad you’re so flush with cash all of a sudden that you can go around buying houses for people who don’t need them. Why don’t you keep the money and actually make something of your life?”

“What do you think I’m trying to do? Not my fault I was dealt a shitty hand.”

“No, the deal is never anyone’s fault. But you control the way you play.” There’s a splash and tinkling of ice cubes, then a moment’s pause and another one. Two more drinks poured.

Cameron flings open the camper’s back door, tumbles out, and starts pacing in Ethan’s driveway. Under his bare feet, the pavement is still warm from the hot summer day. “I’ve played my hand as best I could. You could’ve told me Sowell Bay was where I came from.”

Aunt Jeanne snorts. “What good would that have done?”

“I might have maybe found my father before I was, say, thirty years old.”

“That man is not your father.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“She was my sister, Cammy.” Aunt Jeanne’s voice is weary now, almost defeated. “For all your mother’s flaws, she was no dummy. If your father was some big-shot business guy . . . I mean, if he were even a marginally productive member of society, or, hell, even alive . . . I don’t know, Cammy. I think if it were that simple, she wouldn’t have let him miss out on being a part of your life.”

“She missed out on being a part of my life.” Cameron kicks a clump of crabgrass in a crack of Ethan’s driveway. “Seems like letting people go comes easy to her.”

“Letting go,” Aunt Jeanne says softly, “can be the hardest thing.”

Cameron feels his face twist into an involuntary scowl. It’s basically the same thing Avery said when they were paddleboarding under the pier, but somehow hearing it from Aunt Jeanne makes him want to kick right through the concrete.

“Look, I need to bounce,” he says. “Work in the morning.” This isn’t true. He doesn’t work until noon, but it seems like the sort of excuse a responsible person might give to get off the phone in the middle of the night.