Page 61 of Brenna, Brat

“Maybe they’re just…” Campbell glanced over at me. “I remember how you looked ill when you thought about my mother with her little boyfriend. I don’t want to make you carsick, but maybe your parents are just lonely in a physical way.”

“That was a very oblique reference to their sex life, so thank you,” I said. “Also, I don’t get carsick, and I don’t think that Dion does, either. I think he only wanted to sit in front.” I hesitated. “Sophie kept saying that my mom was up to something.”

“She said that your dad and mom were going to talk face to face, which you supported.”

Yes, but I didn’t need to hear how I had probably been wrong about that. “The best thing to do would be to forget about them and enjoy the weekend, as much as we can now that Dion is in the back seat.”

“I’m awake and I heard that,” he announced, and Campbell laughed. He only grinned when Dion also announced that we had to stop because he already had to use the bathroom, even though we had barely cleared the Oakland County line (he had forgotten to go before he left, he explained). We waited for him in the car at a gas station.

“I have some news about a job.”

“Oh?” I looked at Campbell, and he was playing with the change in his console.

“I’ll be lucky if anyone would even consider hiring me,” he said. “I don’t have a ton of expenses, but I can’t live off savings indefinitely. Especially if I’m going to have to give some or most of those savings back.”

“And? What’s the job?”

“It’s with one of Beckett’s friends, a lawyer for a wealth management firm. They work exclusively for a family that owns a chain of coffee houses where you can get your hair cut as you wait for your drink. They also have their own brand of pork rinds and pork rind-flavored coffee.”

“The Caffeine Barbers? I’ve heard of that,” I said. “I read that they’re expanding a lot but I thought that they only have their shops in the South.”

He nodded. “The job’s in Texas,” he explained. “I’m going to fly down next week to interview.”

“Oh,” I said again. This time, it was the same sound I made when one of my sisters (usually Juliet, but sometimes others) had socked me in the stomach. But I rallied. “That should make you feel a lot better. It will be a relief to make money and also to move away from Detroit.”

“I don’t have the job yet,” he cautioned, but I was sure he would get it. You only had to meet him to know that you’d want him. You’d want to hire him, I meant.

Dion didn’t take too long before he was back with a giant can of energy drink which meant that we’d be stopping at another bathroom again soon. The beverage perked him up a lot, and he started asking many questions about our destination. That was good, because I didn’t have much to say at the moment, myself.

Campbell talked about heading up north for the summer when he and his sister had been kids, something that had stopped fairly early for him. “It was the off-season, but I was still doing camps, training, and summer league teams. We visited during the winter because my dad owns a box at Woodsmen Stadium and we went to a few of their games. Well, he went to a lot of games, and I came along if I had time around my hockey schedule,” he corrected himself. “My sister used to go up all the time to party with her friends.” The words “not anymore” went unsaid.

“What’s your sister like?” Dion asked, and Campbell opened his phone and had me find some pictures. All her social media, all those carefully composed shots with their carefully contrived poses, had been deleted after her father’s indictment.

“Damn!” Dion yelled from the back seat when he laid eyes on the screen. “She’s smoking hot.”

“Yeah, and she’s my sister,” Campbell reminded him.

“I can still admire, can’t I? Damn,” he marveled again. “This is the one who tried to steal Sophie’s husband?”

“No, because Sophie and Danny weren’t together. He dumped Carrington when he realized that he still loved my sister, though,” I spoke up.

“No offense to Sophie, but—”

I was sure that he was going to say something offensive, so I told him to shut it.

“Too bad I’ll never meet her.” He flicked to more pictures. “Who’s this girl in an office?”

“Who?” Campbell asked back. “Oh, you mean a woman with dark hair, glasses, tall?”

“Beautiful,” Dion added. “A rack like—”

“That’s my former assistant,” Campbell interrupted. “Those are all the people in our old department at our holiday party. Give me back my phone.”

“I thought that you were a new man now,” I reminded Dion. “I thought you weren’t going to chase women like you used to. From those comments, it doesn’t sound like you’re any different at all.”

“They chased me,” he corrected. “And I am a new man.”

No, not really. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots.” I remembered my grandmother saying that, and it was probably true because she had been right about most things, especially about hand basting when setting in sleeves. I glanced back at Dion, who was now looking at his own phone, and then over at the driver of this car. I was sure that there were many, many beautiful girls in Texas, probably millions of them. I remembered what I’d figured out about Campbell’s average time in relationships—had it been a month and a half per girlfriend?

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