Page 57 of Veiled in Brick

“The bare minimum to live, yeah. I remember.”

“I cared for you when you were sick.”

Liam held up a hand to stop him. “You never did shit for me. That was all Mom.” His voice faltered on the mention of his mother.

“And look where she is now,” he returned the choice words with a hefty weight. Liam’s shoulders sagged, and Carter added, “She’s in the ground—”

Liam countered angrily, “What does that have to do with anything?!”

“You had potential,” Carter complained. “She knew it. I knew it. You knew it, too.”

“This—” Liam stammered back disbelievingly, “This shit again?”

“Yeah—this shit again. We all tried to get you to go pro—baseball. Football. Ya could’a done it. Made somethin’ of yourself. Supported us.”

“Oh, good God—that was fuckin’ eight years ago, Carter!” Liam exclaimed. “Believe it or not, I’ve moved on from high school. I had one coach tell me I should give a scholarship a shot.”

“And ya should’ve taken the advice,” Carter retorted. “Wasted it away to go to school to, what, teach? It’s a waste of fuckin’ time, you’ve been doing it for almost a decade—”

“Graduating in the fall, but thanks—”

“Took ya long enough—”

“Well, I had to get my shit together for a few years, Carter,” Liam told him snidely. “Had to focus on work for a bit. Save up money.”

“It was the wrong call.” Carter shook his head as he narrowed his eyes at his son. “Teaching probably won’t stick—ya don’t have the brains for it anyway—”

“Hey!” I shouted. “Don’t fucking talk to him like that!”

“Not anything I’m not used to, Zoey,” Liam called back to me and then redirected his attention to his father. “I didn’t want to go fuckin’ pro. I obsessed over it for…years. Thought about what I could’ve done, but even if I had really wanted to go for it, guess what?” He paused before stating, “My body was too fucked up to do it anyway. Sophomore year, my grades were shit and you took a bat to my legs—” One of my hands involuntarily raised to my mouth at his admission, and Liam rambled, “Dunno how you caught me, I was a fast fucker. My right knee still doesn’t work right from that; it goes all…wonky when it’s cold. Junior year, you caught me drinking a beer with some friends at the lake.” Liam pointed at his father as he emphasized his words, “Y’know, ya surprised me that time. Drove me home. Gave me a talk on the porch. Got through all that and then you got me—you had to wait for it by then though, right? ’Cause I was bigger than you. If ya wanted to do damage, you had to catch me off guard.” I felt my teeth clench as Liam noted, “Fucked up my arms when you pushed me down the patio steps.”

Carter pursed his lips together. “Go ahead,” he said in a grave tone. “Bring up all the bad and none of the good.”

“The good?!” Liam returned incredulously, his vocal cords beginning to grate. “What fucking GOOD was there?! Senior year, Mom died.” Silence hung in the air for a beat, and then he said, “You hit me with the goddamn base of a lamp. You remember the one—short. White. Heavy.” Liam gestured at the scar on his upper lip with a wave of his hand, his mouth snarling as he spoke, “Gave me this.”

“Well, you fuckin’ deserved it,” Carter said with purpose, and I found myself balling my hands into tight fists to hold my tongue.

“Oh, good, I deserved to get a split lip and a concussion right after my mother died—”

“You deserved it because it was your. Fucking. FAULT!” Carter emphasized the last three words with a single step toward Liam, pointing at him accusingly with tears biting at his eyes.

Liam’s defensive demeanor left him entirely at those words, the muscles in his back that had been visibly tense going slack as he whispered, “Don’t say that.”

Carter swiped at his eyes quickly, locking his hazel gaze on Liam as he said, “She knew. She knew if you would’ve listened, me and you wouldn’t have gotten into it so much—”

“Don’t,” Liam said through his teeth.

“Hell,” Carter continued, “you remember how she was that day. You’re the one that was there—”

“She was sick, it—it wasn’t like that.”

“Sick?” Carter voiced. “You made her sick. All our fuckin’ fighting, she didn’t want to be here anymore.”

Liam muttered, “That’s not—not true; stop.”

“I have the goddamn note, Liam,” Carter admitted in a hushed tone. “It was you.”

“Carter,” he said his father’s name in a small voice, and nausea rose in my gut with the way that Liam’s shoulders slumped over himself.

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