Burn It Up(74)

He shrugged and took the lighter back. “I barely remember him—he left two days before my fifth birthday.” He’d found that lighter a couple of weeks later, wedged between the cushion and arm of his old man’s recliner. His mom hadn’t even gotten angry when he’d killed one of the only trees in their yard, trying to set it on fire. She’d just looked at that lighter and held his face to her hip, and she’d cried. She’d said, “I’m mad at him, too.” Casey had rediscovered the lighter in the junk drawer not long after, and kept it to himself ever since.

“For what it’s worth, I was surprised when he left town,” Nita said. “He loved you boys.”

Casey frowned. “You think?”

“Oh yes. He bragged about you both. Never within your earshot, but he used to come by to fix my old Pacer—Tom Grossier was the best mechanic in this town,” she added, and sipped her wine. “Was and still would be. Anyway, I’d bring him a coffee or a beer, and I’d mention whatever I’d seen you and your brother getting up to in the yard that day, and his face just lit up, every time.”

“What’d he say?”

“He always told me exactly how tall Vince was, right down to the half inch—like I didn’t see the boy every day with my own eyes. And he was always going on about how smart you were.”

“Smart?”

“Oh yes. About how you’d invented a new game, or taken something apart to see how it worked.”

“Jeez. All I remember is getting yelled at, for breaking stuff.”

Her smile turned sad. “Well, fathers can be like that with their sons. They can equate praise with coddling, I think—my own father was like that with my brothers. And Fortuity’s not the kind of town a man wants to subject a softhearted child to.”

“No, I guess not.”

“But come on, Casey. The suspense is killing me. What was the bad news?”

“I, um . . .” He lowered his voice, even knowing his mom would be tuned in one thousand percent to whatever crap was on the TV. “I found out that Vince and I . . . That we don’t have the same mother. Our mom isn’t his mom.”

Nita’s expression changed, but not as Casey might have expected. There was no puzzlement there, no shock. The realization hit him in an instant. “You knew?”

She nodded. “I did, yes.”

“Jesus.” He’d said it too loud, and she shot him a cautious look. He said it again, more quietly. “You f*cking knew, all these years? Since when?”

“Since after I’d known Dee maybe a year or so. She and your dad moved here when Vince was tiny—just a few months old. No one had any reason to suspect she wasn’t his natural mother. But then when she was pregnant with you, she told me. You were her first and only biological child, after all. I think she needed to tell someone. Everyone assumed she’d already been through childbirth once before. That couldn’t have been much fun.”

“So who in the f*ck is Vince’s real mom?”

She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. Dee never talked about her much, except to say she was your father’s ex-girlfriend. And she didn’t think too highly of her—that’s for sure. Though how could she? She loved your brother like a son. He was her son. Imagining how another woman could ever give him up was beyond her.”

“How the f*ck am I supposed to break this to Vince?”

Nita looked cagey, fiddling with the stem of her glass. “Do you think it’s even wise to?”

“You think I can just know this, just sit on this news, and not tell him?”

Nita studied the tabletop a moment, then met his eyes with her brown ones. “You have to understand a couple things, Casey. Firstly, that your mother loved you both—loved Vince as much as she does you, her own biological son, and even with Tom leaving her the way he did. And she still loves you both, in her way. But secondly you need to understand that Vince loves her, too, in spite of everything that’s happened. He’s sacrificed a lot to stay here, to take care of her, to provide for her.”

Casey felt his legs go leaden at that, guilt catching like an anchor.

“Vince might talk big about how loyal he is to this town, especially with that casino coming down the pike,” Nita said, “but he truly committed to Fortuity when he committed to your mom. He accepted that he was stuck here for as long as she lives, and at some point, he must have decided to make the most of it.”

And sadly, “making the most of it” in Fortuity amounted to menial jobs or physical labor for most people.

“But that makes it even more f*cking unfair,” Casey said. And it made him feel like more of a world-class shit than ever, for not having been the one who’d stepped up and stuck around. “That Vince could’ve gone someplace else, been something more. But he chose to stay here, to take care of a woman who’s not even his real mother?” And if he hadn’t, it would’ve been down to me. And what scared Casey worst of all was trying to guess if he’d have done as his brother had. Manned up, been the good son. He honestly couldn’t say.

“Think about it this way, Casey.” Nita took a long drink from her now dwindling glass. “What do you think would’ve happened to Vince, if he hadn’t had your mother tethering him to Fortuity?”