“Because she’s seventeen and she wants to do what she wants to do. With no pressure from us or anyone else.”
“Well, she’s your daughter, all right.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shook her head. “Nothing…except, have you thought about telling Allie the truth about Sam?”
Shit. And things had been so pleasant there for a while. Might as well get this over with.
“I have. And I’m not telling her,” he said.
“Why not?”
He got up from the couch and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of whiskey. Rusty’s cousin had left a bottle of Jim Beam in the cabinet and Rusty had told Zeke to help himself. Zeke wasn’t a whiskey man, but the conversation they were about to have seemed to call for it. He offered her a sip from his glass, but Mimi refused.
“The guy has a police record,” he said.
Mimi blue eyes flashed with concern. “I’m not going to ask how you know that, because I can only imagine. So…how bad is it?”
He went to the briefcase he kept next to his gun and holster, pulled out the printout he’d made from his Internet search and handed it to Mimi.
She quickly read the page. “Child support? Zeke…your father has another child? How long have you known this?”
“I looked it up this morning. I was going to try, Mimi, I really was, but there’s no way I’m letting this bastard into Allie’s life. Or ours, either.”
“Baby, don’t you see? This changes everything. This means more than ever you have to tell Allie! You have a brother or a sister out there, maybe more than just one. I agree, Sam is a loser. Or at least, if you look at this rap sheet, he is. But you owe it to yourself to hear him out, and so does Allie.”
“I know everything I need to know about him.”
“Zeke, you haven’t seen the man in over twenty-four years—”
“Not true. I saw him eighteen years ago. The night before I found out you were pregnant.”
She flinched. The hurt in her eyes made him wish he could take it back, but he was tired of keeping things from her.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” she whispered.
He took a long sip of the whiskey. It felt good going down. Hot and smooth and powerful as it filtered through his veins. He could see how it would be addicting. This feeling of false competency.
“Remember that day you broke up with me? Because I sure as hell do. You were waiting for me at my place, and I was happy, thinking you’d come to surprise me and tell me something good, but instead you told me you couldn’t see me anymore. And before you left you whispered in my ear. You remember what you said?”
&n
bsp; She went pale again. “I…”
“You said, do something big, Zeke. I know you have it in you to be so much more than what you are right now.”
“I never meant—”
“No, you were right. I wasn’t good enough for you. I was a slacker. But I listened, Mimi. I listened hard. I cleaned up my act. Stopped smoking pot. I even tried to enlist in the army.”
“The army?” She looked at him as if he were a stranger. The story he was about to tell her was an ugly little room of his life that he’d kept hidden away from her. Not because he hadn’t trusted her with it. But because telling her meant he had to relive it.
“I went to a recruiter in Panama City. And I was this close,” he said, putting the pads of his two fingers together, “to signing on the dotted line.”
“What stopped you?”
“That week Buela was diagnosed with a heart problem. She told me she was fine. To go join the military, that she was proud of me. But I couldn’t leave her here alone. Allie was just a kid, only thirteen. What if Buela needed help? What if she had a heart attack and I was halfway around the world? So I did a little digging around and I found the bastard. I found him, Mimi. All that time Allie and Buela and I wondered where he was, he was just two hours away. Living in Pensacola. So I went to see him.”