Coming Home(80)

Danny smiled. “How old was he?”

“Fourteen. My brother’s gonna say I’m full of shit, but that boy was fourteen.” She watched as Danny lifted his chopsticks and grabbed some lo mein; with a quick roll of his wrist and a twist of his fingers, he had the long noodles twirled into a neat roll on the end of the sticks. He glanced up at her and brushed his shoulder off haughtily before bringing it to his mouth, and Leah rolled her eyes, causing him to chuckle.

Her phone beeped twice and she leaned over. “My brother,” she said before tapping the screen. Leah smiled as she held the phone up, turning it around for Danny to see.

YOU ARE SO FULL OF SHIT!

Danny laughed as she placed the phone back on the table. “Told you,” she said.

“Your family seems cool.”

“They’re the best,” she said, taking a bite of a pot sticker. “You gotta have a thick skin to roll with us.”

“I believe it,” he said with a laugh.

“What about you?” Leah asked, taking a sip of her water.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s your family like?”

He laughed humorlessly. “Not like yours.”

Leah twisted the cap back onto her water. “You don’t get along?”

“We get along, I guess.” He shrugged. “We’re just not that close.”

“Do you have a big family?”

“Just me, my mom, and my sister.”

“What about your dad?” she said.

“I don’t know my dad.”

Leah watched him for a second before she dropped her eyes. “Did he pass away?” she asked, sifting through the chicken with her fork.

“No, he left before I was born.”

“Oh.” After a few seconds of silence, she said, “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “It’s fine. I mean, I’m not f*cked up from it or anything. I guess I could have been, but I had a family. It just wasn’t my real one.”

“Your mom wasn’t around either?”

Danny exhaled, running his hand through his hair. “No, not really.”

Leah bit her lip before she said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I mean, if you don’t mind hearing this shit.”

She shook her head. “I want to know about you. Even the shitty stuff.”

He smiled sadly, his eyes dropping for a second before he said, “Here’s the thing about my mom. She did her best, but life dealt her one crappy hand after the other. She got pregnant with my sister when she was eighteen. Supposedly that guy had the decency to hang around for a year after she was born before he took off.”

Danny looked up as he said, “I’m sure it sucked. I mean, I can’t imagine being left with a baby that young. And I guess at that age, the only way she could think of to fix it was to find a replacement for him. She went looking for a guy who could take care of them. And she thought she found him.”

“Your father?”

Danny nodded. “I still don’t know if she got pregnant to try and keep him or if it was an accident, but either way, he obviously wasn’t into it.”

Leah frowned, and he said, “So she ended up a single mom to two kids from two different guys who wanted nothing to do with her.” Danny reached over and spun the bottle of water on the table. “She had to work two jobs just to pay the bills, and when she wasn’t working, she was out trying to find the next man who would take care of our family. So we never really saw her. I mean, the two jobs thing couldn’t be helped, but I just wish she had realized we didn’t need the man. We would have been fine without a father as long as we had a mother.”