Page 7 of Den of Iniquity

“I guess.”

“Help yourself. If you’re using one of the big mugs, press the two-cup button. For a small cup use the other one. Cream and sugar?”

He nodded.

“Cream is in the fridge. Sugar is in the sugar bowl on the counter. If you want to stir your coffee, be sure to get a spoon out of the drawer. When people use the sugar bowl spoon to stir their coffee, it sends Mel around the bend.”

“That’s one of the rules?” Kyle asked.

“Yup,” I told him. “Let’s call it rule number one.”

Our Magnifica coffee machine takes a while to grind the beans and brew the coffee, so it’s not exactly an instantaneous process, but the wait means that each cup is freshly brewed. While Kyle’s was in the making, I wondered what the hell we’d talk about. How does a seventysomething make casual conversation with a heartbroken teenager who is, more or less, a stranger? Chances are, Kyle was dealing with the same issue.

When he came into the living room, rather than settling on the sofa, he sank down onto the floor and sat cross-legged next to Sarah, who was curled up on her rug. She greeted him with a welcoming tail thump.

“How did you sleep?” I asked.

“Not very well.”

That was hardly surprising. Neither had I.

“I got a text from your mom a little while ago,” I told him.

“Oh?”

“She sounds mad as hell and says she’s coming to get you. She’ll be here by eleven.”

Kyle looked alarmed. “But I thought you and Grandma Mel said I could stay.”

“We said we needed to talk about it, and we did, but the bottom line on whether you go or stay is up to you. You get to decide. Mel and I are both on board if you want to stay, but the final decision will be yours.”

“Mom’s going to be mad.”

Those words and the uncertainty with which they were uttered didn’t sound like they came from someone prepared to regard himself as an adult.

“She already is,” I advised him, “and that’s hardly surprising. Moms are like that, and yours comes by it honestly. When my mother, your great-grandmother, got mad, believe me, she was something fierce.”

“Really?”

“Really,” I replied. “You see that framed photo at the far end of the mantel?”

Kyle nodded.

“Mind getting it down?”

He unfolded his long legs and stood up in one smooth movement without the slightest difficulty. I might have been able to get up and down that way once upon a time, but not anymore. My two fake knees just aren’t up to it.

“This one?” Kyle asked, handing me a framed photo of a young man dressed in a World War II–era army uniform.

“That’s the one,” I said. “Does the guy in the photo look familiar?”

Kyle frowned. “He looks a lot like me.”

It was true. That was the first thing that had struck me the daybefore when I first caught sight of him—how much Kyle looked like my father and like me, too, for that matter. DNA is weird that way. It picks and chooses and sometimes skips a generation or two.

“That’s because he’s my father,” I told him, “your great-grandfather. He was only a few months older than you are now when he left home and joined the army. He and my mother were dating and about to get married when he died in a motorcycle accident. My mother learned she was pregnant after he was gone. Her parents wanted her to give me up for adoption but she refused. Over their objections, she kept me and raised me on her own without a bit of help from her folks or from my dad’s family, either. As for her parents, she never spoke to either of them again.”

“Never?”

---