“Hungry?” I said, trying to be nonchalant.
“Not really.”
“When was the last time you ate?” He only shook his head. “You ought to eat something.”
“Sure, Mom.” He gave me the briefest flickers of a glance—half accusing, half apologetic. I must have glared at him. I didn’t appreciate the label. I didn’t appreciate having to behave like that label.
He cleared a spot on the table where I deposited the pizza.
I pulled my stack of papers out of my bag and set them between us. I’d put the one about Cormac’s father on top. A grainy, black and white picture of the man occupied the middle of the page. He’d been lean and weathered, with short-cropped, receding hair. In the picture, a candid snapshot, he was smiling at something to the left of the camera, and wearing sunglasses.
Ben stared at it a moment, his expression blank. I thought I knew him pretty well by now, but I couldn’t read this. He was almost disbelieving. Then, his lips quirked a smile.
Finally, he said, “I’d forgotten about that picture. It’s a good one of him. Uncle Doug.” He shook his head, then looked at me. “You’ve been busy.”
“Yeah. It’s funny how much of your family’s history is plastered all over the newspapers.”
He started shuffling through the articles. “Real busy.”
“Just remember that the next time you think you can keep a secret from me.”
“Why go to the trouble?”
“I wanted to make sure that you and Cormac aren’t bad guys. I have to say, you have kind of a creepy past. When you say this stuff doesn’t matter, I really want to trust you.”
“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea. You might be better off on your own. Get out of Dodge while the getting’s good.”
We were pack. I’d see this through. “I’ll stick around.”
“I haven’t seen my father in over ten years. We had a throw-down screaming match over this Patriot Brigade garbage. I was twenty, first one in my family to go to college and so full of myself. I was educated.” He gave the word sarcastic emphasis. “I knew it all, and there I was to throw it back in the face of my poor benighted father. And he was so full of that right-wing nut-job rhetoric… I left. Cormac was still there, helping him work the ranch.
That’s the only reason he got tangled up with that crowd, was because of my father. When I left, so did he. I still don’t know if it was something I said that convinced him. Or if we’d just spent so much time looking out for each other—we were already kind of a team, then.
“Dad called me right before that last trial. I’d just passed the bar. He wanted me to represent him. I said no. I’d have said no even if we were on good terms. He really needed someone with experience. But all Dad heard was that his only son, his own flesh and blood, was turning his back on him. The funny thing about it all, I wanted to convince him he was wrong. There wasn’t a government conspiracy out to get him, I wasn’t trying to sell him down the river. But everything that happened, from the FBI wiretaps to me walking out on him, confirmed everything in his mind. He’s too far gone to come back.”
“You haven’t been to see him. You haven’t talked to him at all,” I said. “Do you want to? Do you think you should?”
He shook his head. “I made a clean break. We’re all better off if it stays that way. Cormac and I always kind of knew that something he’d done in the past would come back to haunt him. I didn’t think it would be this.” He tossed the printouts back on the table.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She divorced my dad after thirty years of marriage, sold the ranch to pay his legal expenses, and is now working as a waitress in Longmont. And that’s the whole story of my sordid, screwed up family.” He shook his head absently. “You know what’s always gotten to me? My dad and I aren’t that different. It’s where we came from, that whole independent rural culture. I remember telling him, yeah, sure, take back the government, put it back in the hands of the people. That’s great. But you’re not going to do it with a stockpile of dynamite and hate speech. Me—I went to law school. Thought I’d work the system from the inside, sticking it to the man.” His smile turned sad. “Maybe we were both wrong.”
I wanted to hug him and make silly cooing noises. That Mom thing again. He had this traumatized look to him. Instead, I hefted the grocery bag. “I brought beer.”
“My hero,” he said, smiling.
We settled down to beer and pizza. “What have you been working on?”
“Precedents,” he said. “You’d think in a state where half the population totes around guns in their glove boxes this sort of thing would have come up before. We have a Make My Day law for crying out loud. But there isn’t too much out there to cover if you shoot something thinking it’s a wild animal, then it turns out to be a person.”
“Except for the werewolf that killed Cormac’s dad.”
“Which isn’t going to help Cormac’s case at all if the prosecutor digs it up, so I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t draw anyone’s attention to it. Judges get nervous when weird things keep happening to the same person.”
I turned an invisible key at the corner of my mouth. “My lips are sealed.”
He gave me a highly skeptical look. I wanted to argue—then realized I couldn’t, really. We fell into a moment of silence, eating and drinking. He stared at the computer screen as if it would offer up miracles.