After Hours (InterMix)(62)

I grimaced.

“He was complaining about one of the players, saying what a bum he was, how he’d peaked years ago. I said something like, ‘Yeah, Dad, like you’ve done anything worthwhile in your whole miserable life.’”

“Oh dear.”

Kelly drained his glass. “He didn’t get angry. He got this glazed look in his eyes, and just stared at the screen a long time. Then he told me, ‘I’m not your dad, you know. Your real daddy’s some f*cked-in-the-head vet your mom spread for, the summer before she met me. Now he’s in the pen, and I’m stuck with you.’ And I just went all numb and cold, because as much as I wanted to hit him, I kind of hoped it was true. I wanted to believe him. I didn’t want that sloppy, alcoholic shithead’s blood in me. I didn’t want to share anything with the guy. Not my house or my mom or my f*cking DNA.”

“Did you say anything?”

“No. And it never came up again. I doubt he even remembered he told me that, the next day.”

“And your mom never mentioned it?”

He shook his head.

“So you don’t know anything about your real father?”

“I know some. Enough. I dug around and found my birth certificate, but it had my stepdad’s name on it. So I went to the library and got somebody to help me search the local records, to look for the names of any guys who got incarcerated in the months before I was born. I found one guy’s name who it could have been, and his photograph, in an old article about his arrest. James Mahoney, his name was.”

“Jeez, you could’ve been Kelly Mahoney?” Cue the fiddle music.

“I know. Man could shit shamrocks with a name like that. Anyhow, I thought he could’ve been my father, maybe. Tough to tell, from an old black-and-white newspaper head shot, but the dates made sense, and he was a vet, like my stepdad had said.”

“Did you ask your mom?”

“Nah. She had enough crap to deal with. Let the poor woman have her secrets.”

“Did you do anything?”

“Fixated on him for a while, then just kinda let it go, for a long time. ’Til I was in my mid-twenties and heard about that job in prison security.”

A chill closed over me. “Where he was locked up? Or was he out already?”

“He was inside. Still is. And yeah, you guessed it—same place.”

“Did you see him, while you were there?”

“Yeah. Every f*cking day.”

“So . . . did you take the job because of him being there?”

Kelly sipped his coffee. “I told myself I didn’t, that it was just a job, but I’m sure it factored. I’d spent more than a decade wondering about the guy by then.”

“Did you ever ask him if he’d known your mom?”

“Nah. I never said shit to him, outside of what I had to, as a guard. I didn’t treat him any nicer or any worse than any other inmate there.”

“What was he like?”

“Quiet. Not too much trouble. If Vietnam f*cked him up, he kept his wounds way under his skin. And if he knew my mom had married a guy named Robak, he never let on. He was just this tall, quiet guy, with weird eyes. Real pale hazel, like ginger ale. Kinda like mine, kinda not. But I’m pretty sure he was the one.”

“Wow.” I realized I hadn’t touched my food in several minutes, and took a couple bites of cold toast, ruminating. “Did it change things, to meet him? Or to see him, anyhow?”

“I guess. Mainly it just confused me. Now I had two men I had no clue how to feel about. One complete *, but who’d at least been man enough to step up and pretend he was my dad. He sucked, but he stuck around. And this other one, some war-f*cked con who probably had no clue his son was standing on the other side of the bars, telling him it’s lights-out on Cell Block C.”

“What did he get sent away for?”

Kelly looked down at his hands. “Doesn’t matter. Just something real bad.”

Indeed, to get locked up for so long. And to make Kelly, the brashest man I’d ever met, go silent this way.

I decided not to push it any further. My thoughts had drifted to Jack. Jack, with his unconfirmed lineage. Jack, with a dad who showed up when it suited him, a dad who could do something worthy of a sentence next week and not shock a soul. With a mom who loved him but couldn’t seem to get her life on track. So many strikes against him, yet he wouldn’t even realize what they were for another eight or ten years.